calendario eventi  :: 

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28/1/2012

Two exhibitions

MoMA PS1, New York

Darren Bader: Images
January 29 – May 14, 2012
2nd Floor Project Rooms, MoMA PS1

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana –Marx / Stuff: the precise affinity between the generic and the specific –Ford / I see you've gone and changed your name again –Cohen Sculpture’s everywhere. It's space and space is everywhere. Space is in your thought, space is in front of your eyes and around you, it fills your mouth and infiltrates your hearing. Space is the stuff on the other side of contact. Our hands—which is to say, our eyes ears tongue nose respiration language—are all over the place/space.

There's this stuff called art. I'm really into it, or at least I was and think I still am. This stuff is a way to infuse space. Art is not sculpture somehow. Sculpture comes to establish a place; art subsists on space, but also transcends it. Art might be sleeping in the parking lot, but could also drive up and take you out for dinner. Art somehow happens inside of you—it's any of your proverbial hands being guided by art's specific and unlocatable contours.

I had to say all that because as someone who plays the role/vocation of this maybe- obsolescing thing called ―artist,‖ I want to define where I'm coming from, and where you might take what I'm giving to you. I don’t have a lot of faith in museums and galleries being our primary brokers of the word ―art.‖ So I guess I'm trying to tell you that although I'm complicit with words like ―art‖ and ―sculpture,‖ I'm not as complicit with their distribution. Although my sculpture at this museum isn’t critical of this distribution, I'd feel a little disingenuous if I were to simply say, "hey this is my artwork," and that was all I said. Hmm, don't want to sound so didactic. Basically, I hope you find something of value in this area of the museum that is nominally a show by me. The museum says my name is Darren Bader, but my name could just as easily be Tracey Emin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or Doesn't Matter. Art is a beautiful thing. I love it more than I’m able to express. Trying to find a home for it (or in it) is a strange thing nowadays. I don't know if you know what I mean. Leaving you with: Time and touch are the beginnings of all encounters

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Darren Bader (b. 1978) was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and lives in New York City. Bader was included in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, as well as Modify as Needed (2011) at MOCA Miami, Florida; The Color of Company (2011) at the Abrons Arts Center, New York; Looking Back/The Fifth White Columns Annual at White Columns, New York; Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market (2009) at the Tate Modern, London; FAX at the Drawing Center, New York; and To Illlustrate and Multiply: An Open Book (2008) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Organized by MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey with Assistant Curator Christopher Y. Lew, Darren Bader: Images at MoMA PS1 is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Darren Bader: Images will open on January 29 and remain on view until May 14th, 2012. Exhibitions at MoMA PS1 are made possible by the Annual Exhibition Fund with support from Hoor Al Qasimi, Richard Chang and Tina Lee, Adam Kimmel, Peter Norton and the Peter Norton Family Foundation, Jennifer McSweeney, Beth Swofford, David Teiger, Agnes Gund, Dana Farouki, Sydie Lansing, John Comfort, Philip E. Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, and Enzo Viscusi, with additional funding from The Director’s Circle of MoMA PS1, The Contemporary Circle of MoMA PS1, and MTV.

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Henry Taylor
January 29 – April 9, 2012
1st Floor Main Gallery, MoMA PS1

(Long Island City, NY—January 23, 2012) MoMA PS1 presents a major solo exhibition of artist Henry Taylor (American, b. 1958), bringing together more than 70 works by the Los Angeles-based artist. Organized by Peter Eleey, Curator of MoMA PS1 and Laura Hoptman, Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, Henry Taylor will open on January 29 and remain on view through April 9, 2012.

For a decade before and during his studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Taylor worked as an aide to the mentally ill at a hospital in Camarillo, California. A figurative painter with a generous, gregarious personality, this experience—so different from that of a typical art student—sharpened his interest in, and appreciation for, the diversity of individuals from all economic and social walks of life and encouraged a passion for an intensely empathetic style of portraiture that is energetic and immediate. That he has often painted his pictures on objects close at hand—from empty cigarette packages to detergent boxes—in addition to traditional stretched canvas reinforces the feeling of informality and a freshness that surrounds his practice. Taylor also uses commonplace materials and objects from his immediate environment to create sculptural assemblages, which are often similarly figurative in form.

Taylor’s earliest mature works include group portraits of his large family, often painted from photographs, fellow students from art school and patients under his care, in addition to self-portraits. After leaving school, Taylor broadened his subjects to include not only friends and acquaintances, but people he met by chance—a waitress at a local restaurant, a homeless person he encountered on the sidewalk of his Chinatown neighborhood in Los Angeles. Quickly painted, often in a single sitting, these are nonetheless formal portraits; faces are closely studied and carefully painted, as are telling elements of clothing like a cap or a logo on a tee- shirt. Whether he is painting a portrait of his beloved brother or a homeless man whose name he never caught, all of his portraits communicate both an affection and familiarity. When asked recently for his criteria for choosing a portrait subject, Taylor answered simply, ―I paint those subjects I have love and sympathy for.‖

Over the past ten years, Taylor has also painted portraits of figures he does not know, but who he deems important to a larger African-American community. A recent series of large, public-sized works commemorate sports figures and heroes of the Civil Rights and Black Panther movements, as well as martyrs to racially-motivated violence and police brutality. Painted from photographs, these hybrids of portraiture and history painting are more complexly composed than his works from life, and include narrative details that construct symbolic stories around recognizable personalities like the track and field star Carl Lewis or the Black Panther leader Huey Newton.

Taylor’s paintings can be seen in a modern American portrait tradition that includes artists such as Alice Neel, whose intimate style and thick brushwork closely relates to his own. They can also be considered in the context of a specifically African-American history of portraiture alongside the work of Barkley L. Hendricks (b. 1945), for example, and Kerry James Marshall (b.1955), who spent his formative years in Los Angeles, and comes from roughly the same generation as Taylor. Although his work might fall easily in to a tradition of American figurative painting, Taylor’s voice remains unique.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Henry Taylor (American, b. 1958) was born in Oxnard, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo presentations of Taylor’s work include Grrrrrl, Santa Monica Museum, California (2010), and Sis and Bra, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2007). Taylor’s work has also been included in various group exhibitions, such as 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2008); and At Home/Not at Home, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2010).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Henry Taylor is organized by Peter Eleey, Curator, MoMA PS1, and Laura Hoptman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is made possible by Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis and by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley. Additional generous support by Lawrence B. Benenson. Special thanks to Karen and Brian Conway. The accompanying publication is made possible by MoMA's Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.

Image: Henry Taylor. The Long Jump by Carl Lewis. 2010. Acrylic on canvas. 87 1/2 x 77 inches (165.1 x 172.7 cm). Courtesy the artist and Untitled,New York. © 2011 Henry Taylor.

Press Contact:
Rebecca Taylor, (718) 786-3139, rebecca_taylor@moma.org

Opening: Sunday, January 29, 2012 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue in Long Island City, Queens - New York
Hours:
MoMA PS1 is open from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Thursday through Monday. It is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. • artbook@MoMA PS1 is open from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Thursday through Sunday.
Admission:
Admission is a $10 suggested donation; $5 for students and senior citizens; free for MoMA members and MoMA admission ticket holders. The MoMA ticket must be presented at MoMA PS1 within thirty days of date on ticket and is not valid during Warm Up or other MoMA PS1 events or benefits.

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