Leon Golub and Nancy Spero
dal 8/4/2003 al 25/5/2003
Segnalato da
8/4/2003
Leon Golub and Nancy Spero
Christine Koenig Galerie, Wien
The first joint exhibition of New York artists. Since the very beginning of their creative activities in the early 50ies they have consistently taken up various issues related to war, violence and human rights, creating works with powerful messages from their respective viewpoints as a man and as a woman.
We are showing the first joint exhibition of New York artists LEON GOLUB
(born 1922) and NANCY SPERO (born 1926), who have been represented by the
gallery with solo exhibitions since 1991. They were awarded the 3rd
Hiroshima Art Prize in 1996. Leon Golub was participating at documenta 11 in
2002, Nancy Spero at documenta 10 in 1997. Since the very beginning of their
creative activities in the early 50ies they have consistently taken up
various issues related to war, violence and human rights, creating works
with powerful messages from their respective viewpoints as a man and as a
woman.
Nancy Spero is choosing images of women from various periods and cultures
for her collages, always dealing with war and cult. For her, history is a
history of wars and therefore a history of women, of victims as well as of
surviving.
"Avoiding a feminist rant, Spero treads a fine line between polemic and
humour. Humour is indeed a key weapon in her armoury, yet the dark side is
never far from the surface."
(Elizabeth A.Macgregor)
Nancy Sperox{00B4}s work "is a vital utopia in process, uncertain and
unpredictable: a procession of maternal/feminine figures in a loose
choreography (...), an homage to creation, and its continual potential for
self-revision and the challenging of social and cultural order."
(Catherine de Zegher)
She has completed a number of permanent installations and wall works at
venues in the U.S. (Lincoln Centre subway station, New York) and Europe,
three of them in Austria:
Ronacher Theatre, Vienna, Jüdisches Museum, Vienna and Heeresspital,
Innsbruck.
"I have pictured some of the events and some of the kinds of experiences
that undercut our current world pictures, that is to say the effects of
power and domination, the uses of interrogation to control dissidence or
opposition, how such behaviours effect the consciousness and psychic
responses of victimizers and victims and also to indicate some of the public
and private behavioral gestures of men acting out real time reactive
scenarios."
(Leon Golub)
In the last years Leon Golub has broken with structured, confrontational
images, but his language still remained sardonic. Dogs, lions and cyborgs
are now representing elements of change, aggression, and a whole range of
irregular and irritable circumstances.
In the image:'Scratch 2', leon Golub, 2000.
(Selected texts by Leon Golub 1948-1996, Do Paintings Bite?, edit. by
Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Cantz 1997.)
Opening: 9th April 2003, 7.00 p.m. Â 9.00 p.m.
Exhibition showing until 25th May 2003
GALERIE CHRISTINE KOENIG
Schleifmuehlgasse 1A
A-1040 VIENNA
t: +43 1 585 74 74
f: +43 1 585 74 74-24