Context is Everything
dal 6/6/2003 al 19/7/2003
Segnalato da
6/6/2003
Context is Everything
mullerdechiara, Berlin
Ellen Harvey. What makes an artwork art? Is context really everything? Can an art cliche' still be art? What happens if you take landscape paintings outside onto the streets? Or if you take graffiti into the gallery? Or if you let the subject of a portrait speak back? Or allow the viewer into the intimate space of a self-portrait? Or reveal representational painting for the fraud that it is?
Ellen Harvey
What makes an artwork art? Is context really everything? Can an art
cliché still be art? What happens if you take landscape paintings outside
onto the streets? Or if you take graffiti into the gallery? Or if you let
the subject of a portrait speak back? Or allow the viewer into the
intimate space of a self-portrait? Or reveal representational painting
for the fraud that it is?
'Context is Everything' includes recent works that play with a variety of
traditional art practices and their dependence on framing devices. 'The
New York Beautification Project' is an illegal public art project for which
Harvey painted 40 small oval landscapes directly in oils onto the most
graffiti-laden sites in New York City. Its companion piece, 'Paintings of
Paintings' consists of a series of paintings of graffiti-covered city scenes
all framed in inappropriately ornate frames. 'Twins' is a video installation
of two sychronized videos, one of the artists' face while drawing a
self-portrait and the other of the drawing itself. '100 Free Portraits' is
the record of a performance in which Harvey sat on the streets of New York
offering free 15 minute portraits to passers-by in exchange for their
filling out a a questionnaire about the finished portraits which were then
mailed to the participants after being scanned. 'Seeing is Believing' is a
video of what appears to be a painting being made of the studio scene behind
the canvas but which is in fact a painting based on a live video feed from
the recording video camera.
Ellen Harvey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 1998 graduate
of the Whitney Independent Study Program and took part in the PS1 Institute
for Contemporary Art's National Studio Program for 2000 - 2001. She is the
recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Lily Auchincloss
Fellowship for 2002. Her most recent solo project was a'A Whitney for the
Whitney at Philip Morris' at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris in New
York. Recent group exhibitions include: 'Shuffling the Deck' at the
Princeton University Art Museum, 'Moving Faces' at Outline, Amsterdam, '637
Running Feet' at the Queens Museum of Art, 'Painting as Paradox' at Artists
Space in New York, 'Hier ist Dort' at the Secession Museum in Vienna,
Austria, 'Against The Wall' at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary
Art , 'Strangers/Etrangers' at the PS1 Museum's Clocktower Gallery, 'First
Person Singular' at the Seattle Art Museum and the 2000 Kwangju Biennale.
Her illegal public art project 'New York Beautification Project' can be seen
at http://www.NYBeautification.org. This is her first solo exhibition in Berlin.
opening June 7th, 6 PM
Exhibition open from June 7th through July 19th, Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 7
PM
For further information, or if you have any questions, please contact Laurie
De Chiara or Christina Linden at the gallery. Tel.: +49-30-39032040
müllerdechiara
weydingerstrasse 10
10178 berlin
tel +49-30-390-320-40
fax +49-30-390-320-44