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31/10/2012

Mario Merz / Kutlug Ataman

Sperone Westwater, New York

Mario Merz
Major Works from the 1980s

Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce an exhibition of vintage works by Italian artist, Mario Merz (1925 - 2003). This is the artist’s eighth solo show at the gallery, and features three major paintings and one sculpture from the early 1980s. The exhibition is on view 1 November through 22 December 2012.

A principle member of the Arte Povera group in the late 1960s, Merz possessed an anti-elitist aesthetic. In his work, he utilized accessible and unconventional materials from everyday life, as well as organic and inorganic debris. The rapid industrialization of northern Italy in the second half of the 20th century gave rise to an interchangeable association between the natural environment and architecture. This relationship, in addition to the disciplines of science and mathematics, are consistently prevalent in Merz’s alchemical art.

Central to Merz’s work is the Fibonacci progression – a numerical sequence where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. Merz translates this natural system of proliferation and growth in his art, referring to it as “an intensified life.” Wandering Songs I (Canti errabondi I) (1983), an acrylic and oil painting with leaves and pine cones, spans over twenty-five feet across: a tense, powerful energy is generated with bold gestures of colorful, impastoed paint that cover over half of the canvas, while the rest is left exposed. The artist also incorporates the architecture of the space by positioning a block of beeswax and an untamed branch in the foreground, breaking the geometric composition of the canvas.

In Le Foglie (The Leaves) (1983-84), measuring over 26 feet across, gold leaf squares are scattered around two large asymmetrical leaf-like forms. The reflective qualities of the gold leaf and enamel add intensity and depth to the surface. In 1967, Merz said:

The leaves were enormous only because I realized that walls were big and leaves were attaching themselves to walls. I wanted to do a painting that would relate to the wall, not just to its internal image; and so the internal image adapted itself to the external relationship.

Merz’s lifelong exploration of man’s constantly changing relationship with nature is encapsulated in Pianissimo (very slowly, very softly) (1984). In this work, a Plexiglas and steel cabinet elegantly cages a convergence of beeswax and pine cone. The wax, as a natural product and material long used by artists for casting, is shaped as a cone and inverted on a pole. With this, Merz suggests a drill into the earth or a weapon used in battle. Merz further emphasizes the connection between nature and man-made environments by incorporating the shape of leaves created from welded steel. Another work, the large-scale painting, L'Epoca Del Ferro (1983-85), which translates to “The Age of Iron,” – also utilizes metal with three steel strips crossing the corners of a square canvas depicting a prehistoric animal.

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Kutlug Ataman
Mesopotamian Dramaturgies

New York, NY: Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce its representation of artist Kutlug Ataman and his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Ataman returns to New York after eight years of working intensively in Europe and the Middle East. In much of his recent work, he casts his gaze on the history and modernization of Turkey, his native country. Kutlug Ataman: Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, on view 1 November through 22 December 2012, will include four important video installations from the artist’s latest series.

Mesopotamian Dramaturgies (2009-2011) revisits the recent history of Mesopotamia -- the "cradle of civilizations" that has witnessed the birth of many cultures and nations -- to focus on the tension between tradition and modernization. Ataman's interest in the representation of the individual or the collective through narrative widens to the concepts of history and geography, and to the way a nation forms and stages its own narrative. In speaking about the series, Ataman says:

I remain very interested in our constructs; how we construct our narratives, but I have moved from people to community -- how groups of people create their own common mythology, how we construct our knowledge of history and geography, how we rewrite each other's stories and how these stories are imposed in cultures.

Mayhem (2011) is about the destruction of old structures in order to create new ones, and was made at the dawning of the Arab spring. Ataman uses water as his main subject not only for its cleansing symbolism, but also for its destructive force. Mayhem is a multi-screen video sculpture that can be viewed from both outside and from within.

Journey to the Moon (2009) depicts the activities of inhabitants of a remote village in eastern Anatolia who reportedly set off for the moon on board a minaret transformed into a spaceship. This entirely fictional story is set in 1957, around the time of the Cold War space race. Using a sequence of black and white still shots, 'fabricated evidence', and a scripted voiceover, this footage is juxtaposed with interviews by contemporary Turkish scholars who comment on the topics addressed in the story. Ambiguously suspended between reality and artifice, Journey to the Moon alternates these two narrative levels in a structure similar to that of investigative television reports, where the opinions of experts lend depth to the documentary materials.

In English as a second language (2009), Ataman projects a film of two Turkish schoolboys reciting "nonsensical" English poems by Edward Lear, hampered by the difficulty of a newly-acquired language and the absurdity of the text they are reading. This work is complemented by The complete works of William Shakespeare (2009), in which the entire folio of works by Shakespeare, painstakingly hand-transcribed by the artist, are projected as a scrolling image, alluding to the notion of the book as a source of enlightenment. Both works refer to the complexities of a country finding its place in a globalized world in which English is the lingua franca.

Born in 1961 in Istanbul, Ataman lives and works in London, Islamabad and Istanbul. He is the recipient of the 2004 Carnegie Prize, awarded for the work Küba (2004), originally commissioned by ArtAngel, London and exhibited at the 54th Carnegie International; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include The National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2010), a mid-career retrospective at Istanbul Modern (2010-2011), and ARTER, Istanbul (2011). Ataman's works have been shown at many international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial (1997, 2003, 2007, 2011), the Venice Biennale (1999), the Berlin Biennale (2001), the Sao Paulo Bienal (2002, 2010), and Documenta 11 (2002), as well as the Tate Triennial (2003).

Image: Mario Merz, Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1982, oil & waterpaint with clay, snail shell & leaves on wood 34 5/8 x 66 7/8 inches 88 x 170 cm SW 07299 Private Collection

For more information and images, please contact Maryse Brand at +1 212 999 7337 or maryse@speronewestwater.com.

Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm, Monday by appointment

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