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13/9/2013

Tony Tasset

Kavi Gupta Gallery, Berlin

Kavi Gupta BERLIN is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by the American artist Tony Tasset.

As a young artist in the mid-eighties, Tasset's “Domestic Abstractions” garnered considerable attention. It was a decade where artists' criticism of the commodification of the art object had brought forth a new generation, from Artschwager to Steinbach to McCollum, who would amalgamate pop and minimal aesthetics. Tasset's abstractions share in this discourse as they equate the pursuit of art objects by the desirous contemporary art collector with the taxidermied trophies sought by the big game hunter. Also visible in the abstractions is the work's relationship to the romantic concept of sublimity. In his own description of the works, Tasset wrote, "I couldn’t reach the sublime in painting so I found the sublime in nature and just framed it." However, within a couple years, despite the work receiving much praise, Tasset ended the series and began another body of work that would further his inquiry into the intersection between commodity fetishism and popular culture.

Nearly 25 years later, after finding a forgotten box of aging animal hides in his attic, Tasset returned to using the material. Instead of framing the hides as he'd done before Tasset took to collaging the scraps onto canvas and adding to the compositions masses of oil painting and erratic spray painting. The result are works that speak not only to the development of Tasset's own oeuvre over three decades, but also to the transformations that have taken place in contemporary painting.

On view during the exhibition are two of the artist's first domestic abstractions from 1986 alongside a handful of paintings made this past year. For further questions and/or images from the exhibition, please email the gallery at info@kavigupta.com.

Tony Tasset (b. 1960 in Cincinnati, US) lives and works in Chicago, US.

Image: The Ecstasy of a Square, 2012. Oil, hide on panel 40" x 30"

Kavi Gupta BERLIN
Kluckstraße 31 10785 Berlin Germany

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