calendario eventi  :: 

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8/1/2014

Three exhibitions

Hauser & Wirth - Savile Row, London

Hans Arp
Chance - Form - Language (and a FRANZWESTigation)

Curated by Julian Heynen, this exhibition examines the relationship between form and chance in a selection of Hans Arp’s important but rarely seen sculptures from 1947 to 1965. In an unusual approach, Heynen positions Arp’s work alongside Passstücke (Adaptives) by Franz West, examining the shared creative principle of the two artists. A selection of Arp’s poetry will be installed on the walls and broadcast throughout the gallery.

Hans Arp is a familiar figure of classical Modernism and was a key contributor in the development of Dada and Surrealism in the early twentieth century, yet it was during the following decades that he would articulate the forms to which he would persistently return. Although his later practice is often overlooked, Arp continued producing sculpture and poetry in a continuation of the Dada tradition until his death in 1966, during which time he built up an incredible body of work.
Hans Arp "Chance - Form - Language
(and a FRANZWESTigation)"

‘Chance – Form – Language’ comprises twenty sculptures from Arp’s later period, cast in the artist’s preferred materials of bronze, marble and aluminium. The sculptures are broadly figurative and demonstrate a loose continuation of classical traditions, depicting curved organoid shapes which originate from an observation of nature combined with an element of fantasy. Arp’s creative process was guided by intuition and informed by chance; burgeoning, abstract forms encounter complex, introverted figures, revealing an unique visual vocabulary with a basis in biomorphism.

‘Ptolemy II’ is a seminal example of Arp’s approach to sculpture in his later period, revealing an exploration of form through a sensual language of opposites – inside and outside; solid and void; presence and emptiness, human and nature. The sculpture is a singular, timeless form that both draws on and transcends sculptural abstraction and the history of art, becoming autonomous and placeless, freed from commissions with an intrinsic beauty of its own.

Within this exhibition Arp’s works are presented in a dense but irregular installation, forging connections between individual sculptures while becoming immersed in an almost endless metamorphoses of shapes. Arp’s poetry, an intrinsic part of his practice, is given equal importance in the exhibition. Over 20 of his poems will be broadcast into selected areas of the gallery through ceiling speakers. Excerpts from another group of 27 poems will be installed directly onto the gallery walls. The concurrent presentation of Arp’s two spheres of artistic activity in a single space will awaken a sense of consistency across his work as a whole, demonstrating how his material and linguistic forms interpenetrate and complement each other.

Works by Franz West punctuate the exhibition to shed an unexpected light upon Arp’s practice. Franz West’s Passstücke invite interpretation through human participation. As in Arp’s late work, the sculptures themselves are ambiguous semi-organic forms – meaning evolves through the way humans intuitively engage with the pieces, introducing an element of chance to the work.

‘Arp’s criteria in his search for form is often perceived as a kind of positive aimlessness. This was what led us to turn to a contemporary artist ‘for advice’, as it were, and incorporate a few of his works in the exhibition. Five sculptures by Franz West (1947 – 2012) are mixed in as visual footnotes to the works of Hans Arp. Most are examples of his so-called ‘Adaptives’, or ‘Fitting Pieces’. With them West makes it impossible to overlook the (seemingly) arbitrary aspect of form; these sculptures were intended to be used by viewers in combination with their own bodies as instruments for self-exploration.’ – Julian Heynen

In displaying Arp’s sculpture alongside his poetry and works by Franz West, this exhibition proposes a new examination of Arp’s art, where chance is viewed as an active component in the creation of both his sculptural and linguistic forms.

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Zhang Enli
The Box

Zhang Enli is a champion of forgotten spaces and objects. His practice is grounded in melancholic portrayals of objects or places from everyday life, through painting, sculpture or installation such as ‘Space Paintings’, in which he paints directly onto the walls, ceilings and floors of a room. For ‘The Box’, Zhang’s second exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in London, the artist will present his first-ever sculptural installation alongside a new series of paintings.

In his paintings, Zhang creates an index of commonplace objects related to humanity. Taking visual material from whatever is close at hand – a piece of string, a hose, a marble ball from the floor of his studio – Zhang draws us into his world, documenting the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life.

Influenced by the loose washes of traditional Chinese brush painting, Zhang dilutes his paint until it is almost like a glaze, leaving pencil-drawn grids visible beneath the layers of paint. By allowing the grids to show through the painted surface, Zhang constantly reminds us that his paintings are artistic constructs, not direct replicas of any given object. The perspective of each painting is skewed to heighten the drama of the object’s shape, but Zhang’s expressive lines and curves are kept in check within this measured framework. In this way the rigid structure of his pencil-drawn grids can be viewed as a means of ordering the chaos of contemporary life.

Zhang’s paintings are rarely produced from direct observation, but from sketches, photographs and, significantly, from his memories of the objects he is depicting. The muted tones and thin application of paint make the objects seem not quite present, as if occupying a liminal reality where only the essence of the object is depicted on the canvas. His subject matter is usually enlarged, so that only a specific fragment of a scene is shown, as seen through the viewfinder on a camera. In ‘Architecture’, Zhang portrays a modern building, but instead of a sweeping cityscape, he hones in on a section of a window, contrasting the transparent bluish hue of the glass pane against the building’s heavy structural lines. Although Zhang chooses to work with grids, a common technique when enlarging photographs, this belies the nature of his practice, since his depictions are not faithful renditions of objects, but highly personal offerings.

His previous series have often taken containers as their subject matter, whereas in his recent work Zhang is occupied with the nets and twine that bind these containers. Three works, ‘The Box’, ‘The Cargo (3)’ and ‘The Package 2’, depict colourless, non-descript shapes, which are transformed into mysterious bundles by a mass of brightly painted knots and tightly bound string. In ‘Transparent Shelf’, Zhang plays with the blankness of the canvas in another way. Here, only loosely sketched horizontal lines suggest the presence of a shelf. It is rainbow-coloured ribbons, which are draped vertically over the shelf’s structure and descend to the floor as a result of gravitational pull, which create the apparition of a ‘shelf’ out of the void.

In his ‘Space Paintings’, Zhang paints directly onto the walls of a room to create nostalgic environments. These range from the abstract, where colour and gesture recall sights and sounds of a particular place, to figurative reproductions of redundant, empty spaces. Zhang renders mould, dirt and stains which climb the walls and spill onto the floor, often alongside marks left by furniture or picture frames – all remnants of human interaction with a room which was once inhabited and is now deserted. His ‘Space Paintings’ depict a kind of negative space, as the viewer uses the marks and absence of objects to re-create presence through imagination.

For ‘The Box’, Zhang will engineer a more intimate and completely immersive version of a ‘Space Painting’ by painting the inside of a freestanding plywood box. Whilst Zhang’s paintings on canvas are broadly representational, the narrative element of the ‘Space Paintings’ is determined by the viewer. Zhang’s painting acts as a catalyst for the viewer’s imagination, and for personal narratives which emerge
whilst walking through the painting installation.

Zhang Enli is currently exhibiting at Museo d’Arte contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy, until 5 January 2014. His first ‘Space Painting’ in London, at the ICA, is on display until 22 December 2013. From 4 December 2013 to 1 August 2014, Zhang’s work is included in the group show ’28 Chinese’, works from the Rubell Family Collection at the Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami FL.

Recent solo projects include: ‘Topology’, Hauser & Wirth Zürich (2012); Hauser & Wirth, New York NY (2011); Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2011); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2010); Hauser & Wirth London (2010); Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, Switzerland (2009), travelling to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (2009). Zhang has also produced ‘Space Paintings’ for the 2012 Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kochi, India and for ‘Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art’, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2010).

About the artist

Zhang Enli was born in 1965 in Jilin, China. In 1989, he graduated from the Arts & Design Institute of Wuxi Technical University and relocated to Shanghai where he was a teacher at the Arts & Design Institute of Donghua University until 2008. Zhang remained largely overlooked during the post-socialist Chinese art boom of the nineties, escaping the hype of his more fashionable Chinese contemporaries. He is continuing to gain recognition for his work internationally.

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Alex Van Gelder
Meat Portraits

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Alex Van Gelder’s first exhibition in London. Van Gelder’s Meat Portraits is a series of visceral photographic studies of animal remains from a slaughterhouse in Benin, which upends traditional notions of portraiture.

Van Gelder photographs raw meat and entrails, either as he finds it in the marketplace, or after arranging it into contorted compositions, as if staged for a formal portrait. Sinewy ligaments are stretched against planes of taught, semi-transparent flesh, ripped, sagging muscles hang loosely and knuckles and faeces jut and spurt from between incisions in the animals’ skin. Whereas portraiture delves into the soul of the sitter, Van Gelder’s Meat Portraits literally delve inside their subjects, exposing the findings in an unrestrained portrayal of corporeality.

‘African butchers don’t use electric saws as Europeans do but cut up the meat by hand which produces a variety of styles. The slaughterhouse was in the open air and in front of it a small market where they would sell the still warm meat. I worked there on and off for one year producing my Meat Portraits. I consider these portraits still lives.’

– Alex Van Gelder

On first encounter, the Meat Portraits revolt and nauseate, but there is a strange beauty underlying their initial impact. Van Gelder is concerned with the transitory state between life and death and, although the series is named Meat Portraits, he considers these still-life works. This distinction highlights that the carnal remains in the Meat Portraits are now lifeless objects as opposed to living organisms. Bloodied and still pink, the redness of these objects acts as a sign of recent life. In this way, the Meat Portraits are reminiscent of the traditional African deathbed portraits that Van Gelder collects, where a photograph of the deceased is placed alongside their bed, around which the family gathers to pose for a photograph in a ritual to commemorate the passing of a loved one.

In ‘Meat Portrait #010’, innards drape sacrificially, bulging and engorged, from a metal shelf set against a rock face. A group of blue-green flies can be seen busily digesting the inanimate shining mass of colours and shapes, another sign of ongoing life amidst decay. Van Gelder’s hulking slabs of meat are unceremoniously pictured on the floor, resting on a scrap of cardboard or a patch of dirty tarmac. In the more deliberate compositions, cracked and dirty basins create a frame for the ambiguous animal parts, with an impervious black surround, like a shroud, echoing the darkness of death.

In a playful turn, within some of the portraits it is possible to discern a human profile or ghoulish face. In others, anatomical clues have been completely removed to create a distilled image. In ‘Meat Portrait #037’ Van Gelder depicts an assortment of offal laid haphazardly in a blood-stained bowl to give the impression of wet cloth, as if it were a basket of clean laundry waiting to be hung out to dry. Other compositions are more figurative and veer towards taxidermy, resembling anatomical studies that might be found in a surreal zoological museum. Equine jaws are prised open and meticulously presented for scientific study – though the cadaver is left unclean, with cavity-ridden teeth and bacteria and rancid debris still collected on its tongue.

Two additional series by Van Gelder will be displayed in this exhibition: Organized Crime and Painted Paint. For the Organized Crime series, Van Gelder has further dismantled animal carcasses. In these works there is an explosive sense of violence and butchery, jaws wrenched out of place and eyeballs askew. The distinct and jarring textures – of muscle, bone, skin, tooth, and fur – create abstract compositions in a cacophony of colour and noise. In Painted Paint, Van Gelder photographs containers full of blood and guts and other remaining slop from the animal’s emptied carcass, calling to mind a pot of paint, the sponge and froth on the surface brimming with potential.

About the artist

Alex Van Gelder lives and works in Paris. Based in Africa for several years, Van Gelder is a collector of twentieth-century African photography. Works from his collection were exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland in 2006, and Phaidon published ‘Life & Afterlife in Benin’, a book of the collection, to accompany the exhibition. Van Gelder’s previous artistic projects include a portfolio of 18 photographs of Louise Bourgeois’s hands in the final years of her life, exhibited at Hauser & Wirth Zürich in 2011. At Bourgeois’s invitation, Van Gelder photographed her at her New York townhouse to produce the series. More than purely a portrait project, Bourgeois considered this collaboration to be an extension of her own work. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, ‘Alex Van Gelder – Louise Bourgeois. ARMED FORCES’, published by Ediciones Polígrafa and Hauser & Wirth.

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Image:
© Zhang Enli
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

For press enquiries please contact Melissa Emery at Sutton PR on +44 (0)20 7183 3577 / melissa@suttonpr.com; or Amelia Redgrift at Hauser & Wirth on +44 (0)20 7255 8247 /
amelia@hauserwirth.com

Opening: Thursday 9 January 6 – 8 pm

Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row - London W1S 2ET
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm

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