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21/1/2014

Darren Almond / Franz Ackermann

White Cube Bermondsey, London

White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present ‘To Leave a Light Impression’, an exhibition of new work by Darren Almond. This exhibition will include photographs from the ‘Fullmoon’ and ‘Present Form’ series as well as a group of small-scale bronze sculptures.

The ‘Fullmoon’ series of photographs, which have taken Almond to every continent over a period of 13 years, are taken under the light of a full moon using long exposure, enabling details undetectable to the human eye to be revealed. For works in this show he has traveled to Patagonia, Tasmania, Cape Verde and the Outer Hebrides. While depicting disparate lands, the works all embody Almond's interest in time, both as an actual, lived experience as well as a cultural and historical construct. They acknowledge his deep connection to particular landscapes, and map the artist’s personal interest in its geology, myth and history.

The Patagonia pictures employ classical compositions – referencing Romantic landscape painting – and are bathed in a supernatural light, the result of the lack of airborne pollution in this pristine, almost untouched land. Almond’s tripartite photograph of the surface of the Perito Moreno Glacier is compressed to the point of abstraction: emphasising both the painterly quality of its celadon-coloured ice as well as its formidably dense formation and scale. Attesting to geological decay, the blue colour signifies its prehistoric date and is only revealed at the moment the ice breaks, a common occurrence due to man’s impact on the environment.

In the large-scale, expansive photographs of Cape Verde, rough black stones emerge from the Atlantic Ocean. The rocks are solidified lava, and this seemingly diabolic, remote landscape, that bears the evidence of its own formation so vividly, played a key role in Darwin’s book 'On the Origin of the Species’ (1859). Almond’s interest in what the landscape reveals is echoed in his ‘Present Form’ photographs of standing stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides installed at the centre of the exhibition. These photographs of individual upright stones, wrought out of the oldest known rocks in the British Isles, ravaged and partially covered with vegetation, form part of a stone circle dating from 3,000 BC, and are thought to have been used as an astronomical observatory to measure 18.6-year moon cycles. Almond has photographed the stones as evidence of our primal need to measure and quantify the passing of time.

Shown alongside the stones are six pairs of bronze sculptures which act as displaced measures since each one represents the relative weight of one of the astronauts that walked on the moon. Contrasting with the expansive scale of the photographs, these small hand-polished columns of bronze are filled with lead and engraved with the astronaut’s initials, identifying the individual. Like the standing stones, these works represent a sculptural connection between man and moon, and a method of mapping visible and invisible space. A meditation on the space between the visible and invisible, the landscape and the skies, is explored in Laurentia (2012) a work in which a quotation by Nan Shepherd is written over 11 train-plates. The title refers to both the ancient supercontinent and the small indigo blossom, this work interweaves the relationships between the macro and the micro, between nature and man, between the infinite and the finite.

Born in 1971 in Wigan, United Kingdom, Darren Almond lives and works in London. He graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1993 and held his first solo exhibition in 1995. His solo exhibitions include Art Tower Mito (2013); Frac Haute-Normandie, Rouen and FRAC Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand (2011); Parasol Unit (2008); SITE Santa Fe (2007); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2006); K21, Düsseldorf (2005); Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Britain (2001); De Appel, Amsterdam (2001) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999). He has participated in group exhibitions including ‘Sensation’ (1997-1999); Berlin Biennale (2001); Venice Biennale (2003); The Busan Biennale (2004); The Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2005); Moscow Biennale (2007); and the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain (2009).

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Franz Ackermann

Franz Ackermann creates cartographic watercolour drawings of urban areas undergoing rapid growth and development. These ‘mental maps’ form the basis of his multi-faceted site-specific artworks. Alongside the maps his work incorporates brightly painted wall murals, three-dimensional panels that jut-out into space, and black and white photographs, in an all-encompassing environment that dissolves traditional boundaries between artistic media.

Ackermann’s work is charged with the frenetic energy and underlying tensions of densely populated urban areas. For his exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey these urban themes will take on quasi-religious connotations, recreating the sensory exuberance and visual stimuli of a renaissance chapel, in which paintings hang in close proximity to one another around a prominent, architectural centrepiece.

Underlying the exhibition is a highly subjective experience of place that emphasises playfulness, drifting and the unreliable mechanisms of memory. These themes are not only represented visually in the work but are also an important aspect of how the work is encountered. Experienced spatially as well as visually, audiences are compelled to move around the installation, continuously adjusting and re-adjusting their views and subsequent reading and understanding of the work.

Franz Ackermann was born in 1963 in Neumarkt St Veit, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2013); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2009); Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Kunsthalle Basel (2002); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2000) and Portikus Frankfurt am Main (1997). Important group exhibitions include ‘Altermodern’, Tate Triennial, London (2009); ‘Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2006); Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon; ‘Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing)’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and ‘Drawing from the Modern, 1975–2005’, MOMA, New York (2005).

Image: Fullmoon@Sandwalk Wood 2013. C-print 47 11/16 x 47 11/16 in. (121.2 x 121.2 cm) (unframed)

White Cube
South Galleries, Bermondsey
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3TQ
Opening times:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm
Sunday 12pm – 6pm

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