10/1/2015
It Rained Again
Bureau, New York
The exhibition is a stage for the past tense to repeat. The frozen flow of a pewter river, the disintegrated perspective of an exploded interior, the silent chisel, the halted brush. The exhibition on view is implicitly frozen, finished, passed.
It rained again. Past tense, repeat. Of precipitation, of movement, of falling from the sky. Again, but before.
The exhibition is a stage for the past tense to repeat. The frozen flow of a pewter river, the disintegrated perspective of an exploded interior, the silent chisel, the halted brush. The exhibition on view is implicitly frozen, finished, passed.
Bąkowski opens the exhibition with repetition. Counting footsteps with deliberate rhythm and sustained minor chords. A faint view into a banal grey world slowly turning and progressively vanishing.
"This is a degeneration of seconds. With afterglows and echoes of preceding seconds."
The main room is a boneyard. movement is implied but halted in statuary forms and still images plied from animation. The body of the viewer moves, counting steps as through Bąkowski's obscured landscapes. The Lost Lady Found is conjured by the reflections of Rebet's inky brush. Through the looking glass of the magician's screen of deception, the disappeared are re-imagined. Atop the central tomb, the rider of Maunz's cast-iron saddle is equally vanished, envisioned through the reflection in a subterranean mineral torrent. Adamo's carved, twisted figure looms over the room as a wicker man stretching skyward. Atassi's painting depicts the setting itself: the disintegrated space of an exhibition. The layers of patterns and complex renderings in perspectival space suggest the tenuous constructs and fictions inherent to the staging of an exhibition. Here the histories of production, of labor, of imagination and turmoil are only echoed. The vestiges of the past are made manifest for you the viewer, wet from the rain, again.
Farah Atasi, (b. 1981, Brussels Belgium) lives and works in Paris. She is represented by Galerie Xippas, Paris and Geneva; and Michel Rein, Brussels. She has been the subject of two recent institutional exhibitions in France this winter: at Contemporary Arts Center Le Portique in Le Havre and at Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire.
David Adamo, (b. 1979, Rochester NY) lives and works in Berlin. He will open a one-person show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo this January, and an exhibition at Ibid, Los Angeles this spring.
Wojciech Bąkowski, (b. 1979, Poznan Poland) lives and works in Warsaw. He is represented by Galeria Stereo, Warsaw and has a solo exhibition currently on view in New York at Audio Visual Arts (AVA).
Lionel Maunz, (b. 1976, Washington DC) lives and works in Brooklyn. He has had three one-person shows with Bureau, and will be featured concurrently in a group show this January at On Stellar Rays.
Christine Rebet, (b. 1971, Lyon France) lives and works in Paris and New York. Her work is currently on view in Zurich at Grieder Contemporary with artist Melli Ink. She will be included in a survey of 100 years of animation at Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands. Rebet will have her first solo show at Bureau in May of 2015.
Image: Wojciech Bąkowski, Worsening of Eyesight, HD video, sound, 2013
Press contact:
office@bureau-inc.com; +1 212 227 2783
Opening reception Sunday January 11, 6 - 8 p.m.
Bureau
178 Norfolk Street
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday - Sunday, 11 - 6 p.m., and by appointment