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1/6/2015

Two Exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Laura Owens

Since the late 1990s, Owens has developed a characteristic style, not defined by a certain technique or form of painting, but by a specific approach to painting. Her primary interest is in painterly space. At the same time, Owens’ works are often site-specific and refer directly to the exhibition space, whether in the proportions or dimensions of her canvases or in the selection of site-referential motifs. As a consequence, Owens focuses on the design of complex visual spaces through a gamut of painterly techniques. Owens’ formal vocabulary is eclectic and refers to art history as well as vernacular motifs. The idea of the “image within an image” is another recurring formal device, which on the one hand allows her to negotiate various components like colors, techniques, spaces, and concepts within a work and on the other hand to refer to the active role of the beholder.

Owens’ pictures layer a variety of media and techniques. Thick applications of paint, thin washes, silkscreened images, needlepoint, and found objects attached to the surface of the canvas are all in her repertoire. The use of trompe l’oeil shadows alongside dense impasto became one of her trademarks. Her process of working and the techniques she uses vary in a quite experimental and unconventional way. For her exhibition in the main gallery space of Secession, Owens produces a complete new body of large scale paintings.

Laura Owens was born in Euclid, Ohio (USA) in 1970, and now lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Cao Fei
Curated by: Jeanette Pacher

Cao Fei is one of the most interesting Chinese artists today. Her artistic approach is characterized by a high degree of innovation and joyful experimentation, and her work reflects this in its variety. Fei produces multimedia installations, videos, large format photography, and in her most comprehensive work to date, RMB City (2008–2011), she constructed a complex virtual city full of iconic architectures on the Internet platform Second Life.

Born in Guangzhou in 1978, she belongs to the first generation to grow up in post-communist China, which calls itself New Human Beings. In her work, Fei explores the condition of this society characterized by rapid transformations, its fears, lost dreams, the urban habitat, its fantasies and strategies to overcome or to escape reality. In doing so, she uses the (stylistic) means of social critique, conventions of documentary film, and the aesthetics of popular culture. The artist shows a special interest in new urban centers, whose radical transformation illustrates the contradictions of modern China, and which often serve as a backdrop for her works.

In the video and the eponymous photography series COSplayers (2004), Fei shows the everyday overlaps and parallels between reality and fiction. The protagonists are young people who are dressed as their favorite characters from video games in the urban surroundings stage (fantasy) plots, whereas the isolation and alienation of these young Chinese people becomes clearly palpable in the domestic environment of their parents. With the project Hip Hop (2003), the artist attempted to break through the generation gap by encouraging people from all ages and various social backgrounds to dance to hip hop tracks, filming them. Whose Utopia? (2006), again, contrasts the humdrum reality of the life of factory workers with their dreams and aspirations at a time of economic growth and social change. The video documents the daily routine of the (largely migrant) workers at a lighting manufacturing plant in China's Pearl River Delta region and shows them absorbed in their repetitive tasks, where they almost appear as extensions of the machinery surrounding them, on the one hand. At the same time, the workers were asked about their passions and ambitions, and are filmed in the same working environment while staging some of their dreams, like dancing or playing guitar.

In one of her most recent film projects Haze and Fog (2013), Fei quotes the genre of the zombie film. But she defines zombies as members of the new Chinese middle class, who have lost a link to their souls. They stand symbolically for traditional and modern China: in the course of modernization, they have lost their traditions, everyday rituals have changed, and at the same time a new service sector has grown up around them. This is not a nostalgic point of view, however, with which the artist creates this close up of society, but rather it's about the possibilities that the can be offered by leaving behind inflexible, fixed life models.

Cao Fei's works have been presented internationally, including Tate Modern, London and Pompidou Center, Paris (2014), Mobile M+, Hong Kong (2013), 29th São Paulo Biennale (2010), the Sydney Biennale (2006 and 2010), the Moscow Biennale (2005), the 52nd Venice Biennale Chinese Pavilion (2007) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Cao Fei was the finalist of Hugo Boss Prize 2010, and won The 2006 Best Young Artist Award by CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award). The exhibition at Secession is the artist's first solo show in Austria.

Image: Cao Fei, film still from “Haze and Fog”, video, 46 min, 2013. Courtesy: the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Press Contact:
Katharina Schniebs T. +43 1 587 53 07-10 F. +43 1 587 53 07-34 E-Mail: presse@secession.at

Opening: Tuesday 2 June 2015

Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, Wien
Hours:
Tue - Sun 10am to 6pm

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