calendario eventi  :: 

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6/9/2004

Two exhibitions

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Annika Larsson
HOCKEY / NEW GRAVITY

September 7 – October 16
Main Gallery

Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce Annika Larsson's second solo exhibition at the gallery. In the two new video works presented Larsson continues her interest in overt obsession and addresses the potency of aesthetic codes, imagery, and manipulation.

New Gravity (2003, 29.5 minutes) brings together hard minimal music and the aesthetic of the geek. Susceptible and socially stunted adolescent boys are guided by a thumping lullaby of synth music and roaming, sometimes pulsing, lights (music by New York based Tobias Bernstrup and Moravagine). Wide eyes and slack mouths are accentuated by Larsson's persistent close-up camera shots and lighting. The geek look, generally considered unlikable, is here heavily fetishized. Part way through the piece, a 3D animated man enters the mix. A software creation, this character interacts with one of the boys without the limitations and logic of gravity. Implications of sporadic fantasy and danger funnel toward the unreal; these manipulations reveal a world where the science of matter and energy disintegrate, disclosing alternate dimensions and experience. Tilting, then floating and hanging, the phantasm of weightlessness itself intermingles with desire.

Hockey (2004, 25 minutes) depicts a game between unnamed teams, directed and filmed by the artist in front of 13,000 empty seats at the Stockholm Globe Arena. Pushed to the fore is Larsson's preoccupation with the props and rituals of a game and the surrounding structure. A concentration of brand logos and symbols is embedded everywhere. Reinforcing and guiding Larsson's specific focus, the soundtrack incorporates synthetic hockey noises with synth pop music (conceived by Larsson, arranged by Larsson and Tobias Bernstrup, performed by Tobias Bernstrup). Although traditionally set in hierarchal terms, in this game penalty and triumph are held evenly. Similar to Larsson's earlier work, her interest here lies in control and suggestion, taking apart the real game with each movement and edit finely engineered.

Although Larsson is clearly obsessed with control, within her fetishistic nature lies a willingness to engage in unpredictable circumstances. The result is a visceral and disorienting experience for the viewer.

Annika Larsson was born in 1972 in Stockholm and graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2000. She currently lives and works in New York. Upcoming exhibitions of her work include the Sevilla Biennial, Spain and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.

Image: Annika Larsson
'Hockey', 2004
Still from DVD
Running Time: 25
©Annika Larsson
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Genichiro Inokuma

September 7 – October 16
Gallery 2

This exhibition of drawings and small paintings by Genichiro Inokuma, created between 1955 and 1975, addresses the aspect of the Gallery 2 program that is engaged in presenting historical work with the intention of contextualizing current work. This particular presentation is timely in relation to present interests in works on paper as well as graphic imagery from Japan. All of the works exhibited were made when the artist lived in New York City and showed at the Willard Gallery.

Inokuma, 1902 – 1993, along with artists such as Kenzo Okada, Yayoi Kusama, Minoru Kawabata, and Atsuko Tanaka -- currently exhibiting at the Grey Art Gallery -- who showed extensively in the United States and Europe, synthesized the flat, decorative, and suggestive style of traditional Japanese painting with Western abstraction in ways which were recognized at the time as international, innovative, and influential. The earliest works exhibited, gouaches from 1956 and 1957, combine calligraphic elements on broad fields of color in ways which clearly relate to the work of Mark Tobey, who also showed at the Willard Gallery, and to Helen Frankenthaler. Both were influenced by Japanese art as demonstrated by their interest in abstraction, reduction and improvisation. Other figures influenced by Japanese art and Japanese artists in New York in the 1950s include Franz Kline, Sam Francis, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

In the 1960s Inokuma began to paint works based on imagined aerial views of cities, reducing three dimensional topography to two dimensional patterns which at once suggest the energy and visual complexity of the urban fabric yet remain completely abstract. Many of the forms used to represent roads, buildings, and train tracks seem to derive from visual symbols used in contemporary printed Japanese maps, an early example of the interplay between painting and popular visual language and print media which is so important in contemporary Japanese work.

Of the last group of works in the exhibition, John Cannaday wrote in the New York Times, October 14, 1972: 'The Cityscape is apparently an inexhaustible source of motifs for Mr. Inokuma, whose new abstract inventions are even more engaging than those in his previous shows…. Now his patterns seem to be based on transverse sections of sordid, neglected patches of urban earth such as the Jersey Meadows. The transmission into formal elegance is complete, and there are a half dozen small paintings – only six or eight inches across and not much higher – that are alone worth a visit to this excellent show.”
'Inokuma returned to Japan in 1975 for health reasons. He died childless and left the works in his collection to a museum bearing his name in his home town of Marugame. During his residence in New York he had ten one-person exhibitions at the Willard Gallery. His work was included in the Sao Paulo Biennal in 1959; exhibited at the ICA Boston, 1958; at the Carnegie Institute in 1958, 1964, and 1967; as well as at MoMA and the Guggenheim in 1965 and 1964 respectively. Work was purchased for both collections at that time.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Miani Johnson of the Willard Gallery and Joshua Mack.

For more information and images please contact Jeremy Lawson

Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24 Street NY 10011
New York

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