Pierre Bismuth
dal 20/4/2006 al 19/5/2006
Segnalato da
20/4/2006
Pierre Bismuth
Galerie Erna Hecey, Bruxelles
Combining media culture's fascination for celebrities, graffiti art, and a reflection on the function of the signature, "Most Wanted Men" exemplifies one of Bismuth's basic creative strategies: to make a work out of the structuring conventions of other artworks and mass media products.
Most Wanted Men
As part of the joint project by Erna Hecey and Jan Mot, Erna Hecey Gallery is
pleased to present an exceptional new work by Pierre Bismuth that transgresses the
boundaries of the traditional exhibition space.
Street graffiti meets sixties conceptualism in Bismuth's Most Wanted Men.
The title, a reference to Andy Warhol's famous photographic series of wanted
criminals, refers here to the hottest artists in the contemporary scene, their
names spray-painted by Bismuth in different colors both inside the gallery and in
various locations across the city. Combining media culture's fascination for
celebrities, graffiti art, and a reflection on the function of the signature, Most
Wanted Men exemplifies one of Bismuth's basic creative strategies: to make a
work out of the structuring conventions of other artworks and mass media products
in order to expose different mechanisms of visibility and meaning creation. In the
first place, Most Wanted Men offers an ironic comment on a certain deadlock in
conceptual art, which heralded the death of the author and the
dethronement of romantic genius while greatly magnifying the importance of the
signature as a final guarantee of the dematerialized object.
Bismuth's graffiti makes of these most wanted signatures an autonomous work
by cutting the signature off from any external reference (the name is no longer
attached to a work) and from its auratic link to the person (it is not the named
artist who signs).
Furthermore, the formal simplicity of the artist's
graffiti technique creates a lively contradiction with the much vaunted names that
constitute the work's content names that become strangely
meaningless when viewed in the context of city streets and neighborhoods where hot
artists are total unknowns (instead of art escaping the confines of the
institution into the hustle and bustle of life, here it is literally the names
that break free and mingle with the world). Finally, Most Wanted Men plays on the
alienating distance between person and name, and the quasi-autonomous life that
names sometimes lead, best expressed by a line from Lou Reed's Songs for
Drella, itself a comment on Warhol's fame: People who want to meet my
name are always disappointed in me.
Most Wanted Men continues Pierre Bismuth's exploration of the paradoxes of
the proper name begun in works such as Certificates of Authenticity
(2000, in progress), where different artists certify that the document in question
is not an original work, To Kate from Kate (2005), a series of
dedicatory notes by Hollywood stars starting and ending with Kate Winslet, and
Wearing the Name of Someone You Might Never Meet (2001), t-shirts
emblazoned with names randomly chosen from the telephone book.
At Jan Mot, Pierre Bismuth will create another unique work involving graffiti,
making an enameled plaque with the design of the graffiti found on the
faade of the gallery. Over the course of one year, Pierre Bismuth will
make a series of plaques representing all the graffiti left on the gallery.
Erna Hecey represents Pierre Bismuth since 2002.
Opening Friday 21 April 7 - 10 pm
Galerie Erna Hecey
rue des Fabriques 1c - Bruxelles
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 2 - 7 pm