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2/11/2006

Gabriel Orozco

Museum Ludwig, Koln

Samurai's Tree Invariant

For his exhibition Samurai's Tree Invariant in the Museum Ludwig Gabriel Orozco has developed 672 digital prints in a 50 x 50 cm format and arranged them in seven rows across the four high walls of the DC:Room. Each print is unique, although every one depicts the same geometric form, consisting of various large circles. This composition is invariant. The color however changes from one print to the next, allowing anomalous constellations to appear.

Moving in a pattern like the pace of a knight in a game of chess ("two forward, one across") the three primary colors, red, blue and yellow wander from one segment of the circle to the next. Using a computer program the artist has run through all possible moves. In their entirety they seem to be revolving around different axes, as if they were 672 snap-shots of the movement. An animation, which is also on view in the exhibition, emphasizes this; it shows the 672 scenes in a loop of one-second sequences.

Orozco has been working with the circle constructions shown since the mid 1990s. Samurai’s Tree Invariant is the first work to present all possible declinations of an invariant basic form simultaneously. The exhibition visitors stand in the midst of a sequence of images - lacking a beginning or an end. For Orozco the circle symbolizes "total movement but also total statics. Total flatness but also total volume". Samurai’s Tree Invariant, as well as the circle itself, seem to be dynamic and still at the same time.

The exhibition Samurai's Tree Invariant in the DC:Room of the Museum Ludwig is being shown on occasion of the award of the blueOrange 2006 by the German Cooperative Banks - Deutsche Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken - to the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. Endowed with a prize-money of 77.000 Euros, the blueOrange is considered to be one of the most prestigious awards for visual arts in Germany and Europe.

Contemporary until November 26, 2006
Ed Ruscha. Photographer

Even today, the work of Ed Ruscha - who was born in 1937 in Los Angeles, where he still resides - has yet to be grasped in its full significance. This is especially true of his photographic oeuvre which, despite being a legend in its own right and a great influence on up-and-coming artists, is scarcely known. Yet it stands for the new departures in photography during the 1960’s, which completely remapped the boundaries between photography and art. Inspired by American photography of the 1940’s and 1950’s, as well as by Euge'ne Atget’s photographs of Paris, Ed Ruscha soon arrived at a conceptual approach to the medium and in this way propelled his artistic work forward by means of photography. Consequently, the main focus of the exhibition will be on the artist’s early photographs from around 1960, which he took in Europe and the USA, and his photographic works from the 1970s, which also led to such acclaimed artist’s books as Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The most important lender apart from the Whitney Museum of American Art is the artist himself, who has contributed photographs from his own collection that are shown for the fist time.. The exhibition has been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and mounted by curator Margit Rowell. After Paris and Zurich, Cologne constitutes the last European stage of this exhibition, which is being put on in collaboration with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. Parallel to the exhibition in Museum Ludwig, the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur will show the series "Picturing Ed" by Jerry McMillan, who over a period of many years portrayed the artist in his private moments, as well as at work and in his studio. This dossier exhibition comprises some 40 exhibits and will be presented in the entrance hall in Room 4 of the Photographische Sammlung. To mark the exhibition, on September 3 Museum Ludwig will be holding a one-day symposium on "Ed Ruscha in the Context of Photography and Art since 1965". The symposium is supported by the Freunde des WRM/ ML, together with the US consulate general and Amerika Haus Koln.

Contemporary until 12 November 2006
The eighth square. Gender, life and desire in art since 1960

When a pawn in a chess match reaches the eighth square on the far side of the board, the player can swap him for a piece of his or her choice. So the pawn - a lowly foot soldier - can transform into a queen, a powerless figure into the epitome of power, a man into a woman.

Sexuality does not end in family politics or a TV series. Sexuality is always a quaking and transmuting, is desire and power, seduction and sadness, splendour and misery. Looking beyond vaudeville or pornography, only art enables the subject to be discovered in all its fascination and specificity. It not only permits a game with the sexes and with forbidden desires that is free of danger, but is alone able to grasp all of sexuality’s inherent contradictions. What does that mean for divergent desires? What does that mean after our present liberalisation, in a world standardised to death? What is this world like for feminine men, for masculine women?

"The Eighth Square" casts a new and sharp eye on art, it sounds out the historical and social developments. This is the first exhibition and the first catalogue in which drag and gender, queerness and transsexuality are presented on a broad platform, in all of its facets, and above all where it is allowed to be erotic.

The exhibition presents works by David Altmejd, Kenneth Anger, Diane Arbus, David Armstrong, Francis Bacon, Stephen Barker, Matthew Barney, Monica Bonvicini, Marc Brandenburg, Kaucyila Brooke, Louise Bourgeois, Brassai, Claude Cahun, Tom Burr, Daniela Comani, Lucky DeBellevue, Kerstin Drechsel, Nicole Eisenman, Thomas Eggerer, Valie Export, Hans Peter Feldmann, Jochen Flinzer, Annette Frick, General Idea, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sunil Gupta, David Hockney, Jonathan Horowitz, Peter Hujar, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Deborah Kass, Jurgen Klauke, Peter Knoch, Ferdinand Kriwet, Ins A Kromminga, Inez van Lamsweerde, Zoe Leonard, John Lindell, Lovett/Codagnone, Attila Richard Lukacs, Winja Lutz and Toni Schmale, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bjorn Melhus, Marlene McCarty, Michaela Melia'n, Annette Messager, Donald Moffett, Tracey Moffatt, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Bruce Nauman, Piotr Nathan, Marcel Odenbach, Henrik Olesen, Catherine Opie, Jack Pierson, Adrian Piper, Aurora Reinhard, Robert Rauschenberg, Salome', Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Dayanita Singh, Markus Sixay, Jack Smith, Katharina Sieverding, Ingo Taubhorn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Paul Thek, Cy Twombly, Gitte Villesen, Del LaGrace Volcano, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz.

Image: Gabriel Orozco, blueOrange price

Museum Ludwig
Bischofsgartenstr. 1 50667 Cologne, Germany

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