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25/10/2001

Dan Graham - Mary Heilmann

Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

Dan Graham. A show for all the children
27 October to 22 December 2001
Opening: 26 October 2001, 6 p.m.

Dan Graham (born in 1942, lives and works in New York) is one of the most important American artists of his generation. Currently a comprehensive retrospective of his work underlines his significance for the development of conceptual art and his influence on the video and performance art in the last hirty years. Having been shown at the Museu d’Arte Contemporanea de Serralves in Porto and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, the exhibition will travel to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in November and will be shown in the KIASMA in Helsinki next year.

"A show for all the children" is the title Dan Graham has chosen for his exhibition at the Galerie Hauser & Wirth. The presentation centres around his new pavilion "Girl’s Make-up Room", which is related to projects that were created for the 1997 Sculpture Exhibition in Münster. The room, composed of two-way mirror glass with sliding doors made of perforated steel is, like many of Dan Graham’s works, a hybrid between a quasi-functional space and an installation that serves to expose processes of perception and certain expectations. Visitors are asked to enter the room and use make-up at a little table. But they soon realise that neither the little make-up mirror nor the walls of the pavilion will allow them to apply a perfect make-up: The two-way mirror walls only produce a distorted reflection. And this only, when it is not entirely transparent due to the reflected day light. The little mirror, which can beattached anywhere on the steel walls by means of a magnet, has a fish-eye lens on it, which also gives only a distorted reflection of the visitor’s face.The perforated steel walls are continuously producing changing ray patterns. Combined with the semi-mirrored glass these ray patterns create a virtual world that is changing with the light and is thus in a state of permanent flux. The visitor has access to this world and is at the same time both an observer and an object of observation. In addition, the title of the pavilion questions the children cult in our society - does a little girl really need her own make-up room?

Part of the exhibition is also a new video entitled "Six Sculptures/Pavilions for Pleasure" that Graham created in collaboration with the Galerie Hauser & Wirth. It documents six different pavilions by Dan Graham that are in public places and have different functions. This title also refers to the ambiguous nature of the pavilions - they are at once sculptures and places of pleasure.

Further projects are represented by three new models, such as the "S-Curve", which was realised this year as a permanent installation in the courtyard of the Hauser & Wirth Collection in St. Gall and is used as a café.

Dan Graham’s photographic work deals recurrently with the culture of everyday life and architecture. Glimpses of private life are combined with images of housing architecture, thus creating new perspectives.

"Please enter!" reads the sign next to the "Girl’s Make-up Room" - Dan Graham asks visitors to "enter" his work, to appropriate it. It is important for him that we become a part of his work. Graham’s works are situated at the interface between architecture and everyday culture, they confront us with our clichéd perceptions and behavioural patterns. In the truest sense of the word he holds up a mirror to our consciousness. And the reflection does not always live up to our expectations.

Dan Graham’s video entitled "Rock my Religion" will be shown as part of a seminar at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (Zurich School of Design), Ausstellungsstrasse 60 (lecture hall, 1st floor), on Saturday, October 27 at 5 p.m.

Mary Heilmann
27 October to 22 December 2001
Opening: 26 October 2001, 6 p.m.

American artist Mary Heilmann (born 1940 in San Francisco, lives and works in New York) shows an exhibition of new oil paintings and works on paper at the Galerie Hauser & Wirth. Her abstract works, which she started in the 70's, are some of the most extraordinary examples of contemporary art. They have also attracted a wide audience in Europe since the artist participated in major exhibitions such as Der zerbrochene Spiegel (The Broken Mirror) at the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in 1993/94; or in nuevas abstracciones (New Abstractions) at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia inMadrid in 1996. Additionally, Heilmann had several large-scale solo exhibitions, including a show at the Zürcher Stiftung für konstruktive und konkrete Kunst in 1997 and at the Camden Arts Centre in London this year.

"The question, how an abstract painting at the end of the 20th century should look like, could be answered as following in the future: like one by Mary Heilmann." This is how the young artist Lisa Ruyter recently described the importance of Mary Heilmann’s - uvre; her work has lost none of its original freshness over the past three decades.Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles and influenced by the surfing culture, the free speech and Beat movements, Mary Heilmann completed first a degree in literature, before she studied ceramics at Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 she began to paint. While most artists at that time were experimenting with the concept of dematerialisation and demanding that painting should avoid any references to experience outside the material presence of the work itself, opted Mary Heilmann for painting, rebelling against the accepted rules. "Rather than following the decrees of modern, non-representational formalism, I started to understand that the essential decisions taken during the creative process were more and more related to content. The Modern movement was over..."

Since then, Heilmann has created compositions that evoke a variety of associations. Her work may be non-representational and based on an elementary, geometrical vocabulary - circles, squares, grids and stripes - but there is always something slightly eccentric, casual about them. The simplicity of the forms is played down by a deceptive form of nonchalance: the contours are not clearly defined. In some paintings, amorphous forms appear to melt into each other like liquid wax. Splashes of colour can be discerned, sharp edges bleed for no apparent reason, and the ductus of the brushstrokes is always perceptible. Heilmann’s casual painting technique conceals a frequentlycomplex structure that only gradually reveals itself to the viewer. Above all, the artist brings out the symbolism of colour, emphasising the qualities of colour’s subtle nuances, its potential for arousing emotion and evoking associations with consummate skill.

Heilmann communicates her personal experiences through her compositions. Not, however, in the sense of a literal illustration, but as the eloquent abstraction of a moment in the past - or in the future. Heilmann’s paintings describe a personal world, but it is a world with which the viewer is familiar. This allows a dialogue to take place that extends far beyond the merely formal observation of a work of art: everyday events are hinted at, fragments of pop or high culture can be discerned, music, literature and film are cited. In otherwords, life in all its richness is expressed in these apparently so simple,abstract compositions, in which, to quote Mary Heilmann, "stories are told in songs - elliptically, poetically, in the form of allusions, hidden references or riddles to be solved."

A rational analysis of the effect Heilmann’s paintings have is not always possible, which renders their appeal all the more emotional. Looking at them has often the effect of taking a sip of instant happiness; they recall memories of a day at the beach, or can be enjoyed like a beautiful piece of music. It is precisely the variety of emotions expressed in - and elicited by - Heilmann’s paintings that make her work such a shining example of contemporary art.

Galerie Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zurich
hours: Tue - Fri 12 - 6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Next exhibition:
Art Cologne: October 31 - November 4, 2001, Hall 03.2, Booth G017
Art Basel in Miami Beach, December 13 - 16, 2001 Hall 2, Booth D9

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