calendario eventi  :: 

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6/9/2008

Three exhibitions

Sculpture Center, New York

Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone

SculptureCenter is pleased to present a two-person exhibition by Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone titled We Burn, We Shiver. Featuring newly commissioned works by both artists, this exhibition creates a sculptural conversation in which public and private space collide and the prosaic meets the romantic. We Burn, We Shiver. will be on view September 7–November 30, 2008 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 7, 4-6pm.

Martin Boyce presents a suspended sculpture composed of standard fluorescent light fixtures in the form of a spider web. Measuring approximately forty by fifty feet, the piece will fill the entirety of SculptureCenter's ceiling space and hang twenty feet above the ground. Boyce has employed the web as a motif for several years, a form that references the urban grid and simultaneously suggests organic order, both possessing the ability to expand infinitely. The sculpture will diverge from an earlier version of the piece in that the web will be irregular, reflecting a broken grid.

Ugo Rondinone presents several works cast in bronze and filled with lead including a fireplace and a river rock. The fireplace is cast from an existing 19th century fireplace and built into a free-standing wall. The exhibition employs displacement as a method to unmoor the familiar from a specific time and place in order to reveal a more psychologically charged state. A romantic image, the fireplace suggests an intimate, domestic space while Boyce's hard, cold fluorescents are indicative of commercial, public spaces. The shift in scale and orientation will create a dreamlike space that telescopes our experience of interior and exterior space.

Martin Boyce is a sculptor based in Glasgow. He has had solo exhibitions at Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt, 2002); Tate Britain (London, 2006); and the Centre Art Contemporain (Geneva, 2007). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Sculpture Projects Münster, 2007; UnMonumental at the New Museum (New York, 2007); the Shanghai Biennial (2006), the Lyon Biennial (2004), and Carte Blanche á Ugo Rondinone at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2007).

Ugo Rondinone is a Swiss artist now living in New York known internationally for diverse bodies of work including sculpture, installation, photography, painting, sound, video and drawing. He has had solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2006); Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2003); Kunsthalle Vienna (2002); and the Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2003) in addition to representing Switzerland (with Urs Fisher) at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Thanks
Special funding for We Burn, We Shiver. has been provided by a grant from The Henry Moore Foundation.

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Degrees of Remove:
Landscape and Affect

Rosa Barba, Luis Buñuel, eteam, Cyprien Gaillard, Anthony Hamboussi, Carla Herrera-Prats, Tim Hyde, Marie Jager, Gianni Motti, Aura Rosenberg, Oscar Tuazon

SculptureCenter presents Degrees of Remove: Landscape and Affect, a group show organized by SculptureCenter Curator Sarina Basta and Fionn Meade. Degrees of Remove will be on view September 7–November 30, 2008 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 7, 4-6pm.

Degrees of Remove regards landscape as an interpreted notion of space. The exhibition examines how contemporary experiences of landscape are increasingly mediated through various forms of documentation within urban societies.

While the word "landscape" was borrowed into English from the Dutch in the 16th century in direct relationship to painting, later definitions came to associate it with vista or natural scenery, and ultimately to a more general equation of landscape with image. As mediations between landscape and the individual have evolved through the increased prominence of photography, film, and other technologies, so has the perception of what constitutes landscape. With these technologies as intermediaries, the exhibition explores related ideas of the author as viewer and the viewer as witness.

The artists included in Degrees of Remove decode and alter the conventions of reproduced space through appropriation, interpretation, misinterpretation, and overlapping narratives. Anthony Hamboussi, for example, captures abandoned, recuperated, and in-between spaces through documentary-style photography. In La Petite Ceinture (2005), he has created one of the most extensive archives to date of a railway that connected the outer neighborhoods of Paris to the city's main railroad stations. Built in the 19th century, it has been abandoned since 1934. Returning to one of the sites, Hamboussi finds warning signs with racial overtones, of his previous passage. Captured in a subsequent photograph, is this trace of his visit, as an observed observer.

Embracing various degrees of distance from their sources, all the works on view portray a remove, exploring how spatial constructs relate to fiction and affect, the transposition of spaces into surfaces, and the elaboration of allegorical gestures. In Color Like No Other (2007) Cyprien Gaillard presents three different perspectives of a condemned multi-storey high-rise in Toryglen, Scotland. Gaillard shows the building as depicted in a Sony ad campaign, with a concert of paint blasting through the building's windows, as well as in quiet, unspectacular footage of the tower seconds before its demolition, and in a printed press release from the Glasgow Housing association validating the terms of the building's destruction.

As with the other artists included in Degrees of Remove, Cyprien Gaillard's work offers an examination of space and urban landscape that is simultaneously personal yet highly mediated. The choices of mediation have a direct impact on how the landscape is read, modifying the affective relationship between the source and the viewer.

Gianni Motti contributes Collateral Damage (2003), a series composed of appropriated journalistic photos documenting the war in Kosovo (1996-99), that were never released by the AFP (Agence France Press), for which Motti purchased the rights. Depicting explosions in a mountainous setting, Motti became interested in how the images, out of context, could be misread as the depiction of an idyllic Swiss village in a bucolic setting. Exploring the theme of dis-information and authorship, Motti was eventually sued by the AFP for selling the framed photographs as artwork.

A three night screening in conjunction with Degrees of Remove at Anthology Film Archive will take place in November.

Special thanks to The Cultural Services of the French Embassy for their support of Degrees of Remove through travel assistance.
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Soy el Final de la Reproducción

Ignasi Aballí, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, Isidoro Valcárcel, Juan Luis Moraza, Pedro G. Romero

SculptureCenter presents Soy el Final de la Reproducción, a group show organized by guest curator Beatriz Herráez. Soy el Final de la Reproducción will be on view September 7–November 30, 2008 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 7, 4-6pm.

Soy el Final de la Reproducción offers perspectives on architecture and sculpture through literary references, leading to an examination of self-dissolution, transience, erosion, and mechanisms of accumulation. It is through the presentation of archives, suggestive moments, and paradoxically the disappearance of information that the exhibition communicates these ideas. This exhibition presents five Spanish artists who span three generations. In many cases, their artistic practice involves theoretical writings and a curatorial interest grounded in historical exhibitions.

Soy el Final de la Reproducción, translated as I am the End of Reproduction, is a celebration of recessive and transient aesthetics. In the book Bartleby & Co, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas introduces the notion of "writers of No", writers who, when faced with the possibility of writing, "would prefer not to". All quietly forsook vanity and tried instead to contain the possible space for "the writing to come" – ultimately retreating from production and creativity. In an era where we seek generative systems, Soy el Final de la Reproducción looks at studies of space, or modes of operation, that state themselves (or their intentions) to be recessive. This exhibition explores the fleeting, grey space of "No".

The works in the show are investments in alternative time and hostile to the cult of efficiency. Each work acts as an infinite and silently hermetic repetitive or accumulative system. This methodical, inexhaustible mode of creation constitutes a cold, unemotional process, conscious that if there were a conclusion, it would not end well.

Pedro G. Romero's Semana Tragica (The Tragic Week), part of his series FX archive (2000–ongoing), collects an archive of images portraying disfigured monuments, depicting churches in particular, classified using terms in modern art's lexicon. The piece documents Barcelona's Semana Tragica riots (July 25–August 2, 1909) against catholic buildings, at the time symbolic of the bourgeois. The ruined monuments of FX archive link modern art's iconoclasm with politically subversive movements of Spain's 20th century history.

Torre para suicidas (Tower for the Suicidal) (1984) is an architectural project by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. The tower is equipped with zones for housing, administration, and suicide facilities, with social workers to aid the families of the departed. An ironic twist on 1970s utopian housing projects 'for better living,' Medina's plan fosters loss rather than efforts to redeem the individual.

The piece also critiques excess bureaucracy in state organization, in this case, geared explicitly toward the loss of an individual.

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest's paintings titled Ciudades Secretas (Secret Cities) (2005) are assembled using layers of written text, shapes, masses of color, and collaged documents. He superimposes layers of information that act as a glazed screen simultaneously revealing and hiding different cycles of the artist's own stories and travel journals incorporated beneath the surface. Though never readable, Diest's diary is suggested through the bright surface of his geometrical palimpsests.

Juan Luis Moraza hangs Moldes de Besos (2004-2005), improbable "Casts of Kisses" from the ceiling. Each sculpture portrays a futile attempt to crystallize the moment and intensity of a kiss. Moraza ensures the anonymity of those once locked in an intimate moment, but by contrast reveals the intimate and recessed details of the mouths' void.

Ignasi Aballí's Persones (People) (2007) is a drawing that contains and freezes time: a blurry line of dusty footprints on the gallery walls, created by the artist and visitors leaning against the wall. Aballí suggests a supposed passage of visitors and transforms traces of time into form, simultaneously rendering the individual footprint illegible.

Trained as an art historian, Beatriz Herráez works as an art critic and a curator based in France and Spain. She advises the Exhibition and Cultural Program at Montehermoso Cultural Center (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain).

Soy el Final de la Reproducción was originally exhibited at castillo/corrales in Paris (October 13 – November 10, 2007). castillo/corrales is a collectively-organized gallery, occasionally known as Kunsthalle Belleville.

Thanks

Special thanks to SEACEX: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior (Spain's State Corporation for Overseas Cultural Action) for their support of Soy el Final de la Reproducción through accommodation and travel.

Opening reception on Sunday, September 7, 4-6pm.

Sculpture Center
44-19 Purves Street Long Island City - New York
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Monday, 11am-6pm
Admission: $5 suggested donation

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