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29/9/2008

Peter Downsbrough

Angels Barcelona, Barcelona

Àngels Barcelona will open the new season with the first individual exhibition in Spain of Peter Downsbrough (USA, 1940), with new sculptures and wall pieces. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will present a screening of the artist’s most representative videos.

In his sculptures, videos, films, photographs, books and sound pieces, the artist investigates the traditional use of space and language as objects. His material consists of black tape, adhesive letters and aluminum pipes, which create lines, planes, geometric forms or words: adverbs, prepositions or conjunctions (which connect one part of a phrase to another: and, but, as, of...). Through displacements, discontinuities and ruptures, he enters into a dialogue with these elements, the space and the pubic, offering the spectator new/different forms of seeing and interacting.

Downsbrough’s artistic career began in the early sixties when he abandoned his architecture studies. Since then, his artistic process is centered in questions regarding the “position” and “displacement” of objects, elements, and people within a determined space, such as the constructed and concrete space of an exhibition gallery, of an architecture or a book, or even the city. He is interested in the relation that is established among these elements due to their position, as well as the new possibilities that come to light as a result of their displacement.

Downsbrough’s video and photographic works are explorations of how space is structured and organized. He started taking photographs to document his own work with two vertical metal pipes, capturing the negative spaces present in urban space. In the mid-seventies, he started to work with video. In 1980, he rented commercial space on the Spectacolor Board on Times Square in New York to put up a piece called The Dice, which made him one of the first artists to use that space. This showing was documented in the film 7 come 11, one of his only films that uses color. The use of black and white is in fact a fundamental characteristic of Downbrough’s work. In his words, “black is the most dynamic, it makes structure evident and avoids subjective elections. We think in black and white.”

From 2000, his plastic language is refined even further and the artist only films cities, architectures, and places almost or completely bereft of people, or at least lacking any activity for which these spaces were created. Only the word seems to establish an ultimate contact with a human reality.

Peter Downsbrough has shown individually in the United States and Europe in institutions such as: MAMCO (Geneva), SMAK, Stedelijk Museum van Aktuele Kunst (Gent), Kent Institute of Art and Design (Canterbury), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Lyon) or the Palais de Beaux- Arts (Brussels) and regularly in galleries such as Erna Hecey (Bruselas) o Barbara Krakow (Boston). He was selected for the Venice Biennale (2006). In addition, he has participated in group exhibitions in MNCARS (Madrid), MOCA (Los Angeles) or the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), among others. His public work can be seen in several European cities, including: Rennes, Warsaw, Lodz, Brussels and Lyon.

To request images or an interview with the artist, contact the gallery at: info@angelsbarcelona.com.
T: +34 93 412 5400

Angels Barcelona
C/Pintor Fortuny, 27 - Barcelona

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