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28/1/2010

Three Exhibitions

Spruth Magers, Berlin

Alighiero Boetti
Insicuro Noncurante

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the work ‘Insicuro Noncurante’ by Alighiero e Boetti in Berlin. The work has the form of a portfolio with 81 numbered sheets which provide an overview of the artistic production of Alighiero e Boetti from 1966 to 1975. It comprises various work forms such as original sketches and glued works, postcards and letters, but also copies of his large-format major works, to which the sheets manifest various relationships.

Alighiero Boetti, alias Alighiero e Boetti, was born in 1940 in Torino and died in 1994 in Rome. He was self-taught as an artist and abandoned his studies at the University of Torino in order to dedicate himself to art. From the middle of the 1960s onwards, he gained attention through his artistic activities. After his first exhibition in 1967, he became affiliated for a short while with the Arte Povera movement. As of the middle of the 1970s, Boetti presented himself as the fictional artist-couple ‘Alighiero e Boetti’, in order to point towards opposing factors in his oeuvre such as individuality and society, error and perfection, order and disorder.

In ‘Insicuro Noncurante’, Boetti's delight in the analysis, reorganization and hence the identification of systems of order spilled over onto his own oeuvre. It offers a personal as well as survey-like compilation of many of his most important works, along with personal sketches in a small format. One gains an impression, moreover, as to how Boetti's apartment in the Roman quarter of Trastevere looked. Hanging on the walls were objects which interested him; down below were postcards and photographs as well as his own sketches and pictures, which may be found in the portfolio.

Numerous sheets of the work provide information about the analytical and simultaneously playful involvement of the artist with such human-created systems of order as mathematics, language, and their basic elements such as numbers and letters. Sketch-like number-games on graph paper are included here as well as a version of one of his major works entitled ‘Classificazione dei mille fiumi più lunghi del mondo’ (1970-1977), which represents in book form a classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world and simultaneously reveals the impossibility of this sort of operation.

Also to be seen are copies of his first embroidery-works commissioned in Afghanistan in 1971, the year when Boetti discovered the country as his second homeland, along with letters and post cards which he sent to friends and to himself starting in 1969, thereby anticipating Mail art. In addition, the portfolio includes a sketch-like version of the ballpoint-pen picture ‘Mettere al mondo il mondo’. Quotation marks and letter bar are drawn here on graph paper, where they are accordingly easier to group together and to decipher than on the large-format pictures, in which the figures which are left white seem to become lost upon the background filled in with ballpoint pen, even though they belong at the same time to a clearly-defined system. The version on display here functions as a instructional example for how to read Boetti's pictures done in ballpoint-pen.

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George Condo
Family Portraits

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present an exhibition with new works by George Condo. At the opening of the gallery in Berlin in October 2008, large-format drawings by the artist were displayed in the cabinet on the upper floor. Now with the exhibition ‘Family Portraits’, Condo is continuing the discourse on the figurative element in painting, which is one of the fundamental aspects in the artist’s oeuvre.

George Condo, who already in 1984 had his first solo exhibition at the Monika Sprüth Galerie in Cologne, resided at the beginning of the 1980s for an extended period in Cologne and moved within the context of the ‘Jungen Wilden’. The style of this group of young painters, to which such artists as Walter Dahn and Jiri Dokupil belonged, was typified by an emphatically painterly and expressive character which deliberately distanced itself from the artistic movements in vogue at that time, such as Minimalism and Concept Art. Whereas artists who practiced painting wished to free themselves from the notion of art which was esteemed at that time, unconventional art forms such as graffito and comic simultaneously entered into the formal repertoire. The repudiation of a historical or genre-specific hierarchy continues to characterize the oeuvre of George Condo right up to today: the pictorial language of painting from Velázquez to Picasso enters into a symbiosis with the aesthetic of the modern comic book and of everyday visual culture. There are not, however, any direct pictorial quotations or discovered and appropriated motifs to be found here; instead, Condo connects formal references and subjects into a new pictorial sphere, so that an art-historical aspect shines through the presence of a contemporary visual world.

The portrait as a classical pictorial genre functions in Condo's works as a commentary upon the history of painting and simultaneously as a mirror of our own era. Through the utilization of light and shadow, which recalls classical chiaroscuro, Condo draws forth from the dark, almost black background the countenance of the grotesque-beautiful ‘Smiling Girl’ (2009) or the lugubrious shape in the work ‘Silent Thoughts’ (2009). The figures, which are to some extent composed of geometric forms, look like hideous creatures with their gaping mouths and bulging eyes, and they summon up associations with ventriloquists' puppets. At the same time the paintings, executed in the virtuoso manner of the old masters, take on a melancholic and abstracted appearance.

The large-format works of the exhibition such as ‘The Fallen Butler’ (2009) or ‘Central Park’ (2009), combine figures, fragments of faces and abstract forms into an intricate pattern juxtaposed on the pictorial surface. The temporal aspect indicated by the titles becomes an element of the paintings. The narrative element, however, does not serve to describe a specific occurrence, but instead complements the depiction of complex factors and constellations. Inasmuch as Condo coaxes an irritated smile from the viewer with his humorous and grotesque mode of representation, he places at our disposal the manner in which we perceive experienced reality.

Whereas the current era is characterized by an intensive examination of the past, i.e. of history and its reception, it is influenced at the same time by an environment which is constantly increasing in speed and complexity. In his oeuvre, George Condo expresses an awareness of the history of images and the phenomena of our times. His paintings, along with his sculptures and drawings, evince a characteristic which maintains a delicate equilibrium between the sublimity of the work of art on the one hand, and the aspects of comicality, grotesqueness and distortion on the other.

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Michail Pirgelis
Akropolis

Sprüth Magers Berlin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Michail Pirgelis in Berlin. The artist, who was born in Germany and grew up in Greece, is displaying in ‘Ακρόπολης – Acropolis’ new sculptures and objects which are all based on original parts of airplanes.

Pirgelis' works oscillate between readymade, appropriation and autonomous sculpture, but they also transcend these categories, not least of all through the material which he favors. The airplane parts which, even after their actual utilization, continue to be valuable, and which Pirgelis collects from scrapyards throughout the world, extend the history of the objet trouvé by establishing an extreme position. The concentration on the airplane, which has been optimized with regard to its utilization by human beings in accordance with natural law, situates the works in a productive discourse concerning the relationship between humanity and the technological progress which has had a decisive influence on a modernism characterized by reflection. Flight as the ‘most improbable’ form of human locomotion, together with its mythic connotations, continues in this context to be imbued with a deep fascination.

In his exhibition, Pirgelis displays seven new objects. In addition to two sculptures from the ‘Airsaddles’ series (2009), brightly polished oute fuselage sections which hang nonchalantly from the gallery wall, he also presents a series of baggage storage compartments which have been transformed into loudspeaker towers. On the one hand, these objects, more than two meters in height, profane the high-tech material through the artistic intervention; and on the other hand, they also make a tongue-in-cheek reference to the technique of bricolage, to assemble and reorganize as a cultural practice in whatever form.

The works of Michail Pirgelis sometimes seem to attain a freedom from their fate of ending up as scrap material. Through the treatment of the artist - the acts of cutting, collaging, highlighting, covering and polishing - the objects reacquire an aura which mass air-transportation has taken away from aviation. Particularly in an era when the threats posed by the airplane as a means of transportation - whether from an ecological perspective, or with respect to the latent menace through international terrorism - receive widespread discussion, Pirgelis' art seems to have much to say about the repercussions of the technologies created by human beings. Thus Pirgelis' works achieve their impact, not only through their formal beauty and texture, but also as a reflection upon the dialectical relationship between humanity and technology which goes all the way back to the Icarus myth.

On the one hand, the exhibition title ‘Ακρόπολης – Acropolis’ refers to the archeological procedure engaged in by Michail Pirgelis - the process of seeking, finding, and preparing - but on the other hand, it also opens up a perspective for approaching the subtly understated works of the artist as an expression of fundamental experiences which humanity has acquired during the course of cultural history.

Opening Jan. 29 2010, at 6 pm

Monika Spruth Philomene Magers
Oranienburger Str. 18 - Berlin
Opening Reception: 29.01.2010, 6 – 9pm
Hours: Tue – Sat, 11am – 6pm

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