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18/10/2010

Logiques

Mamco, Geneve

INFORMATION FICTION PUBLICITÉ (IFP) L’Épreuve du jour
Pierre Leguillon. Danse libre
Daniel Roth. Cloaks of Invisibility
Bujar Marika. Paradox Park
Gérald Minkoff. Un portrait
Fabien Piccand. You are Fabulous

Mamco is pleased to announce the upcoming opening of its latest sequence of exhibitions, Logiques (Logics), which is scheduled to run from 20 October 2010 to 16 January 2011. The fall program, whose title comes to us from a collection of writings by Philippe Sollers,* boasts two parts. First, there is an ensemble of three major monographic shows featuring work by widely recognized artists who are rarely—if ever—shown in Switzerland.

This will include a retrospective, a first, devoted to INFORMATION FICTION PUBLICITÉ (IFP), a French collective that was active from 1984 to 1994, along with two other exhibitions highlighting the art of Daniel Roth and Pierre Leguillon. Secondly, In memoriam brings together three shows that each pay homage to three artists who were active in Geneva and who passed away in 2009, Gérald Minkoff, Bujar Marika and Fabien Piccand.

Cloaks of invisibility is the most extensive show ever devoted in Switzerland to the work of Daniel Roth (1969, Schramberg, Germany). A native of the Black Forest in Germany who currently lives and works in Basel, this artist assembles installations from a mix of elements (drawings, sculptures, texts and photographs) that seemingly chronicle fantastic phenomena in a quasi- documentary way. His work springs from places that he has closely observed and which inspire in him stories that he elaborates in his large-scale pieces. Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam (2008), for example, conjures up a fictional forest taking root beneath the city of Amsterdam, the artist’s intention here being to remind us that the historic districts of the Dutch capital were constructed in the 17th century thanks to wood brought in from Germany. In Roth’s work it is very often the hidden or forgotten worlds, the inaccessible or forgotten sites, that serve as the framework for the stories he tells.

Several renowned institutions have already featured the artist’s work, notably South London Gallery, the Dallas Museum of Art, Bonn’s Kunstmuseum, and the Artists Space in New York. Taking up Mamco’s 4th floor in its entirety, Roth’s show offers visitors the chance to discover ten installations by this intriguing German artist.

Pierre Leguillon (1969, Nogent-sur-Marne) is increasingly in demand, mounting a growing number of shows in France and abroad, confirmation of the keen interest his work is generating. Mamco is very pleased to present for the first time in Switzerland an exhibition featuring his work. The show boasts the singularly choreographic title Danse libre (Free Dance). Leguillon’s work stands out for the wide range of activities it spans. Leguillon has indeed been by turns a photographer, art critic, publisher, teacher and exhibition curator. In the early 1990s he made a name for himself with his slideshows, designed as performances with the sequences of images and references evolving from one presentation to the next.

Leguillon’s pieces draw on a corpus of existing images and works which he appropriates, reactivates and presents to the public in novel rereadings. And whatever the material form this presentation takes, be it slideshow, exhibition or publication, the artist looks to weave together a disparate material that incorporates multiple visual supports, including photographs, postcards, pages from magazines, advertising spreads and promotional materials, etc. This approach allows Leguillon to draw up a true genealogy of images. Pierre Leguillon has recently exhibited at the Moderna Museet in Malmö, CAPC in Bordeaux, the Artists Space in New York, and the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, as well as Mudam in Luxembourg and the Louvre in Paris, where his diaporama / vestiaire was shown.

Mamco is also hosting the first retrospective devoted to INFORMATION FICTION PUBLICITÉ (IFP). The IFP “agency” was formed in 1984 by Jean-François Brun and Dominique Pasqualini, and quickly included Philippe Thomas, whose work will be the focus of an extensive show next year at Mamco. Mounted by David Perreau, the IFP retrospective exhibition is the first to cover the art practiced by the collective, which was active in France and abroad for a decade. The show will feature a selection of works that makes plain the singularity of the group’s activities. Thanks to its original approach, the show can highlight the way this “agency” was a forerunner of art’s permeability vis-à-vis design, fashion and advertising, and how it changed the concept of the artist as sole creator while problematizing the very notion of the art exhibition.

Along with this program, Mamco will pay tribute to the memory of three artists who passed away last year, Gérald Minkoff, Bujar Marika and Fabien Piccand. In memoriam, a series of three monographic shows featuring a selection of their works, paints a fitting portrait of these three singular figures.

Born only at the age of fifty-seven as an artist according to his self-definition, Bujar Marika (1943, Tirana – 2009, Geneva) viewed his work as an act of donating or contributing to art and society. Embracing a postminimalist, postconceptual esthetic, Marika’s works are to be taken first as a cosa mentale, although they are no less liable to adopt forms whose sensual qualities are striking for both their simplicity and their precise beauty. A few months before he died, Marika elaborated an exhibition project around the idea of paradox called Paradox Park, entrusting its realization to the artist and curator Anne-Laure Oberson. The museum is especially pleased then to host this show, which brings together some ten works by Marika, some of which were completed a short time before his death and others done posthumously based on the artist’s notes.

A photographer and pioneer of art video in Switzerland, Gérald Minkoff (1937-2009) was also an ethnologist, traveler, avid collector and lover of words driven by an insatiable curiosity and profound humanism. His artwork teems with invention and drew upon his erudition and many passions. Besides his video works and photographs, which brought him no little attention, Minkoff was also known for his palindromes and other language games. Working with the artist Muriel Olesen, his companion of forty years, Mamco is set to pay homage to him with an exhibition that will provide visitors with an extensive look at this man of many facets.

An outstanding, truly memorable figure of Geneva’s art and underground scene, Fabien Piccand (1971-2009) first made a name for himself as the founder and spearhead of Artamis, an association and self-administered cultural venue in Geneva that was active from 1996 to 2008. Widely enthusiastic and unbowed by society’s constraints, provocative and politically committed, Piccand was the source of a barrage of projects designed to carve out new spaces of freedom in the city, occasionally going so far as to flirt with the limits of legality. These last few years, before the tragic accident that ended his life at the age of thirty-eight, Piccand had intensified his artmaking with works that turned a highly critical eye on society’s disquieting trends in security measures and the control it exercises over the individual. You are Fabulous is the title of an exhibition-homage mounted by the artists Fabrice Gygi and Matthias Grau, who were both close friends of the late artist.

Image: Daniel Roth, Spheres floating over the peninsula, 2008

For any request regarding extra informations and illustrations, please contact the press department : Clarisse Jaouen, c.jaouen@mamco.ch | tél. +41 22 320 61 22

The press conference of the exhibition sequence is held on Tuesday, October 19 at 11am at Mamco, in the presence of the artists.

Opening, Tuesday, 19 october, 2010. 6-9 pm

Mamco
10, rue des Vieux Grenadiers, Geneve
Hours: tue-fri 12-18, sat-sun 11-18

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