4 solo shows
dal 20/4/2012 al 23/6/2012
Segnalato da
20/4/2012
4 solo shows
Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf
Two retrospectives with works by Yuksel Arslan and Carol Rama. Between tragedy and comedy, on show works by Peter Land for Springtime. Last, in Dance Macabre, Dado presents his nightmarish and grotesque drawings.
CAROL RAMA
Böse Zungen
With Carol Rama (born 1918), the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is organising the first institutional exhibition in the Rhineland for one of the most extraordinary artists of her generation. The oeuvre of the Italian artist, who was awarded the Golden Lion for her life’s work at the 2003 Venice Biennale, is characterised by a radical breaking of taboos. Her dealings with the body and sexuality in her openly sexual watercolours from the 1930s anticipate themes that became important for action and body artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Her sensitive, often ironic drawings, collages, object pictures and watercolours, which the artist continues working on today, are equally shocking and elegant, rebellious and eccentric. Personal memories and early familial burdens, sexual notions and all kinds of everyday fetishising objects, myths and the present merge into a cosmos of its own in Carol Rama’s work that mirrors tendencies in post-war modernism but has preserved its own strong sense of individualism.
The exhibition understands itself as a solo presentation that is nevertheless thematically linked to the Yüksel Arslan (born 1933) retrospective that is simultaneously on show at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. A presentation of a selection of the early drawings by the Montenegrin artist Dado (1933-2010) is also being planned. Despite the idiosyncratic nature of these three oeuvres and their very different artistic vocabularies, they do overlap to some extent in terms of themes and pictorial worlds, making it sensible to present them in a joint context: the obsessive and unfathomable, motifs of dreaming, playing, sexuality, violence and dismemberment, the body as fragment and fetish.
Carol Rama employed images of “experienced“ objects and fragmented body parts such as shoes, shaving brushes, sets of teeth, tongues and eyes, which she arranged into new, often enigmatic images. She transformed fetishist sexuality, unfathomable fantasies and fears as well as bodily deformations and mutations into a puzzling poetic that is unprecedented in its mixture of naivety and boldness and which surmounts the Surrealist or Dadaist quotation. In the early 1970s, she discovered rubber as new working material for herself. Wear marks lend painterly qualities to old bicycle tyres, enabling them to tell their own stories as authentic fragments. The resulting collages and sculptures are close to the material sensitivity of Arte Povera, recalling Neo-Dadaist or Neo-Realistic tendencies in their assemblages of everyday items and Surrealist poetics through the erotic charging of the protruding valves. Carol Rama uses old maps or engineering drawings as the support for her pictures since the early 1990s, the structures of which she contrasts with her own pictures in a recourse to early pictorial inventions.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication.
----
PETER LAND
SpringTime
curated by Elodie Evers
21 April – 20 May, 2012
A two-facedness oscillating between tragedy and comedy traverses the entire oeuvre of Peter Land (*1966). While his works provoke laughter at first sight, they are revealed upon closer examination to be insufferable transgressions in the realm of “normality.” Land
gained recognition in the mid 1990s with his simply produced videos – documentations of personal failure and grotesque meaninglessness in which the artist is seen tumbling down an endless flight of stair, repeatedly falling off a ladder while painting or crashing to the floor while doing a drunken striptease to catchy disco hits. The Kunsthalle presents a selection of Land’s early films and recent
installations in a parcour reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: Different-sized doors that lead nowhere, doorknobs that do not work, and the eponymous piece “Springtime,” which comprises a pile of debris from which an arm protrudes. The boundaries between children’s games and nightmares are fluid in Peter Land’s work.
A total of 100 multiples from the edition “The Other Option” by Peter Land can be purchased on the occasion of the exhibition.
----
Yüksel Arslan
The Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan (born 1933, lives and works in Paris) left his native country in 1962 and settled in Paris where he has since generated an creative oeuvre in his home based in and on the reception of cultural, sociological, philosophical and artistic literature. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf represents the first presentation of a selection of nearly 200 works on paper outside Turkey since 1959. The show, curated by Elodie Evers and Gregor Jansen in cooperation with Oliver Zybok, focuses on the so-called artures, paintings on paper produced in a unique technique with special paints.
Their contents deal with the relationship of thought and mysticism, science and the visual arts while taking up philosophical, literary and musical currents that can be designated as the foundation of Western thought, knowing full well that the insights anchored here would probably never have come about without the empirical values of others peoples and cultures.
Arslan does not make use of classic paints for his works, mixing instead pigments from diverse herbal extracts, bodily fluids and other natural elements such as flowers and grass in addition to such substances as oil, coal and stones. This process is a central component in the development of the pictorial invention and does not represent a distinct preparatory part of the creative act. According to Arslan, the origins of painting have increasingly been neglected since modernism or, at the latest, since the introduction of industrially manufactured paints. Like Jean Dubuffet, the artist endeavours to cast off the ballast of the present in order to extract the true essence. Arlan can only rediscover the original via things that have seemingly been overcome by culture, but in fact have only disguised by it, for example procreation and sexuality. He is familiar with cultural “ballast” through his long occupation with modern and ancient languages, history, philosophy, music and traditional cultures. But Arslan has come to the recognition that much of this does not correspond to the true essence of the human being, and in the process, he pursues the similarities linking popular elements in the origins of cultures around the world.
The exhibition, which is presently on show at the Kunsthalle Zürich (28 January – 9 April 2012), can be seen afterwards at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. The comprehensive and opulently illustrated exhibition catalogue published by Hatje Cantz Verlag features texts by Elodie Evers, Jacques Vallet and Oliver Zybok and well as an interview with Yüksel Arslan by Beatrix Ruf.
----
Dado. Danse Macabre
Dado (Miodrag Djuric, 1933-2010) was born in Montenegro and went to Paris in 1956. He found support there for his work as an artist from Jean Dubuffet, Bernard Réquichot and Horst Kalinowski and was mentored by the art dealer Daniel Cordier, whose gallery was the site of his first solo exhibition in 1958. From 1960 he lived and worked in an old mill in Normandy, where his produced paintings, drawings and prints – surrealistic images, brutal and existential depictions of a fantastic horror. Dado, who was friends with Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn since 1962, described himself as a “philosopher of everything twisted.” His obsessive, often nightmarish pictures have close ties to and are rooted in Surrealism. They have a deep melancholy that is inherent to all living creatures and are simultaneously expressions of uncompromising humanity. Dado’s pictures depicting the bustle of human misery are inhabited by numerous boisterous and grotesque monsters and peculiar creatures. The people are degenerated, swollen and misshapen, bloated and hacked to pieces. The fleshy structure has been dissolved; the ink strokes suggest a transparency, in the opaque absurdity of which horrors have established themselves and appear malleable at the same time. The forms melt, often characterising a catastrophic state of emotional dismemberment and horrifying physical decay. At a time dominated by Abstract Expressionism, Dado became an important model for such exponents of a new figuration in art as Eugen Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz. The Kunsthalle is exhibiting a selection of his early drawings dating from the 1960s.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.
http://www.dado.fr
----
Image: © Carol Rama
C’è un altro metodo per finire, ancora, 2003
pastel, watercolours and enamel on paper on canvas
24.5 x 34.5 cm
Courtesy Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
Press and Communication
Dirk Schewe Tel.: +49 (0)211 8996256 Fax: +49 (0)211 8929576 presse@kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4 D-40213 Düsseldorf
Hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, public holidays: 11 am – 6 pm
Entrance:
Adults Eur 5,50
Concessions Eur 3,50
Groups (10 or more) Eur 3,50
Disabled and Young persons under age 18 free
free of charge between 6 and 8 pm on the last Thursday of every month.