calendario eventi  :: 

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13/9/2006

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

Katharina Fritsch

"I find the play between reality and apparition very interesting. I think my work moves back and forth between these two poles." Katharina Fritsch White Cube is pleased to present a new body of work by German artist Katharina Fritsch, her first show in London since her exhibition at Tate Modern in 2001. Fritsch is known for creating iconic objects, imagery and sculptural installations that imprint themselves on the mind. Her work creates a tension between the familiar and the uncanny, where humour is tempered by an incessant sense of unease.

In this exhibition Fritsch has created a site-specific installation, transforming the exhibition space into a municipal park, or at least the memory of a park that she frequented as a child in the town of Essen. To create these mental landscapes Fritsch has created works from postcards sent to her by her grandfather in the 1970's and 80's. These romanticized scenes are set within the industrial landscape of the Ruhr district, referred to by the artist as her 'heimat' or homeland. Transferred onto large, individually silk-screened panels, the single-colour matt painted surface is the result of a meticulous and extremely precise handcrafted printing process that appears deceptively simple. Each panel depicts the scene in a single colour, as if the other colours in the spectrum have faded, over time, by the bleaching of the sun to leave a trace, or a melancholic memory as if viewing the picturesque scene at twilight.

Fritsch has specifically mapped out the space by dividing the gallery with two identical central enclosures, which surround the viewer with three large panels. Composed of imagery of detailed parkland, each panel, in its differing hue, provides an intimate backdrop for a single sculpture placed on a white pedestal. One is a pale grey vase, a perfect geometric form from Fritsch's imagination; the other a classical sculpture of a woman's torso rendered in pure white, carefully scaled down from a bronze sculpture Fritsch had known from her childhood. Fritsch creates a pictorial world where the materiality of an object is distilled by memory and dream.

Katharina Fritsch was born in 1956 in Essen. Solo exhibitions have included those staged at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1988); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (1996); Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel (1997); Tate Modern, London (2001); and K21 Kunstsammlung im Standehaus, Dusseldorf (2002). Fritsch represented Germany at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 alongside Martin Honert and Thomas Ruff. Fritsch lives and works in Dusseldorf.

Katharina Fritsh will be in conversation with Iwona Blazwick at the ICA on Friday 15 September at 7pm in the Nash Room. Please contact the ICA box office for tickets on +44 (0) 20 7930 3647.

Private View Thursday 14 September 6-8pm

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Neal Tait

Now is the discount of our winter tents

White Cube is pleased to present ‘Now is the discount of our winter tents', an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Neal Tait. For this exhibition, Tait has made a total environment, an installation with painted walls and a bench where visitors can sit and contemplate the works (a re-make of a distinctive 1980s design). The bench echoes the strange conjunctions of craft and technology that is a key concern in Tait's paintings and the installation as a whole can be seen as a reaction to the inert nature of the ‘white cube' or gallery space.

Tait is interested in the way that themes and ideas can become redundant through their overuse and in the way that old stories or ideas can be reconfigured to open up space for new meanings and associations. For this exhibition, Tait has created a body of work which although treated with a certain lightness in both mood and spirit, carries with it a resignation to its own possible failure. These paintings, like much of the artist's work, have circuitous themes without obvious single entry or exit points and are underpinned by a strange, almost absurd logic. Narratives and sub-narratives are implied through collaged visual elements that have the seamless fluidity of a dream or the rhetoric of a fairy tale combined with the perverse playfulness of surrealism.

Often Tait's paintings seem to hinge on visual transformation where objects and images - a hat stand, a coat or a bunch of flowers, for example - carry the potential to become strange and unsettling visions. At the centre of a large plant, a small, blue head emerges, the leaves appearing like some huge, oversized baby's bonnet. In one picture, a man dressed in what seems to be medieval costume bares his backside to give birth to a child, next to an incongruous towering bouquet of flowers. In another work, we see a woman crying and a disembodied purple hand reaching from beyond the picture plane to offer comfort. Tait's cast of characters range from the heroic to the deeply pathetic and are often developed from a simple point of departure such as a story in a newspaper, a found photograph, a photograph taken by the artist, or one of his many preparatory drawings. As Michael Bracewell has observed, these paintings “take their compelling place as transmissions from what might be a world running parallel to our own: a world with its own time, its own dramas, its own cast of species, its own social hierarchy and its own way of doing things."

Neal Tait has exhibited in international group exhibitions such as ‘Painting on the Move', Kunsthalle Basel (2002), ‘Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2004) and ‘Hoch Hinaus', Kunstmuseum Thun. Solo exhibitions include Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2002) and Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle (2006).

A fully illustrated monograph on the artist, with essays by Michael Bracewell and Jeremy Millar, will be published by Other Criteria, London, in September 2006.

Image: Katharina Fritsch

Private View Thursday 14 September 6-8pm

White Cube
48 Hoxton Square - London
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm

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