calendario eventi  :: 

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11/1/2008

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

LISA RUYTER
THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce the third solo show of the American artist Lisa Ruyter who lives and works in Vienna. Since 1996, Lisa Ruyter's paintings have been based on individual photographs taken by the artist and have, therefore, formed a map of her movements around the globe as well as her personal development. The photographs, although casual, are always intentional. One cannot imagine Ruyter photographing these scenes without an implied audience. Ruyter then selects a small percentage of these pictures and begins the process of fixing them in paint. She "transcribes" the photographs onto the picture plane, selecting the portions of the image that she wishes to render, leaving out details she finds trivial, while focusing on others. Once the paintings have been drawn in, Ruyter begins to map out colors, filling in her own drawings. The final fixing of the images occurs when Ruyter, usually in a single sitting, redraws the lines with a paint pen, bringing the painting into sharp focus. The power of Ruyter’s paintings lies in the way she takes on seemingly ordinary images and makes them extraordinary. What appear, at first, as giant paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat colors with poignant, powerful subjects. The effect freezes the narrative and pushes it toward abstraction. Ruyter titles all of her paintings after films, though any relation of the title to the subject matter is incidental.

Whether painting crowds, party scenes, fashion models swaying down the catwalk, trees or Greek island landscapes, Ruyter's need to document the world around her through this disinterested, removed lens where the viewer is both there and not there is the stance of an original artist with a keen eye and cool, distanced vantage point. About her work, Ruyter says, “I have consciously created a style that will keep the work interesting or relevant, and that will create points of entry for art historians as well as someone who has never before considered art.” The artist has shown her work in galleries and museums the world over, including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), the Denver Art Museum (USA), Collection le Consortium (Dijon, France), La Colección Jumex (México), the Essl Collection (Klosterneuburg/Vienna), and Valencia Arte Contemporáneo (Spain). Lisa Ruyter has had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in leading galleries around the world, and, in 2008, solo shows will be presented in Paris, Tokyo and Vienna. Her work has also been seen in numerous group shows and at international art fairs. For further information, please contact elena Bortolotti: +331 42 72 99 00 or elena@ropac.net

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ALEX KATZ
DRAWINGS
“If I get the surface right everything will be there.”
Alex Katz, 1991

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce the opening of a second show devoted to the drawings of the American painter Alex Katz. This show, which consists of rarely seen works from 1970-2006, follows an earlier exhibition of the artist’s “cartoons” and serves as a retrospective of the artist’s drawings. The palpable feeling of distance and Katz’s sharp line in his works on canvas are already fully developed in his subtle drawings: “At first, it may seem surprising that the painter who exposes the eye to emptiness and attaches importance to skin and demarcation prepares his pictures in the manner of the old masters. That goes against the basic notion of Pop and media art” (Werner Spies). Alex Katz does not consider his drawings preparatory sketches for paintings. Rather, when the artist starts to realize a drawing, long before oil touches canvas, he already has a very precise idea of the picture in his mind’s eye.

Carter Ratcliff once aptly called his drawings, “paintings in black and white,” a statement he explains in an essay written on the occasion of the Alex Katz Drawing Retrospective at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Ithaca, NY in 1991: “Katz does not wander through the world with a sketchbook in hand, waiting for some object or effect of light to catch his attention. First he decides to paint a picture, then he makes a few drawings specifically for that work [...]. The casual look of the line in drawings [...] shouldn’t lead us to assume that, in this early stage in the process, Katz is idly playing about, waiting for some large purpose to formulate itself. Before he picks up his pencil, he has a good idea of what he wants to do.” Alex Katz was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. From 1946 to 1950 he studied painting first at Cooper Union in New York and then at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Although Katz belongs to the Pop generation of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, his paintings were not given international exposure until the 1970s. Since the eighties, Katz has been the protagonist of Cool Painting, achieving global influence and becoming a virtual father figure for a generation of painters who are now between thirty and forty. A 1997 exhibition in Zurich and Hamburg called “Birth of Cool” demonstrated how the musical ‘coolness’ of post-war American jazz by Stan Getz or Miles Davis inspired a new style of American painting.

With his figurative pictures, Alex Katz was always a crossover artist between abstraction and realism. His paintings were figurative at a time when the collective American art scene had turned away from representational art. In those days, Katz confronted the painters who insisted on an impulsive, individual style or, in the other instance, on presenting works whose representative content had been reduced to barely perceptible nuances. Katz himself has said he wanted to defend himself against Abstract Expressionism and the violent self-projection of artists like Jackson Pollock: “Without further ado, the young painter picks up the threads of America’s usable past, of Georgia O’Keeffe, Fairfield Porter, Ralston Crawford, and Edward Hopper” (Werner Spies). For futher information, please contact Victoire de Pourthalès, victoire@ropac.net (+33 (0)1 42 72 99 00)

Opening 12 january 2008

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme, Paris
Free Admission

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