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1/2/2011

Susan Hiller

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of new work by the internationally renowned artist Susan Hiller. An Ongoing Investigation will take as its focus Hiller’s series of works made as homages to different influential art historical figures from the 20th century including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein. Combining conceptual and minimalist strategies and aesthetics with the influence of feminism, popular culture and psychoanalysis, the exhibition will feature works in a diverse range of media including sculpture, photography, and installation.

Emerging in the early 1970s, after initially studying as an anthropologist, Hiller is now considered one of the most influential artists of her generation. Hiller’s output has taken many different forms and frequently derives from a process of collecting, cataloguing, restaging, and transforming cultural artifacts and experiences as a means of exploring the subconscious and unconscious mind.

In her latest sculptural installation, Homage to Gertrude Stein (2010), Hiller uses a vintage desk as a literary reliquary. Referencing Stein’s interests in automatic writing, the artist has stacked a collection of books relating to the subject, filling the underside space of the desk. Hiller herself has employed various forms of automatic writing in her practice for over thirty years and has transposed this method of mark- making onto wallpapers, photography, and canvas. Placed on top of the desk is a binder containing facsimiles of Stein’s postgraduate papers on automatic writing. While providing a succinct visual bibliographical guide to Stein’s library, the rounded shape of the table also humorously evokes Stein’s physical proportions.

The exhibition will also include the final and most ambitious work in Hiller’s Homage to Joseph Beuys series (1969-2011) entitled Home Nursing. This wall installation comprises eight vintage, felt-lined medicine cabinets, filled with antique glass bottles, containing holy water from numerous springs and wells around the world. In electing to utilize glass vessels, felt, and water, Hiller alludes to the ways Beuys made symbolic use of matter-of-fact materials and sacramentalised everyday activities. By collecting water from holy wells or sacred springs, the artist transforms banal tourism into a form of quest or pilgrimage.

In her ongoing Rough Sea series, Hiller explores the complex relationships between painting and photography that she first identified in her seminal postcard piece Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1976), a key work which will be on display at Hiller’s 2011 Tate Britain survey exhibition. Many of the postcards collected for this work were reproductions of paintings, while others were printed versions of photographs that had been hand-tinted prior to reproduction. The Rough Sea archival pigment prints play out various permutations of these possibilities. Accompanying and relating to this series are several previously unseen Addenda (1976-1986) works, each of which focus on a particular theme or issue exemplified in postcards acquired by the artist after Dedicated to the Unknown Artists had been completed.

The exhibition will also feature a number of new aura portrait photographs that form part of Hiller’s ongoing Homage to Marcel Duchamp series. In Duchamp’s 1910 portrait of his friend Dr. Dumouchel he explores the practice of clairvoyance. In the image a range of vibrating colours emanate from the contours of the sitter’s body, while a luminous white band radiates from his hands. Hiller looks at this historical tradition through a collection of found photographic portraits in which the sitters are surrounded by clouds of coloured light that are generated by electronic means. This particular series functions therefore both as a metaphor for contemporary society in the digital age and as a celebration of the continuing desire of people to experience and record spectral phenomena.

This mapping of Modernism’s ghostly legacy is continued in another group of individual portraits of people levitating which form part of the Homage to Yves Klein series (2010). Alluding to Klein’s iconic and faked photograph Leap into the Void (1960), Hiller views this work and her subsequent found images as part of a tendency in modern art to make use of certain mystical or spiritual traditions derided as superstitious by scientific rationalism.

Susan Hiller (b. 1940, Tallahassee, Florida) lives and works in London. A major survey exhibition curated by Ann Gallagher will take place at Tate Britain in 2011 (1 February – 15 May). The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Jan Verwoert. Hiller has exhibited widely at international institutions and is represented extensively in international private and public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; Frac Bourgogne, Dijon; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Inhotim, Brumadhino, Brasil; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Art of South Australia, Adelaide; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Tate, London; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

For further information please contact David Field
Tel: 020 7183 3577 or Email: david@suttonpr.com

Private View Invitation Wednesday 2 February 2011, 6 - 8pm

Timothy Taylor Gallery
15 Carlos Place London
Open Mon-Fri 10-6pm Sat 10-2pm
free admission

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