Kenneth Noland staining ‘Horizontal Stripe’
paper piece at the paper mill
Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, NY, 1978
Photographer: Lindsay Green

“I’ve followed other artists gratefully and I hope I’ve also followed my own path….sometimes along side other artists. I’ve also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist. I love art and I love the life of art and I only wish that the real life of art could affect social change in a good way and that the invasion of commercialism in art and the invasion of entertainment into all areas of our lives hadn’t brought some of the worst features of our culture into the realm of art.

—Kenneth Noland
“The Bennington Years” symposium, University of Hartford, March, 1988

I heard of Kenneth Noland’s death through a text message from my friend and fellow painter Don Voisine: Kenneth Noland RIP. This isn’t the sort of thing artists kid about, not Don’s idea of a practical joke; still, I clung to a small shred of doubt. Moments later, I googled Don’s exact words and found that Noland had indeed passed away. Well, I figured, at least he made it to his 85th year. Not a bad run, not a bad run at all. But it’s difficult to fathom: one of the last great colorists of the 20th century is no more…”

Click to purchase on Amazon.com

By Tracey Bashkoff (Author), Don Quaintance (Author), John Hanhardt (Author), Karole Vail (Editor)

Exploring the origins and early days of the Guggenheim Museum — when it was first known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting — this volume reveals for the first time the Guggenheim’s complex architectural history, drawing on extensive correspondence between Founding Director Hilla Rebay and artist Rudolf Bauer (whose work the Guggenheim collected exhaustively) to reveal the leading role Bauer played in envisioning the collection and the museum. It also explores Rebay’s unusual curatorial conceptions and framing practices at the museum’s early locations. Karol Vail provides biographies of many lesser-known artists in the museum’s collection, while others discuss the museum’s early history and ambitions. Architectural drawings, installation views, photographs and color plates of selected artworks help track the rise of this great museum.

Daniel Göttin, Installation Proposal for MINUS SPACE, 2010

February 6 – March 13, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new immersive installation by Basel, Switzerland-based artist Daniel Göttin entitled Network 45 with Signs. For the past 20 years, Göttin has focused on making temporary, site-specific interventions that examine the subjective nature of perception. His installations, always consisting of common industrial materials, such as tape, carpet, and paint, playfully respond to the specific characteristics of an architectural site and activate the viewer’s relationship to it.

For Network 45 with Signs, Göttin will create a black tape wall installation throughout the entire gallery. At select intervals throughout his installation, he will also install a series of abstract “signs” made of aluminum foil on laminated cardboard, which were informed and inspired by his recent residency in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Daniel Göttin has mounted nearly 60 solo exhibitions and projects since 1990 at museums, galleries, and non-profits worldwide, including throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, and the United States. His work has been presented, commissioned, collected, and written about widely over the past 20 years. In addition to his artistic work, Göttin, along with his partner, artist Gerda Maise, also directs Hebel_121, an experimental exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland.

Daniel Göttin’s installation Network 42 (2008) is also still on view in the café at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate in Long Island City, NY. It was originally created for the exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, which was on view at the museum from October 2008 – May 2009.

SUPPORT
The exhibition Daniel Göttin: Network 45 with Signs is supported by Abteilung Kultur, Basel, Switzerland. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

David Baskin, JAG, 2008

February 5 – April 17, 2010

An exhibition of sculpture curated by David C. Terry & Matthew Deleget.

Participating Artists:
David Baskin, Suzanne Broughel, Virginia Griswold, Kent Laforme, Sylvan Lionni, Jaye Moon and Claire Watson

Helio Oiticica & Neville D’Almeida
Block-experiment in Cosmococa, CC1 Trashiscapes, 1973
Room installation with slide projectors, sound, mattresses, pillows & nail files

February 4 – May 1, 2010

The Hunter College Art Galleries presents an exhibition featuring a rare glimpse into the collaboration between artists Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida Beyond Participation: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida in New York.

The collaboration between renowned Brazilian artists Hélio Oitica and Nevielle D’Almeida from the late 1960s though the 1970s changed how audiences perceived art, shifting them from passive viewers to active participants. Exhibited for the first time together, the slide-show environment Cosmococa—Programa in progress, CC1 Trashiscapes (1973) is shown alongside D’Almeida’s film Jardim de Guerra (1967), as well as two of Oiticica’s notebooks from 1973 reproduced in facsimile. The dynamic installation CC1 Trashiscapes comprises two projectors flashing 32 slide-photographs onto opposing gallery walls, accompanied by a soundtrack including forró music (typically from the Northeast of Brazil) such as Luis Gonzaga’s baião, Jimi Hendrix songs, street sounds, and voices. Mattresses line the floor, and nail files are available for use by visitors. The audience is invited to relax and recline horizontally while filing their nails in the dark as they watch the images on the surrounding walls. The slides themselves consist of three distinct photographic series: Luis Buñuel’s face on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, a series of black-and-white photographs of Luis Fernando Guimarães (an actor and friend of Oiticica) wearing Parangolé 30 Capa 23 M’Way Ke, and the album cover for Weasels Ripped My Flesh by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, all manipulated with white line of cocaine by the artists’. This work is an important progenitor of early video and installation art and influenced subsequent generations of artists tremendously.

CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION:
Jocelyn Meade Elliott completed the coursework toward her MA in Art History at Hunter College and is working on her Master’s thesis on the subject of Hélio Oiticica’s filmic work made during his years in New York from 1970–78. She is an independent curator working in New York City.

PUBLICATION:
The exhibition will be accompanied by a color catalogue featuring an essay by Jocelyn Meade Elliott, an interview with Neville D’Almeida, and text and images by Hélio Oiticia and Neville D’Almeida. Images are available upon request.

Helio Oiticica
Vermelho cortando o branco, 1958
Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 cm
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Projeto Helio Oiticica

November 19, 2009 – February 21, 2010

Haus Konstruktiv completes its exhibition programme for 2009 with the presentation of one of the most significant collections of Brazilian Concrete-Constructive art: “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” showcases for the first time in Europe “The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”. Although individual works from Mr. Adolpho Leirner (born, 1935 in São Paulo) have been shown frequently in the past years, this will be the first time the entire Adolpho Leirner collection is exhibited outside of Brazil or the United States. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the MFAH, which owns the Adolpho Leirner collection since 2007.

The Leirner Collection comprehensively documents how starting in the early 1950s, artists from the Brazilian avant-garde assimilated and contested the tenets of international Con-structivism, developing a unique Concrete-Constructive art. “Collecting is like a love affair. It means making discoveries in a huge game of hide-and-seek. Each and every one of these discoveries represents an important part of my life,” says the passionate collector Leirner. Painstakingly assembled since the late 1950s, the collection includes works that trace the beginnings of non-figurative art by artists such as Cícero Dias (1907–2003) and Samson Flexor (1907–1971), as well as works by members of “Grupo ruptura”, “Grupo frente” and Neo-Concretismo in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The latter of which include such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), rediscovered in recent years by the international art world and honoured with large solo exhibitions.

“Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” will enable a broad public to gain fascinating and informative insights into the development of Concrete-Constructive art in Brazil, while sim-ultaneously revealing so far little-known cross-connections and artistic dialogues with Swiss concrete art.

The exhibition directly ties in with Haus Konstruktiv’s incorporation of art history initiated with the grand jubilee exhibition “max bill 100″ (winter 2008/09): the reconstruction of the first Bill retrospective from 1951 in São Paulo already showed how the artistic exchange between concrete artists working in Europe and Brazil intensified from the 1950s onwards with Max Bill as a central figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, is the major publication Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the MFAH. Edited by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (distributed by Yale University Press), the volume assesses the research of avant-garde artists and groups of Concrete and Neoconcrete tendencies in post-War Brazilian art, and generates updated frameworks and new lines of investigation for the interpretation of these interrelated ten-dencies. It comprises of thirteen essays that were commissioned by a group of distinguis-hed artists, critics, and scholars from Brazil and the United States. The publication was designed by the noted Brazilian designer and artist Alexandre Wollner.

Installation view

January 15 – February 13, 2010

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents the works of Jorge Eielson, Donald Moffett, David Noonan, Steven Parrino and Salvatore Scarpitta. From the 1950’s to the present these artists have stripped, ripped, twisted, draped, stretched and stitched the canvas to create works that push the definition of painting.

For over a century the notion of materiality has intrigued philosophers – debating the hierarchy of form over substance and vice versa. Art critics also joined this debate in the latter half of the 20th Century when artists began tackling these concepts in actual practice, with some artists discovering the possibility of an easy truce. In 1961 with the introduction of the X form in his work Salvatore Scarpitta proclaimed he was “breaking the constriction of the rectangle.” So it is that each of these five artists has broken free from the dimensional confines of the stretcher while remaining true to painting, material and form assuming equal weight as content.

Jorge Eielson is most recognized for his use of the quipus, a knot imbued with cosmic symbolism and used as an ancient Incan counting system. Born in Peru to a Peruvian mother and Swedish father Eielson’s work matured in Italy where he spent the bulk of his adult life. Fashioning his quipus from fabric that was once a shirt or rope or burlap, Eielson twists and stretches his material over the flat surface of the canvas, creating a physical object where both tension and serenity coexist.

The late 1950’s work of Salvatore Scarpitta also appears wrought with tension, but with a visceral edge not readily evident in the more contemplative works of Eielson. The artist has said after his experiences with WWII “I started ripping up the oil paintings, the canvas that had become an utter enemy for me….I needed to run the risk of leaving fingerprints.” The resulting works comprised of ripped raw canvas strips resembling bandages speak of both wounds and healing.

Steven Parrino’s work and persona is often linked to preoccupations of death and nihilism further mythicized by the artist’s own premature death. Despite coming of age in an era Parrino has described as when “the word on painting was ‘Painting Is Dead’. I saw this as an interesting place for painting…and this death painting thing led to a sex and death painting thing…that became an existence thing.” Parrino’s “misshaped paintings,” as he referred to them, are in essence about existence and the possibilities of what painting can be.

Donald Moffett’s recent paintings appear abstract, but upon closer examination distinct corporeal references and orifices emerge. The canvas itself a body. Unlike the punctures and slashes of Fontana, Moffett’s holes are precise with sutured edges and his cuts are methodical and neatly zipped. His flayed paintings are just that – stripped as a body is skinned. A founding member of the Gran Fury collective, Moffett’s measured exploitation of his raw materials concentrates his works pointed political and sexual content.

David Noonan’s work appears more directly figural, silkscreen images on collaged raw linen. The images themselves are often blurred and re-imagined through cutting and re-assembly. The tradition of collage allowing the artist to build a multi-layered narrative in which there is no hierarchy of images. While the narratives are left open for interpretation, the materials themselves imbue the work with an atmospheric antique ambiance, like 19th Century sepia prints.

As Scarpitta aptly stated, “I wanted to make air circulate there where the canvas, with its form had become oppressive.”

Erik Saxon, Untitled, 1996
Watercolor on Arches paper, 10 x 7 inches
Donated to Yale University Art Gallery, CT

For artists, scholars, and art enthusiasts interested in modern and contemporary American works on paper, AboutDrawing provides a unique resource for study and exploration. With a focus on the New York-based drawing collection of Werner H. Kramarsky, this site hosts a comprehensive selection of images, essays, artists’ biographies, and other information about artists and exhibitions associated with the collection.

AboutDrawing also acts as an interactive companion to the definitive volume on the Kramarsky collection, 560 Broadway: A New York Drawing Collection at Work, 1991-2006, edited by Amy Eshoo and published by Yale University Press in February 2008. An engaging reflection on the fifteen years that the collection was headquartered at 560 Broadway in SoHo, this book documents one collector’s contributions to the careers of many emerging New York artists and to the contemporary art world at large.

Both AboutDrawing and 560 Broadway detail, in particular, Wynn Kramarsky’s extensive history of donations to public arts institutions across the country. The site currently limits its scope to materials connected to those artists whose work has been donated. Site visitors may explore images of donated work online and can use the site’s resources to locate objects at their home institutions.

About the Collection
The Kramarsky drawing collection is the result of more than sixty years of interest in Minimal, Conceptual, and Post-Minimal American drawings. With an intuitive attraction to the raw materials and intimate processes involved in making a drawing, a continued interest in developing supportive relationships with artists, and, above all, a commitment to careful looking, Wynn Kramarsky has amassed nearly three thousand works of art, more than half of which have subsequently been donated to museums and other public institutions.

Don Voisine, Chemical Moment, 2009
Oil on wood, 16×17 inches

“Brent: Upon entering the gallery, your first show on the West Coast, San Francisco, Gregory Lind, immediately you become aware of all that is color. Oddly it is not the black that pushes its presence first. But like a good friend, faithful, the blacks unfold at a different speed, which require the intimate. If dark be the turbine then color is the outwardly expressive, and is the meter. In the exhibition space this is what travels across to us in calibrated splendor.

Don: Your response sounds similar to the reaction people have when coming to my studio for the first time. Having seen a painting or two in various group shows they would expect the studio to be a dark and perhaps foreboding place. Often the first words uttered are, “Wow, look at all this color!” I think this explains why salon style installations of my work have been done in a few exhibitions. It replicates the experience of seeing the work in the studio…”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (America), 1994
Photo: Andrew Cross

January 16 – April 25, 2010

Curated by Elena Filipovic with Danh Vo (at WIELS, Brussels), Carol Bove (at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel), and Tino Sehgal (at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main).

WIELS premieres a major traveling retrospective of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, b. Cuba 1957-1996), one of the most influential artists of his generation. Including both rarely seen and more known paintings, sculptures, photographic works, and public projects, reflecting the full scope of Gonzalez-Torres’ short but prolific career and drawn from the Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres as well as public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, this groundbreaking exhibition proposes an experimental form that is indebted to the artist’s own radical conception of the artwork.

Defying the idea of the exhibition as fixed and the retrospective as totalizing, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form offers instead several exhibition versions, and none the authoritative one, all the better to present the oeuvre of an artist who put fragility, the passage of time, and the questioning of authority at the center of his artwork. At each venue in which the show will be hosted, the exhibition will open to the public and then halfway through its duration, it will be taken down and re-installed by a different invited artist whose practice has been informed by Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Curated by Elena Filipovic, a first version of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will open to the public at WIELS on January 16, 2010 and, on March 5, 2010, the artist Danh Vo will undo that show and re-install it—adding and removing artworks, changing such things as lighting, labels, and the order of presentation, in other words, effectively making an entirely new version of the exhibition.

Inspired by Gonzalez-Torres’ understanding of the artwork as potentially infinite in meaning and as well as his practice of changing the arrangement of artworks weekly in the case of one exhibition (”Every Week There Is Something Different,” 1991) or, in another, shifting the form and content of an exhibition when it went from one venue to another (”Traveling,” 1994), Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form grounds its approach in Gonzalez-Torres’ very personal understanding not only of the art exhibition, but also of the artwork writ large. The resulting retrospective, initiated and organized by WIELS in collaboration with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, New York, underscores not only the enduring legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ oeuvre, but also several very distinct aspects of his work: from its vulnerability to its concern with formal issues to its scathing social critique, each of these is emphasized in one of the versions of the traveling exhibition.

1 retrospective, 3 venues, 6 versions, 3 artist-curators: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will offer its visitors the possibility of finding a new interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres’ engaged and complex body of work with each visit. The curatorial interventions of the invited artists—Danh Vo at WIELS, Brussels; Carol Bove at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Tino Sehgal at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main—will emerge from different interpretations of the meanings and presentation possibilities for Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form thus acknowledges that the way an exhibition begins and ends its “story,” the emphasis it places on one aspect more than another, the way it presents individual artworks, the juxtapositions it constructs, the mood it creates (because the works of art are hung sparsely or densely, shown theatrically or in bright institutional light, emphasizing their monumentally or rather their vulnerability, etc.), in addition to the way an exhibition is discursively presented—all of these potentially shift the way that a body of work might be understood by its public. And all of these participate in the construction of the meaning and reception of an oeuvre, which is to say, nothing less than the construction of history.

Catalogue:
 The tour of the exhibition will be followed by a fully illustrated catalogue documenting each version of the exhibition and including essays by Elena Filipovic, Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal as well as interviews with artists of various generations. Essentially a publication determined by the voice of artists, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Specific Objects without Specific Form will underscore the decisive impact and importance of Gonzalez-Torres’ work on art practices today. Due to appear in 2011.

Installation view

The Lesley Heller Workspace is pleased to present The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now, an exhibition organized by guest curator Jason Andrew, featuring the work of artists associated with The Wells Street Gallery, one of Chicago’s vanguard galleries of the late 1950s.

On exhibition will be works from the Wells Street Gallery period (1957-1959) as well as examples of recent work by a majority of the original artists associated with the gallery including: painters Richard Bogart, Ernest Dieringer, Judith Dolnick, Robert Naktin, Ronald Slowinski, Naomi Tatum, Gerald van de Wiele, Donald Vlack, sculptor John Chamberlain, and photographer Aaron Siskind.

The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now is the first exhibition of it’s kind, uniting the tough gang of young Chicago abstract artists who together ran the Wells Street Gallery from 1957-1959. They were “a band of young, fire-eating vanguard artists,” wrote the prominent art critic Franz Schultze in Art News, and the gallery was tagged “an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town,” by the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

The Wells Street Gallery played a major role in granting young artists like sculptor John Chamberlain and painter Robert Natkin their first one-person exhibitions at a time when too few galleries in Chicago, or elsewhere for that matter, where interested in the work of abstract artists. This exhibition pays tribute to this artist-run gallery and the brief yet historic contribution it made in advancing abstract art in Chicago.

“The Wells Street Group,” as they were called, were “sewn together by a plucky and often exciting lot of young painters,” wrote Franz Schultze. The group’s colorful, vigorous, nonobjective and non-representational expressive paintings were distinguishable from the “Monster Roster” of Chicago expressionists, lead by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, and the Bauhaus-influenced formalists, leading critics to consider them the counterpart to the New York School of abstract expressionist calling them the new “Chicago School.”

Jason Andrew is an independent curator and archivist. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, Andrew is the founding director of Norte Maar, which encourages, promotes and supports collaborations in the arts. Guarding against any special interest in any particular style or genre, his curatorial projects bridge gaps left in art history and reflect the creative imagination of the past, present and future. Recent curatorial projects include the retrospective exhibition Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes / Five Decades of Painting, and the new paintings by young painter Brooke Moyse.

Helio Oiticica, Metaesquema 167, 1956
Gouache on board, 16 x 16 1/8 inches

December 17 – February 6, 2010

Drawings, 1954–58 brings together over twenty rare works by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), a pioneer in Modernism and multi-disciplinary practice whose works-on-paper have not yet been exhibited independently. The exhibition features works from the artist’s three major drawing series: Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 will be on view at Galerie Lelong from December 17, 2009, to February 6, 2010.

Oiticica’s works form a bridge between painting and sculpture; furthermore, they connect the Modernist utopia of the 1950s with the more fractured period of social and political tensions of the 1960s and ’70s. His revolutionary performances, sculptures, and installations—-most notably, the series Parangolé, Bilateral, Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief), Bólide, and Penetrável (Penetrable)—-outline a cohesive, sustained investigation of color and abstraction as a framework for spatial experience. The delineation of architecture in two dimensions is most visible in his drawings.

From 1955 to 1956, Oiticica was associated with Grupo Frente, a group of avant-garde artists including Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Though Oiticica was still a teenager and the youngest member of the group, his Grupo Frente drawings demonstrated an intuitive response to color matched with rigorous discipline-—a distinctiveness that would remain until his last works. The Sêcos (1956–57) establish Oiticica’s engagement with space as structure; in these he used color more economically, concentrating on symmetry and asymmetry. Years later, Oiticica’s Penetrables would make tangible the spatial relationships that are hinted at in the drawings. In the Metaesquemas (1957–58), with which viewers may be most familiar, he layers color in sharp precision, suspending the forms in a space that is perceived beyond the drawings’ borders.

The timing of the exhibition is made poignant by a tragic event: on October 17, 2009, a fire broke out at the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, including the storage facility where Oiticica’s works were kept. Though initial reports of the damages were devastating, it has since been deemed that a number of works can be restored. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 allows the public unique access to the visionary basis of Oiticica’s groundbreaking work.

Bernard Gilcozar, Four palets. Polyptique., 2009
Duct tape and wood, 135 x 90 x 7.5 cm

January 21 – March 7, 2010

Installation view

January 6 – February 20, 2010

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present the first New York show of shaped, monochromatic paintings from 1965-66 by Ronald Davis – including four iconic examples that have not been on public view since the 1960’s.

In the fall on 1965 Ronald Davis introduced a series of eight geometrically shaped, richly painted monochromatic canvases at the newly opened Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. Consisting of rectilinear forms (e.g. a rhomboid, a parallelogram etc.) this body of work presented an illusionistic spatial order while also projecting an even greater sense of depth than their 4″ deep stretchers provided.

At play in Davis’s applications of two- point perspective were the lessons of spatial fictions learned from methods artists had employed in the past – from early Renaissance painters to Duchamp and, more contemporaneously, to the shaped canvases of Frank Stella. With this new and relatively radical body of work, however, Davis introduced the notion of depicting a three-dimensional abstract shape emanating from the wall as a monochromatic form. The idea of painting as object, hotly considered at that time, took on even greater depth with this work as it seemingly beamed out images of colors and shapes. Davis’s concerns with articulating space and perspective amounted to an investigation of form as it encompassed matter. “The nature of form in space…” as curator Susan Larsen has noted “… is the subject of Davis’s continuous probe.”

The work of Ronald Davis resides in over forty museum collections in North America and Europe. It has been the focus of over eighty solo exhibitions including six at Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles, five at Leo Castelli, New York and five at Blum Helman, New York.

Davis was born in Santa Monica, CA and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 – 64, and then moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked until 1993. Davis currently resides with his wife Barbara in New Mexico.

Joe Barnes, Red Diptych, 2008
Acrylic on canvas, 17.7 x 24.2 cm each
Installation at Herz Jesu Kirche, Cologne,  2008

February 5 – March 2010

Installation view

January 23 – March 5, 2010

Terry Haggerty, Recoil, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 180 cm

January 15 – February 27, 2010

Andreas Grimm Gallery presents a solo exhibition with new works by Terry Haggerty. Haggerty’s interest has “always been… in how we arrive at abstraction”. His works appear to play with the three-dimensional affects of trompe l’oeil and with theories of color in art and design from early in the last Century. They also refer to modern abstract iconography, in particular that of the Op Art movement of the 1950s and 60s.

His new shaped works, exhibited for the first time in this exhibition, present layers of overlapping color that distort the picture plane. Since the canvas structure of these works has been shaped slightly, the viewer perceives both the effect of the lines bending to create the shape of the canvas and the opposite; the canvas appears to make the lines bend. With the shaped works there is a sense that the illusionistic painting becomes tactile like an object or that there is an outside pressure applied to distort the rigid rectangle into a subtly curved form.

Consistent with his past work, Haggerty maintains in these paintings a focus on the dynamic gesture of line that embodies not actual objects, but rather, actions or occurrences, like letters or other symbolic abstractions. The viewer is left with an odd sense of displacement that throws the canvas out of shape. In the work “Recoil,” two bands snake together contrapuntally up the canvas creating a strong tension of a stretched, fibre-like abstraction that could spring back like a rubber band. Each of the works embodies tension, movement and gesture, all brought together into a seamlessly perfected, matte surface eliciting the tactile curiosity of all who view them.

Terry Haggerty (born 1970 in London) studied painting at the Cheltenham School of Art in Gloucestershire, Great Britain, and currently lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Following “Inside Out” in 2007, this is the second exhibition by Terry Haggerty at Andreas Grimm in Munich. Among his numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA, Haggerty’s works were shown at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and CCNOA, Brussels.

February 17 – May 23, 2010

The first exhibition to bring together South American and US geometric abstraction, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s features more than 90 works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Constructive Spirit examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films. Featured artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

Constructive Spirit includes many never-before-seen works from the Newark Museum’s preeminent collection of US art, as well as major loans from acclaimed private and public collections and galleries across both continents.

Complementing the exhibition are related programs and events. On Saturday, April 10 from 10 am to 5 pm the Newark Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will present an international symposium that will offer new perspectives on South American and US abstract artists including John Ferren, Juan Melé, Charles Biederman, Gego, Josef Albers and Lygia Pape. Other related programs include a lecture series, gallery talks and family events. For information, click here.

Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s is accompanied by a major publication of the same name that will be available February 2010 at the Newark Museum Shop. Fully illustrated and co-published by Pomegranate Press, it features seven essays that place North and South American abstraction in dialogue. Authors include Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O’Hare and Cecilia de Torres. The 196-page publication will be available in hardcover for $39.95. Call 973-596-6696 to pre-order your copy today.

January 24 – February 24, 2010

The Suburban is pleased to present The Suburban, a solo exhibition by artist Ethan Greenbaum. Greenbaum’s work is concerned with architectural and cultural blank spots. He frequently uses ubiquitous sites like sidewalks or printer paper as his subject matter. Removing these sources from a functional context, he manipulates them to open new associative possibilities. For the exhibition, Greenbaum will be installing objects and architectural modifications that engage with the multiple public and private spaces of The Suburban.

The Suburban emblem is repurposed as both show title and window display. Removing the name from the logo, the artist prints the resulting symbol on adhesive vinyl. Hung in the upstairs window, the design suggests commercial signage or a pictograph of a crossed out zero. Continuing this play with negation and substitution, the main gallery entrance is locked; viewers must enter through an open garage door. Inside, an entrance has been cut in the wall that separates garage from exhibition space.

The gallery walls are covered with A1 sheets of paper printed with lorem ipsum, a nonsensical filler text used in graphic design as a placeholder. Devoid of information, these blocks of text create an opaque barrier, stacked floor to ceiling like bricks. On the floor Greenbaum has built a low wall of cinder blocks covered in plasticine. Traditionally used as a material for model-making, the gray plasticine forms a thin surface that paradoxically obscures and reproduces the blocks as unique objects. This makeshift partition stretches across the room, simultaneously framing and preventing access to one half of the gallery. Acting as both wall and window, the partition echoes material and linguistic equivalents created throughout the show.

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. He graduated with an MFA from Yale in 2005. Selected exhibition venues include Anna Kustera, NY, Circus Gallery, LA, Shenghua Arts Center, Nanjing and Gallery SATORI, NY. He is also a co-founder and editor at the online arts journal, thehighlights.org.

Simon Ingram, Riser, 2009
Oil on linen, 38 x 38 cm

January 9-23, 2010

TAG is the first exhibition in the INITIATIVE series, a program established to offer gallery artists an opportunity to exhibit more experimental or project based works, and to add diversity to the gallery exhibition schedule.

In TAG painters Simon Ingram and James Cousins present an exhibition of new paintings that sit outside their regular exhibiting practice. As the title suggests their joint exhibition promotes an exchange of ideas and provides a new context in which to consider their works.

James Turrell, Bridget’s Bardo, 2009
Installation

Until April 5, 2010

In collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the American light artist James Turrell has created his largest-ever walk-in light installation in a museum context: an 11-metre-high, “space within a space” structure that covers a floor area of 700 square metres and reaches up to the glass roof of the museum. One of Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces, it is a hollow construction divided into two parts. The two interconnecting chambers – the Viewing Space and the Sensing Space – are both completely empty and – a new feature of this type of work – flooded with slowly changing coloured light. The Kunstmuseum is showing The Wolfsburg Project along with a number of Turrell’s other works in the most extensive exhibition by the artist in Germany to date.

Visitors can enter the piece via a steep ramp that leads down from the upper floor into the Viewing Space; immersing themselves in a “sublime bath of light”, they can experience with all their senses how the architectural elements of the space dissolve in this homogeneous visual field, creating a sense of perceptual disorientation. While the light reveals and refers to nothing beyond itself, surface qualities interact with those of colour and space to create an atmosphere that completely envelops the spectator and stimulates the senses. Viewers become submerged in a mysterious, painterly world of pure light. Turrell describes this as “feeling with your eyes”, an experience he regards as not just aesthetic but also spiritual.

Installation view

October 30, 2009 – June 5, 2010

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts present the exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. The artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings with a power saw in order to reveal their hidden construction, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. He spoke of his work as an activity that attempted “to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls.” When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments, known as “cuts.” They include a section of an apartment floor (Bronx Floors: Double Doors), three parts of a house near Love Canal (Bingo), a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City (Pier In/Out), and the rooftop corners of a house in New Jersey (Splitting: Four Corners). For this exhibition, the Pulitzer has borrowed these very cuts from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and from the private collection of Thomas and John Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York, also lent nearly fifty photographs, while the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, provided numerous works on paper, including eleven drawings. Two of Matta-Clark’s films, Fire Child and Conical Intersect, are also on view, offering a means to understand better the performance aspect of his art.

The placement of Matta-Clark’s work in the exhibition spaces designed by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer encourages new ways of looking at art, architecture, and the urban environment. Ando’s pristine building not only heightens the roughness of Matta-Clark’s cuts, but it will also recall the artist’s lost interventions. Both he and Ando sought to break the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural “box” by allowing light to penetrate spaces in unexpected ways.

A web catalogue featuring installation views of the exhibition will be located at http://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org

Reminiscent of an alchemist, Matta-Clark pursued the transmutation of a discarded object into something filled with “hope and fantasy.” He was deeply concerned with the abandonment of buildings and the fate of urban communities. He became socially and politically active during the 1970s and wrote that he focused on buildings, “for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures. Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.”

The exhibition programming, entitled Transformation, connects the artist’s social activism to present-day St. Louis. The Pulitzer, in collaboration with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, has organized programs that build upon Matta-Clark’s desire to imbue abandoned objects, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning. The Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark’s legacy into the 21st century and to inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts. An interactive web presence will reflect this community-driven programming at http://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org/transformation

January 23 – February 27, 2010

Dirk Rathke creates objects with painterly materials – wooden frames, canvas and paint – that go beyond the scope of the genre. This Berlin-based artist is part of a young generation that has developed fresh approaches to painting and has distinctive solutions in the geometric-abstract tradition. The relationship between line, area, space and movement is the main emphasis in Dirk Rathke’s artistic exploration.

With his room drawings, Rathke explores the dialectical conflict between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional space. The same tension exists in his paintings. Exploiting the spatial potential in the surface of the canvas, Rathke zestfully bends, shifts and twists them out of axis.

Julian Jackson, Ariel, 2009
Oil on wood, 56 x 48 inches

January 7 – February 6, 2010

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents the third solo exhibition of paintings by New York artist Julian Jackson. Jackson’s exhibition, will o’ the wisp, presents a new body of work expanding the artist’s development on the subject of light.

In folklore involving the will o’ the wisp, a term used to describe the flickering light of twilight, travelers are led to unexpected places from one world to the next. In this show Julian is working with our perception of and experience with light. Where previously the artist received his inspiration from the commune of light within nature, this show speaks of light as a direct entity. Yet as the title implies, the attraction of light is anything but direct. Jackson’s paintings deliver light as both a lure and an escort between the determinate and the ephemeral. With the application of layers consisting of very thin oil glazes and the tedious process of brushing and softening the paint surface presents an imagery of color closely resembling an objective light source. Says the artist, “ultimately, the phenomena of light, color, and a sense of layered space are the central themes of this work.” The illumination and focus of these beautiful paintings helps the viewer focus on the light at the end of the tunnel, one which may tempt us to cross boundaries from this world into the next. In the spirit of a new decade, Jackson’s au courant body of work presents us with the embodiment of transition, one that is ready to take us to the next stage and decade.

Julian Jackson studied painting, printmaking, photography and performance at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and received his BFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He exhibits extensively throughout New York and Germany, and has work in several well known collections including The Sundance Corporation and the Citibank Collection. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

January 23 – February 28, 2010

Installation view

January 8 – February 6, 2010

Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 will present to the New York public a long-overdue survey of the particular kind of minimal work that was made in and around Los Angeles, work which differentiated itself in its emphasis on surface, synthetic materials, industrial processes, and perception. Often referred to under the umbrella term “Light and Space,” the artists and artwork included in this exhibition will present a more inclusive overview of the ground-breaking and diverse art practices that flourished in California in the 1960s. The exhibition includes rarely seen works by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine, and Doug Wheeler.

While most of the artworks included in the exhibition can be referred to as minimal in form, their seductive surfaces, often made out of nontraditional materials, and their luminescent use of color and light characterize them as uniquely Southern Californian. Distinguishing themselves from their East Coast Minimalist counterparts, the California artists in the exhibition were reacting to local concerns with light and atmosphere, often evoking the qualities of the bright Los Angeles sunlight and the shiny, finished surfaces of the city’s ubiquitous signs and automobiles. Noted for translucent, reflective, or ethereal surfaces, the work made by these artists explored the often ephemeral boundaries between painting and sculpture and the broader experiential possibilities of art.

The works on view capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles area during the 1960s, where certain cutting-edge industrial materials and technologies were being developed at that time. Many of the artists employed unconventional materials to create complex, highly-finished and meticulous objects that have become associated with the so-called “Finish Fetish” aesthetic. These artists were also influenced by the industrial paints applied to the surfaces of surfboards and cars, as well as the plastics of the aerospace industry.

Artists such as De Wain Valentine, Helen Pashgian, and Peter Alexander experimented with casting polyester resin in different formats, creating works which explore the material’s ability to both contain and reflect light. Alexander’s Untitled (Window), 1968, which consists of a transparent blue wedge, explores the synthetic material’s qualities in relationship to color and luminosity, whereas Pashgian’s clear, geometric orbs (such as Untitled, 1968-69) deal with shifts in perspective and issues of translucency and perception. Valentine’s Triple Disk Red Metal Flake – Black Edge, 1966, uses fiberglass reinforced polyester to achieve beautiful tensions between exterior and interior spaces.

In a similar manner, the early “cubes” of Larry Bell explore the relationship between the sculptural object and its surrounding environment. Creating perfect cubes made out of glass and metal (among them Untitled, 1966-67, and Untitled, 1969), Bell developed a delicate, vacuum-coating technique to achieve semi-reflective exteriors. The flawless surfaces of these works induce a mesmerizing range of perceptual experiences, simultaneously drawing the viewer inside the object and reflecting the surrounding environment.

Laddie John Dill’s Untitled, 1971, employs glass in a distinct manner: supported by sand and illuminated from below by argon light, its twelve glass panels create a reflective installation of fractured space that exponentially extends the sequence of glass panels in a mirrored progression. This work explores Illustration on first page: DOUG WHEELER. Untitled, 1969. Acrylic, neon tubing, and wood. 91 1/2 x 91 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches. the interplay of site, structure, light, and, in effect, immateriality, while also addressing the viewer. Originally conceived in 1971, the artist has subsequently installed distinct versions of this work in a site-specific manner: always using local materials, Dill configures the panes of glass according to the space in which it is installed.

The relationship between color and surface was a primary concern for many of the artists in this exhibition. Among them, Craig Kauffman and John McCracken utilize color as a physical presence or “material.”

Kauffman implemented plastic as his primary medium, creating his best known work: a series of vacuumformed, Plexiglas wall reliefs that investigate the material aspects of color. These glossy and symmetrical works utilized a vacuum-formed molding technique developed for commercial signage. His transparent, plastic “bubbles” were then painted from behind, achieving a luminous effect through the integration of color and ambient light, to create works which cannot be classified as either painting or sculpture.

The highly-saturated, monochromatic surfaces of McCracken’s works are sanded and polished to produce such a high degree of reflectiveness that they simultaneously activate their surroundings and appear translucent. Thus, the objects gain a singular and almost otherworldly quality, appearing at once physical and immaterial through his application of color. His signature form, referred to as a “plank” (the exhibition includes Red Plank, 1967, and Think Pink, 1967), leans at an angle against the wall (the site of painting) while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm and physical space of the viewer. McCracken’s work further challenged the notions of Minimalism through the artist’s interest in spiritual phenomena.

Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler, all of whom began as abstract painters, developed practices which employ light and indeterminate space to extend and disorient the visual experience. These artists created environmental installations which explore the physical, sensory, and temporal aspects of the architectural space.

Irwin began his practice by dismantling the act of painting in order to expose the perceivable qualities of color and space. The “dot painting” Untitled, 1963-65 (on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), made up of small dots of color that interact with the viewer’s eyes, is an example of Irwin’s early interests in perception and its mechanisms. The exhibition will also include an example of Irwin’s freestanding, transparent acrylic columns (Untitled, 1970-71), in addition to an untitled work from 1969 (on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego) that is comprised of a white, convex disc mounted on the wall and lit from four points, casting numerous shadows to effectually dematerialize the object.

Turrell’s work employs light as a medium. He creates what appear to be luminous three-dimensional forms which, upon closer inspection, resolve themselves into empty planes of light. Using colored light to cast geometric forms onto the corner of a room, these emanating projections explore the boundaries of the material and immaterial qualities of light to achieve perceivable visual forms that are distinct from the physical architectural space. The exhibition presents two such “corner projections” from the late 1960s.

Wheeler’s Untitled, 1969 (illustrated on first page), belongs to a body of innovative light paintings known as his “Light Encasement” series (begun in 1965). These works consist of large squares of plastic, with neon lights embedded along their inside edges that blur the distinction between the work of art and its surrounding context. Generally hung on a wall in a pristine white room of precise proportions, these works create an immersive environment, absorbing the viewer in the subtle construction of pure space. Like Irwin and Turrell, Wheeler’s enveloping environments explore the materiality of light while also emphasizing the viewer’s physical experience of space.

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by noted critic Dave Hickey will be published on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with Steidl, Germany.

Installation view

December 18, 2009 – January 18, 2010

Curated  by Pavel Alejandro Barrios Sosa

“The Artist Magicians form a human conscience, revealing universes that are concentric or chaotic, silent or resounding; they are devotees whose occupation is to reveal or to make possible things that have never been, things that will be, or things that will continue to be. The primordial magic art has not changed; the change is only in our way of perceiving. That limitation in perception leads to tedium and confusion until the evidence is accepted. The magic is there still, with the same simplicity which Benedetto Grocce indicated when he stated that the search for art is to look for a concept that everybody knows. The search for art is not necessary, it is self-evident. It is simply not understood that it is understood.” – Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay by Pavel Alejandro Barrios Sosa

Ludwig Wilding, renowned German artist and founder of the Stiftung fur konkrete Kunst und Design in Ingolstadt, Germany, died on January 4, 2010. He was 82 years old. Wilding was one of the most important representatives of European Op Art.

Michelle Hinebrook, Encrusted, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

LTS presents Exposure: Michelle Hinebrook & Nicki Stager, an exhibition spotlighting the separate works of these two artists. Both are wholly steeped in light, but each reaches a different, yet complementary, conclusion.

Michelle Hinebrook’s newest pieces explore a very specific sort of geometry. Watching each line take the long journey across the canvas, one becomes aware of how each carries a share of the piece, as though the burden of the whole is being shifted into parts, just as light can be expressed in particles. Some pieces reflect like a cut diamond, while others catch the eye like a fish in a net. Michelle Hinebrook has exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery (New York, NY), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York, NY), McKenzie Fine Art (New York, NY), David Klein Gallery (Birmingham, MI), the Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI), Like the Spice Gallery and galleries and museums throughout the country.

Coming roughly a year after her explosive Like the Spice solo show Synesthesia, Nicki Stager continues her conceptual exploration of color and light. Nicki’s all- new photograms have a feel of the glossy about them, and they wash over the viewer like a wave. In this show, her smaller cube-shaped styles continue, but all arrive newly created, and with the additional beauty that comes from experience. Against these works, Nicki showcases her enticing new larger pieces, cubes at new sizes, which have pushed Nicki to work against greater thresholds.

Greet Billet, 1/256 – 256/256,
256 different kinds of black in a movie, 2009
Grey color on wall, video projection

WITH YOUR EYES ONLY is an experimental project, which analyses the elements of perception in a collage of artistic interventions and objects. Within the frame of reductive art, levels of perception and the mechanisms of observation are questioned in a multidisciplinary, playful approach. Starting point are the phenomenological conditions of the artistic production like color, light, material and time which influence the structure and content of the reductive works and wherein exemplary questions related to perception open up. Visual structure is given to the artistic interventions by an architectonic display which refers directly to a changing spatial experience through its staging qualities and, at the same time, is a platform for the presentation of different perceptual levels.

Reductive art is a relational „language of art“, which aims at a specification of perception and develops abstracting image strategies via an analytical and emotional approach. Reductive works, thus, not only question their conditions, but also refer as translating media to further reaching contents and contexts which cannot be experienced straightly. In the foreground of the analysis of these strategies of reductive art and its communicating “physicalness” is the relation of the audience and the object, which contribute to an attempted clarification of the understanding of an artwork by linking up physically directed associative reactions, intellectual consciousness and the interpretation of meaningful content.

The topic also refers to notions of a participatory perception of an artwork following an open concept of the artwork, as it was postulated, amongst others, by the American artist Robert Morris in the 1960s. The approach to expose the artwork to a phenomenological experience was critically opposed by Michael Fried arguing that this understanding of art devotes itself to a dramatics which neglects the audience and negates the auratic right of the artwork (Art and Objecthood, 1967). In contemporary art and in particular in the reductive realm, these, also by Morris proposed options of creation, are consciously employed and discussed anew with respect to changing conditions.

The exhibition project analyses the encounter with strategies of a reductive image language in the context of a relational, perceptual behavior which depends on movement. With the approach of presenting the artistic objects and interventions in a relatively unconventional way, the exhibition consciously refers to the translating, transforming qualities of the respectively addressed levels of perception, which concentrate towards a contentwise expanded discourse. The artistic strategies are developed via various procedures and aim at the development of a dialogical process of perception including also methods which consider site-specific conditions that integrate the artwork in the present or generated space. In this process, the evolving objects serve as information carrier, which point at the content as such via a sensorial mode of perception. The transporting function of the object points at different approaches of recognition, it invites physical participation and notional debate. At first place, it is often drawn on familiar and established perceptive patterns which yet have to be examined with respect to their up-to-dateness and the definite object.

The site-specific extensive intervention of the Belgian artist Ward Denys will set the parameters of the visual-artistic basic orientation of the overall project. Denys deals with the intersections of visual art and architecture, analyzing the borders of functionality and dysfunctionality, of surface and space. Often a physical reversion of the present situation and the object, resembling a mirror effect, is crucial. By this “suspension” of physical constants, he involves the audience and their perceptual reception into the work. Denys realizes this approach when “shifting” the exhibition space by turning the floor plan through 35 degrees, and thus requests, through the changed spatial orientation, also a shift and translation of the perception. This “new” floor plan is the construction plan for his site-specific structure, which, at the same time, serves as a platform for further artistic works.

This intervention lets evolve a new spatial situation, which the New York-based artist Dan Walsh takes up to interpret his notions on light as a phenomenological condition of artistic production. Walsh understands the medium of painting as a tool to bring into play the contemplation of perceptual mechanisms. The analytical experimental projects which he has pursued since years focus on the questioning of the perceptual process. Walsh will construct some site-specific objects of similar texture and form and subject them to different light conditions and -qualities, in order to analyse the changes of perception.

With interventions which are driven by painting, into present, often for this purpose conceived spatial situations, the Brussels-based artist Pieter Vermeersch creates site-specific environments. By means of painting, Vermeersch describes spatial conditions and their interaction with color. With these created color spaces, he lets the audience directly participate and addresses their sensorial levels of perception. Vermeerschs’ contribution will be developed in tight cooperation with Ward Denys integrating his architectonic intervention regarding color and space.

In the specially conceived video installation “Minimal Reality”, the Russian artist Alexandra Dementieva pointedly goes into the process of visual perception. We see a movement, an additive and substractive time lapse which appears through a process of contrasting. In the course of a minutely detailed procedure and starting from a white “void” image, a complementary form evolves up to its anew emptying. We do not know and will not really know what it is that we perceive. But what we see is a process which refers back to the act of seeing; this process is enhanced to an expanded sensorial level of perception by the cooperation with the Belgian sound artist Aernoudt Jacobs.

The contributions of the other participating artists will be presented in such a way that a tight context between the different perceptual levels evolves and a dialogue of the sensorial qualities is triggered. The totality of the exhibited objects shall concentrate, in a wider sense, to an image which is directed by a link of various overlapping, complementary or distinguishing perceptual patterns and contents. The works start a dialogue in the sense of perceiving and using visual levels of perception, and this shall be understood as a proposed physical, mental and sensorial expedition.

The exhibition project finally offers the opportunity to question critically and if necessary re-evaluate possible traditional expectations with respect to the own perception of reductive art. WITH YOUR EYES ONLY hints at a continuous recheck of the own position considering the interaction with present objects and situations.

Participating Artists:
Greet Billet, Kjell Bjørgeengen, Alexandra Dementieva, Ward Denys, Clemens Hollerer, Simon Ingram, Aernoudt Jacobs, Leopoldine Roux, Esther Stocker, Tilman, Pieter Vermeersch, Dan Walsh, Carrie Yamaoka