Kyle Jenkins, Urban Geometry #328, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 30 inches

January 27 – May 5, 2012

The Ecole des Arts de Braine-l’Alleud in Belgium presents the exhibition  ”Colorific,” featuring the work of Greet Billet, Marc Chevalier, Cedric Christie, Krysten Cunningham, Cheryl Donegan, Javier Fernandez, Kyle Jenkins, localStyle, Pieter Laurens Mol, Roland Orépük, Paul Raguenes, Benjamin Rivière, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Léopoldine Roux, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi, Tilman, Jan Maarten Voskuil, and Dan Walsh.

View of Carrie Pollack’s studio, Brooklyn, NY

January 13 – February 25, 2012

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Carrie Pollack: Witness. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of new paintings consisting of digital prints on linen.

Carrie Pollack describes her work as “a catalog of her memories”. In it she examines what we as individuals consciously or unconsciously choose to remember, and how our memories of people, places, and events degrade and change over time. Begun after the death of her father in 2009, Pollack’s new paintings are both poetic and existential, and they investigate the notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as uncertainty and contradiction. She deliberately intends her paintings to function “more as conversations than as statements”. Her imagery can often appear both familiar and unknown at the same time spanning both abstraction and representation.

The source materials of Pollack’s new paintings can be found in long meditative walks she takes daily with her dog around her Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. She carries her camera with her religiously, which she uses as a research tool to record the fleeting nature of her immediate environment. Each day Pollack takes dozens of photographs, which as of late have focused on deteriorating advertising posters, faded graffiti tags, vacant lots, worn textiles, and the fleeting quality of the sky, as well as other elements in transition and flux.

Pollack in turn organizes her photographs – now numbering in the thousands – into several distinct categories: posters, skies, newspapers, and textiles, among others. She spends weeks pouring over her images, intuitively arranging and rearranging them, looking for shared relationships between them. Once she identifies an image of essential interest, Pollack reduces it down to gray-scale in Photoshop, occasionally adjusting its contrast if needed to bring the image into a neutral state. She then prints upwards of one hundred test images with her large-format printer onto a wide array of supports, including newsprint, paper, canvas, and linen. The printing process is intentionally laden with glitches and hiccups, which she readily embraces. She remarks that the technology “adds its own interpretation of the image”, which reflects the way one’s mind continually tries to understand, interpret, and find meaning in the past, present, and future.

In the concluding steps of her process, Pollack prints a final image onto linen in a size that is unequal – sometimes larger, sometimes smaller – to the dimensions of the painting stretcher that will support it. As a result, the printed image often appears misaligned at first glance. Sometimes an image will wrap around the sides of the stretcher bars and onto the back the painting. Other times an image will be completely isolated within a much larger field of raw linen on the surface of the painting. These choices starkly contrast the digital quality of the image with the physical materiality of the painting itself, which directly parallels and exemplifies the complexity of memory.

Carrie Pollack (b. 1973) has exhibited her work throughout the United States, as well as in Germany and Belgium. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Between This Light and That and Space curated by artist Douglas Melini at the gallery this past summer. Pollack has also recently exhibited at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Monya Rowe Gallery, and David Krut Projects, all in New York. She has also produced editions with Daily Operation in New York and Sonnenzimmer in Chicago, IL.

Pollack has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been discussed in publications, such as Time Out New York, Metropulse, and The Daily Beacon. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and a BFA from Alfred University, Alfred, NY.

PRESS
Mechanical Garden: Carrie Pollack’s Error Makes Art, by Jim Long, CityArts, February 7, 2012
Carrie Pollack at MINUS SPACE (image reproduction), WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide, February 2012
Carrie Pollack @ Minus Space, KCLOG, January 28, 2012

Walead Beshty, TBD: Black and White Fold (WB08.305), 2008
Black and white photograph
70 x 40 inches

September 9 – October 15, 2011

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is pleased to announce the exhibition Diapositives by Walead Beshty (1976 London, lives and works in Los Angeles). This exhibition will be the second solo show of the artist at the gallery and will present his latest works.

Since 2006, Walead Beshty has produced a series of photographic works by exposing undeveloped negatives to the X-rays of security scanners at airports. These Transparencies are made by placing large format negatives (4×5) in light-tight boxes which are themselves placed in checked-in baggage. Once the negatives have passed the X-ray machines, they are developed, scanned and printed on photographic paper. The results of this process are random and unpredictable : saturated colour fields traversed by pale light rays or, in contrast, dark shadows.

The work of Walead Beshty is both an on-going exploration and a recreation of the photographic medium. With his Travel Pictures, Beshty has shifted his work from pure photography to a more materialist analysis of the production conditions of the work. It is by emptying his photographs of any pictorial content that Beshty blurs the distinction between the photograph as an image and the photograph as an object. His Transparencies are images but images that represent only their own material existence and the process of their creation, thereby breaking down the barrier between the photograph itself and its material support. Consequently, the photograph must no longer be understood as an image of the world but as an object in the world.

The Copper Surrogates are polished copper plates that, having temporarily replaced the desks usually located in an art gallery, bear the wear-related marks of everyday gallery activities. Here, it is the reception of the work that matters. The work is created by its receptors. By handling, using, touching it, the members of the gallery will transform the table into a work of art.

Just like the Transparencies, the Copper Surrogates are Works in Progress. They are given the status of artwork after having travelled, having been handled, marked. Defined by the machines or the hands of carriers, the works are random and unpredictable, but also unique.The production context of the work is almost always included in the work itself. Transparency and outsourcing are central to the work of Walead Beshty. He lets us discover the social space that surrounds the artwork from its conception to its reception, through its distribution and circulation. This is why the titles of the works resume so meticulously the type of film used for the production, the airports through which they passed, and the dates on which they were exposed to X-rays. The expression of transparency typifies Beshty’s work which seeks to achieve the same level of transparency that could be found in a wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, where, in the words of the artist, “a work of art can be totally beautiful but you know exactly how it was made.”

Beshty refuses a model of photographic practice in which the artist’s « process, how he’s thinking materially, is kept mostly out of view, (as) something only people who are involved in photography can begin to understand ». That model he argues, « puts the viewer in a passive place, as a receiver ». If, on the other hand, the process behind a work’s creation is « always worn on its surface and not concealed or held back, (it) opens up a realm outside of (the photograph) simply being a spectacle that you confront, but makes it a thing that a viewer can be more intimate with » in L.A. Material : James Welling and Walead Beshty in conversation, North Drive Press 3, 2006

« Walead Beshty’s works clearly state that they have move, that they have been subjected to the laws that regulate the movement of objects and also people. They are produced within the framework of specific situations that are meticulously catalogued, in which the activity of an individual combines with one or more systems that channel this activity… It is, in any case, in this sense that one can interpret the following statement : ‘The question most urgent for photography is no longer what inherent meaning it may contain.. But how specific photographs construct and organize social space in a concrete and immediate way » Nicolas Bourriaud, Walead Beshty and Prosopopoeia, in Walead Beshty : Natural Histories, published by JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2011, p. 150

The work of Walead Beshty has been the subject of many solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States: Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC; University of Michigan Museum of Art in Michigan; Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center in New York.His works are also present in the collections of MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Arts and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles.

Work by Daniel Feingold.

May 19-29, 2011

Atelier Sidnei Tendler in Brussels presents an exhibition featuring the work of Daniel Feingold.

Pedro Cabrita-Reis, I Dreamt Your House Was a Line, 2003

February 24 – May 22, 2011

One after another, a few silent steps will be Cabrita Reis’ first retrospective show in Belgium. It is the most comprehensive survey of the Portuguese artist’s works to date, and brings together about sixty works dating from 1985 until 2010, sculptures, paintings, photographs and installations.

Alongside loans from museums and private collections, the exhibition also includes new works conceived especially for this show. The context of M, with its historical collection and the interaction between old and contemporary art exhibitions, functions as an interesting context for Cabrita’s work. Some works from the historical collection will be included in the exhibition.

The work of Pedro Cabrita Reis (Lisbon, °1956) revolves around themes such as housing, living spaces, construction and territory. Drawing inspiration from daily life, he combines commonplace objects such as tables, chairs and doors with industrial materials. Cabrita’s work is crucial for the understanding of the new paradigm in sculpture that has come about since the middle of the 1980s. His complex oeuvre is marked by a highly individualized philosophical and poetic discourse, and encompasses a variety of media. Using simple materials, Pedro Cabrita Reis recycles through constructive processes, almost anonymous memories of primordial gestures and actions that we repeat every day. His works touch on issues of space, architecture and memory, with a suggestive power of association that goes beyond the visual to a metaphorical level.

Almost minimalist in its use of beams, aluminium frames, the symbol of modern architecture, verging on Arte Povera in the use of everyday items, Cabrita Reis’s work adds a singular voice to this history of recent art. It also bears the stamp of the Mediterranean and traces of an ancient thought. At the same time the work will take you out of your comfort zone. The exhibitions rather presents itself as a succession of actions, creating a certain specific spatial tension.

While he does uses 3D space, Pedro Cabrita Reis is more than just a sculptor. His oeuvre can truly call upon the main categories of art. The fluorescent tubes, one of the artist’s preferred materials, while producing a halo of light, determine a line like the one the pencil draws on a sheet of paper. The aluminium front frames, the plaster, the safety glass panels, the bricks, the mere electric cable etc.; all these materials contribute towards a system of representation without losing any of their mysterious everyday quality as objects. These works challenge the boundary between the inside and outside, between construction and object.

In 2010 the exhibition was on show in Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Musée Carré d’Art in Nímes, and it will travel later in 2011 to the Museu Coleccão Berardo in Lisbon.

Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in Lisbon in 1956, where he lives and works. He has participated in many important international exhibitions. Among others, his work was shown at Documenta IX Kassel in 1992, at 22nd and 24th São Paulo Biennales, respectively in 1994 and 1998, at the Venice Biennale Aperto in 1997. In 2003 he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale. Since then his work has been featured in many museum exhibitions.

February 5 – March 12, 2011

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Kyle Jenkins: Sunken Treasure. This is the Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States and it will feature a new site-specific painting installation.

Working in a wide array of media, including painting, wall painting, works on paper, artist books, photography, film, and sound, Kyle has developed a distinct form of intuitive abstraction that incorporates both hard-edge and organic strategies. Informed by the geometric regularity of the urban environment, the artist’s core concern has been the integration of art and architecture over the past decade.

For Sunken Treasure, Kyle will present a new wall painting, new acrylic paintings on canvas, and a suite of new paintings on paper recently produced during a residency in Denmark. The title of the exhibition stems from an ongoing series of projects planned by the artist in which the architecture of the gallery space and the art works presented within it collapse into each other. About this idea, Kyle states, “Sunken treasure is something that is there and present at the bottom of the ocean, but at the same time, it is hidden from view by its position at the bottom of the sea. The work in this exhibition will function in the same way, with no separation between the paintings, the wall painting, and the gallery space.”

Kyle Jenkins (b. 1975, Dungog, New South Wales, Australia) has exhibited his work internationally for the past 15 years, including in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. Kyle’s work was included in our recent group exhibition MINUS SPACE, curated by Phong Bui, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008-2009. His work is included in the collections of Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Qantas (both Australia), and Esbjerg Museum (Denmark), as well as countless private collections worldwide.

In addition to his artistic work, Kyle is Coordinator of the Visual Art Department and Senior Lecturer in Painting & Art Theory at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. During his career, he has curated numerous exhibitions about contemporary reductive abstraction throughout Australia. He has also played pivotal roles in the development and leadership of countless artist-run projects in Australia, including CBD Gallery, SPHERE press, Project 11, MOP Projects, Sydney Non-Objective, Non-Objective Toowoomba, i.e. gallery, and Buttons and Zippers.

Kyle is also a member of the rock bands Bloodspots and Suicide Swans. He holds a PhD in Visual Art and Theory from the University of Sydney, Australia.

SUPPORT
This exhibition has been supported by The University of Southern Queensland, Faculty of Arts Research Committee. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

October 24 – December 24, 2010

David Diao was born in 1943 in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. He moved to Hong Kong with his grandparents when he was six and joined his father in New York six years later. Diao first attracted attention with his show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1969. Two-person shows followed the same year at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (with Peter Young) and at Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto (with Brice Marden), and three years later with Cy Twombly, at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

His work was included in Konrad Fischer’s show Prospect ’73 at Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf. He presented work in High Times Hard Times, New York Painting 1967-1975 at ZKM, Karlsruhe, earlier this year. Major shows have been mounted in Paris, Dijon, Rennes, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Taipei, Hongkong, and Beijing.

His work is featured in the collections of MoMA, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Brooklyn Museum, NY, High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Akron Museum, Akron, OH, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin, MOMA, St. Etienne, France, FRAC Brittany and Burgundy, Ontario Art Gallery, Toronto, and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, among others. Diao has shown regularly with Postmasters since the opening of the gallery in 1985. He lives in New York

Billy Gruner, Punk Painting – Sound Installation, 2010

October 15 – November 7, 2010

Curated by Billy Gruner of SNO in Sydney, Jan van der Ploeg of PS in Amsterdam and Tilman of CCNOA in Brussels.

UND 6 – INTERCONTINENTAL is a group show of international artists exhibiting at Schwartz Gallery working within what could broadly be described as non-objective contemporary art. Organised by artists-curators Tilman, Jan Van der Ploeg and Billy Gruner, it is an annual event that at its root remains an experimental developmental project; a yearly opportunity for convergence for related artists to present and view new work out of a greater array of activity. That activity may fall under the banner of Presentational Art (US), Super Formalism or Minimal Pop (EU) or, as it is defined in Australia, Post Formalism. The UND 6 INTERCONTINENTAL show has been coordinated by Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg and Billy Gruner working from the artist-run spaces they have established within a broad network. These include CCNOA in Brussels, PS in Amsterdam and SNO in Sydney respectively. Artists will have participated by presenting new work that they have themselves selected. This artist-driven approach taking place across a diverse and multiple network of artists engages traction with other interested artists, gallerists and collectors, outside of conventional systems.

Participating Artists:
Billy Gruner, Adrian Macdonald, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Rachel Park, John Adair, Judith Duquemin, Justin Andrews, Ruark Lewis, Giles Ryder, Suzie Idiens, Lynne Eastaway, Sophia Egarchos, Jan van der Ploeg, Frank Ammerlaan, Marita Fraser, Michelle Grabner, Terry Haggerty, Alex Lawler , Geoff Lucas, Paul Morrison, Sean Shanahan,DJ Simpson, Tilman, Sebastian Wickeroth, Clemens Hollerer, Greet Billet, Ward Denys, Colombe Marcasiano, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi,Tom Benson, Michael Duffy, Alma Tischler-Wood

.

Work by Emmanuel Van der Meulen

June 26 – July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the first installment of the Brussels, Belgium-based Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art’s (CCNOA) most recent initiative 30/30 – Image Archive Project (IAP).

Conceived by artist and CCNOA Chief Curator/Artistic Director Tilman, the exhibition will feature a diverse group of small works by 9 international artists, including Delphine Deguislage (Belgium), Clemens Hollerer (Austria), Atsuo Hukuda (Japan), Andrew Huston (USA), Camila Oliveira-Fairclough (Brazil/United Kingdom), Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi (France), Emmanuel Van der Meulen (France), Jan Maarten Voskuil (The Netherlands), and Lars Wolter (Germany).

With 30/30-IAP, CCNOA seeks to establish a collective collection that will showcase the mesmerizing breadth and depth of approaches reductive artists are currently pursuing on the international level.  The project’s title refers to the size restriction for all works to be included in CCNOA’s emerging registry, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm.  This will enable CCNOA to easily travel the project worldwide (museum in a suitcase).

30/30-IAP is administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with artists CCNOA has collaborated with over  the past 12 years, as well as newly invited artists from around the globe.  CCNOA is currently planning forthcoming 30/30-IAP exhibitions at artist-run venues in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand,  and the United States.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Rob List in The Figure Series

June 4-27, 2010

Rob List with Melissa Cisneros, Diego Gil, Constance Neuenschwander, Olivia Reschovsky, Tjebbe Roelefs, and David Weber-Krebs

Parker’s Box is delighted to announce a collaborative, interactive, performance project by Amsterdam-based artist, Rob List.

Rob List’s performance work has enjoyed a constant international presence since the early nineteen-eighties despite the fact that his practice has remained particularly difficult to categorize.

The work has often been seen as both primitive and minimal, in that in most of List’s works he actively seeks to avoid the “representation of human experience”, wanting instead to create a “source of it”. With this stated intention, while technically his pieces involve elements or suggestions of minimalist theater, dance and mime, his energy is primarily invested in a reflection on the relationship between forms and the space they inhabit. In this way, Rob List’s performances seek to engage the spectator in a direct experience of the space they are sharing with the performer(s), free of representation or narrative, and concentrating simply on stimulating our awareness of physical presence and the fact that “the world exists because of our perception”.

This dynamic and this involvement between performer and spectator gently persuades the audience to embrace the here and now of their own and the performer(s)’ presence in a given space, without analysis and interpretation of meaning. Rob List encourages the audience to “recall the authenticity and the primacy of this perception” which requires no thoughts of, recourse to, or need for the virtual and digital universes in which we all spend ever-increasing amounts of our time.

Rob List’s work relates to many disciplines, including painting and sculpture, performance, theater, dance and mime as well as certain aspects of film, video, installation etc. In so much art today, the most frequent common ground between such diverse practices would be that “every gesture and action…seems to provoke the question “What does this mean?” Again, this is precisely the area evacuated by List in favor of a pared down relationship with the “real” that may ultimately be closer to certain abstract painting tendencies than to anything that occurs “onstage”.

At Parker’s Box during the month of June, Rob List will be orchestrating a body of ongoing performances, collaborations, research and experiments characteristic of the activities he has pioneered through his company, OZU, and before that in the context of the Institute of New Dramaturgy (Amsterdam) of which he is a founder and former director. Different works will be programmed at different times throughout the project, including performances by request for every viewer who visits the gallery during the afternoon, and daily performances in the evening (starting at 4 and 6PM) and at night (11PM).

For the work On the Balcony, Rob List has invited Mexican performance artist Melissa Cisneros and Hungarian choreographer/dancer Olivia Reschovsky to create solo movement works for the space. Visitors for On the Balcony are led into a specially created room for a five-minute movement performance that occurs just at the periphery of the visitor’s sight.

In two works from the Folly series (playing on the notion of the vain and absurd act/gesture, whether architectural or otherwise), the sober minimal movements of the performers Rob List and Swiss performer, Constance Neuenschwander revolve around a painted ‘folly.’

Suggestions of hybridization or cloning hover over works like Injerto/Greffe (Graft) featuring the Belgian performer, David Weber-Krebs, Dutch mime Tjebbe Roelofs, and the Argentine choreographer/dancer, Diego Gil; or Ter Kloon (on the matter of the clone) with Hungarian choreographer/dancer, Olivia Reschovsky. These works while dealing with fusion and multiplication of course link back into the central question of the individual body and its relationship to time – as a continual falling away of the present moment – and by extension to the fragility and vanity of human experience.

For the final weekend of the project, Rob List will also be presenting two solo works: Natura Morta, and Engrave, which in different ways dwell on notions of life and death, or the insignificance of gesture in the face of eternity – ultimately homing in once again on the status of the individual in the world. Rob List’s ability to simplify and pare down the content of performance art, removing almost all meaning except what ends up being nothing more than Man’s primal musing about his existence, conversely endows his work with incredible sophistication in the face of the contrasting sophistication of the contemporary world. In his own words, he refers to this as “a desire to return to the simplicity and authenticity of the perceptual animal and the perceptual consciousness. In each performance I wish to embody this literally, in a corporal way”.

Rob List is an American-born performance artist, choreographer and teacher who has been based in Europe for the last twenty-five years. In the early 1980′s he toured internationally in the avant-garde theater and film productions of Ping Chong and Meredith Monk, as well as performing his own movement theater work at La Mama and the Kitchen in New York. Rob List is the recipient of many prestigious awards including the 1997 Dutch Theater Directors Award and a 2002 Kunstprijs from the City of Amsterdam for his entire oeuvre. He was a 2004 Fulbright Scholar and a former recipient of an NEA Choreographic Fellowship.

Rob List’s solo shows and those with OZU include performances at Accusé de Réception, Paris, the Kitchen, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He appeared with Ping Chong at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Osaka Festival, with Ellen Fischer at PS122 and Limbo Lounge, and Meredith Monk in the PBS/ZDF film “Ellis Island.” List has created and performed numerous compositions in recent years at theatres, galleries and international festivals in Europe, the USA, and South America.

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.

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

January 21 – March 7, 2010

September 20 – October 25, 2009

The exhibition project `SUBSTANCE (for Julian)`, at The Suburban, Chicago aims to inform the viewer about two issues addressed as parallel realities of perception – on one hand the notion of a profound play with the qualities of the existing space and simulteanous, the memory of fellow artist Julian Dashper who passed away about six weeks ago and who also exhibited at The Suburban in 2008.

Julian Dashper’s work is speaking to us on a highly conceptual level about abstraction within the perimeters of reductive art-making , yet not to forget the wit and humor underlying his oeuvre. As his passing away coincided with me making plans for the upcoming exhibition at The Suburban, the idea formed to commemorate his influence and strength as an friend, artist and collaborator and to some degree integrate my understanding of his work into this site-specific installation, which at bthe same time reflects on thoughts occurring in my very own work-process; a dialogue, visual and in thought.

This site-specific installation does not intend to comment on Julian Dashper`s achievements, but rather tries to merge with mutual thoughts and shared discussions surrounding the subject of abstract art on various levels, I enjoyed with Julian Dashper and last not least our various points of departure.

The work produced and conceived for The Suburban aims to reflect on the substance of given space . By means of materiality and colour this intervention proposes an interaction of volume and proportion addressing the characteristics of given space.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a sound piece Julian Dashper conceived for the exhibition “2-step,” organized by CCNOA in Brussels in 2003 and an artist book which I will publish on this occasion.

Tilman is an artist and the artistic Director of Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) in Brussels.

June 19 – July 12, 2009

CCNOA presents a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Greet Billet, which will take place in all 3 exhibition rooms of CCNOA. Billet’s exhibition is based on her on-going research project The development of the monochrome in its digital and analogue/graphical form of apparition and will present a large site-specific installation, a new video work as well as a printed edition. The fact that Terence Haggerty’s large site-specific wall paintings in the main space will remain on view during Greet Billet’s exhibition, will provide the public with an excellent opportunity to reflect on the state of digital-based research and its application in the field of non-objective art today.

Clip from Simon Ingram, Random Walk in Brussels, 2009

May 29 – June 14, 2009

Installation view

May 23, 2009 – ongoing

Together
Maike Mei Lan’s latest art installation in public spaces opened in Lommel, Belgium on May 23, 2009. Placed in the heart of town, in a public square surrounded by the village’s most important institutions (church, school and cultural centre), it was essential to capture the
heart of the community and provide a fresh and inviting place to gather and enjoy.

Together is made up of two metal sculptures that are different colors and different shapes, yet work together very well, symbolic of Lommel. The art provides additional inspiration and perspective depending on the time of day, the season, or the position in which you view the work.

Maike Mei Lan also chose to capture the lines of some of the nearby buildings, and did so in a playful way, integrating for example, the shape of a roof or a church window.

“So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.” — Bruce Sterling, February 2009

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

In photography this can be seen in the renewed and enthusiastic interest in abstraction. The exploration of the darkroom’s technical limitations and its structural truths are once again concretizing photography.

The superabundance of ceramics and cast-metal objects weighing on gallery pedestals of the recent years has given way to boundlessness. Untying gravity and provoking physical space is being ushered back into the formalist’s syntax as traditional measures of object value have broken down.

Unlike the contemporary accretion work that engages in synthetic concepts of space, the works included here actively invent spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures and choreographing movement. Accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition — are acts of imitation, a superfluous and redundant practice mirroring web navigation and digital information gathering: web 2.0 assemblage.

“There are many things in the air and all of them are for free” is the title of a loopy wire sculpture by Diango Hernández that is currenty on display at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. I have adapted this title for my purposes as it locates value while poetically summoning the progressive fact that three-dimensional space is new again.

Look up.

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

It is with deep sadness that we post the following letter from our friends at CCNOA in Brussels, Belgium:

Esther Stocker, Abstract thought is a warm puppy, 2008
Installation view at CCNOA, Photo: Sacha Georg

Dear All,

We were informed on 29 April of the final decision taken on 24 April by the Flemish Minister for Culture Bert Anciaux following an opinion from the BBK advisory committee to terminate structural funding for CCNOA as from January 2010.

We remain unconvinced by the reasoning underlying this decision, which will have serious repercussions for our organization, including closure of our facilities, termination of our lease and termination of staff contracts, and we intend to investigate the options open to us.

Over the past ten years CCNOA has become a showcase for discovery, exploration, experimentation, participation and learning, in short an organization that opens eyes, ears and minds. We are proud that our extensive activities in Belgium and elsewhere have provided some 50,000 visitors worldwide with the opportunity to follow new developments in contemporary abstract art and have generated the inspiration for organizations in other countries to open spaces similar to ours. This would not have been possible without the tremendous support of our artists and partners, a large number of art professionals, and of course the general public, over the past decade – very special thanks to you all.

Our current plan is to open an office in Brussels early in 2010 and to continue to work on the international projects (amongst others: With Your Eyes Only @ Medienturm Graz, My Eyes Keep Me in Trouble @ Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA), Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, CAN-Centre D’Art, Neuchatel ) scheduled up to the year 2011. We would appreciate any leads and/or thoughts which might help us secure funding for these and other projects.

We will of course keep you informed of developments on all fronts.

For additional information about our past and current activities, please visit www.ccnoa.org. To post a comment, please visit www.ccnoa.org/forum.

With kind regards,

Petra Bungert & Team CCNOA
Executive Director

CCNOA presents a large site-specific wall painting by British artist Terry Haggerty in the main space. Their program in the multimedia space will present a video work/animation by Piki & Liesbet Vershueren (BE) and their program in the project space will feature site-specific installations by Eric Tillinghast (US/until 24/05) and New Zealand artist Simon Ingram (28/05 – 14/06).

Installation view

Terry Haggerty
Haggerty has become known in recent years for paintings that express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new way. The principle of serial composition can be discerned in Haggerty’s work: light-colored stripes alternate with darker ones to form regular, often horizontal arrangements, which also have a pattern-like quality due to their dense structure. This would not seem particularly remarkable were it not for the fact that Haggerty breaks this linear formation at the edges of the painting — and occasionally also at the symmetrical center of the composition—by bending the lines in a different direction as they approach the boundaries of the painting support. This has a crucial effect on the overall pictorial appearance, in that it immediately transforms the planimetric structure of the painted motif into an illusory perception of three-dimensionality within the image. (Friedrich Meschede) The surface seems to continue beyond the boundaries of the picture support, with the result that the two-dimensional paintings suddenly resemble painted volumes or reflect the illusory perception of a third dimension back onto the pictorial motif. Haggerty’s vibrant wall paintings conjure nostalgic associations from the mustard yellow and avocado décor of the 1960s and 1970s, to optical art, to the precise lines of sugar icing on pastries. He combines humorous and historical references to form abstract compositions that electrify and manipulate the space around them. Biography: Terry Haggerty was born in London in 1970 and lives in New York. He studied at the Southend School of Art, Essex, England, and the Cheltenham School of Art, Cheltenham, England. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kuttner Siebert, Berlin; Grimm Rosenfeld, Munich; Konsortium, Düsseldorf; Aschenbach & Hofland, Amsterdam; and Riva Gallery, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Artists Space, New York. Haggerty’s work was also included in the Prague Biennale (2003) and the Venice Biennale (1994). This is Haggerty’s first solo exhibition in Belgium.

Installation view

Eric Tillinghast 
After attending art school in Sweden, Eric Tillinghast began his art career in California creating charcoal line drawings that became increasingly geometric as he developed and matured. The precision and carefully developed detail of these early works has carried through in his present work, however, in the form of meticulous execution and careful attention to every aspect of design. Finding that he could explore his ideas about line and space more succinctly with metal, he began making box-like constructions of varying sizes and finishes and engraving them with geometrically ordered lines and patterns. Once engaged with this new material, he felt that he had found his form. These works first appeared as singular objects, but soon he began to create pieces with multiple components, often arranged in a grid. As Tillinghast’s work with steel began to evolve, cylindrical shapes appeared and he began to incorporate water into his pieces. His interest was no longer just with space and line, but also with light and liquid. “Empires” is the latest group of works in color by Eric Tillinghast. All of these paintings are made on small, unfolded cardboard boxes and packaging material. As different as each is from the next, they are all a means to the same end: a man-made container, and yet the shapes and varieties employed to make even the simplest rectangular box are apparently infinite. This series explores these forms and the simple geometry they possess.

Alexandra Dementieva at CCNOA on Vimeo

February 13 – March 8, 2009

Alexandra Dementieva (b. 1960 in Moscow; lives and works in Brussels) studied journalism and fine arts in Moscow and Brussels. Her main interests focus on social psychology and perception and their application in multimedia interactive installations. Her videowork integrates different elements including behavioral psychology, developing narrative using a ’subjective camera’. Her interactive installation projects attempt to widen the mind’s potential for perception using different production materials: computers, video projections, soundtracks, slides, photography, etc. By making certain historical, cultural and political allusions, her exhibition locations create the frame within which the idea develops. The projects explore the spectator’s depths of perceptual experience and the interaction of the individual spectator with the exhibition as well as with other visitors. The subject of an installation or its production method becomes less important to her than the mind of the user. Thus the latter becomes the center of the project or the main actor in the performance.

Alien Space
The installation consists of 800 transparent, pearl-colored latex balloons forming two corridors (each around 3 m long) leading to a central circular space. The balloons are reminiscent of living cells, futuristic buildings, laboratories, children’s rooms at Halloween… The installation generates mixed feelings of curiosity, attraction and repulsion at one and the same time. The shining metallic surface is threatening and the fragility of the thin balloon disturbing. When the visitor moves through the narrow corridor, from time to time he accidentally touches the balloon wall, triggering mumbling noises and an occasional weak light shining from inside. When he reaches the central space, his movements effect changes in the audio and video environment. The closer he approaches the opposite wall, the more it is populated by blurry images and creatures. A few steps further on and he can clearly recognize the creatures – television newsreaders interspersed with images of robots and blurry androids. When the visitor is in the middle of the space all the images and faces are clear and bright (as much as they can be on such a surface) but the sounds become loud and irregular, creating noises that are difficult to bear. If the spectator moves close to the wall, the cacophony of voices decreases, creating a place for one or two images. They stay visible; it is possible to understand what they are talking about and recognize what they are. This piece uses images from news bulletins broadcast by various international television stations. They will be recorded over a period of 2 to 3 weeks. The short films (which were first processed journalistically) will be collected and some of them will be reworked and a new soundtrack created. The sequences are regrouped and combined in a 40-cell navigation system. The installation exposes the visitor to staged virtual life while at the same time placing him physically and emotionally face-to-face with a worrying reality filled with accidents, potential destruction, dramas and love stories…

http://www.alexdementieva.org