Installation view

March 4 – May 1, 2010

One might think it easier to photographically reproduce a recent monochromatic painting by John Griefen than a 50’s painting by Ad Reinhardt, as the acrylic paint on a Griefen is textured and thick in contrast to Reinhardt’s matte application. But both Reinhardt and Griefen defy reproduction, and that is just one of the things they have in common. Both demand that the viewer powerfully and authentically engage the actual painting, and both are inextricably bound to the physical act of painting.

This physicality is probably why Griefen prefers a motorcycle to a car, his rustic home in Southwest France to Brooklyn, or wine to water. Life is lived fully in the art of John Griefen, and the viewer can sense this in front of his paintings.

Griefen has been showing in New York City since the 1960s, with numerous exhibitions at Kornblee Gallery, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, and others. His work is in major public and private collections, and has been discussed by writers as diverse as Rosalind Krauss (Artforum, 1969), Hilton Kramer (NY Times, 1973) and Terry Fenton, 1981. Gary Snyder/Project Space is pleased to present its first exhibition of John Griefen’s paintings.

Installation by Roland Orepuk

thru February 27, 2010

Cecilia Vissers, Goath, 2010
Aluminum, 84 x 77 x 1 cm, each
Photo by Peter Cox

January 9-30, 2010

Installation view

November 28 – December 19, 2009

C, an installation by Bergman at ParisCONCRET, configures the chemical symbol for carbon using an innovative architectural product called ‘softwall’ by Molo Design to make a translucent white curve of vertical pleats.

C, in its reductive simplicity, aims to place the viewer “in an indeterminate, luminous space, in attentive contemplation” experiencing the light and space of symbolic carbon.

With this project Bergman references Agnes Martin’s “To the Islands” work from 1974-1979: “This kind of color, a lapse in pure whiteness, is an imperfection. Through it, you imagine the perfect “white” of light.”

In its shape, C also references a 1983 steel work by Richard Serra, Clara-Clara: two mirrored Cs shown in Paris at the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde. Like Serra’s work, this installation is also a phenomenological sculpture that “exists in primary relation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation, in all its senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale.” C, however, is situational rather than site specific because this work engages ParisCONCRET and redefines its space.

Gottfried Honegger & Aurelie Nemours
Restaurant Chez Georges, Paris, France, 1990

December 4, 2009 – January 23, 2010

Works by Jose Heerkens

thru November 21, 2009

Installation view

October 16, 2009 – February 14, 2010

The French-born international artist Daniel Buren is considered one of the fiercest critics of contemporary art. It is particularly towards the museum, its circumstances and conditions, that he likes to turn his critical attention. For the “museum is the place, with regard to which and for which works are created.”

For well over forty years Buren has applied his mischievous intuition to develop works that directly play on their surroundings. Thus, in institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or, most recently, in the Musée Picasso in Paris, he has created breathtaking installations in dialogue with their specific contexts, thereby opening these up to new perspectives. But he has frequently performed his artistic interventions in outdoor locations too, where he typically applies 8.7 cm wide stripes – his characteristic artistic trademark – to give heightened visibility to certain aspects of reality.

In Nuremberg Daniel Buren encounters the striking architecture of Volker Staab, whose symbiosis of different architectural traditions represents a milestone in the history of modern museum architecture. In the exhibition “MODULATION Works in situ” conceived exclusively for the Neues Museum, Daniel Buren explores certain distinctive elements of the museum’s design. Making specific reference to the façade, to the foyer and its staircase, and to the exhibition hall, Buren has evolved works of his own that combine light and movement to create singular and exceptional situations.

Curators: Melitta Kliege, Angelika Nollert, Neues Museum

Nathan Hylden, Untitled, 2009
Acrylic on aluminum, 34 x 28 inches

October 1-31, 2009

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents “Affinities,” a show that juxtaposes new paintings by Nathan Hylden with works by Josef Albers, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Curated by Meredith Darrow, the show connects Hylden’s geometric forms and repeated gestures with those of his art historical predecessors.

Like Albers, Stella and Warhol, Hylden uses a regulated process to create variations within a systematic sequence and to continue Modern Art’s redefinition of pictoral space. Starting with a stack of identically sized aluminum panels, Hylden adds layers of paint and ink to these reflective surfaces, changing the order of operations for each panel. As the series progresses, older panels are used in the creation of newer ones— for example, vertical bands of white paint bridge the borders of separate panels, forming an indexical link between these individual works within the larger series. Another unifying motif presents itself in the screen-printed image of a one-to-one photograph of a blank canvas hanging on a wall. Hylden deliberately chose the loaded notion of a “blank canvas” to evoke long-standing concerns about the relationships between the illusory depth of an image and its physical support. Grounding itself in Albers’s pure geometry, Stella’s insistence on the potential of formal abstraction, and Warhol’s interest in serialized imagery, Hylden extends the conversation to the next generation of artists and viewers.

Nathan Hylden was born in 1978 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. His works have been shown in several international group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo, Art: Concept in Paris and Johann König in Berlin.

Meredith Darrow is an independent curator living and working in New York City.

Steven Parrino, Untitled, 1993

October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The MAGASIN is starting its season with a portrait of the artist Olivier Mosset. The exhibition takes the form of a tribute, gathering works by different artists, but never showing Olivier Mossetʼs own work. The artists are of all generations, from Carl André to Stéphane Kropf including the famous group of artists 1m3 among the youngest. As a key figure of the artistic scene and part of a family with the same artistic sensitivity, Olivier Mosset keeps close links with them. He collects or swaps works with them. He has today gathered an important collection, most of which was offered to the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other works are to be found at the MAMCO in Geneva, the Consortium in Dijon and in Tucson.

The exhibition aims at drawing a portrait of the artist through a series of rooms organized around different specific subjects. A first room will introduce his roots, with Chardinʼs engravings (given each year by his grandfather to his colleagues), or Gregoire Müllerʼs portrait. Another one will highlight portraits of Olivier Mosset with Steven Parrinoʼs photographs of him and acrylic paintings by Walter Steding. Another room will reveal quotations, borrowings and copies (from Hugo Pernet in particular). The following rooms will show monochrome paintings, floor-based works, and the indestructible link between Olivier Mosset and the bikers world.

Participating Artists:
Donald Alberti, Carl André, Ian Annul, Janine Antoni, Matthew Antezzo, John Armleder, Art Club 2000, Richard Artschwager, Olivier Babin, Fia Backström, Donald Baechler, Francis Baudevin, Jérôme Beauvarlet, Lisa Beck, Ford Beckman, Joseph Beuys, Alexandre Bianchini, Mike Bidlo, Dike Blair, Philippe Bodenmann, Serge Bramly, Gavin Brown, Neil Campbell, François Chessex, Robert Colescott, Collectif 1m3, Michael Corris, Mark Dagley, Jamie Dalglish, Ricardo De Olivera, Steve Di Benedetto, Alain Dister, John Dogg, George Dupin, Gretchen Faust, Helmut Federle, Sylvie Fleury, Roland Flexner, Christian Floquet, Catherine Eyde, Jonathan Genkins, Fritz Glarner, Janine Gordon, Christophe Gossweiler, Dan Graham, Amy Granat, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Bill Gruner, Wang Guangyi, Raymond Hains, Marcia Hafif, Isabel Halley / Joanna Avillez, Peter Halley, Stephane Huitmere, Nicole Hassler, Drew Heitzler, IFP, Alain Jacquet, Kyle Jenkins, Michael Jenkins, Kim Jones, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Ben Kinmont, Yves Klein, Serge Kliaving, Jeff Koons, W.J.M. Kok, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Kozik, Stéphane Kropf, Alix Lambert, L/B, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler/Sherrie Levine, Ange Leccia, Serge Lemoine, Lépicié dʼaprès Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Renée Levi, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Russel Maltz, Christian Marclay, Jackie McAllister, Matthew McCaslin, Allan McCollum, Mathieu Mercier, Haley Mellin, Tom Merrick, Jonathan Monk, Elena Montesinos, Valentine Mosset, Grégoire Müller, Chuck Nanney, John Nixon, Cady Noland, Eric Oppenheim, Dimitry Orlac, Elisabeth Oser, Virginia Overton, Steven Parrino, Laurie Parsons, Nicolas Pasche, Yan Pei-Ming, Luciano Perna, Hugo Pernet, Gilles Porret, Philip J. Reilly, Delphine Reist, Bettina Rheims, David Robbins, Christian Robert-Tissot, Walter Robinson, Gerwald Rockenschaub, David Row, Claude Rutault, Lisa Ruyter, Frederic Sanchez, Adrian Schiess, Peter Schuyff, Michael Scott, Donald Sheridan, Tara Sinn, Howard Smith, Keith Sonnier, Walter Steding, Frank Stella, Valentina Stieger, Rudolf Stingel, Vincent Szarek, Blair Thurman, Jean Tinguely, John Tremblay, Li Trincere, Allan Uglow, Günter Umberg, Lily van der Stokker, Jean-Thomas Vannotti, Ben Vautier, Not Vital, Joan Wallace, Wallace & Donohue, Dan Walsh, Joan Waltemath, Andy Warhol, Stephen Westfall, Larry Weiner, Peter Young, Michael Zahn.

Installation view

October 4 – November 1, 2009

Non-Objectif Sud presents Ian Tyson: Recent Sculpture.

For the last 10 years the British artist Ian Tyson has been living and working in the Vaucluse, France. His work centres on a variety of sculptures and drawings, which are shown in this exhibition. The sculptures are constructed from, either, wood, steel tube, bronze or stone. They range from 3 meters to 50 centimeters in height and breadth and are geometric in construction. They are, above all, reflections of the light and architectural space of the South of France. These works represent a very personal Platonic interpretation of the world the artist inhabits and range from homage and votive to the formal, altering space viewed through the openings in the sculptures.

Born in 1933, Tyson went to art schools in Birkenhead (Birkenhead School of Art), and London (Royal Academy School, Painting). He taught at Farnham, St Martins, and Wimbledon schools of art as a part time lecturer with spells as visiting professor at University of Wisconsin and University of California San Diego. His work is included in many public and private collections in Europe, the UK, and the USA.

Installation view at Non Objectif Sud, France, 2009

Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was that because you felt the image had reached a stage whereby via the residue the movement just kept going on all by itself? I sense the building of form and then the letting go, engaging in a perfect slip, of folding in and out, in pairs, a synchronizing of different stages.

In Dark Nebula in Saggitarius, 1979, the marks have a similar feel in touch, and there appears to be some pairing, folding, and twisting. Though any geometric sub-structural hint is well hidden under what lay on top. I have an image of this as the remnants of a bout.

Linda: That was a smaller try of a group of large (approx 4×7′ or larger depending upon the space) drawings I made on the wall. The grid was ruled in with pencil and made a rectangular pattern. Each part of the symmetrical grid was drawn upon with chalk using simple rules: only quarter arcs, straight lines, changing the movement at a crossing, etc. They were freehand and each section done with each hand. That is to say, the right grid drawn on with the right hand and the left with left. I just started in the middle and drew out and then came back. I not quite erased what went before to push it into the background and then did it again, responding to the first drawing. I thought of it as re-seeing in time that could have gone on forever. I guess I stopped when I thought the movement was over. Kind of with a long exhale very much as you describe.

I went from the analytical gesture to some years of drawings in which I used the chalk and eraser to literally remake various spiral galaxies. I was looking at small photos in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies. The epiphany was that these galaxies were the analog of the gestures in the earlier work, and of course by extension the body and brain alike were similarly organized natural phenomena. Drawing for me was a kind of research. Looking at those small pictures united my hand and mind as I tried to find the structure that was simultaneously building and destroying the form. This info was not commonly available as it is now and the few books that existed like Mandelbrot’s first and Pirogene’s were the only references I had to try to find out more of what I intuited to be true. In 1982 I did an exhibition of big drawings in Copenhagen. The show was titled The Order of Chaos and here is a picture of one of them done from the galaxy M101…

Brent: Finding. You come out of a bit of a painting history; gesture; hints of constructive; a kind of record keeping; painting that pays attention to relationship more than heroics, though the mark and scale suggests that’s where you were initially coming from?

Richard: Yes, I do feel that what I do comes out of, and actually continues within, a history of painting. I trained as a painter initially during the early 80s in Christchurch, NZ and my teachers were predominantly abstract expressionists who were extolling the virtues of the New York school and the theories of Clement Greenberg (20 years after the fact.) Being young and impressionable, I came out loving that stuff and have been working my way out of there ever since. Even now, I feel that what ever I do is inflected by a way of thinking about painting which I took on board way back then. In brief it is about: The painting as evidence of process and most importantly for me, the painting as an object. When you say record keeping you are bang on. Perhaps it is more obvious in my earlier work, but I would say even now – I think of the artwork as a kind of physical residue of a physical activity that has taken place. I don’t try to hide the evidence of an artist at work – touch is important to me.

You do well to speak of it being about scale/relationship more than heroics. I had dreams of being the next Franz Kline or Motherwell or de Kooning – a big gestural guy – but soon found that I had a tendency to want to structure things more and tidy them up, to some extent. So I veered towards the Rothko and Newman side of the NY school, and with a touch of Mondrian thrown in, my work became much more about simplicity, solidity, scale and proportion than the grand gesture. I think that to this day relationship is key to everything I do. In fact that word could well summarise it all…

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Sin titulo (pez) [Untitled (Fish)], 1932
Oil on canvas

September 6 – November 29, 2009

Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874—1949) is one of the most influential artists of the early 20th century to have emerged from Latin America. Revered not only as a Modernist painter but also as a teacher and author, the Uruguay native spent most of his life in Spain, Italy, France, and New York before returning to his place of birth.

This presentation of major works selected exclusively from Houston collections complements the related exhibition Joaquin Torres-Garcia: Constructing Abstraction with Wood on view at Houston´s Menil Collection from September 25, 2009, to January 3, 2010.

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Planos de color con dos
maderas superpuestas (Planes of Color with
Two Superimposed Wood Pieces), 1928
Collection: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

September 24, 2009 – January 3, 2010

The exhibition will center chiefly on works from the 1920s to the 1940s, spanning the time from when Torres-Garcia lived in Spain, New York, Italy, and France, developing toys and the vocabulary for his wood constructions, to his eventual settlement in Uruguay as the founder of a Constructivist art movement. These sculptural works will be accompanied by a selection of Torres-García’s oil paintings and drawings, which demonstrate the connections between his experiments in two and three-dimensional forms.

Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874–1949) is revered today as one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century to have emerged from Latin America. A charismatic figure of the international art scene, he exhibited with the most famous artists of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Jacques Lipchitz in Paris, and Marcel Duchamp in New York. Though Torres-Garcia was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, the artist spent most of his life in Spain, Italy, France, and New York before returning to his native Uruguay in 1934 and settling in Montevideo. There he founded the “Taller Torres-Garcia,” a school that promoted avant-garde experimentation and sought to blur the hierarchical distinctions between arts and crafts.

Celebrated for his work as a modernist painter, teacher, and author, Torres-Garcia is also known for breaking new ground in the realm of wooden constructions or “maderas.” Beginning in the late 1920s in Paris, Torres-García adapted the language of Neo-Plasticism from his colleagues Mondrian and Van Doesburg into a new three-dimensional concept for grids and planes made of wood. These maderas informed his simultaneous experiments in children’s toys, which he promoted and sold as educational tools for young minds. His unique innovations in the medium of wood would foreshadow later artistic developments in Europe and the Americas, one example being the work of Louise Nevelson.

Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Josef Helfenstein, director of The Menil Collection, this exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Ramirez, Margit Rowell and Cecilia de Torres, as well as an illustrated chronology and newly translated texts by Joaquín Torres-García.

This exhibition will travel to the San Diego Museum of Art from February 20–May 30, 2010.

Nasreen Mohamedi, untitled, undated
Pen, pencil and ink on paper, 49.5cm x 69 cm
Courtesy Glenbarra Art Museum Collection, Japan

September 5 – November 15, 2009

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) was born in Karachi, (formerly India, now Pakistan) before moving to Mumbai. She travelled abroad to study, spending time in London at Saint Martin’s School of Art (1954–57) and in Paris. After extensive travels to Iran and Turkey in the 60s, she returned to India and settled in Baroda in 1972; here, she became a teacher at the prestigious M.S.University, Faculty of Fine Arts.

In Baroda, Mohamedi produced her classic works: small-scale, abstract geometric drawings, painstakingly composed using pencil and pen – working with the grid and creating deviations with diagonal lines. Virtually alone amongst her peers in India, who generally favoured a figurative narrative style, her lineage can be traced back to an earlier generation of Indian artists engaged with abstraction, such as V.S. Gaitonde. Other parallels for her practice can be drawn with works on paper by the American artist Agnes Martin, or with the utopian abstraction of Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Suprematists, whom she admired greatly.

Despite Mohamedi’s cosmopolitanism, her work also reflects her identity as a female Indian artist working during the second half of the twentieth century, as the subcontinent, its landscapes, urban centres and Islamic heritage are often intimated in her work, particularly her photographs.

About Mohamedi’s Work
Mohamedi worked in various media, including drawing, painting and photography. These works are rarely dated, but fall roughly into three different periods. Early works, which include watercolour and ink on paper, oil on canvas, collage and lithography, are lyrical and semi-abstract. Influenced in part by Japanese calligraphy, they often suggest plant life or landscapes.

In the 1970s Mohamedi moved closer to abstraction, producing serial works based on the grid on square sheets of paper, which have become a hallmark of her practice. She constructed these compositions by means of lines rendered in pen and ink and used technical drawing equipment. In her final works from the 1980s, Mohamedi abandoned the grid, and began to compose geometric shapes, combining diagonal lines, triangles and spheres, suspended on an empty ground.

Throughout her career, Mohamedi produced photographs as a visual record of the places she visited. Although she never regarded them as works in their own right, today they stand as an important part of her oeuvre.

Mohamedi’s diaries, filled with reflections on her work and personal life, attest to the link between her struggle for equilibrium and a disciplined commitment to her practice. The ephemera from her studio, which includes calendars, pages of letterset and magazine cuttings, along with notes, sketches and photographic experiments, reveal her working process and the way she developed a language that is both visual and conceptual.

Mohamedi’s futuristic visions around the grid resonate in time and form with the utopian aspirations of the founders of the city of Milton Keynes itself, built in the late 1960s around a precise and repetitive geometry composed of vertical and horizontal lines. The city provides a fitting context for the artist’s most substantial exhibition in the UK.

This exhibition is an expanded version of Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes – Reflections on Indian Modernism curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson, and organised and initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo. It includes an additional section of works from the Artist’s Estate and other collections, courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York and New Delhi. A variation of this exhibition will travel to Lunds Konsthall, Sweden.

Installation view

July 4 – October 4, 2009

A retrospective of the Dutch artist Kees Visser.

September 5- 26, 2009

August 8-30, 2009

During August, Richard van der Aa (nz/fr) will present a selection of his ‘Easy Pieces’ at ParisCONCRET. The exhibition will consist of monochrome paintings on wooden panels found discarded on the streets of Paris. Subtle relationships of colour, scale, surface and placement will activate the entire space.

Installation view

thru July 25, 2009

Installation view

June 27 – September 26, 2009

Freestyle or The art of surfing the abstract wave

Tilman’s latest monochromes, whether one-off or in series, have an askew look to them; they would appear to have broken with geometric abstraction, with the purism of primary colours and with self-reference. While there is a hint of the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, in fact the syncopated silhouettes and acid tones of these Freeforms spontaneously evoke the dynamic lines and pure colours of the distorted American cartoon images of the mid-fifties.

In other recent works Tilman appears to have distanced himself from the tradition of constructivism and minimalism with which he is often associated. In 13.08 (Pink Champagne) (2008), although the rectangular structure is maintained, the bottom right-hand module of this light pink quadriptych sinks inwards towards the wall, creating a discontinuity reminiscent of the virtual circuit of a video game. The superposed elements of 14.08 (Urban Structure I) (2008) are reminiscent of a composition from the early days of neo-plasticism but the chromatic impurity of the white dispels any doubt. The irony peaks in Splice (2008): two hybrid monochromes precariously propped up one against the other have no wall support and no front view as such, as they are painted both front and back, one of them looking rather like a sandwich filled with slices of paint. Worth noting ‘en passant’ is the title, which is derived from the film editing term ‘to splice’. And what about the series Stacks that uses the same principle as Donald Judd in his works with the same title but inflicts on them sugary tones and a pleasurable sense of accumulation verging on disorder?

So yes, Tilman glides coolly over the shadow cast by modernism, drawing free forms, supposedly abstract but always reinvented. If he avoids the traps of formalism, it is because part of his work process, albeit fundamentally influenced by the non-objective avant-garde starting with De Stjil then Bauhaus, is anchored in real life. The artist stresses that his work is intuitive and that there is no mathematics involved; also that he uses images registered during city walks. The strong visual impact of ‘a huge pink shape consisting of isolation panels mounted on the outside brick wall of a building under construction’ (1) was a motive force in the execution of this relaxed abstraction, which unashamedly runs through a whole range of pastel colours, including some sublime pinks…

This freestyle surfing of the non-objective also enables Tilman to introduce the experience of space into his painting by using structures that oscillate between sculpture and architecture, as in The House of Colors. Stemming from a reflection on floor objects, this unidentified modular object may be three-dimensional and have the feel of a hypothetical utopian construction but it is none the less a work of painting. Its size rules it out as a maquette but nor does it have the physical dimensions or indeed the functional purpose of architecture. Composed of multicoloured rectangular sections interlocked like a giant set of lego the work acts as a sort of observatory with multiple peepholes. The public is invited to experiment and look through this multi-angle viewfinder, not unlike the optical devices invented by painters down through the centuries, from the camera lucida to the camera obscura.

Tilman’s work is primarily about exploring the effect of light on forms and colours — visually, physically and psychologically. We should not forget that, quite apart from the fact that the artist comes from Munich and was influenced by the subtle half-tones of baroque painting, he started out in photography. In one of his catalogues entitled Look Awry (Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 12 May – 25 June 2006), Tilman urged the public to look at his constructions ‘awry’. Playing on the word’s double meaning this could also be understood as an injunction to look at the work ‘askew’. The ‘defects’ or lopsidedness in Tilman’s painting, with its slight dissonance of forms and colours tinged with humour but ultimately extremely elegant, clearly confer a human dimension on the work, transforming what is an art to look at into a space of experience.

–Catherine Macchi de Vilhena

(1) Tilman, Interview Tilman and Chris Ashley, May – June 2006.

Works by Brent Hallard, Richard Roth, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog

Opens June 27, 2009

During July, ParisCONCRET presents work by three contemporary artists who push, gently, against the notion that painting is a strictly 2 dimensional proposition: Brent Hallard (au/jp), Richard Roth (us), Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog (nl).

June 27 – September 26, 2009

Installation views

July 12 – September 7, 2009

Non-Objectif Sud
La Barraliere, Chemin de Visan
26790 Tulette, France

Non-Objectif Sud is pleased to present Hand in Hand, its exhibition for the summer of 2009, featuring the work of nine international artists working in various media. Embracing disparate approaches and an array of form, the works share affinities that are not immediately plain. With many of the works executed on site at La Barraliere, the individual artists engage specificity, convention, contingency, and duration to indite an uncommon orientation where awareness is externalized in unexpected ways. This particular type of embodiment, sensed as an abstract personalization of thought, couples an atypical realization of the works themselves to the palpable ground of their immanent presence. Hand in Hand tests the representation of reality by examining the underlying structure of what is seen, and proposes a material reconfiguration of what is shown.

Dennis Bellone is an artist who works in multiple mediums. He is represented in the collections of the Center Pompidou in Paris and S.M.A.K in Ghent.

Linda Francis is a painter who exhibits widely in the US and abroad. A survey of paintings and drawings was shown at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama, and new work was recently seen at MINUS SPACE project space and at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in New York. Francis is represented in numerous public and private collections.

John Finneran’s exhibition Night Fence, a group of paintings in oil and enamel on aluminum, was seen at Upstairs Berlin last fall. His work was the subject of two solo shows at Rivington Arms in New York.

Josephine Halvorson will exhibit new paintings this fall at Monya Rowe Gallery in New York and next spring at NT Gallery in Bologna. Her work was recently seen at Sikkema-Jenkins & Company, at Cuchifritos, and at Sue Scott Gallery, all in New York.

Suzanne Hill uses organic materials such as herbs, valued for their scent and taste, which are incorporated in non-traditional ways. Her ‘Biome’ works were installed in public spaces the two previous summers during a residency at the Fondazione Tolenti in Venice.

Jim Lee’s second New York solo exhibition, Paranoid, an installation of painted objects and impermanent structures which altered the character of the gallery, was recently seen at Freight + Volume. Lee also curated Accident Blackspot for F+V last spring.

Andreas Reiter Raabe is an artist and educator whose projects including painting, photography, sculpture, and film have been seen at the Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin, at Christine Koenig Galerie in Vienna, and at Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney. His work is a part of Sammlung Daimler in Stuttgart and Berlin.

Jackie Saccoccio organized Blue Balls, an immersive collaborative installation seen last winter at APF Lab in New York. She has had solo shows of her paintings and wall drawings at Eleven Rivington Gallery in New York and at Galerie Michael Neff in Frankfurt, among others.

Michael Zahn’s exhibition As Michael Zahn was seen at Eleven Rivington Gallery in New York last spring. Recent work was included this spring in exhibitions at Pharmaka in Los Angeles and at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. He has organized the exhibition at Non-Objectif Sud for the summer of 2009 along with co-directors Andrew Huston and Karole Vail.

Installation view

May 15 – September 26, 2009

The gallery announces an exhibition of sculptures by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu. After the success of the first presentation Breathing sculptures, this second show entitled Planet of Wind and Water presents 10 new indoor sculptures of wind and water accompanied by works on paper. The show also introduces the diorama of Breathing Earth, Shingu’s most ambitious art project consisting in the construction of a self-sufficient village living from the natural energies of wind, water and sun, which are the result of Shingu’s knowledge on these natural phenomena acquired over the past 50 years. A travelling exhibition of Breathing Earth will take place before the final choice of its building site. The exhibition will also show a 33 mns film entitled Susumu Shingu which has been realized for our exhibition by the German director Thomas Riedelsheimer, with interviews of the artist a nd shots of his worldwide sculptures moving with natural energies. An English/Japanese DVD has been made of this film and is distributed along with the exhibition catalogue.

Born in 1937 in Osaka, Susumu Shingu is a well-respected philosopher and poet of nature and has created numerous animated wind and water sculptures throughout the world. Nature knows no rigid resistance says the artist and if his sculptures reveal the hidden energies of the elements of wind, water and sun, they also move the observer in an idiosyncratic manner, probably because they embody, in consummate beauty, a principle of life. They are moved by the same wind that we feel and allow themselves to be carried by it.

Shingu has had important collaborations with known architects such as Renzo Piano and Tadao Ando, and creators such as Issey Miyake as well as choreographer Jiri Kylian. Susumu Shingu dissipates all borders between these artistic disciplines. His most important project before Breathing Earth has been Wind Caravan where the artist took 21 sculptures between 2000 and 2001 in “six characteristic environments of our planet” in order to observe for a period of 2 months at each site their interaction with nature and their local inhabitants. This one-year project along with his experience with working with natural energies for the past 50 years provide him today with a sound experience of these natural energies which would benefit his new masterpiece Breathing Earth. Breathing Earth is intended as a place of inspiration where artists, scientists as well as children can all exchange together in order to develop fresh ideas based on wind energy so that art can provide impetus for a new and healthier relationship with our planet.

Billy Gruner, Collective Monochrome 14, 2008
CCNOA, Brussels, Belgium

May 30 – June 20, 2009

Installation view
Photo: F.Guillemeteaud

May 16 – August 16, 2009

With this exhibition of the Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig, the CAPC is carrying on the tradition of monographic projects devised for the spectacular nave of the Entrepôt.

After studying set and scenery design in Vienna, Heimo Zobernig turned to art in the early 1980s. His early paintings involved different expressions of abstraction, ranging from the lyrical gesture to the serial geometric motif. His early sculptures made with humble materials—cardboard, plywood—borrowed the vocabulary of Minimalism. The choice of qualityless materials, combined with the attempt to exhaust the pictorial motif through its repetition, situate his work in a vein of criticism and renewal. The artist, associated with the Viennese New Wave, developed an interest, very early on, in performance and video. In a minimal and low-tech mode, these media usually appropriated avant-garde performances and television aesthetics.

Inspired by the theatrical dimension of the nave at the CAPC, the artist has come up with a mise en scène-like presentational arrangement. Red curtains and mirrors form the essence of the installation. But the way they are arranged denies the place’s spectacular dimension, running counter to the installation of in situ works of the Conceptual and Minimal movement which have left their mark on the history of place—works by such artists as Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner.

What is at issue for Zobernig is questioning the mechanisms of (de)monstration and perception through a deliberately disconcerting arrangement or device.The simplicity of the arrangement gives rise to many questions about methods and forms of representation and exposition (shadow, reflection, the double, the virtual, illusion, mise en abyme, distancing…). The viewer becomes the plural protagonist of this oddly staged mise en scène.

The artist, born in 1958, has been exhibited in a great many international shows and biennials, but has almost never shown his work in any French museums, apart from one solo show in 1991, held at the Villa Arson in Nice.

Heimo Zobernig, the book : For his show in Bordeaux, the CAPC and Les Presses du Réel Ed. are jointly publishing the first monographic book about him in French. Designed by the artist with the graphic designers Experimental Jetset, the art critic Catherine Chevalier and CAPC director Charlotte Laubard, this new publication offers an oblique look at the artist’s many-facetted oeuvre, with a special focus on the notions of theatricality and display.

Installation view

May 16 – July 9, 2009

On the occasion of Tilman’s exhibition, a series of 22 prints, a multiple, as well as a 16 page full-color publication will be published.

Installation view

April 25 – May 16, 2009

February 25 – March 23, 2009

A quite exceptional event, “Vides” (Voids) is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing, leaving empty the space for which they were designed.

The idea of exhibiting emptiness is a recurring notion in the history of art over the past fifty or so years, almost to the point of becoming a cliché in the practice of contemporary art. Since the exhibition by Yves Klein – “The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility” in Paris in 1958, totally empty exhibitions have been the statement of different conceptions of vacuums.

While for Yves Klein it was a way to point out the sensitive state, by contrast it represents the peak of conceptual and minimal art for Robert Barry with “Some places to which we can come, and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do’ (Marcuse)” (1970). It may also result from the desire to fudge the understanding of exhibition spaces, as in the work “The Air-Conditioning Show” from Art & Language (1966-1967), or to empty an institution to modify our experience, as in the work by Stanley Brouwn. It also reflects the will to create the experience of the qualities of an exhibition venue, as with Robert Irwin and his exhibition at the ACE Gallery in 1970, or with Maria Nordman at her exhibition in Krefeld in 1984. Emptiness also represents a form of radicalness, like that created by Laurie Parsons in 1990 at the Lorence-Monk gallery, which announced his renouncement of all artistic practice. For Bethan Huws and his work “Haus Esters Piece” (1993), emptiness means being able to celebrate the museum’s architecture, signifying that art is already there on site and there is no need to add works of art. Emptiness assumes almost a sense of economic demand for Maria Eichhorn who, in leaving her exhibition empty at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2001, helped to devote the budget to the building’s renovation. With “More Silent than Ever” (2006), Roman Ondák, for his part, had the onlooker believing that there is more than what is just left there to be seen.

Installation view

January 17 – February 7, 2009

ParisCONCRET’s inaugural exhibition “Pour faire simple”.

Participating Artists:
Pam Aitken, Daniel Argyle, Roger Bensasson, Joel Besse, Sanne Bruggink, Carola Bark, Christoph Dahlhausen, Julian Dashper, Rene Eicke, Billy Gruner, Brent Hallard, Hiroshi Harada, Tony Harding, Jose Heerkens, Sarah Keighery, Irene Kivinen, Vaclav Krucek, Arjan Janssen, Kate Mackay, Aldo Mengolini, Simon Morris, Antoine Nelen, Roland Orepuk, Charles Payan, Jacek Przybyszewski, Paul Raguenes, Alexandra Roozen, Marlene Sarroff, Clary Stolte, Bogumila Strojna, John Tallman, Richard van der Aa, Iemke van Dijk, Jacques Weyer & Guido Winkler