Charlotte Posenenske, Vierkantrohre Serie D, 1967
(Reconstruction 2009)

March 12 – May 30, 2010

The initial exhibition at Daimler Contemporary in 2010 will show major 1960s trends in German abstract art from the Daimler Art Collection: Constructivism, Zero, Minimal Art, Concept and Seriality. Starting with 1950s predecessors – such as Josef Albers, Norbert Kricke and Siegfried Cremer – the show considers abstract art developments in the cities of Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich, but also looks at contiguous Swiss positions. About 60 works by 28 artists are being presented, all developing a specifically German Minimalism in the period from 1954 to 1974 in various media (sculpture, painting, film and drawing).

Participating Artists:
Karl Heinz Adler, Josef Albers, Joachim Albrecht, Peter Benkert, Hartmut Böhm, Siegfried Cremer, Hanne Darboven, Karl Gerstner, Imi Giese, Mathias Goeritz, Kuno Gonschior, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Hajo Hangen, Erwin Heerich, Gottfried Honegger, Norbert Kricke, Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack, Karl Georg Pfahler, Verena Pfisterer, Charlotte Posenenske, Christian Roeckenschuss, Peter Roehr, Ulrich Rückriem, Eckhard Schene, Klaus Staudt, Franz Erhard Walther, Herbert Zangs

In the early sixties in Germany, a new kind of Minimalism developed that was initially largely independent from the developments in America at the time. This German Minimalism was in many cases stimulated by, but also in conflict with, Concrete Art and the European Zero avant-garde, which drew attention to it from 1957 on, starting in Düsseldorf, with unusually staged exhibitions and spectacular projects for public space. The steles, cubes, and picture objects produced by the Zero artists, which lay in the space or stood in front of the wall, represent a significant new step for German art in terms of quality around 1959/60. The Düsseldorf Kunstakademie played an important role in the transition to a specifically German Minimalism from 1962 until around 1970. In the sixties, it provided many of its students with a basis for examining minimalized sculpture. Among them, the young Franz Erhard Walther developed his first proto-Minimalist objects starting in 1962, followed in 1964/65 by Imi Knoebel, Imi Giese, and Blinky Palermo. At the same time, Hanne Darboven in Hamburg, Charlotte Posenenske in Offenbach and, outside academic contexts, Peter Roehr in Frankfurt conceived their first attempts at Minimalist works.

On the occasion of this pioneering exhibition there will be a three-day symposium on May 15 -17, 2010, held at Daimler Contemporary in Berlin. The publicly accessible symposium is inviting protagonists, important collectors, curators and active gallery owners of the time, academics, art critics and journalists, who will give insights in talks, panel discussions and specific lectures. By engaging experts from the respective genres the symposium aims to draw an encompassing picture of the minimalist movement in the field of music, literature, film and dance in Germany.

Installation view

February 17 – May 2, 2010

A major retrospective of Franz Erhard Walther’s work
From 17 February to 2 May 2010, Mamco will be hosting the most important retrospective devoted to Franz Erhard Walther (1939, Fulda, Germany), one of the artists associated with the museum since its founding. Indeed, Mamco has followed his work for many years. De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 (On the Origin of Sculpture, 1958-2009) will be the largest show the artist has put together to date. Spread out over some thirty galleries on the museum’s four floors, this show brings together several hundred pieces that go back over a half century of making art.

As in other Mamco retrospectives (Martin Kippenberger, Claudio Parmiggiani, Siah Armajani), De l’origine de la sculpture, 1958-2009 consecrates an artist whose work has marked the history of the venue, both with an initial show devoted to Walther in 1998 and, since the museum’s opening, the permanent presentation of Werklager, a gallery featuring a large collection of works produced between 1961 and 1972 that includes one of his major pieces, 1. Werksatz (1963-1968).

A crucial artist of the avant-garde in the 1960s
Walther has left a profound and lasting mark on the German art scene by broadening the field of art and proposing new types of work, notably in terms of the role of the viewer as an integral part of a piece. Walther trained at the Offenbach School of Applied Arts and at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie. The artist initially focused on drawing (Wortbilder) before shifting his work towards the object and the new materials that were finding their way into the realm of sculpture such as the body, action, time and space. The early 1960s were a turning point in his output when he declared that the work of art is created in the process of action, the artist’s or the viewer’s. ‘Instead of a material object, be it an image or a sculpture, I proclaimed that the body’s gestures could have the character of a work of art.’

Walther creates cloth sculpture-objects displayed in a variety of ways, spread out in space, folded, filled out by a human body or left as they are, in the state of an object of pure contemplation. Hybrid works of art that verge on painting and sculpture, these pieces invite the viewers to experience their relationship to time and space. Yet whatever the materials or techniques used by the artist – he continues to turn out drawings notably – his work throughout his career has always come down to the importance he places in language, memory and history.

Hundreds of works over the museum’s four floors
The Mamco retrospective covers the different facets of the artist’s work. The extent of the space that has been set aside for the show makes it possible to present several groups of large-scale objects like Das Neue Alphabet (1990-1996), a series of twenty-six foam and cotton sculptures that reproduce the letters of the alphabet; and Raumelemente (1973), a large wall installation featuring thirteen elements made of cotton cloth. Juvenilia, unpublished archival photos, major works from the 1960s and ’70s and very recent pieces will be on hand in an exceptional presentation for the museum-going public in Geneva. The artist’s drawing will also command more than its share of attention with the display – for the first time outside of Germany – of the 500 original illustrations that make up Sternenstaub – Stardust (2009), an autobiographical work in which Walther recounts the highlights of his life between 1942 and 1973.

To top off the retrospective, Walther will be present at Mamco on 20 April for a rare event that is open to the public. On that day the artist and art students from HEAD – Geneva will activate Werksatz, a major work by the artist that is part of the museum collection.

February 7 – April 11, 2010

For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Max Bense, ZKM will present an exhibition showing his international impact on the fine arts and literature, which can be compared to that of Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan. The exhibition, which carries forth the ZKM series “Philosophy and Art,” presents Bense as poet and author, scholar of the arts and literature, as well as exhibition curator and publicist.

Bense, who was active in Stuttgart from 1949 until his death in 1990, propagated an aesthetic of “technical existence” in Germany of the post-war era, which antedated by decades the media-theoretical turn in literature and the humanities that occurred in the 1980s. His thoughts on literature and art were part of a comprehensive philosophical picture of the world that showed a natural-science and “technical reality” of civilization and was aimed against German post-war culture’s romantic and mythologizing trends. Already back then, Bense established a concept of culture that—in the Enlightenment tradition—included the intellectual history of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Max Bense, who was born on 7 February 1910 in Strassbourg, studied physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, and received his PhD in 1937 with a thesis on “Quantum mechanics and existential relativity.” He first worked as a physicist for I.G. Farben in Leverkusen. After his war duties, Bense pursued an invitation from the University of Jena. But he already fled to West Germany in 1948 and was appointed first as visiting professor in 1949 and then as professor of philosophy and the philosophy of science in 1950 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He also taught at the HfG Ulm, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and in Rio de Janeiro.

Bense began pursuing his literary and artistic tendencies as publicist and radio playwright during his studies. In Stuttgart, he also began to organize exhibitions, first at the Galerie Gänsheide beginning in 1957, then at the study galleries he founded at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. He wrote about numerous fine artists and poets, among others, about Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Alberto Giacometti, Almir Mavignier, Henri Michaux, Mira Schendel, and Paul Wunderlich as well as Alfred Andersch, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his exhibitions and essays, Bense also created other forums for the arts: i.e., by founding the magazine “Augenblick” (1955) and “reihe rot,” 1960, which he and Elisabeth Walther edited, which published, among others Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Diter Rot. At the same time, beginning with semiotics and news technology, beginning in the mid-1950s he developed an “information aesthetics” that influenced concrete and kinetic artists throughout Europe and made him one of the seminal theorists of the pioneering era of European computer art.

The exhibition with publications by Max Bense and prints, paintings, and sculptures by artists that were important to Max Bense, or were influenced by him, is supplemented with manuscripts and photos, as well as recordings of his radio plays and television appearances. They show the philosopher and his view of “art in an artificial world” (1956).

Artists in the exhibition:
Kurd Alsleben, Max Bill, Hannelore Busse, Pierre Charbonnier, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Bruno Giorgi, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Harig, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Josef Hirsal, Oskar Holweck, Hugo Jamin, Ernst Jandl, Hiroshi Kawano, Reinhold Köhler, Harry Kramer, Kurt Kranz, Theo Lutz, Aloisio Magalhaes, Georges Mathieu, Almir Mavignier, Hansjörg Meyer, Henri Michaux, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Günter Neusel, Heinz Pfahler, Décio Pignatari, Uli Pohl, Francis Ponge, Diter Rot, Bernhard Sandfort, Mira Schendel, Anton Stankowski, Karel Trinkewitz, Timm Ulrichs, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Oswald Wiener, Emmett Williams, Wols, Paul Wunderlich, and Dolf Zillmann

Curated by Margit Rosen, Jens Lutz, Miriam Stürner, and Peter Weibel

Anne Appleby, Little Sweet Pea, 2008
Oil and wax on wood, 36.6 36.6 inches

Both followers of artist and colour theorist Josef Albers, the American painter Anne Appleby and German artist Kuno Gonschior have a common aspiration of capturing colours, by means of abstraction and through analytical observation of natural experiences.

Anne Appleby (born 1954), former Bay area painter, who works and lives in Montana, is often referred to as a Colour Field artist from her use of large “all over” abstract canvases. After graduating in 1989 with an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, she has for 20 years tried to render the subtle variations of tones and light passing through and over the organic subjects she chooses, for nature is her inspiration and concern. The technique she uses by mixing oil and wax on canvas enables her to obtain, layer upon layer, a delicate sensation of translucence and depth observed in nature, from its ephemeral events. Appleby likes to work in large triptychs or associations of panels, which allows the viewer to enter the fields easily. The contemporary art collector Guiseppe Panza, who commissioned her for the Phaeton’s room at the Ducal Palace of Sassuolo (Modena) is one of her admirers: “Her paintings are the landscapes of a nature that is invisible to our eyes but not to our conscience, which goes beyond the visible.” (Memories of a Collector, Abbeville Press, 2007, p.284).

After studying at the art academy of Düsseldorf and Cologne from 1957-1963, Kuno Gonschior (born 1935) started to create series of chromatic experiences. These series, based on capturing colours as a pure element, only differ from each other by their nuances. Gonschior’s works are playful and experimental, studying colour in all its variation and without the association of the psyche. The Mayor Gallery is showing a selection from the first two decades of his research as a Concrete artist. Often painted on small un-primed canvases, Gonschior applied small dabs of paint, as particles, bearing similarities with the impressionists and his palette, without limit, explored fluorescent colours to black.

Gonschior and Appleby, although two very distinctive artists, aim to touch a wider public, who often reject abstract, but as Gonschior explained at his recent museum exhibition in Germany: “It isn’t about having the right education, you just have to free your mind from these constraints and do the one thing that most people don’t do: concentrate and study the painting for a while, give the painting a chance –for say – 5 minutes. That will have an impact.” (in conversation with W. Smerling, “Just for you and me”, exhibition catalogue, MKM Duisburg, p.28)

The Mayor Gallery will also exhibit a number of paintings by Josef Albers to compliment their works.

Installation views of exhibition Entwicklungen
Clockwise: Manfred Mohr, Anton Stankowsky, Leon Polk Smith,
Camille Graeser, Richard Lohse, Manfred Mohr, Kenneth Snelson

October 31, 2009 – April 5, 2010

Participating Artists:
Camille Graeser, Edgar Gutbub, Heijo Hangen, Matti Kujasalo, Verena Loewensberg, Richard-Paul Lohse, Jan Meyer-Rogge, Manfred Mohr, Aurelie Nemours, Leon Polk Smith, Kenneth Snelson, Jurg Stauble, Anton Stankowski, Norbert Thomas, Martin Willing

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.

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.

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.

Hartmut Böhm
Untersuchungen eines Quadratsystems, IV, 1964/68
40 x 40 cm
Photographer: Grzegorz Zabłocki

May 8 – June 12, 2010
Opening: Saturday, May 8, 2010, 3-6pm

An exhibition of select prints by Berlin-based artist Hartmut Böhm produced between 1965-1975.

MINUS SPACE project space
98 4th Street, Buzzer #28
Brooklyn, NY 11231
> directions

A Letter from the Judd Foundation:

November 30, 2009

Dear Friends,

I am very pleased to announce the start of the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné through the appointment of the Catalogue Raisonné Committee and a Catalogue Raisonné Manager, Katy Rogers. Ms. Rogers, who is currently completing the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné, will manage the project with the advisement of the committee.

The production of a Catalogue Raisonné is a natural extension of our mission to promote a wider understanding of Judd’s artistic legacy by developing scholarly and educational programs. The project is already supported by a newly designed Catalogue Raisonné database, which Judd Foundation has developed over two years, specifically to document artworks by Donald Judd (1928-1994).

The Committee is comprised of Catalogue Raisonné scholars, curators with experience with Judd works, and former studio assistants to Donald Judd, thus establishing continuity with the 1975 Judd Catalogue Raisonné. Founding members include William C. Agee, Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, James Bruce Dearing, Dudley Del Balso and Flavin Judd. Ms. Rogers will begin work on the project in April 2010 and will manage a team of scholars and researchers from the US and abroad, as well as others who worked closely with the artist over many years.

Judd Foundation has allocated seed funding to support the first phase of The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné, a project that is expected to take a number of years. This new Catalogue Raisonné is the first since 1975 and builds upon the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects and Wood-Blocks 1960-1974, co-edited by committee member Dudley Del Balso, Brydon Smith, and Roberta Smith, as part of an exhibition catalogue published by the National Gallery, Ottawa, in 1975. A comprehensive volume of Judd prints, 1951 – 1994, Donald Judd, Prints and Works in Editions: A Catalogue Raisonné, was published in 1993, edited by Jörg Schellmann and Mariette Josephus Jitta (Editions Schellmann and Schirmer/Mosel, 1993; 1996).

The Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné will cover works by Donald Judd in multiple volumes and digital formats. Through this project, Judd Foundation will produce an updated and comprehensive record of the artist’s oeuvre and will expand the body of critical writing on the artist available for scholarly research.

I am sure that you will share our enthusiasm as we begin our work on this great endeavor. It will be a rewarding one, and we all look forward to celebrating with you the publication of the volumes in due course.

With best wishes,

Barbara Hunt McLanahan
Executive Director

About the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné Committee Manager:

Katy Rogers is currently project manager and co-author of the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Collages by Robert Motherwell. The volume is the culmination of a seven-year project overseen by the Dedalus Foundation, and will be published by Yale University Press. Rogers has written on Motherwell and other artists, and most recently contributed to the exhibition catalogue Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis at El Museo del Barrio, New York (October 2009 – February 2010). She received her Master’s degree in art history from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and is an alumna of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

About the Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné Committee Members:

William C. Agee is an internationally renowned art critic and historian. He is currently the Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College, New York. Mr. Agee has published and lectured extensively in the field of modern American art. He was the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from 1974 through 1982, and before that was an associate curator at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He has written a number of essays on Donald Judd and organized several exhibitions of the artist’s work including Judd’s first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1968.

Heidi Colsman-Freyberger holds a doctorate degree from Philipps-Universität, Marburg, Germany. She has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, in commercial galleries, as Robert Motherwell’s secretary-cum-curator, and as a freelancer for Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her Catalogue Raisonné projects include editing Egon Schiele (Harry N. Abrams, 1990) and compiling Barnett Newman (Yale University Press, 2004); she is currently chief researcher for another Catalogue Raisonné project, the paintings and sculpture of Jasper Johns.

James Bruce Dearing is a painter and an independent art consultant living in New York. From 1968 through 1983, Mr. Dearing was a studio assistant for Donald Judd. Over a number of years he developed a deep understanding of Judd’s working practices, and travelled with Judd on research trips and to install exhibitions around the world. He also worked at The Whitney Museum of American Art and was a partner at Bark Frameworks LLC in New York until 2005.

Dudley Del Balso serves on the Board of Judd Foundation. Ms. Del Balso worked with Judd almost continuously between 1968 and 1984 managing his office and overseeing the fabrication of his work. She co-authored the 1975 Judd Catalogue Raisonné published by the National Gallery of Canada. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the International Print Center New York and on the New York Board of the Trust for Public Land.

Flavin Judd, son of Donald Judd, is one of the founding board members of Judd Foundation and is currently the Vice-President of the board. Mr. Judd oversaw the temporary exhibition of selected Judd works at Christie’s New York in 2006, for which Judd Foundation received an award from the International Art Critics Association (AICA). Mr. Judd regularly writes and lectures on his father’s work.

Click for Manfred Jäger’s web site

Francois Morellet, Sphere – trames, 1962
Collection Maximilian & Agathe Weishaupt, Munich

November 22, 2009 – January 31, 2010

Installation view

November 13 – December 22, 2009

A solo exhibition by the late British artist Jeremy Moon (1936-1973).

Daniel Göttin, Vakuum, 2009
Adhesive textile tape, transparent tape, aluminium tape
Installation view

November 15, 2009 – February 28, 2009

Featuring 50 artists from 8 countries.

Participating Artists:
Nir Alon, Nathan Baker, Carola Bark, Nicholas Bodde, Ingo Bracke, Lars Breuer, Silke Brosskamp, Laura Bruce, Christoph Dahlhausen, Bruno Dorn, Reinhard Doubrawa, Martin Durham, Karsten Fodinger, Manuel Franke, Marcel Frey, Sebastian Freytag, Tom Früchtl, Daniel Göttin, Wiebke Grösch und Frank Metzger, Yvo Hartmann, Geka Heinke, Graham Hudson, Gary Jolley, Laresa Kosloff, Andreas Lorenschat, Antonia Low, Tumi Magnusson, Guido Münch, Aki Nakazawa, Esther Neumann, Frank Piasta, Jan van der Ploeg, Trevor Richards, Kai Richter, Karen Scheper, Rita Rohlfing, Christine Rühmann and Sjaak Beemsterboer, Christiane Schlosser, Arne Schreiber, Nicola Schudy, Daniel Schürer, Paul Schwer, Cony Theis, David Thomas, Tony Trehy, Jan Verbeek, Cornel Wachter, Achim Zeman

Installation view

October 23 – November 27, 2009

Work by Brent Hallard

November 12 – December 19, 2009

An international, visual conversation between abstract painters; a traveling, transformable series of shows.

Exhibiting artists – Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier

Meridian Gallery is pleased to present TRANS: form | color the San Francisco manifestation of a series of international traveling shows by nine artists from Japan, Germany and the United States who are engaged in a dialogue about Painting and Abstraction.

Begun as an in-person and online conversation between Richard Schur in Munich, Mel Prest in San Francisco and Brent Hallard in Tokyo, TRANS has grown into an exhibition with nine artists. Three of the artists hail from Germany, four artists live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, one in upstate New York and one lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a visual dialogue between themselves and as a means to join today’s contemporary painting dialogue.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference, as well as, the ways that the works align both formally and conceptually, with a range of abstraction spanning hard-edge, optical, minimal, expressive and conceptual. An aspect of the artists’ continuing dialogue is the installation of TRANS: form | color, which is done onsite by the artists together. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic and timely exhibition.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century, with its awareness of history as well as conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

“…These painters, calling themselves TRANS, meeting in person or on the Internet, found that they share a common interest in the painting process, pure, and often not so simple. Unlike previous groups, they share no common ideology and they certainly are not likely to publish a manifesto. And they all agree that it is the viewer’s response, which completes the work…”
—Peter Selz

TRANS:Abstraktion opened in November 2007 at Weltraum, a non-profit gallery space in Munich, Germany. In March 2009 TRANS:formal traveled to Pharmaka, a non-profit space in Los Angeles. Each show includes new work by each artist –thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. TRANS: form | color at Meridian Gallery will be the first time all artists will be present at the exhibition.

Catalogue available, with notes on TRANS: form | color by Peter Selz.

Julie Mehretu, Berliner Plaetze, 2008-2009
Ink and acrylic on canvas, 304.8 x 426.7 cm
Commissioned Work by the Deutsche Bank
in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

October 28, 2009 – January 6, 2010

Acclaimed American artist Julie Mehretu premieres a new suite of paintings that she has produced for the fifteenth project of Deutsche Guggenheim’s commission program at the exhibition space Unter den Linden.

Julie Mehretu is celebrated for large-scale paintings and drawings that layer abstract forms with familiar architectural imagery. Inspired by a multitude of sources including historical photographs, urban-planning grids, Modernism, and graffiti, these semi-abstract works explore power, history, and the built environment, and the often dystopic impact of these factors on the formation of personal and communal identities.

For the Deutsche Guggenheim commission, Mehretu established a studio in Berlin where she produced a remarkable group of works that deals with erasure, decay, and liminality. The architectural underlayer is erased, leaving canvases that seem to shiver in an indeterminate state.

‘Julie Mehretu: Grey Area’ has been curated by Joan Young, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition will be on view in spring 2010 in New York as part of the Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim.

Installation view at Hamish Morrison Galerie

October 31, 2009 – January 8, 2010

Frank Badur: Colour Recall at Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin, Germany
Frank Badur: Why Pattern? at fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin, Germany
Frank Badur: Editions at Jordan Seydoux – Drawings & Prints, Berlin, Germany

The galleries Hamish Morrison Galerie, fruehsorge contemporary drawings and Jordan Seydoux – Drawings & Prints are pleased to present three exhibitions by the artist Frank Badur on the occasion of his 65th birthday.

Frank Badur who was born in Oranienburg near Berlin lives and works in Finland and Berlin. Since 1985 he works as a professor for painting at the „Universität der Künste”, Berlin. His oeuvre was shown in numerous international institutions (Malmö Kunstmuseum, SE, Mondriaanhuis, Amersfoort, NL , Museé de Cambrai, F, Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA, etc.) and is present in many important collections (Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA, etc.).

Although at first glance he may seem to be a representative of geometric abstraction, Badur is an artist who can by no means be pigeonholed merely as a devotee of Concrete or Essential Art. A vital, sensual delight in colour and line run through all of his work. In painting he takes on issues of dimension and proportion, investigating the tonality and intensity of colours in more ore less rigidly ordered fields and stripes. On paper by contrast, free-form lines alternate with clear grid structures, creating compositions with virtuoso rhythms.

The new exhibitions bear witness of Frank Badurs mastery of geometric abstraction as well as of his ability to express his unique concept of colour and light in his work. In his new paintings large and small sized works are combined and develop a vivid dialogue. Badur presents a new intense colour palette, in which he especially experiments with tones of red.

In the centre of the exhibition at fruehsorge contemporary drawings is the presentation of a new drawing series “Reflections on the Eisenman Grid”. In this cycle of 24 works Badur reflects on the formal structures of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” by US architect Peter Eisenman.

Since many years Frank Badur is particularly interested in graphic art and experiments with different techniques (etching, screenprint etc.). On the occasion of his exhibition at Jordan Seydoux the artist has edited a new series of six wood cuts. Especially for this body of works the graphic studio Tabor Press has developed a new printing technique with MDF (medium density fibreboard) boards, which enables the artist to produce special colour applications.

Parallel to the three exhibitions a new catalogue on the oeuvre of Frank Badur is published by “Kehrer Verlag” publishers, with texts by Hubertus Butin and Christian Rattemeyer. A limited edition of 100 catalogues will include a signed print by the artist.

We are very pleased to be able to present Frank Badurs broad range of new works in his hometown Berlin in such a comprehensive way that has had no predecessor.

Installation view

October 18 – December 23, 2009

Zdenek Sykora & Bridget Riley
Richard Paul Lohse & Manfred Mohr

October 3, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Heinz Teufel, the famous gallery owner and collector, died in 2007. He was a great patron of Concrete Art in Germany. From opening his first gallery in 1966 in Koblenz up to his 1998 activities in Berlin he consequently pursued a stringent gallery profile – independent of the fluctuating fashions of the art world. Including works by over 40 internationally renowned artists, the collection of Concrete Art he put together within this period was given to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. This assortment of art, including 200 paintings, numerous sculptures, and an extensive stock of prints, gives an exemplary pan-European overview of Concrete Art since the Second World War. The inclusion of Eastern European as well as Italian and French manifestations of the abstractionist movement is an outstanding feature of the collection and rarely to be found in museums.

Participating Artists:
Josef Albers, Olle Baertling, Hermann Bartels, Horst Bartnig, Hubert Berke, Max Bill, Andreas Brandt, Antonio Calderara, Ad Dekkers, Jo Delahaut, Piero Dorazio, Rita Ernst, Eberhard Fiebig, Mark Francis, Christoph Freimann, Günter Fruhtrunk, Raimund Girke, Hans-Jorg Glattfelder, Camille Graeser, Heijo Hangen, Siebe Hansma, Auguste Herbin, Uwe Kubiak, Jan Kubicek, Walter Linck, Richard Paul Lohse, Manfred Luther, Max Hermann Mahlmann, Karel Malich, Jan Meyer-Rogge, Manfred Mohr, Francois Morellet, Wilhelm Müller, Aurelie Nemours, Mario Nigro, Gudrun Piper, Bridget Riley, Jan Schoonhoven, Anton Stankowski, Zdenek Sykora, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Herman de Vries, & Beat Zoderer.

October 31 – December 19, 2009

We are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Kai Richter at our gallery. Kai Richter builds three-dimensional “sculptures” in connection with and response to the room conditions at hand. He reacts to them, changes them, highlights them—and in doing so, allows us to experience them as rooms in new and different ways.

One of the oddities of art history’s terminology is that the word “constructions” usually implies intellectual planning and not the processes of assembly themselves which are material, physical, and sensual actions—such as we find in the sculptural work of Kai Richter. Richter constructs his works in the literal sense of the word (Lat. construere = to build, erect). In doing this, he works freely with the specific characteristics of his materials and the peculiarities of the exhibition room and does not concern himself with planning. Architecture is the paradigm of constructing. To a certain extent this applies to Kai Richter as well. What constructing really means is better studied at construction sites than after the buildings themselves are finished. What the artist admires as the “timeless beauty” of building site construction – from which he also learned a lot for his own artistic creations – is the pragmatic use of tools and materials, but above all the honesty and clarity in treating the totally individualistic plastic vocabulary revealed there.

The aesthetic attraction of Richter’s works is not self-serving. It arises incidentally and comes about as a result of the often brittle and awkward materials whose treatment is free and open to improvisation. A work such as “Doka” which gives you the feeling of a free, contemporary etude on the age-old theme of “bundled columns” already indicates in its title the basic material that it uses – the yellow-colored concrete form supports made by the Austrian Doka Company. As a plastic form, “Doka” stretches from the floor to the ceiling, supporting the room metaphorically instead of tectonically, thus laconically bringing up the subject of the relationship between sculpture and architecture, form and space.

What continues to surprise us about Richter’s work is how much poetry, humor and lightness he suffuses into his prosaic ingredients – the construction wood, scaffolding poles, and plasterboards. Like a jazz musician who strictly adheres to the harmonic sequences of a melody while transporting them into improvisational lightness, Richter treats the plastic elementary themes of volume and mass, gravity and statics as well as the dialectics of stress and support. With Kai Richter there are no finely-chiseled form constructions built to last an eternity, but rather generous, open gestures, a clear grasp of the room situation and the corresponding sculptural reaction to it. This conception of sculpture draws its very own strength from the fact that the sensitivity, spatial feeling and sensuality of the materials merge together in its plastic weightiness.

Leni Hoffmann, Flipper, 2009

September 26, 2009 – March 28, 2010

The Düsseldorf-based artist Leni Hoffmann has created a site-specific ex-hibition that dialogues with the architecture and the collection of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum in a refreshing new manner. This radical show fundamentally challenges the collection-based institution through ephemeral on and off-site projects that evolve over time and question the autonomy of art.

Few movements have influenced the course of modern and contemporary art as deeply as Suprematism and Constructivism. Like her predecessors El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, Leni Hoffmann (born 1962) in turn questions the autonomy of art and in particular painting through site specific, “user-friendly” installations that, like Proun, extend painting into architectural space and everyday life. Hoffmann’s exhibi-tion renders homage to the Museum Ludwig’s exceptional collection of Russian Avantgarde art, which is currently highlighted in a separate six-part exhibition series.

Both this project series and the Hoffmann exhibition are curated by Katia Baudin, Deputy Director of the Ludwig Museum.

In accordance with her “nomadic” approach, Leni Hoffmann has selected five very different and totally unexpected locations for her work that underscore architectural discrepancies or particularities of the museum inaugurated in 1986 and designed by the Cologne-based Architects Busmann & Haberer. A visit through the exhibition is simultaneously a visit through the entire museum, a treasure hunt that takes the visi-tor from the entrance hall to the roof terrace, while encountering works in a hallway and in a permanent collection room. These colorful, geometrical paintings that extend vertically and horizontally into space – from windows and walls to the floor and the ceiling – unite two materials of contradictory nature, durable concrete and malleable plasticine. The viewer is invited to become a transitory part of many of these installa-tions, by leaving his footprints on the clay and sitting on the cushion-covered con-crete extensions.

The exhibition reaches directly beyond museum walls, with a temporary outdoor seat-ing sculpture in the midst of a major construction site neighboring the museum, which encourages the spectator/user to enter into a new dialogue with this transitional envi-ronment.

The most radical work of the exhibition is still to come: “pizzicato”, in which she will create on an unannounced day, a unique work for Cologne’s leading local newspa-per, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, directly inspired by the offset printing process. This work – which will last one day –, will enable everyone who purchases the newspaper that day to own a unique work of art, as no two editions will be exactly the same.

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

James Turrell, Ganzfeld Piece (model), 2008
Installation
Photo: Zooey Braun, Stuttgart, 2009

October 24, 2009 – April 5, 2010

The primary medium of Californian artist James Turrell is light. Probably the best-known artist in his field, Turrell’s entire oeuvre since the 1960s has been devoted to exploring the diverse manifestations of this immaterial medium and working towards a new, space-defining form of light art. While light here refers to nothing beyond itself, it causes surface, colour and space to interact and allows viewers to immerse themselves in a mysterious, painterly world.

Occupying a central place in James Turrell’s oeuvre is the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert which the artist has been transforming into an observatory since 1974. Building upon the cosmic aspects of this quiet, meditative place, Turrell is creating the worldwide largest museum installation he has made to date at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, producing a light-filled space of experience in the tradition of his Ganzfeld Pieces. Making full use of the adaptable architecture system of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg – unique within the German museum landscape – his installation will be an exploration of space and light: immaterial and material at once. The timelessness and fascination of James Turrell’s works derives from his incredible skill at capturing fleeting light and giving it the visual presence and tactile density of a physical body.

October 31, 2009 – February 28, 2010

Born in Lisbon in 1956, Pedro Cabrita Reis is one of the leading Portuguese artists of his generation. This exhibition will be his first presentation in a German museum since 1996. Cabrita Reis has exhibited widely and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta IX in 1992; in 2003 he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale. Currently, he is participating in the 10th Lyon Biennale with two large works. In the most comprehensive show by the artist to date, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting around sixty sculptures, including several large-scale pieces, paintings, drawings and photographs from 1985 to 2009, covering the entire basement floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart.

Since the early 1990s, Cabrita Reis’s work has revolved around the themes of housing, habitation, construction and territory. Along with artworks based on elements of everyday life, such as tables and chairs or doors and windows, he often creates expansive installations that fill the exhibition spaces with both complex and imposing structures. He counters the classic white cube with his use of massive brick walls, found objects and industrial materials such as neon tubes, steel girders or rough wooden planks.

Pedro Cabrita Reis is a keen collector, both of the flotsam of civilization and of sensory impressions. For him, discarded everyday objects are just as welcome finds as the panorama of an abandoned building site or an old olive tree. Like retinal afterimages, such visual stimuli plant the seed of an idea for one of his melancholic-archaic sculptures or for a new painting. In his work, Cabrita Reis repeatedly addresses fundamental issues of art; he explores the concepts of painting and sculpture and develops sculptural methods of drawing in space. While Cabrita Reis’s rugged walls and the cardboard sheds held together with adhesive tape might at first glance seem to refer to social realities outside the realm of art, they are not bound up with these realities, nor do they attempt to duplicate them; instead, they transform them into intriguing and sometimes quite literally opaque artworks. Wherever windows appear in Cabrita Reis’s installations, they are invariably blind, boarded up or painted over, the doors to his dwellings are inaccessible. Cidades Cegas (Blind Cities) is the title of a group of works whose stoically melancholic appearance alludes to the Unbehaustheit (‘homelessness’) of man as a basic constant of the human condition – one of the leitmotifs in Cabrita Reis’s oeuvre.

In addition to works on loan from major museums and private collections, the exhibition features new works that have been developed especially for the Hamburger Kunsthalle. After premiering in Hamburg, it will travel to the Carré d’Art in Nîmes and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. It is the first exhibition of the new curator of the Galerie der Gegenwart, Sabrina van der Ley, in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

A comprehensive catalogue with 200 colour illustrations has been published to accompany the exhibition and features amongst other texts by António Lobo Antunes, Dieter Schwarz and Pedro Cabrita Reis.

November 6, 2009 – January 29, 2010

Participating Artists: Rolf Rose, Don Voisine and Susanne Jung.

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.

Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles (Einige Kreise), 1926
Oil on canvas, 55 1/4 x 55 3/8 inches
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

September 18, 2009 – January 13, 2010

Pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal pre–World War I treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent of one’s observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his art, Kandinsky strove to use abstraction to give painting the freedom from nature that he admired in music. His discovery of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” occupied him throughout his life.

Kandinsky is a central figure in the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His works not only represent a part of the core and essence of the collection, but also helped to inspire the creation of the building. In 1929, Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting Kandinsky’s canvases under the advisement of artist Hilla Rebay. Ten years later, their enthusiasm for the artist’s paintings, among those of others exhibiting nonobjectivity—a style of abstraction with no ties to the observable world—led them to open the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. Later, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1943 to design what has become one of the architect’s greatest masterpieces, which opened in 1959 as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Though Kandinsky is known for an abstraction that expressed his inner nature and Wright for his advancement of an organic architecture connected to the natural world, both advocated a spiritual, aesthetic experience of life. During the museum’s fiftieth-anniversary year, the landmark building is filled with the canvases that encouraged its inception.

Kandinsky draws from the three largest public holdings of the artist’s work—that of the Guggenheim Museum; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich—as well as renowned institutions and private collections to bring together nearly one hundred paintings dating from 1902 to 1942. Complemented by more than sixty works on paper from the collections of the Guggenheim and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation, this retrospective retraces the painter’s oeuvre, focusing on key events that informed his life and work. Marked by two world wars and the 1917 Russian Revolution, Kandinsky’s abstraction did not develop in unworldly detachment; rather, this exhibition, the first full-scale retrospective of his career in the United States since 1985, reveals the complex background to his artistic advancement.

This exhibition is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Christian Derouet, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich