Pierre Juillerat, B_76.5215, 2009-2010
Lacquer and acrylic dispersion on canvas
220 x 170 cm

September 2 – October 3, 2010

The solo exhibition alpha floor of Swiss painter Pierre Juillerat is a consistent continuation of the New Concrete and Constructive Art program by dr. julius | ap. Juillerat‘s work expands the range of the artists represented by dr. julius | ap with a strictly geometric painting position.

In most cases, Juillerat‘s paintings show stripe and line structures that are set on various image carriers with very high precision, always using his own and intuitively chosen specific set of colours. Due to the orientation to vanishing points lying far outside the image area, these structures often appear like detail views of larger, wider spatial contexts. Shifting these points may breake geometric laws, and the perspective effect even increases the impression of vast space.

Pierre Juillerat, born 1967 in Bern, has completed a degree in architecture ETH Zurich, pursued by a long career as an airline pilot. In parallel, he independently developed his geometric painting style, which combines impetus from both fields. The opposite of the firmly structured, geometrically planned and bright dynamic clarity in his work is evident.

Pierre Schwerzmann, painter and teacher of design, notes on this: “The human perception of the automated movement, as in instrument flight, the hostile environment of high altitudes, which provides colours with their icy cold temperature and causes the alloy of the materials, shape the work of Pierre Juillerat. The aluminum sheets designed for speed are taken from a decontextualisation of aviation; they are a contrast to the slowness of the act of painting. It is a serial production technology, which faces the primitive and unique action of the painter. His paintings attempt to exist outside their own borders. Colours flowing over the edges are transitional areas. Non-Existing and emptiness are just as decisive as the visible portions of the work. What we have here in front of us is a unique and specific vision of the void and the tension that comes from an apparent calm.”

The renowned art historian Matthias Bleyl, professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee, writes about these works: “The constructive potential that the seemingly perspective painting by Pierre Juillerat contains, predestinates it for an expansion into real space, for which approaches in the draft stage already exist. His way of working, which also includes various rigid image carriers, like aluminum sheets or plexiglass panels, is well-suited for the production of three-dimensional, but at the same time picturesque objects. This step would be, given the recent development of his paintwork, very consistent, and probably it is just a matter of time before it is realized. Meanwhile, however, only the pictures remain with their seemingly complex nesting and broken spaces, which still reveal themselves as pure surface paintings.”

Works by:
Manfred Mohr, Josef Linschinger
Dora Maurer, Karl-Heinz Adler
Karl Gerstner, Vesna Kovacic

July 31 – October 30, 2010

Participating Artists:
Karl-Heinz Adler, Rita Ernst, Karl Gerstner, Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, Wolfgang Körber, Vesna Kovacic, Josef Linschinger, Dora Maurer, Manfred Mohr, Marcello Morandini, Axel Rohlfs

Installation view

June 30 – August 20, 2010

Curated by Josiah McElheny

Participating Artists:
Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Wenzel Hablik, Walther Klemm, Josiah McElheny, Eileen Quinlan, Heather Rowe, Robert Smithson, Katja Strunz, Bruno Taut

This exhibition began with a question: is it possible for a particular aesthetic form or structure to express both abstract concepts and political ideals? A brief, yet formative moment in history suggests that it might be. Just after World War I, a group of Western European artists and architects who were committed to non-authoritarian and socialist principles envisioned a new, modernist world, constructed out of crystalline forms and structures. In contrast, their fellow colleagues and rivals believed that the geometry of the square, rectangle and grid represented the most essential and efficient solution to economic and aesthetic questions. The rationalists won the argument, but what happened to this alternative model? Here, examples of these early explorations — mostly forgotten until recently — are paired with subsequent investigations and studies from the 1960’s and today. Together, these works propose that the fractures, reflections and the natural, imperfect geometry contained in the crystalline represent a way of thinking and building that encourages myriad solutions.

Three eras from the past 90 years are juxtaposed and intermingled within the exhibition: 1918-1922, 1964-1966 and today. Woodcuts, watercolors, a book, a postcard and a photograph by German and Czech artists and architects are accompanied by a large sculpture by Robert Smithson and a period fashion magazine which contains his influential essay “The Crystal Land”. Interspersed among these historical works are recent projects by four contemporary artists (including myself) that further explore the implications of crystalline structures.

These depictions are not simply gestures towards symbolic, romantic or science fiction motifs, but are images and objects that describe an abstraction that is both made and found, planned and unanticipated. Though this direction was at times suppressed or overwhelmed, throughout the twentieth century and particularly today, there have been artists who have pursued an aesthetic based on the complexity and diversity of the crystalline. These works of sculpture, photography, drawing and writing are brought together in order to sketch an outline for an ongoing history about the search for ways to represent a multitude of possible viewpoints and not a single universal one.

–Josiah McElheny

Notes on the earliest historical works in the exhibition:

An original copy of a limited-edition book by the architect Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur in 5 Teilen und 30 Zeichnungen des Architekten Bruno Taut (1919), depicts a modernist architectural environment situated in the mountains. This artist book formed the center of a portfolio of projects created by the Gläserne Kette (the Crystal Chain group), whose members included Walter Gropius and Wenzel Hablik. The Crystal Chain’s ideas were highly influential on the early Bauhaus — until director Walter Gropius renounced the previous political ideals of the school in 1923 (following the collapse of the German Socialist revolution) and declared that the school would then focus instead on ideas abouttechnology.

Of two woodcuts by artist and Bauhaus faculty member Lyonel Feininger, one from 1919, Kathedral, is extremely well-known due to the fact that it was published in the first prospectus for the Bauhaus in Weimar; the second is from the previous year, Zirchow VII., Nr. 1 (Prasse W 11). Fellow Bauhaus faculty member Walther Klemm’s Postkarte zur 50. Tonkünstlerversammlung des Allgemeinen Dueutschen Musikvereins Weimar depicts a crystalline monolith as a shining beacon or lighthouse. Wenzel Hablik, a painter and an architect from the Czech Republic, is represented by two watercolors that were part of the Crystal Chain exchange: one of an interior Freitragende Kuppel, 1919, and one of
an exterior, Cyklus Austellungs-Baute “Würfel”, Variante 4, 1921.

An important touchstone in the exhibition is the tiny photograph of Walter Gropius’ 1922 Marzgefallenen-Denkmal in the Weimar cemetery. This concrete sculpture was a monument to those workers who died defending the fledgling socialist government. This black and white photo was taken soon after it was built (by an unknown photographer); the Nazis destroyed the monument in the 1930’s, though it has since been reconstructed.

Gilbert Hsiao, Quiet Fire, 2010
Acrylic on wood, 70 cm x 70 cm

June 10 – July 25, 2010

dr. julius | ap is pleased to announce Gilbert Hsiao: Light Noise, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Berlin-based artist. Hsiao will present a suite of new acrylic paintings on irregularly-shaped wooden panels.

For more than twenty years, Hsiao has explored the mechanics of visual perception. His paintings of the past decade are characterized by their use of intricately overlayed, exacting stripes of color. Hsiao’s new paintings on view at dr. julius | ap highlight his recent adoption of shaped wooden panels. The shapes created an active, continuously shifting surface, with no traditional sense of top or bottom, left or right. Hsiao new paintings seem to simultaneously defy both the eye and one’s sense of gravity.

In making his work, Hsiao uses two crucial tools: masking tape and an industrial paint sprayer. His palette is broad and leans toward the industrial, often utilizing metallic, fluorescent, and iridescent colors. Unlike much reductive, pattern-based painting, however, Hsiao approaches his practice spontaneously and makes each painting intuitively. In other words, Hsiao’s paintings are not executed according to a predetermined plan, but rather are the sum of a series of improvised decisions.

After 30 years in Brooklyn, NY, USA, Gilbert Hsiao (b. 1956, USA) now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and Germany. He recently mounted solo exhibition at Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston) and MINUS SPACE (Brooklyn). Recent group exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / MoMA (New York), McKenzie Fine Art (New York), IS Projects (Leiden, The Netherlands), Sydney Non Objective (Australia), and Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (Bonn). Hsiao was awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2008. His work is included in a number of public, corporate, and private collections worldwide.

Rafael Ferrer, Exterior installation
Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 1969

June 8 – August 22, 2010

El Museo del Barrio is proud to announce that Retro/Active, The Work of Rafael Ferrer, the first solo exhibition in a museum to examine the breadth and depth of the artist’s influential production over the last 55 years, will be on view June 8 – August 22, 2010. The travelling retrospective, curated by Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, includes approximately 100 works from the mid-1950s to the present in a vast variety of media including collage, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and mixed-media. It is part of El Museo’s FOCOS series, which highlights the work of mature, under-recognized, and groundbreaking artists.

“Rafael Ferrer is a greatly important living artist. This expansive retrospective strives to spark a critical re-consideration of his work,” notes Cullen. “El Museo is proud to be showing his entire oeuvre, from documentation of his earlier better-known works to his post-1980 creations, for the very first time.”

“In many ways, Rafael Ferrer’s career reflects El Museo’s own history,” states Julián Zugazagotia, Director of El Museo del Barrio. “His work both stands within and moves beyond the major art movements of the 20th century—Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, as well as large-scale, figurative painting. The course of Ferrer’s artistic development runs parallel to, but often outside of the art historical cannon, enriching and troubling any preconceived idea of what an artist of Puerto Rican birth is or should be.”

A fully illustrated, bilingual exhibition catalogue, with entries covering various thematic aspects of the artist’s work by guest authors, as well as chronology, accompanies the exhibition. Included in the catalogue is an introduction by Zugazagoitia; an introductory overview by Cullen; as well as essays by Edward Sullivan, Vincent Katz, and Carter Ratcliff. The retrospective will be augmented by a forthcoming biographical monograph on Rafael Ferrer, authored by Cullen for the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center as part of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series.

About Rafael Ferrer
Rafael Ferrer was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1933, and from an early age was exposed to international groups and artists in Puerto Rico, New York, and Los Angeles. He attended Syracuse University where he focused on playing jazz timbales. Upon his return to the island in 1953, he studied painting with the exiled Spanish surrealist, Eugenio Fernández Granell, at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. Ferrer joined Granell in Europe during the summer of 1954, where he met Wifredo Lam, as well as André Breton, Benjamin Peret, and other renowned artists associated with the Surrealist movement. This trip would have great influence and long lasting impact on his oeuvre.

After notorious and critically-excoriated exhibitions of collaged paintings, environments, and welded steel combines in Puerto Rico during the early and mid-1960s, Ferrer moved to Philadelphia in 1966. The artist began to carry out ephemeral “actions” and to create improvisational sculpture with chain link fencing, corrugated steel, neon tubing, leaves, ice, hay, and grease. Ferrer became internationally recognized between 1969 and 1971 for his participation in seminal “postminimalist” exhibitions, including: Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969); Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information (Bern Kunsthalle, 1969); and Information (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970). His 1968 and 1970 exhibitions at Leo Castelli’s Warehouse, 1969 and 1970 solo exhibitions in Essen and Amsterdam, and his Deflected Fountain as part of a 1970 Duchamp homage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art sealed his reputation within the avant-garde. His attempts to bring the New York avant-garde to the island were again, critically misunderstood and his relationship with his birthplace continued to be fraught.

During the early 1970s, Ferrer began creating room-sized installations that were more poetic, literary, and allusive. Building off his earlier use of natural and industrial materials he continued to incorporate ephemeral elements in his work such as found objects, neon and either painted or printed imagery. Madagascar (Pasadena, 1972); Museo (MCA Chicago, 1972); Deseo (Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, 1973); and Isla (MoMA-Project Room, 1974) all stem from this period. While Ferrer had previously been colleagues of artists such as Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, and Alan Saret, his travels introduced him to other groups that were to have a direct impact on his subsequent work. He became friendly with Claes Oldenberg, the Chicago imagists including Roger Brown, and several of the American “New Image Painters,” including Neil Jenney and Alex Katz.

Ferrer developed various long-standing series in the 1970s. In this period, he received several NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Nonetheless, through his change of format, his work began to be positioned outside of the cutting-edge, and pigeonholed within several “Latin American” projects as well as along “primitivist” and “intuitive” lines. His ongoing series included Maps (approximately 100 drawings on printed maps and navigational charts); Faces (over 500 visages drawn on paper bags of various sizes); Kayaks and Constructions (assembled and painted, often hanging, sculptures). In the mid 1970s, Ferrer began creating intimate and magically-named Tents, with painted sides and often with a crowning word over the portal.

He was excited to observe Katz painting from life while vacationing in Puerto Rico, and soon he returned to painting. In 1980, Ferrer began his nearly 20-year engagement with large-scale Painting (1980-1997), incorporating portraits, nudes, musicians, nightclub and cockfight scenes, landscapes, and scenes in the Dominican Republic where he lived and worked part-time. He also produced homages to various artists, including Wilfredo Lam, David Smith, Alberto Giacometti, and Giorgio Morandi.

Despite the fact that Ferrer remained consistently engaged with, and responsive to, the changing trends of the larger art world around him, his involvement with large-scale painting has never been considered alongside American “New Image Painting” or Italian transavanguardia or German Neo-Expressionism. His entire body of work after 1980 has never been critically recognized or examined together with his earlier, better-known production. This retrospective will, for the first time, note the continuities of Ferrer’s interests and themes over his lifetime.

During his long career, Ferrer has created artist’s books, fine prints, and has had major public art commissions in the Bronx (1979), Philadelphia (1982), and Puerto Rico (2004). Currently, his smaller-scale work involves drawing, collage and mixed-media on paper and canvas, and engages language, topical news, and artistic events culled from newspapers and magazines to express his sharply critical, witty observations.

Rafael Ferrer’s work has been acquired by prominent private and public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, yet his contributions remain outside of U.S. or western art histories, as well as the standard histories of Puerto Rican and Latino contemporary art.

Installation view

April 6 – May 22, 2010

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Otto Piene’s historical Light Ballet sculptures and Fire Paintings from 1960 to 1967. Piene created these works during the prime years of the ZERO movement, which he founded with artist Heinz Mack (and later Günther Uecker) in Düsseldorf in 1957. Reacting to the personally charged post-war expressionism in Germany, the ZERO group banished psychological expression in their work and often used nontraditional art materials. A leading figure in kinetic and technology-based art, Piene employs the use of light and the surrounding environment in his Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, and demonstrates the connection between art, nature, and science.

The idea of Light Ballet originated in 1959 after Piene directed lights through the stencils of his earlier “raster” (grid) paintings, forming moving projections in the room. Piene’s kinetic light ballets are on view, including earlier types with construction work lights. The sculpture Light Ballet on Wheels (1965) consists of a black aluminum drum with a revolving disk and two lamps, which projects light in varying forms onto the ceiling and walls. Electric Anaconda (1965) is a five-foot column of seven flat black painted brass globes with argon bulbs that light up in timed phases. The intent is to expand the viewer’s perception of the space and encourage participation in the play of light. Piene describes these performative sculptures:

The term Light Ballet can be taken literally: as a light “dance” in a specific order and “choreographic” sequence, more or less improvised according to the sound, which is inserted as a guiding beam […] I attempt to give the Light Ballet the naturalness that breathing in and out has for the man who is alive. A nuanced flow of light interests me more than a clash of contrasts. The sound is not music but an accompanying, and at times leading, noise, which among other things has the task of creating a chosen silence, in which the light is then alone.

Piene’s study of light continues in his smoke and fire paintings. Using smoke (soot), Piene often creates a hazy gray and black target-like form against a light background, as in Rauchbild (1961). In the Fire Paintings, Piene lightly burns a layer of solvent on pigmented paper, developing organic forms from the remnant, or the soot. According to the artist in 1965, “pictures grew within seconds on a border line between destruction and survival – the “Fire Flowers.” Works, such as Heat Flower (1967) and Red Sky (1967), are part of the Fauna and Flora series, which explicitly reference nature.

Piene was born in Laasphe, Westphalia, Germany in 1928, and he lives and works in Düsseldorf, Cambridge, and Groton, Massachusetts. From 1948 to 1953 he attended the Blocherer Art School and studied painting at the Academy of Art in Munich and the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Piene graduated with a philosophy degree from the University of Cologne in 1957—the year ZERO was founded. After serving as a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, Piene became the first Fellow of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) from 1968 to 1971, during which he coined the term “Sky Art” for large outdoor sky/light projects, such as Olympic Rainbow for the 1972 Munich Olympics. In the same year, Piene became Professor of Environmental Art at MIT. From 1974 to 1994, he was director of the CAVS. Piene’s solo exhibitions include retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1996) and at the Prague City Gallery (Prague, Czech Republic, 2002), and a show at the Museum am Ostwall (Dortmund, 2008-2009). In 2008, Piene presented a Sky Event during Nuit Blanche in Paris.

This exhibition coincides with a forthcoming 700-page monograph, which covers Piene’s work since the 1950s.

May 1 – June 5, 2010

Terry Haggerty has in recent years become known to a wide audience, due to numerous exhibitions and his spectacular wall installations, most recently at the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium, CCNOA in Brussels, or Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In what is now his third individual show at Kuttner Siebert Galerie, Terry Hagerty shows his newest works, which represent the logical development of what has always characterized his painting.
The dictum of abstraction in Terry Haggerty is not only shown in the reduced structure of what is represented but also in the display of materiality. Nowhere is the work of the artist hand visible, and in so doing the concept of artistic uniqueness that accompanies gesture can be understood. But the painting is unique precisely because the absence of the artistic hand, at the same time the most superficial character of minimal art, can underscore the works’ object character.

Terry Haggerty’s works are marked by their extraordinary perfection, whereby several layers of varnish seal the surface of the image, thus keeping the visitor at a distance. But he does not succeed in refusing the visual impact. And it is even more heightened in his new works by way of the deformation of the support, through the sculptural accentuation of the painted sculptures. Distortions of the right angle such as buckling, stretching, or constriction underscore the forces immanent to the image in perception. Finally, what is painted condenses more tightly to an object, the support becomes the body of the image so that it is no longer possible to decide whether what is painted follows the support or if the body follows the painterly structure.

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

May 8 – June 12, 2010

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Hartmut Böhm: Graphic Systems, Prints 1965-1975. This is the Berlin-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City and it will feature ten silkscreen prints produced between 1965 and 1975.

For more than fifty years, Hartmut Böhm has been working in installation, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work focuses almost exclusively on the aesthetics of systems that highlight the relativity of perception. Böhm’s practice is organized around four primary areas of investigation: Systems (serial structures), Perception (transparency and visual ambiguity), Gestalt (partition and outline), and Concept (linear principles and infinite progressions).

Perception is the dominant facet of the work he produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which includes the prints on view at MINUS SPACE. About his work of this period, Böhm states, “It was about investigation, comprehension, and perception as active learning…it wasn’t about optical sensations.” Böhm views the systems in his work as pictorial strategies, rather than metaphysical vehicles pointing toward the realm of utopia. He continues, “The fascination for me lies in the simultaneous logical combining of the visible and invisible elements, and their derived principal separation from that same logic.”

A comprehensive interview with Hartmut Böhm, his first in English, was conducted by Matthew Deleget and published on MINUS SPACE in February 2004. Böhm’s work was recently included in the group exhibitions Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in 2009, and MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008.

Hartmut Böhm is one of the most important European reductive artists of his generation. He was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1938, and studied with Arnold Bode, the founder and curator of Documenta, at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel. Böhm produced his first systems-based work in 1959. Several years later, he was included in the seminal constructivist exhibition Nouvelle Tendance: Propositions visuelles du mouvement international at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 1964. The exhibition heralded in the Op, Kinetic, and Zero Art movements.

Böhm has mounted more than sixty solo exhibitions and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions internationally. His work is included in nearly seventy public collections worldwide. The Chelm Museum Collection of Contemporary Art in Chelm, Poland, mounted a retrospective of Böhm’s prints in 2008.

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

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

Melitta Nemeth, Verborgene Farben II, 2009
Acrylic on aluminium, 70 x 70 cm

April 30 – June 5, 2010

Melitta Nemeth, born 1974, lives and works in Budapest, Hungary where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts.

With her latest work, the series Verborgene Farben [Hidden Colours], she attempts to expand the boundaries of painting in relation to its two-dimensionality and the use of colour, light and reflection. Highly precise geometric shapes cut out of the basic material lead the viewer’s eye from the colour of the cutting edges to the back of the objects whose colour scheme is only to see in reflection and thus indirectly. So the material qualities of the work, the characteristics of the bearing wall and the specific light situation become elements of a complete work.

For Melitta Nemeth it is one of the most important tasks of Concrete Art Today to overcome existing restrictions, such as in traditional painting, and find new ways to determine the variations of form, colour, light and their combination.

Monika Brandmeier, Sachverhalt, 2006 (detail)
Wood, paint, steel rod, tin

April 18 – June 20, 2010

Installation view
Photo: Alistair Overbruck

April 11 – June 27, 2010

SYSTEM MIT ÜBERRASCHUNGEN
“Böhm verbirgt nichts, verschleiert nichts und breitet alles unmittelbar vor dem Besucher aus, doch die eigenwillige Verbindung von rigoroser Ordnung und ständiger Wandelbarkeit, Muster und Variation, Volumen und Leere aktiviert den gesamten Raum und ist schließlich von einer ausgesprochen kathartischen Wirkung.”

–Gregory Volk, Stiftung für konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, 2000

Rosa M Hessling, Amplidao Interior V, 2006
Pigment/Enamel on Aluminum
50 x 70 cm

April 9 – May 29, 2010

Sarah Morris, Small Flat Jumbo [Clips], 2010
Household gloss paint on canvas, 152.5 x 152.5 cm

March 24 – April 30, 2010

Gallery Meyer Kainer announces “It’s All True” an exhibition of new works by Sarah Morris, labeled after an unfinished documentary film by Orson Welles.

“It all gets back that there is no inside or outside, you’re just a part of it. There is no periphery. There is no being on the edge. You’re in this system. To me, that is what the films and the paintings aspire to confront”.*

Sarah Morris is an internationally recognized painter and filmmaker, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings as parallel to her films – both trace urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In both these media, she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics. Morris assesses what today’s urban structures, bureaucracies, cities and nations might conceal and surveys how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in studies of conspiratorial power, structures of control, and the mapping of global socio-political networks.

In this exhibition, Morris will be exhibiting a new series of paintings, “Knots” and “Clips”. Forms reminiscent of knots or paper clips intertwine. These simple binding structures suggest a transition from enduring utility to contingent organization or text, data and copied material. Morris’s paintings create a form that is continuously splintering and self-generating, and without resolution, creating after-images of capitalism and pre-images of new systems of control. Morris’s project, which spans both painting and film, creates a new level of discourse – playing simultaneously architecture, industrial design, entertainment, commerce and politics. Morris portrays, with beguiling perfection, bureaucratic structures of control and networks and the attempt to mask their own power. The infiltration and use of these mainstream forms and the creation of systems of interpretation that are ambivalent and even possibly contradictory is achieved by engaging and investigating moments of failure toward its use and avoidance.

Also on show is film “1972″. This is the second time (since /Robert Towne/, 2005) that Sarah Morris decided to shift her lens from the wide panoramic view of a city to an intimate portrait of an individual citizen of that city. Georg Sieber was the head psychologist of the Olympic Police and the Munich Police in 1972.
 Sieber was hired by the International Olympic Committee and Munich Police to project possible scenarios that would jeopardize the safety of the Olympic Games and prepare the security training that they would require. Contrary to the common perception that the Germans were not prepared, Sieber exposes a very different analysis of what occurred that day: The dramatic hostage-taking of the israeli olympic team by members of the terror group Black September.

The exhibition will also feature Morris’s new film Beijing shot during the 2008 Olympics. Beijing observes the overwhelmingly perplexing and contradictory economy and politics of China, made all the more resonant in the current climate of the global credit crisis. The film explores the spectacle that unfolded during the opening of the 2008 Olympics. Shot from multiple perspectives and given unprecedented access by the International Olympic Committee, Beijing captures the variances within the city, from the urban routine of its citizens to the choreographed actions of various heads of state. Morris employs the notion of duality, coupling it with the constant presence of the spectacle or the event and its constant multiple interpretations. Morris’s version of cinema vérité uses not only architecture and its infrastructure as phantom characters, but also exposes political leaders, Olympic athletes, actors, film directors, and architects in a quasi-narrativ e about this developing city that opens up numerous fictional possibilities and questions the authorship of the spectacle itself and ultimately, the role of the artist.

Marietta Hoferer, Big C-9 (detail), 2010
Pencil and tape on paper, 60 x 60 inches

March 6 – April 11, 2010

Marietta Hoferer’s luminous pencil and tape drawings also employ rigorous formal technique but with an entirely different outcome. Hoferer begins her process by laying out a grid in pencil on paper, and then adds layers of tape that shift in tonality over time. The results are shimmering geometric patterns that appear defined by logic and process but actually reflect the organic movements of the artist’s hand, with references as disparate as Agnes Martin’s Minimalist paintings and North African textiles. Subtle in their muted colors, Hoferer’s drawings alter according to changes in light and the placement of the viewer. In Coptic Time, a title borrowed from Morton Feldman, the artist continues to refine her unique process, creating seven schematic textured drawings that animate the gallery.

“I create grid-like formations and abstract compositions with faint pencil and tape lines or thousands of small hand-cut pieces of transparent tape, inspired by the rhythms of architecture and weaving. Although subtle, the linear bands and geometric patterning, reveal a luminous surface that changes with the light and differing vantage points.

Although my drawings might appear planned, calculated and mathematical to the viewer, it is actually the opposite. I work intuitively, guided by my chosen materials. My work is more a visceral response to my surroundings than a literal reference. Atmospheric conditions – light and weather, plant and other organic forms make a deep impression on me, as well as a parallel interest in architectonic structures that are mysteriously transmitted into my tape drawings.”

Marietta Hoferer was born in Hausach, Germany and studied at Hunter College in New York and at St. Martins School of Art and Design in London before receiving an MFA from Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Recent Exhibitions include KunstBüroBerlin, Berlin; Galerie Mourlot, The New York Public Library and the Drawing Center, New York; Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland and the 2009 International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in Seoul, Korea. This year she will have work included in Wall Drawings (March 2010) and then will have a solo show (October 2010) at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, CA. She is a 2009 NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hoferer lives and works in New York.

George Rickey, Diptych – The Seasons, 1956
Stainless steel and polychrome

February 18 – March 20, 2010

Marlborough Gallery announces that a major exhibition of works by George Rickey will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on February 18 and continue through March 20, 2010. Twenty-four important indoor and outdoor works from Rickey’s personal collection and now held by the George Rickey Estate will be exhibited in the first floor gallery.

George Rickey is internationally regarded as among the most inventive and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. His iconic kinetic works were the outgrowth of experiments with wire and metal that began during his service in World War II. By the late 1950s and 1960s he reduced sculptural forms to simple, geometric shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, cubes, and lines and largely limited his materials to stainless steel, creating a body of work that is a mesmerizing combination of minimalism and movement.

Important Works from the Estate will focus on Rickey’s sculptural exploration of light, line and shadow as effected by the changing air currents, wind and other natural phenomena; and will feature rare, unique works including the stainless steel and polychrome Diptych – The Seasons (14 x 55 x 22 • in.), 1956, Personage (98 x 20 x 39 in.), 1958 and Harlequin (78 x 25 x 25 in.), 1958, all of which were foundational in the development of Ricky’s kinetic oeuvre. Additionally Two Lines Vertical (20 • x 3 • x 2 in.), 1965, will be shown on the outdoor sculpture terrace at Marlborough on 57th Street. Two Lines Vertical was created by Rickey for his personal collection following the exhibition of the earlier but similar work Two Lines Temporal, 1964, at Documenta III in 1964 which established Rickey’s international reputation. Two Lines Temporal has been in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection since 1964.

Whether in columns, clusters, lines, or suspended shimmering planes, Rickey’s sculptures capture the expressive moment of the intersection of material form, light and movement in space. As art critic Alexandra Anderson-Spivy comments in the catalog essay: “His works mesmerize viewers even when they are still. But these fluid geometric constructions are born to move and they partner best with natural forces. Rickey often declared that he aimed ‘to make things [that are] as contemporary as the weather report,’ And gentle winds and changing weather usually are his sculptures’ greatest friends. The artist never ceased to explore the possibilities offered by the symbiotic relationship between his sculpture and the physical laws of natural motion, chance and light. ”

George Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 the family moved to Scotland, where his father, an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. While studying modern history at Oxford, Mr. Rickey also took courses in painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie L’hôte and at the Académie Moderne, where he worked under the Modernist painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

Rickey served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry, an experience that reawakened earlier interests in science and technology. After the war, he resumed his peripatetic teaching career. A year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of Design in the late 1940s was decisive; for it was there that he seriously began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement. In 1949, while working as an associate professor at Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture using window glass.

In 1960 Rickey moved to East Chatham, N.Y., which remained his home base until the end of his life. He retired from teaching in 1966 after five years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., but continued to make sculpture and to travel incessantly. To keep up with his many public commissions and exhibitions, he maintained studios in Berlin and in Santa Barbara, California. Rickey’s last sculpture — his tallest, at 57 feet 1 inch – was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Japan in 2002.

Rickey received Honorary Doctorate degrees from nine institutions and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974 and received the Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.

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