Artipedia - Arts News

Zones arides (which means “arid zones” or “dry areas” in French) sprang from the desire of artist and globe-trotter Olivier Mosset to share his passion for the mythical country that is Arizona. Zones arides brings together eleven artists, in residence or as simple passengers, to form an ephemeral transatlantic scene: Wilfrid Almendra, John Armleder, Clairet & Jugnet, Aurélien Froment, Mathieu Mercier, Olivier Mosset, Morgane Tschiember as well as Chantal Akerman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia. They try to remap and revisit the contours of this “arid zone” by any means available (documentary, painting, monumental sculpture, video, etc.).

The two parts of Zones arides, at the Ricard Corporate Foundation in Paris and at le lieu unique in Nantes, constitute two instances of the same project: the joint attempts to recreate a landscape fragmented in its multiple interpretations and to import a piece of American territory on French soil. In 2007 the exhibition will travel to The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Tucson.

In contrast to its physical reality (the desert takes up 80% of its surface area), Arizona is peopled by countless mythologies, which have made it a cult destination for many American and European travelers. Once the grandiloquent scenery of a founding epic, it now serves as the setting of fantasized representations.

The grand fictional machine of Hollywood largely contributed to its legendary status, even though the American dream embodied in the conquering cavalcades of John Ford’s films has largely been revisited since the 1960s. Similarly, the wars underpinning that dream have been reassessed from the perspective of their tragic consequences: the destruction of indigenous populations, the sealing of borders and the whittling away of the desert caused by urban sprawl. Beyond the undeniable power of cinema in preempting the imagination of the West, the ability of artists to appropriate it has also been well known. In the early twentieth century, American photographers communicated their idealized version of an industrious America. The long love story between the desert and land artists, with their manifold investigations, is not any different. Painting has also largely tapped into the “springs of aridity” to experiment with the collusion between geographic dryness and radical pictorial work.

The exhibition spans the whole range of artistic practices and strives to draw a new map of mythological territories. The list of “super stereotypes” naturally associated with Arizona includes the road and the car, its mechanical counterpart (both symbols of the American way of life and of perpetual movement), but also the Frontier, “Indians”, or cactuses. The artists of Zones arides have drawn from this list the material needed to reactivate the myth, each in his/her own favorite medium: painting, monumental sculpture, installation or video.

Catalog
A catalog will be published alongside the exhibit by le lieu unique and the Ricard Corporate Foundation, with the support of the CULTURESFRANCE (French Association for Artistic Initiative), the city of Nantes, and the DRAC (Regional Office for Cultural Affairs) for the Pays de la Loire region.

Information
Fondation d’entreprise Ricard
11/24/2006 - 01/05/2007
9 rue Royale 75008 Paris
Tel: 33 (0)1 53 30 88 00
info@fondation-entreprise-ricard.com
http://www.fondation-entreprise-ricard.com
Admission free, open Monday – Friday, 10am – 7pm.
Closed from 23rd December to 1st January (included).
Subway stations, parking lots: Concorde, Madeleine

le lieu unique - scène nationale de Nantes
11/12/2006 - 01/07/2007
entrée quai Ferdinand-Favre Nantes
Tel.: 33 (0)2 40 12 14 34
http://www.lelieuunique.com
Admission free, open Tuesday – Saturday, 1 – 8pm, and Sundays, 3 – 7pm.

Ákos Birkás: Men II., 2006, Oil, canvas, 100 x 210 cm, Photo: József Rosta

Ákos Birkás is known first and foremost by the public, up to the present day, for his “Heads” series, his abstract ovals painted as a programme from the mid-eighties up till the late nineties, comprising nearly two hundred pieces in all. Not only the entirety of the painter’s oeuvre, but even a large portion of the “Heads” series is practically unknown in Hungary. This is not surprising, however, since from 1985 Birkás worked abroad with increasing frequency and for longer periods.

He last had a large-scale solo exhibition in 1994 in Budapest; this was followed by a presentation in Vienna in 1997, in which he summarised the developments in his painting until that point. His new pictures have been on view in the decade since in German, Viennese and Parisian galleries. Thus, the local art scene has received Birkás’s new pictures produced around the new millennium with not a small measure of surprise (moreover, incomprehension): these are easily painted, large-scale, realistic portraits, which might appear to be diametrically opposed to his earlier paintings, known at home. By now, however, Birkás has taken a further departure from his abstract ovals, going as far as socio-political, narrative scenes, featuring several characters – on view for the first time at the Ludwig Museum Budapest.

That which might seem to be an unexpected turning point in the eyes of some, is actually the fruit of Birkás’s coherent artistic programme; it is an oeuvre that incessantly questions the nature, role and aims of painting (and the painter), and thus, does not remain static, but is in a constant state of flux, in motion. Birkás’s pictures are the proceeds of a self-analysis of art and the artist (but not merely documentary), reflecting upon painting, and within this, first and foremost the intellectual relationship to portrait-painting, and this relationship, this self-reflection embraces in a single arc Birkás’s various periods, and his artworks that might appear at first sight to be inconsistent or radically innovative, or even provocative. This retrospective exhibition does not simply align the selected pieces of his oeuvre one alongside the other, but we intend to indicate this span, as well: to the conceptual and theoretical foundations of Birkás’s painting, and to the det ermining questions of the development of his life-work, in these works produced from 1975 up till 2006, of diverse genre, technique and ambition.

On the occasion of this retrospective show, we are also publishing a bilingual Hungarian-German catalogue of 144 pages, which will be launched in mid-December.

Information:
Krisztina Szipocs, art historian, curator of the exhibition
e-mail: szipocs.krisztina@ludwigmuseum.hu
Tel: +36-1-555-3463

Orsolya Csejtei, press relations
e-mail: csejtei.orsolya@ludwigmuseum.hu
Tel: +36-1-555-3468