Artipedia - Arts News

Centre pour l’image contemporaine

Joëlle Flumet in collaboration with Andreas Kressig
I would prefer not to

&

Thierry Kuntzig
The Waves

Exhibitions from
1 February to 1 April 2007
Opening Wednesday 31 January 2007 starting at 6 pm

Centre pour l’image contemporaine
Saint-Gervais Geneva
5, rue du Temple
1201 Geneva
Switzerland
http://www.centreimage.ch/

Joëlle Flumet in collaboration with Andreas Kressig
I would prefer not to
Installations

For the first time, Joëlle Flumet will be working with Andreas Kressig. The two artists have proposed an on-site intervention on the second floor of the Center for the Contemporary Image. Their collaboration, which involves a series of drawings by Flumet and a series of animations based on the drawings by Kressig, is meant to play with the venue’s architecture and its possibilities.

Flumet’s drawings plunge us into an odd domestic universe. At the center of her strange world lies the object: a mirror, a folding screen, an armchair, a table, a wall, objects or architectural elements that are functional first and foremost and whose use, on the face of it, harbors neither secret nor surprise. And yet…

These large-format drawings depict figures in indoor settings which are easily identified thanks to the stereotypical furnishings (living room, kitchen, office, and so on). Flumet’s use of the clean-lined vectorial drawing and the broad areas of saturated color offers a clear-cut view of the situation; surfaces are sharply delineated while no details clutter up the scene, suggesting restraint and rigor.

Yet this apparent legibility, tinged as it is with a certain decorum, is quickly disrupted, unexpectedly contradicted by the odd position of the figures or their strange activity, making us reread with a fresh eye the theoretically harmless activities in a context that has now become incongruous, and vice versa.

If the situation does become singular it’s because the action taking place there is decontextualized (people don’t normally practice abseiling while blindfolded and in an office!). That singularity is at odds with its representation, which is squarely situated in a generic or typological register. And the opposite holds as well. An interesting tension arises from this dual movement for it pokes fun at the very idea of leeway or discrepancy, and inevitably engages the viewer’s critical eye1.

Thierry Kuntzig
The Waves
Interactive installations

The effect may take its own sweet time but it is gripping. Viewers, facing a screen on which a wave is shown surging forward and breaking, enter a corridor and walk towards the image, irresistibly drawn towards the swelling sea. Yet the closer they approach, the clearer it becomes that their own movement affects both the speed of the wave and the volume of the sound for the swell slows until it freezes into a black-and-white image while the sound fades to silence. Backing away, viewers then create the opposite effect.

The change is gradual and follows the pace set by the viewers’ stride, and this merging generates a certain fascination tinged with joy before a wave that is about to wash over us but which we control. The device also gives rise to a feeling of anxiety, the kind we get in a nightmare. Slowing down the image, far from reassuring us, paradoxically creates an effect of powerlessness.

The paradox in this case articulates a certain relationship to knowledge and probably to the other in terms of desire and temptation. In a marvelously poetic and effective way, it puts in play that attraction sparked by knowledge that is elusive, ungraspable, fleeting.

To suspend time. That tension between movement and stasis which is at work here lies at the heart of all of Thierry Kuntzel’s art. His installations and videos speak of obliteration, renewal, coming together, the inexpressible as the limit of images, disorder. They explore the mechanism of film and motion pictures which the artist connects with the mechanism of the human psyche.

For more information go to: http://www.centreimage.ch/

CCNOA - center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art

EMMANUELLE VILLARD
screen 1 . 2 . 3 .

January 26, 2007 - March 4, 2007

CCNOA
center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art
Boulevard Barthélémylaan 5
1000 Brussels
Belgium
T + F: (32) (0)2 502 6912
E: info@ccnoa.org
W: http://www.ccnoa.org

CCNOA center for contemporary non-objective art Brussels, Belgium, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by French artist Emmanuelle Villard: Paint it, Black (main space), and a new video and multimedia program ‘screen’ featuring on a bi-weekly basis experimental video and multimedia works by international artists: ‘Dumpster’ by John Beech & Einar Westerlund (UK/USA), ‘Moving Light: Spring 2005’ by Erika Blumenfeld (USA), and ‘Meanwhile in the same place No. 8’ by Else Marie Hagen (N) (entrance).
Paint it, Black

Imagine an era in which artists working in the field of abstraction are considered decorators and the primary quality of abstract painting is that it can be transformed into wallpaper or packaging for shampoo. Imagine further that in this era viewers have become accustomed to recognizing a picture before looking at it, their gaze travelling across the surface of the canvas as it would across the surface of an everyday world with which they feel totally familiar.

What would that leave painting?

The exhibition draws on a play on language constructed around the concept of what remains, what is left. First, left in the literal sense of the term: for we know that paint can be fluid, that it can run, trickle, drip, dislodge itself, spill over and out of the frame of the picture; that in its descent it can form drops, drips, diverse ‘accidentals’ extrinsic to the artistic intention; and that these remains, the ‘residue’ as it were of the picture, become an integral part of the work. And second, left in the figurative sense of the term: reflecting on the history of abstraction and the various formal shifts that lead it to flirt with decoration and design, I cannot but wonder what is there left of abstract painting today.

A dialogue between three propositions
The first, which gives the exhibition its title, is a triptych. The picture has deserted the wall, leaving in its place a wall painting, ‘disembodied’, basic in form and execution. The ‘body’ of the painting is transposed to the piece in suspension, both design and baroque in its inspiration. It looks as if it has been immersed in paint and then left to drip, to dry very slowly, before being put on display. The floor piece is vertical to the suspended piece, marking the place taken up below it by this hypothetical dispersion of matter. And yet this residue creates on the floor a strange length of lace – something between a napkin and a carpet – as if, on coming into contact with the exhibition space, these pictural remains have been transformed into a composition that is essentially decorative. These shifts of sense and form between the three elements are also acted out in spatial terms: the composition as a whole, the quality of the different materials and the different qual
ities of black change as the viewer moves around the exhibition space inciting him to observe not just from one but from many view points.

The two other propositons are pictures which play ironically and without complex on the seductive artifices associated with the fair, with show business. They draw on two ‘classical’ registers - the drip and the stripe - highlighted here by the use of glitter. Playing with the light and the angle of vision of the viewer the glitter ‘illuminates’ or ‘extinguishes’ the pictures as if they were everyday objects.

Each of the propositions aims to question the way in which the viewer ‘views’, by multiplying his points of vision, both in the space itself but also by proposing a to-ing and fro-ing between the field of the abstract painting and the field of the object. But with special attention to the surface: as a ‘trompe-l’oeil’ or ‘trompe-sens’ and, by extension, as a tool for questioning perception. (Emmanuelle Villard, 2007)

For additional information, please contact Sacha Goerg sacha@ccnoa.org or visit the respectieve websites:
http://www.emmanuellevillard.com
http://www.johnbeech.com
http://www.erikablumenfeld.com
http://www.ccnoa.org

For more information go to: http://www.ccnoa.org

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)

RUDOLF STINGEL
January 27 - May 27, 2007

Museum of Contemporary Art
220 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
T 312.397.3826
F 312.397.4095
W http://www.mcachicago.org

I wanted to be against a certain way of painting. Artists have always been accused of being decorative. I just went to the extreme. — Rudolf Stingel

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, opens the new year with Rudolf Stingel, the first major museum exhibition in the United States of renowned international artist Rudolf Stingel, on view from January 27 to May 27, 2007. This twenty-year retrospective takes a comprehensive look at this influential contemporary artist whose work seeks to demystify the artist, the artistic process, and the art object. Celebrated for his explorations of the process of painting and the “idea” of art, Stingel combines minimalist, conceptual, and performative practices to create unexpected spaces.

Employing a wide-ranging palette of unconventional materials that includes carpet, rubber, painted aluminum, and Styrofoam, Stingel reflects upon fundamental questions facing painting today: authenticity, meaning, hierarchy, and context. By transforming the process and perception of paintings, Stingel’s work alters the viewer’s physical encounter with the artwork, and invites participation in a new and deeper understanding and appreciation of art. When Stingel carpeted New York’s Grand Central Station in 2004, and later covered a lobby floor with a vivid orange rug in Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye at the MCA in 2005, he transformed the spaces into works of art that visitors needed to occupy to experience. Stingel remarked, "This had all the intellectual qualities that I ask from a painting. It’s aggressive, it’s against the system, it’s against the usual way of doing a painting. Once in a while, it’s good to freshen up the air with these kind of
things."

This retrospective, covering Stingel’s work from 1987 to 2007, is curated by Francesco Bonami, MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large, who says, "Stingel consistently aims to redefine what painting can be, what it has been, and what it is." Bonami has consistently followed Stingel’s progress over the decades, including his work in four previous exhibitions that he curated at the MCA: Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings (1999), Age of Influence: Reflections in the Mirror of American Culture (2000), Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye (2005), and Figures in the Field: Figurative Sculpture and Abstract Painting from Chicago Collections (2006).

Stingel’s full range of work, including his recent portraits and self portraits, are represented in this career survey, along with a new site-specific installation created for each venue. Unique to the MCA, Stingel is covering the front atrium lobby wall with silver panels that visitors can write on or cut into, altering the work over the course of the exhibition. When Stingel originally showed his silver paintings he found that visitors repeatedly scrawled on them, so he pushed the idea further, challenging visitors to question their ideas about what surfaces invite graffiti. Stingel takes the language of public rest rooms, bus stops, and underpasses and puts them into a museum setting, undermining the space and people’s perception of painting.

Stingel plays with the idea of art and decoration, often placing on the wall what is typically found on the floor, and vice versa. Similar to the way that he may install a carpet on the wall of an exhibition space, Stingel hangs large-scale panels of Styrofoam, some with surfaces that depict deep footprints. To make these Styrofoam works, Stingel steps in acid and then walks across and marks the surface. Both the carpets and the Styrofoam works document the physical interaction between the work and human contact, either by the artist or visitors.

Stingel has produced various bodies of work over the past twenty years that highlight his highly original process of creating art, but the unifying theme of the exhibition is Stingel’s connection with painting. Even the sculptural works such as Untitled (1994-96), depicting an Indian deity with many arms holding a mixer, scissors, paintbrush, spatula, paint tube, and compressed air gun, refer back to painting by holding the essential tools to create a painting in its hands. Although having worked and lived in New York City since 1987 when he left Italy, Stingel continues a European relation to the history of painting that he both parodies and glorifies in the process of his dissection.

For the most recent body of work in the exhibition, Stingel has been focusing on enormous photorealistic portraits and self-portraits. Included in the last Whitney Biennial, Stingel’s self portraits show a dark, melancholic side of the state of mind of the Western artist. These self-referential paintings about painting manage to both criticize and pay tribute to the artistic process at once, with a humor and beauty that can also be subversive.

EXHIBITION TOUR
Whitney Museum of American Art: June 28 - October 14, 2007

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Rudolf Stingel, with essays by Francesco Bonami, MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large; Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Reiner Zettl, Assistant Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. The catalogue provides a comprehensive look at Stingel’s work which seeks to demystify the artist, the artistic process, and the art object. His full range of work, including his recent portraits and self portraits, are represented in this handsome volume. With important contributions by Francesco Bonami and Whitney Curator Chrissie Iles, Rudolf Stingel is the first to examine the broader implications of the artist’s creative practice in contemporary society. Published in association with the MCA Chicago. 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in, 256 pages, 90 color illustrations.

EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS
Lecture: Deep Content: How Art Means, and Means, and Means
Tuesday, April 24, 6:30 pm, MCA Theater
Jerry Saltz discusses Stingel’s work focusing on how to interpret and understand it by putting it in an historical context. Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz is currently a Visiting Critic at Columbia University and Yale University. Saltz has been a part of the New York art scene for more than two decades and is known for his passionate opinions, lively writing, and insights about contemporary art and the art scene.
This program is made possible by The Gloria Brackstone Solow and Eugene A. Solow, MD, Memorial Lecture Series.

Curator Conversations
Saturday, January 27, noon
MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large Francesco Bonami leads a tour of the exhibition Rudolf Stingel.

Italian Cultural Institute Talk
Thursday, February 8, 6 pm
MCA Manilow Senior Curator at Large Francesco Bonami gives a talk about Rudolf Stingel’s work and the exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute (500 N. Michigan Ave, Suite 1450, 312.822.9545).

Class: Picture Painting
Thursdays, March 8 - April 12, 6-9 pm
Inspired by the Stingel exhibition, this class has students experimenting with different styles of painting using acrylic and watercolor paints. A guest artist comes for a final critique and shares their work and insight with the class. Colorist painter and teacher Barlow has been teaching at the MCA for seven years. He also teaches painting and drawing classes at the Marwen Foundation, Columbia College, and School of the Art Institute.

Rudolph Stingel Family Tours
First Sundays and first Tuesdays of the month from March through May, 11 am
Support for Family Programs is provided in part through the MCA Women’s Board Family Education Initiative.

Family Days
Saturday, February 24, 10:30 am - 4 pm
Co-presented with the Hyde Park Arts Center
Families can enjoy a full day of fun to celebrate the opening day of Rudolf Stingel and MCA EXPOSED: Defining Moments in Photography, 1967-2007 with the MCA. Family tours, scavenger hunts, prizes, and demonstrations make an exciting day of art activities. Activities are appropriate for all ages and Family Day museum admission is free for families with children 12 and under.

Saturday, April 28, 10:30 am - 4 pm
Co-presented with Lookingglass Theatre Company
Families can enjoy a full day of fun with a family tour of Stingel’s paintings, a scavenger hunt, prizes, and creation stations all day. Lookingglass Theatre performs throughout the day and teaches families how to make stage props for a play. Activities are appropriate for all ages and Family Day museum admission is free for families with children 12 and under.

Major support for Rudolf Stingel is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris. Generous support is also provided by Nancy and Sanfred Koltun, Anne and Ken Griffin, Neil G. Bluhm, Anne and Burt Kaplan, and Helen and Sam Zell. Additional support is provided by Sara Szold, Andrea and Jim Gordon, J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Foundation, Frances Dittmer Family Foundation, Stefan Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Chicago, and Bert A. Lies, Jr. MD and Rosina Lee Yue, and David Teiger. Air transportation is provided by American Airlines, the Official Airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) is a private nonprofit, tax-exempt organization accredited by the American Association of Museums. The MCA is generously supported by its Board of Trustees, individual and corporate members, private and corporate foundations, and government agencies including the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. The Chicago Park District generously supports MCA programs. Air transportation services are provided by American Airlines, the official airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The MCA is located at 220 E. Chicago Avenue, one block east of Michigan Avenue. The museum and sculpture garden are open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm and Tuesday from 10 am to 8 pm. The museum is closed on Monday. Enjoy free admission every Tuesday generously sponsored by Target. Children 12 years of age and under, MCA members, and members of the military are admitted free. Information ab
out MCA exhibitions, programs, and special events is available on the MCA website at http://www.mcachicago.org or by telephone at 312.280.2660.

MEDIA CONTACTS
Erin Baldwin, 312.397.3828, ebaldwin@mcachicago.org
Karla Loring, 312.397.3834, kloring@mcachicago.org
John Eding, 312.397.3832, ihodes@mcachicago.org
http://www.mcachicago.org/media

For more information go to: http://www.mcachicago.org