Charles Gaines in the Venice Biennale
“Explosion # 14″, 2006, Pencil on paper, Diptych, detail
Venice Biennale 2007
June 10, 2007-November 21, 2007
Charles Gaines will be included in the upcoming Venice Biennale, opening June 10, 2007. Gaines’s work was chosen by Robert Storr, the director of this year’s Biennale. A highly influential artist and teacher, Gaines has been living in Los Angeles since 1989. For his exhibition at the Arsenale, Gaines will present “Airplanecrashclock”, a seminal sculpture from the series of “Disaster Narratives” which Gaines developed over the last decade. New and ambitiously scaled drawings from the “Randomized Text” and “Explosion” series will condense an artistic interest that has for more than a decade focused on laying bare the social relationships between feeling and intellectual recognition. Gaines is interested in critiquing the way we experience art, and particularly how we derive meaning and the experience of feeling from it. Gaines’ complex explorations attempt to reveal the political underpinnings of artistic representation by laying bare the linguistic structures that form truth/meaning and feeling. By understanding that feeling is produced in art rhetorically, Gaines shows that the truthfulness of any expression is politically realized, that it is an expression of political belief rather than truth.
A 1967 graduate with an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Charles Gaines began his professional career in 1972. He has had over 50 one person exhibitions and several hundred group exhibitions in the US and Europe. In the early 70s he was included in 1975 Whitney Biennial. He joined the Leo Castelli Gallery and the John Weber Gallery in New York in 1977. In addition, he has been represented by Young Hoffman, Chicago; Daniel Weinberg, San Francisco; Dorothy Goldeen, Los Angeles; Richard Heller, Los Angeles; Lavignes-Bastille, Paris; and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. He has been in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria (2-person exhibition); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla. He is in the collection of many major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Wadsworth Atheneum, Harford, Connecticut; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, Esslingen; Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany. Recently, he has had a two-person show at the RedCat Gallery, Los Angeles, with Edgar Arceneaux, and a one person show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. He is currently preparing a solo exhibition at LA><ART in Los Angeles for July 2007. Charles Gaines has also published several essays on contemporary art, he is a full time faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. He is presently represented by SusanneVielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles; Michael Kapinos Gallery, Berlin; Brigitte March Gallery, Stuttgart; Steven Wolf Gallery, San Francisco.
More information can be found on the gallery webpage at http://www.vielmetter.com
For further questions please contact the gallery at info@vielmetter.com.