Artipedia - Arts News

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art

MARC QUINN
October 5, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Curated by John Zeppetelli

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
451 rue St-Jean
Montreal, Québec
H2Y 2R5
(514) 866-6767
info@dhc-art.org

http://www.dhc-art.org

Gathering over forty recent works, DHC/ART’s inaugural exhibition by conceptual artist Marc Quinn is the largest ever mounted in North America and the artist’s first solo show in Canada. Marc Quinn is a central figure within British art whose work is principally concerned with the body’s mutability in time, its physical presence in space and its anxiety within culture. His work also poignantly explores mortality, beauty, kinship and the interplay of art and science.

Marc Quinn’s work ranges across a variety of media - from sculpture to painting, drawing and photography - and includes dazzling, if contentious, frozen self-portraits cast from his own head and filled with his own blood to stunning frozen portraits of his infant sons made with their respective placentas and umbilical chords. The latest of these, Sky, is included in this exhibition.

Quinn’s The Complete Marbles, a suite of sculptural portraits of amputees and disabled individuals in sparkling white marble allude to fragmented Greco-Roman statuary while slyly addressing heroism. Quinn has made DNA portraits of his family and of scientist John Sulston, paintings of improbable gardens, and highly evocative wax castings of people with life-threatening illnesses — Chemical Life Support — where the wax is mixed with daily doses of the medications that keep the individuals alive. Another wax portrait of a serene young woman Beauty and the Beast is colored darkly by animal blood.

Digitally manipulated animal flesh is the basis for two stunning Mirror Paintings on view, as well as for Cybernetically Engineered, Cloned and Grown Rabbit, a seven foot bronze sculpture, at once comic and melancholy, of a shaped rabbit carcass. Quinn has arrested the decay of flowers by immersing them in sub-zero silicone and made painted bronze sculptures of supermodel Kate Moss in extreme contortions. Other bronzes include a series of human skeletons, among them The Selfish Gene, which depicts a couple in the throes of love-making.

In 2004 Marc Quinn won a major public art commission for the Fourth Plinth: his Alison Lapper Pregnant, a large marble portrait of a naked, severely disabled and very pregnant woman was installed in London’s Trafalgar Square — a bold and powerful tribute to both disability and motherhood.

A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by British art historian Lynda Nead and Montreal psychoanalyst Harvey Giesbrecht accompanies the exhibition.

BIOGRAPHY
Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied History of Art at Cambridge University (1982-85) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Marc Quinn is represented by White Cube, London and Mary Boone Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous museum and private collections around the world.

http://www.dhc-art.org

Information: Cheryl Sim, Program Coordinator
(514) 866-6767 / cheryl@dhc-art.org

For more information go to: http://www.dhc-art.org

Frankfurter Kunstverein

GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON: "SOUTH OF HEAVEN"
July 27 - September 16, 2007

FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN
Steinernes Haus am Römerberg,
Markt 44, 60311 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
phone: +49.69.219314–0
fax: +49.69.219314–11
post@fkv.de
Tuesday - Sunday, 11 am - 7 pm

http://www.fkv.de

In Underworld, a novel by the American writer Don DeLillo, one of the characters mentions how, "lately, geography seems to have gone back on itself and become smaller." Each of us assimilates only a part of the world that surrounds us, trying to escape from the density of an accelerated multitude of sensations. When withdrawing we only take in a small portion of what is happening around us and thus almost automatically adapt to move around our individual realities.

"South of Heaven", a major solo exhibition by the New York-based Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson, departs from a similar notion: all of us customize the world in a way or other to make sense of it. Citizens, criminals, outlaws of all kinds as well as artists try to make sense of the systems they operate in. A series of photos depicting political messages taken from the streets of New York, black paintings using tattoo motives, flags, army blankets, a jail table, a bomb checklist, a video showing the US flag fluttering in an eternal loop on the floor of the exhibition space… they all seem remains of a bigger picture that we need to reconstruct in our minds. We have probably heard of most stories to which the works are referring. Actually quite simply the works are preoccupied with all kinds of individual and collective attempts to break the "social contract" from the Unabomber to some legal and illegal power lobbies.

The works of Gardar Eide Einarsson share a sober elegance that contributes even more to intrigue the viewer. Using what at first sight looks like a very depurated formalistic language the artist poses to the viewer the question of what he really is looking at. By absorbing and then isolating motifs from the so-called underground music and from literature scenes and then weaving them together with political references, Gardar Eide Einarsson forces us to reflect upon the difference between contemplating an image and using it.

Black Flag (Liberty), 2004, depicts a black flag with a half moon, or Untitled (American Flag), 2007, an inkjet print on plywood, shows the American flag ready to be used, ready to add a personalized text. The series of Outlaws paintings (2004-2005), displayed on the floor, constitute a strange family album of signs ready to be used by a dubious gang. Their aesthetics convey the spirit of the conservative American south state movement, an interest, which also pops up in Conservative, Traditional, Ultra Traditional, 2005 a photographic work by Gardar Eide Einarsson in which a series of sleeves and bottoms of white-collar politicians appear in the image like a syntax of sartorial conservatism.

Thus "South of Heaven" on one hand is intended to familiarize the viewer with Gardar Eide Einarsson’s very particular and personal way of investigating different media and materials. On the other hand the exhibition discovers the way art can serve to emphasize transversal readings, sourced from street culture and politics. In the works of Gardar Eide Einarsson art and reality come into a relation of mutual resonance and exchange rather than of representation. The artworks in "South of Heaven" have been chosen with the intention to present a working methodology as well as to use the exhibition as a framework for the viewer to engage in the tension that exists between the world of images and the world as a place where action can take place, where violence is more than an image.

Gardar Eide Einarsson’s "South of Heaven" has been organized in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Gèneve.

SPONSOR: The exhibition has been realized with kind support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

VENUES: Centre d’Art Contemporain Gèneve (18 January - 16 March 2008).

CATALOGUE: A catalogue with texts by Katya García-Antón, Ina Blom, Dieter Roelstraete, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann and a conversation between Gardar Eide Einarsson and Bob Nickas will be published in German, English and French by Revolver, Frankfurt am Main. Designed by Christoph Keller

DIRECTOR/CURATOR: Chus Martínez
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday–Sunday, 11 am–7 pm
INFORMATION: http://www.fkv.de
PRESS CONTACT: Julia Wittwer, Melanie Räuschel, phone: +49.69.219314-30/-40, fax: +49.69.219314-11, e-mail: presse@fkv.de, http://www.fkv.de
(text and image for download under PRESS)

For more information go to: http://www.fkv.de

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Alex Hartley
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
27 July - 21 October 2007

The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh
EH1 1DF
P +44 (0) 131 225 2383
F +44 (0) 131 220 3130
info@fruitmarket.co.uk

http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2007 Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition is the first major British solo presentation of the work of Alex Hartley, a British artist whose work confronts our experience and understanding of the built and natural environments.

One of the yBa generation of artists, Hartley works primarily with photography, though often incorporating it into sculpture and installation. His practice offers an extremely original analysis of modernist and contemporary architecture and its relationship to landscape. He investigates buildings in terms of vision and the visionary, the individual and the institution, and the relationship of utopian schemes, whether successes or failures, to works of fiction.

The exhibition brings together a significant body of existing and new work. It begins on the facade of The Fruitmarket Gallery on which Hartley will make a new work that particularly exemplifies his highly individual approach. He is interested in ‘buildering’ (climbing on buildings) and has clad the Gallery in an image of itself, marked with routes up the façade that he has climbed as preparation for the exhibition. This work relates to Hartley’s putative guide book to Los Angeles, LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture, (Black Dog, 2003), a funny and curiously insightful book in which he looks at the city as surface, and through photography and topographic drawings presents landmark buildings in LA in terms of the routes a climber might take to explore them.

Inside the Gallery, other new work extends the possibilities of solo climbing as a metaphorical and actual approach to the built as well as the natural environment, with photographs of the artist tackling a variety of buildings around Scotland. These extreme explorations of the relationship an individual might form with a building are complemented by other photography-based works, including Don’t want to be part of your world, an ongoing series in which Hartley looks at the relationship and interdependence between architecture and nature, and the individual’s position with regard to both. Each work in the series takes the form of a photograph of an impressive natural wilderness into which Hartley has inserted a hand-made architectural relief. The reliefs are all models of highly individualistic buildings, often utopian in aspiration and more often than not doomed to failure.

Two major installations take on the interior architecture of The Fruitmarket Gallery, inserting photographs of unattainable, idealised modernist spaces into the fabric of the building. Untitled (Installation), 2007, offer a tantalising glimpse of an illusory space beyond the Gallery, while the monumental Case Study, 2001 is a photograph of an imaginary, idealised, domestic interior, held within a structure made of translucent glass, wood and plaster. At first glance, it seems as though one might be able to enter the space. Walking round it, however, it reveals itself more of a sculpture than a structure — a closed, tapering, inaccessible form.

Hartley’s practice examines the influence of architecture on the individual in and against the landscape in a physical and conceptual context. It offers a variety of approaches to the built environment, Hartley occupying a shifting set of roles from photographer and architectural historian to builderer, rambler, mountaineer and explorer, offering an original analysis of architecture and its relationship to landscape.

For more information go to: http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk