Artipedia - Arts News

Daimler Contemporary

Ill.: Nic Hess, König Gerrit [King Gerrit], 2007 (Detail)

Minimalism and After I
- objects for imaginative and
real use
September 21, 2007 - January 27, 2008
Daimler AG
Daimler Contemporary
Haus Huth
Alte Potsdamer Straße 5
10785 Berlin
Germany
+49 (0) 30 259 41 42 0
kunst.sammlung@daimler.com
11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Admission free
http://www.collection.daimler.com

The Daimler Art Collection is pleased to announce the exhibition “Minimalism and Applied I” at Daimler Contemporary, Haus Huth, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. “Minimalism and Applied - objects for imaginative and real use” explores the relationship that exists between minimalist formal language and applied art. As the subtitle of the exhibition suggests these ‘transfers’ can be useful for imagination, association and play. Our exhibition at the same time represents the beginning of a new thematic focus to be continued in the next future.

Approaching the theme from the perspective of the Collection’s history, the exhibition aims at encouraging a dialogue between the developments in the areas as an open dialogue. We have abstained from providing a pure comparative presentation of art and design and have opted to place the main focus on artists of our collection who have been active in both areas. These range from names such as Josef Albers and Arakawa/Gins to contemporary position like Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig and Leonor Antunes. The works by these 25 artists are complemented pars pro toto by designs from Renzo Piano, the architect of Potsdamer Platz, as well as by design products from Gerrit Rietveld, Herbert Krenchel, Charles Eames and Konstantin Grcic. As one can derive from these names the aspects of applied art are represented in the fields of architecture, graphic design, logos and branding, as well as furniture design.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive program, including artist talks, lectures and discussions with artists and designers as well as thematic guided tours: These tours are available on every first Saturday of a month at 4 p.m. (November 3 / December 1, 2007 / January 5, 2008). Guided tours “Art and Architecture on Potsdamer Platz” art can be booked on request. Please check our website regularly for updates and announcements.

Exhibition catalogues are available at Daimler Contemporary, at our co-operating bookshop Bücherbogen am Savignyplatz and further more can be ordered online.

Participating artists:
Josef Albers (D), Ruby Anemic (D), Leonor Antunes (P), Arakawa/Gins (J/USA), Eva Berendes (D), Max Bill (CH), Martin Boyce (GB), Krysten Cunningham (USA), Stéphane Dafflon (F), Karl Duschek (D), Maria Eichhorn (D), Ossi Fink (I), Konstantin Grcic (D), Nic Hess (CH), Donald Judd (USA), Kazuo Katase (J), Imi Knoebel (D), Herbert Krenchel (DK), Sylvan Lionni (USA), Alexander Liberman (USA), Richard Merkle (D), Isamu Noguchi (J), Danica Phelps (USA), Renzo Piano (I), Gerrit Rietveld (NL), Meg Shirayama (GB), Anton Stankowski (D), Franz Erhard Walther (D), Franz West (A), Georg Winter (D), Lars Wolter (D), Andrea Zittel (USA), Heimo Zobernig (A)

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Rodney McMillian, Untitled, 2006
Baboons, columns. Installation of variable dimensions.
Photo by Gene Ogami / Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter
Los Angeles Projects

An Atlas of Events
October 6 - December 30, 2007
“The State of the World”
cultural forum
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Av. de Berna, 45 A
Lisbon, Portugal

http://www.gulbenkian.pt

An Atlas of Events opened on October 6 as the final stage of an year-long cultural forum in which the production of theories and ideas was accompanied by reflection and debate, and where creativity, and cultural and artistic practices, interacted with a wide range of different audiences.

It is against a backdrop of intense uncertainty — experienced at individual, local, regional and international levels — that we propose An Atlas of Events, a group exhibition of 28 artists from many different countries and cultural regions. This is a meaningful effort to bring together very different views of the world by artists who offer us carefully observed reflections that reveal the complexity of how the ‘political’ is experienced in simple, everyday ways, asking each of us to rethink assumptions about conditions beyond our own experiences.

Many of the works in the exhibition introduce ideas that are caught within a moment of urgency — the urgency of production, the urgency of sharing and the urgency of refusing to remain quiet. In some cases, artists address broader and more general concerns within the world, be it the infinite adaptability of capital, reflections of a dominant consumerism at a global scale, the devastation of the landscape, lost history and culture, or the fear of the future. In other cases, artists address their own life experiences, or predicaments particular to their own country or geographic region, such as radical urban changes, the proliferation of means of production and distribution, or responding to chaotic or violent conditions.

Each artist creates works that respond in particular ways to the state of the world, and in these works are cautionary tales but also ones that do not relinquish hope. Within the dark nihilism that circulates, there is also the possibility of positive change. In an unstable world, these works try to propose a way towards a new kind of equilibrium. We might also be able to devise new affirmative signs and attitudes that could help us envisage a more promising future, where together with hostility we might find hospitality, and where the dogmas can be replaced by global doubt as a method of knowledge
and of creation.

And, while we do not think that art can change anything, in-and-of itself, we hope the exhibition can place in relief particular concerns about a range of distinct historical and current socio-political conditions, in a way that provokes us to continue to question, beyond the limits of the gallery, the prevalent packaged version of our ‘rights, wrongs, enemies and friends’, and to examine the extent to which opinions are given, received, or arrived at through a process of personal and thoughtful investigation. This is the process that each of the artists has already been through to produce his or
her work.

List of artists: Adel Abdessemed, Ângela Ferreira, Camila Rocha, Eduardo Sarabia, Erinç Seymen, Josephine Meckseper, Kelley Walker, Mai-Thu Perret, Michael Rakowitz, Minouk Lim, Mircea Cantor, Nasan Tur, Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko, Paul Chan, Paulo Nozolino, Pieter Hugo, Robin Rhode, Rodney McMillian, Rosana Palazyan, Rui Toscano, Santiago Cucullu, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Seifollah Samadian, Sergio Vega, Sophie Ristelhueber, Sze Tsung Leong, Yael Bartana and Yun-Fei Ji.

Curators: António Pinto Ribeiro, Debra Singer and Esra Sarigedik Öktem

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday, Sunday, 10 am - 6 pm
Saturday, 10 am - 10 pm
Closed on Monday.

Portuguese-English catalogue available.

For additional information, please contact:
Miguel Magalhães
mmagalhaes@gulbenkian.pt
Tel. +351 21 7823529

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is a Portuguese private institution of public utility whose statutory aims are in the fields of arts, charity, education and science. The head-office is located in Lisbon and there is also a delegation in the United Kingdom (UK Branch) and a centre in Paris (the Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre).

“The State of the World” cultural forum is an international cross-disciplinary programme of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and is part of the celebrations for the Foundation’s 50th anniversary.

http://www.gulbenkian.pt/estadodomundo

FOUR

D.B.
David Blamey
Curated by Paul O’Neill
Until 25th November 2007
FOUR
Fourth Floor
11 Burgh Quay
Dublin 2, Ireland

http://www.fourdublin.com

For his first solo exhibition in Ireland, David Blamey will present two new works that correspond to the spatial peculiarities of the gallery at Four. Commonplace in their materiality, and yet monumental in their transformative presence, the work addresses the constraints of the exhibition space by taking us beyond it. With references spanning the quotidian photography of Ed Ruscha and Christian Boltanski, the iconography of spiritual organizations, minimalism, mysticism, system theories and global tourism, this presentation extends Blamey’s reputation for meticulousness and fastidious under-production. His works are presented as quietly assisted ready-mades awaiting the viewer’s scrutiny and ultimately, their evaluation. In so doing, the exhibition D.B. raises questions about how qualitative values in art can be produced without obvious cultural agency.

Continuing his on-going series of pin drawings on fabricated panels, Pin Board 2, (2007) is a scaled-up notice board almost entirely covered with office pins. Upon closer inspection, this mass of colours and sizes registers a multitude of small disparities that stem from the varied geographic sources from which they originate. Blamey states, “If you compare a 1/16″ diameter round head pin manufactured in the US with the same type of thing made in Spain or the UK, you will find differences. Subtle inconsistencies in production values have allowed me to accumulate a range of colour variations and sizes from all over the world that creates, in accumulation, a sense of space.” Through a laborious process of gathering, drawing and building, these works turn on the possibility of transforming commonplace materials into a satiated map of the universe, with so many places, times and points of intersection and (in-) significance. Pin Board 2 remains ambivalently positioned between a c
ommonly employed bulletin board with all its notices removed and the highly crafted embodiment of a contemplative spatial illusion. The effect is one of pleasurable disorientation.

In Road, (2007) row upon row of individually framed watercolours hang in a grid. These paintings by unknown Indian art students were purchased by Blamey during two trips to Mumbai’s so-called Thieves’ Market (Chor Bazaar) in 2005 and 2007. Never intended for exhibition, or to be seen as a collective whole, the examination papers are gathered together here for their first public display. Each and every representation shows the same scene: a figure walking away from the viewer down a wide straight road under a pale blue sky. Equivalent, but again varying in small ways, the overall image is of multiple interpretations of a single moment frozen in time.

D.B. makes apparent Blamey’s critique of fixed notions of creative autonomy by eschewing self-categorization from within an art-world premised on specialization and signature aesthetics. Describing his practice as being engaged with “the idea that the distance between the art world and the real world can be almost nothing” and with the work evolving from a process of “framing, adjusting, assisting, promoting, thinking-about and reassessing what’s already there”, Blamey’s methods echo Douglas Heubler’s maxim that “the world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting — I do not wish to add to them”.

Blamey’s guiding principal that the stuff we have at our disposal is already complicated enough without adding anything more therein converges with his observation that our perception of the world can never meet our understanding of it. His projects often pivot on this dialectical tension between things that are so familiar that they have become almost invisible and ideals that are somehow always out of reach. This struggle to simply understand is often informed by an interest in belief systems from parallel fields of cultural production, whether it is the spiritual movement, popular science or, in this instance, in considering the art world as a debatable social sub-system in and of itself. D.B. therefore is an exhibition that resists any resolution that a normative solo show may purport to offer. Instead it endeavours to better understand those very impulses that lead us towards any such
attempted conclusion.

http://www.fourdublin.com

http://www.davidblamey.com