Artipedia - Arts News

FRAC Bourgogne

Copyright Stefan Brüggemann :
Untitled, 2007 - glass, mirror, 86 x 80 in, Ed. 1/1

Stefan Brüggemann
October 11th 2008 - January 10th 2009

Opening
on Friday October 10th from 6 pm

Frac Bourgogne
49 rue de Longvic
F - 21000 Dijon

http://www.frac-bourgogne.org

For his first solo show in France, Stefan Brüggemann (born in 1975 in Mexico City) has brought together a selection of works which subversively upset the rules of the art game, in particular, here, those governing representation and its content.

Stefan Brüggemann’s proposition is as paradoxical as it is provocative, in the way he plays with artistic codes, the better to reduce them to nothing. Art history tumbles into oblivion in favour of the surface of images. For example, he uses typography, but in order to deny the artistical reference thereto, typography also making reference to communication methods. The nihilist posture comes across in an often seductive way, ensnaring the spectator in his/her own art culture.He describes his praxis as TWISTED CONCEPTUAL POP, an association that is nothing if not paradoxical.
The exhibition is constructed in three areas. A small entrance room is painted all in black, with, on the floor, a pile of posters with white wording printed on a similarly black ground—references to minimal sculpture and political art which Stefan Brüggemann one more activates the better to underscore the uselessness of all political ambition in art, along with all content-related dimensions.

Two rooms echo each other on either side. Five reversed mirrors, facing the wall, are shown in one room, and five sentences made with black adhesive lettering are written on the walls of the other room. The sentences are very representative of what he has been developing since the mid-1990s : to deny today’s norm of the “all-communicational”, where everyone is summoned to explain, comment, and elucidate, until the cows come home. Stefan Brüggemann sets up a language of refusal, often negative postulates affirming void, absence and impossibility. The texts he has chosen here are provocative in what they proclaim.

The five mirrors turned towards the wall echo the five texts, as if in the negative, and assert the refusal of their function. Nothing can be reflected in them. No images. No ideas. By reversing the mirror, Stefan Brüggemann denies this relation between art and reality, and art and the viewer. The mirror also shows the simultaneity between work and viewer, present value, and value of the conscious presence of the world, which Stefan Brüggemann here seems to empty out: FROM ANYTHING TO ANYTHING IN NO TIME, he writes on the exhibition wall. As part of real, the Internet is a work source for the artist, so its time-related reality can be summoned up. Because no information on it can ever really be deleted, all the information on it is mixed with an almost indeterminate time-frame.

As a perfect reflection of a world where tomorrows no longer lay any claim to sing, the work seriously delivers the truths of the day, fuelled by the works of conceptual artists, pursuing the forms of negativism which marked 20 th century art, forms involving the end of myths and beliefs, including those of creation. The works refer at times brutally to the society of disappointment that is ours, setting the individual face to face with him/herself in a world with no geographical or temporal landmarks, a world that is globalized and purposeless.

Claire Legrand, head of public services
Translated by Simon Pleasance

The Stefan Brüggemann show (curator : Eva González-Sancho) is a joint project put on by the Frac Bourgogne (Dijon – FR) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Bern – CH).

The Frac Bourgogne is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC: Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Burgundy Regional Council, the General Council of Côte-d’Or.

The Frac Burgundy is member of PLATFORM .

open from Monday to Saturday from 2-6 pm, except public holidays

Guided tour - Saturday November 22 th 2008 - 3 pm at the Frac - free entry

A catalogue has been published by jrp/ringier (Zurich - CH), jointly edited by the Frac Bourgogne (Dijon) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Berne, CH).

Frac Bourgogne
49 rue de Longvic
F - 21000 Dijon
http://www.frac-bourgogne.org

K21 Kunstsammlung

Lawrence Weiner:
AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
September 27, 2008 - January 11, 2009

K21 Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen
Ständehausstraße 1
40217 Düsseldorf
+49 (0) 211.8381-600

http://www.kunstsammlung.de

Lawrence Weiner (born 1942, South Bronx, New York) has been long recognized as a central figure among the founders and developers of Conceptual Art, whose origins reach back to the 1960s. The exhibition Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE is the most important retrospective in many years to be devoted to this radical, complex, and epochal artist. Especially in recent years, Weiner has been regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic artists worldwide. He has defined art as “the relationship of human beings to objects and of objects to objects in relation to human beings,” and this premise constitutes the core of all of his work to date. For Weiner, language is a material object - whereby the existence of the individual work is nonetheless independent of its material execution. His works address an unending diversity of physical and cultural phenomena, exploiting verbal figures, punctuation marks, and graphic elements as resources in order to transgress conventi
onal hierarchies and boundaries. Here are works that address matters both simple and complex, challenging viewers in both conceptual and political terms.

The focal point of this exhibition is formed by approximately 50 language works and a number of works executed according to them. Also featured are 10 early paintings, a sculpture, and circa 30 drawings. The presentation also includes circa 200 artist’s books and multiples as well as circa 230 posters. The exhibition itself is supplemented by works installed in the city’s public spaces and those appearing in a daily newspaper.

‘untitled’ (from 5 second cityscapes) 2007 - Gregor Stephan

Enda O’Donoghue, Gregor Stephan, Sven Kalden, Sean Lynch/Michele Horrigan, Sladjan Nedeljkovic / Karin Krautschick, Isidro Ramirez, Paul Halliday, Raphael Grisey, Michael Tan

Nine artists together around one plaza. An exhibition at Platz der Vereinten Nationen 1.

Berliners and visitors to the city passing the Palast der Republik today see only the concrete towers that once supported the building. There is little here now to remind them of the Palast itself. Every day, the viewer’s knowledge is adapted to the latest changes at the site, slowly erasing the pictures of the intact original from memory. A similar process took place in the early 1990s at what is now Platz der Vereinten Nationen. Besides the monumental statue of Lenin that once stood here recalling the Palast’s monumental concrete pillars, its slow and laborious removal was also characteristic of the way Berlin deals with its (architectural) past. The end of the story is well-known: the monument was dismantled, the parts including the head were buried in Köpenick, and the Leninplatz was renamed. In spite of, or perhaps precisely because of this neutralisation, the place retains a sense of the unusual.

This is now demonstrated by ‘Ein Platz’, an exhibition organised at 1, Platz der Vereinten Nationen by Enda O’Donoghue and Gregor Stephan with the kind support of Galerie Hunchentoot and WBM. The show includes material by nine German and international artists, bringing together video, photography and object-based works that take the Platz der Vereinten Nationen as their point of departure. All of these works play with the ordinariness and supposed neutrality of the plaza, and with the peculiarities, stories and memories that lie beneath the surface.

Address: Platz der Vereinten Nationen 1, 10249, Berlin
Opening: 10.10.2008 at 19:00
Exhibition runs: 10.10. to 01.11.2008
Wed to Fri - 16:00 to 19:00
Sat 11:00 to 18:00
and by appointment

http://www.galerie-hunchentoot.de

Dublin City Gallery
The Hugh Lane

Ground
Fergus Martin 2008
acrylic on canvas 263 x 82 cms
Image courtesy Green on Red Gallery.

Fergus Martin
11 October, 2008 - 11 January, 2009

Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1

http://www.hughlane.ie

Fergus Martin’s exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is drawn from his recent experiences of sight and seeing. A new body of work in painting and sculpture that is united by a sense of drama and raucous reflection. Yet their placement leaves the viewer in an unsettled state of calm.

Martin has called his paintings ‘the carriers’ of colour, but the colour is not restricted only to its structured composition. Mediated by the viewers gaze, it belongs to the entirety of the world as the eye sees it, and renders it accessible.

Born in Dublin in 1955, Fergus Martin works in a variety of media from two-dimensional work such as painting and photography to sculptural works, defining and questioning the relationship between central and peripheral, form and energy. He has exhibited widely with recent exhibitions at Internationale Kunst in der Südwestkurve, in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in C2, Crawford Municipal Gallery of Art, Cork.

For further information on the temporary exhibitions programme
contact Michael Dempsey
e: mdempsey.hughlane@dublincity.ie

Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1
t: + 353 1 2225550
e: info.hughlane@dublincity.ie
w: http://www.hughlane.ie