A New York la Gagosian Gallery propone negli spazi al 522 di West 21st Street una raccolta di opere di Anselm Kiefer raccolte sotto il titolo "Transition from cool to warm".
Mentre al 555 di West 24th Street c'è la grande istallazione "Reason" di Carsten Höller.
CS
What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don't construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.
—Anselm Kiefer
Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings, artists’s books, and watercolors by Anselm Kiefer.
Employing broad-ranging and erudite literary sources, from the Old and New Testaments to the poetry of Paul Celan, Kiefer’s oeuvre makes palpable the movement and destruction of human life and, at the same time, the persistence of the delicate, lyrical, or divine.
Central to the exhibition are more than forty unique artists’s books, their pages painted with gesso to mimic marble, displayed in an installation of glass vitrines. Erotically charged female nudes and faces emerge from the pages. Artists’s books are an integral part of Kiefer’s oeuvre; over time they have ranged in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and in materials, from lead to dried plant matter. In this selection of books, the sequences of narrative information and visual effect evoke the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual through the female figures on the marbled pages. They are a reminder perhaps of the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and even of Michelangelo’s belief that his figures were “freed” from the stone with which he worked.
The large array of new watercolors in this exhibition marks a significant return in Kiefer's work to the elusive and sensuous medium. The exhibition’s title, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” refers to a celebrated book of watercolors that he produced from 1974 to 1977, in which cool, blue marine land and seascapes transform into warm female nudes. Kiefer's fascination for eidetic process, rather than teleological outcome is underscored by the alchemical effects he achieves in these new works—aleatory, and as luminescent as the natural forms they evoke.
The watercolors and books are complemented by romantic landscape paintings, in which lakes can be glimpsed through screens of trees or where surfaces of splashed molten lead peel back to reveal the sea or landscape depicted beneath.
“Transition from Cool to Warm” is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard and James Lawrence, and an interview with Kiefer by Louisa Buck.
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, and lives and works in France. His work is collected by museums worldwide. Recent institutional exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2010); “Shevirat Hakelim,” Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2011); “Beyond Landscape,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2013); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); “L’Alchimie du livre,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2015); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015). In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) at the Opéra national de Paris. “Kiefer Rodin” will be on view at the Musée Rodin, Paris until October 2017, subsequently traveling to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. In November 2017, Kiefer will receive the J. Paul Getty medal for his contribution to the arts.
CS
I start with a formula to get a process going, then the formula takes over and continues into infinity on its own. It is not about creative decisions anymore; there is no choice, only reason.
—Carsten Höller
Gagosian is pleased to present “REASON,” an exhibition of recent work by Carsten Höller, his first in New York since “Experience” at the New Museum in 2011.
Giant mushrooms, mirrored revolving doors, abstract paintings, hyperreal little fishes, an environment for children in the form of a huge dice: Höller unites art, play, and phenomenology to transform the gallery into a laboratory that is equal parts rationality and incomprehensibility. Trained in the natural sciences, he has long been fascinated by the methods through which we seek to understand the world, studying the unique attributes and behaviors of humans, fungi, insects, and animals by imposing standardized systems of logic. Revolving Doors (2004/16), constructed according to triadic division, engulfs the viewer in a mise-en-abîme of ever-changing, turning reflections. Beyond this, the overall scheme for the two galleries is predicated on binary, asymptotic division—with color gradations, light intensity, and the placement of the works themselves following a pattern of diminishing halves. The Divisions paintings, as well as the murals that fully cover two adjacent walls of the gallery, follow this same logic. Divisions (Rose-grain Aphid and Surface) (2017) provides the geometric structure with a biological equivalent, revealing the parthenogenesis of a female rose aphid against a red background. The aphid produces offspring autonomously through division, while the vivid red sections become smaller and less intense, moving from left to right.
The Giant Triple Mushroom (2014–15) sculptures—an organic corollary to the planar environment of the Revolving Doors—combine enlarged cross-sections of three different fungal species, hybrids that seem at once empirical and surreal. Fly agaric mushrooms always make up at least half of these sculptures, with two other species attached in quarters; like many of Höller’s topics, they are both formally and conceptually captivating, as incarnations of “irrationality with a method.” When ingested, fly agaric mushrooms can induce hallucinogenic effects—as seen in Muscimol 3. Versuch(1997), an early video that Höller made while under the influence. Flying Mushrooms (2015) is a giant stabile with moving parts, which turns when its lowest arm is pushed, causing a crop of seven fly agaric replicas to orbit slowly through the air, exemplifying their name. Each mushroom is cut vertically down the middle, then reassembled so that one half is upright and the other upended, the distinctive white-spotted red caps spinning like propellers at either end of their stems. Eliminating subjectivity, Höller instead allows divisional formulae to determine each composition. He searches for reason only to escape or disprove it, providing a model for infinity through dispassionate yet exquisite symmetry.
