Ice fishing

Col titolo di si svolge alla Galleria Max Wigram una bella mostra.

Ice Fishing - McArthur Binion, Bill Bollinger, Charles Harlan, Virginia Overton, Michael E. Smith  4th June – 26th July 2014

“Ice fishing is the practice of catching fish with lines and fish hooks or spears through an opening in the ice on a frozen body of water.”

A photograph of ice fishing looks like a minimal activity. A white surround, with a black hole, and an individual engaged in a practice that looks almost motionless. The work that is unseen, cutting into a frozen lake, withstanding the extreme weather conditions and travelling to the often-remote location, are hidden. 

Ice fishing is also, along with traditional river fishing, Brooklyn-based artist Charles Harlan’s hobby, and so a link, or rather a way of approaching apparently minimal practices, comes roughly into focus: a process of thinking about ‘work’, and what is worked with.

Looking at the work of five artists spanning five decades since the mid-20th century, Ice Fishing is interested in drawing links between artists whose work, in its simplicity and connotation, belies the important processes and aims that lead to its making. 

McArthur Binion (b. 1946 Macon, MS, lives and works in Chicago, IL). “Binion’s primary medium is wax crayon, which he tediously grinds and rubs into wood and aluminium panels, resulting in simple and abstract subjects that are usually mono- or duo-chromatic. Given a closer look, the crayon is heavily applied, creating layers, textures, and complexities that engage African American history by referencing Binion’s time picking cotton as a child.” From McArthur Binion, published by Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago. Previous solo exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2012). 

Bill Bollinger (1939 – 1988, New York) was one of the foremost sculptors of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, showing with Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, and included in Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. Working with industrial materials and focusing on the gesture of construction and the limits of matter, Bollinger’s work is at once beautiful and stark. In 2012 The Sculpture Centre in New York mounted a retrospective of Bollinger’s work curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll in conceptual collaboration with Rolf Ricke, which brought this artist’s work to the attention of a new generation of sculptors. 

Charles Harlan (b. 1984 Smyrna, GA, lives and work in Brooklyn, NY) studied at NYU under Carol Bove, for whom he later became an assistant. Harlan works with found materials and their physical and cultural histories. Artworks that may appear simple, are often invested in a great labour of transport, a process he explains as: “with each stop on its journey a sculpture adds to its aura, more metadata, another memory.” For Ice Fishing, Harlan travelled to London to research and construct two new works: Concrete and London Bricks. 

Virginia Overton (b. 1971 Nashville, TN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) works with materials, placement and sourcing: as the artist says, “the pieces are what they are, real things in the world, not extraneous objects to be placed on a pedestal.” Overton’s work is currently exhibited in the solo show Flat Rock at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and a site-specific installation at Storm King Art Center, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include: Westfälischer Kunsteverein, Münster; Kunsthalle Bern; The Kitchen, New York, and Deluxe, The Power Station, Dallas. 

Michael E. Smith (b. 1977 Detroit, MI, lives and works in Hopkinton, NH) work comprises objects, pictures, and video. Using found and discarded commodities, Smith’s work counters the ecological and economic disasters of our era with a materialism of basic needs, displayed as a layout of ruined bodies. 

Smith’s solo shows include Zabludowicz Collection, London (forthcoming) and Power Station, Dallas (2014). Smith exhibited at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2014), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2014), Whitney Biennial (2012). 

This exhibition was curated by Darren Flook, and would not have been possible without the help of JTT Gallery, New York; Mitchell Innes & Nash Gallery, New York: KOW, Berlin; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. 

La Bella Figura, la creatività italiana da Max Wigram

Lucio Fabro ItaliaFeticcio 1981

   

La galleria londinese Max Wigram presenterà dal 18 Febbraio al 28 Marzo, nei suo spazi di XX Bond Street, una interessante mostra a tema storico, dal titolo “La Bella Figura” dedicata alla cultura italiana, in un percorso trasversale, che spazia dal dopoguerra fino al 1992.

La mostra, che include opere di Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carlo Mollino, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Alighiero Boetti, e Gilberto Zorio, miscela manufatti artistici al design, in un focus sull’eccellenza del bello, sulla grande tradizione culturale che ha sempre caratterizzato, nonostante la forte problematica della cultura politica, il nostro paese.

Giulio Paolini - Ora come ora

Tramite l’accostamento di arte, design, e film, la mostra cerca di far luce sull’ambiguo equilibrio del potere che prevale tutt'oggi sulla produzione artistica italiana, e in un certo senso la mantiene. Note opere storiche di artisti come Fontana, Pistoletto, e Manzoni verranno quindi usate nel contesto della mostra per analizzare le particolari condizioni vissute dalla maggioranza di questi artisti, in quanto operativi nella giovane repubblica italiana. Una Repubblica che, con le sue disfunzioni, ha prodotto le condizioni necessarie per protesta, dialogo, certe libertà, e, a volte, indignazione.

Luigi Ghirri Modena 1978

Ogni italiano conosce l’espressione ‘bella figura’, in un doppio senso che é a volte usato come sinonimo per l’Italia stessa, intesa come la nazione con profondi problemi e fazioni contrarie, obbligate a coabitare. Una nazione di poteri opposti, che rappresentano rispettivamente il bene e il male, intrecciati in una malizia corrotta e irrisolta che si trascina appresso il fardello di tempi lontani dalle strutture incompatibili con la nuova società, con la nuova lingua, e con i nuovi modi di organizzare la tradizione della fede religiosa cattolica.

P.P. Calzolari Scalea 1968

La Bella Figura spera di evidenziare questi aspetti, sovente espressi dalle voci di denuncia degli artisti, poeti, musicisti e comici, organizzati in movimenti indipendenti caratterizzati da un approccio anti-elitario attraverso la promozione della semplicità del quotidiano nel pensiero intellettuale e nell’uso di materiali umili. In retrospettiva, il bersaglio di queste proteste può essere identificato nell’alienazione industriale, ma anche nel rampante consumismo che era forse un compromesso necessario per il rapido sviluppo della Repubblica Italiana.

La mostra è stata curata da Bjorn Stern.

John Giorno, Everyone gets lighter

Max Wigram Gallery is pleased to present EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER, the first one-person exhibition in the UK by American artist and poet John Giorno. 

For almost half a century, Giorno has been exploring and developing new media through which poetry can be disseminated and reach new audiences, an operation he continues with this exhibition. With twenty-four new watercolour Poem Paintings, a performance, and the iconic Dial-a-Poem, the exhibition offers an overview of how the Giorno seeks alternative ways of writing and presenting his poetry and connecting with an audience in powerful ways, inviting us to reflect on how we perceive words, and images.

In the Poem Paintings, Giorno transposes punchy sentences from his own poems onto paper in bold, white capital letters reminiscent of newspaper headlines - a font that he developed with a graphic designer, and has been using since 1984. The words are set off against painterly backgrounds of pastel-toned washes of colour. The viewer both reads and looks at the charged sentences like thanks 4 nothing or just say no to family values, engaging with the poem on two different, simultaneous yet exclusive levels. Giorno provides a visual and narrative anchor by presenting the watercolours in a sequence that follows the chromatic spectrum: from yellow to blue to green, a poetic narrative is developed through purely visual means. In these works thus, painting becomes a vehicle for poetry.

The search for new media for poetic dissemination led Giorno to integrate technology into his work, creating the seminal Dial-a-Poem. A project that was famously presented at MoMA in 1970 and again in 2012, Dial-a-Poem brings people over two hundred random poems read aloud by their authors, including musicians, artists and writers who were friends and colleagues of Giorno - including Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg. At Max Wigram Gallery, visitors will be able to call poems from a telephone in the exhibition, or online.

These aural, visual and textual venues for the circulation of poetry conflate in Giorno’s powerful performance, with which he will inaugurate the exhibition. The incisive pronunciation and forceful delivery recall the headline-style font of the Poem Paintings, and the presence of the poet’s own body seems to transform the words into palpable entities, engaging with the audience in a physical, visceral manner.

All of Giorno’s projects to date have had one purpose: to connect with an audience. In EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER, Giorno succeeds by presenting poetry that is not only read, but also experienced.

NOTES TO EDITORS

John Giorno (b. 1936 in Brooklyn) lives and works in New York. Giorno’s solo exhibitions include EATING THE SKY, Broadway Billboard at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island, NY; Faux Movement, Centre d’art contemporain, Metz; Star 69: Dial-A-Poem Relics, Venice Biennale, and gallery exhibitions at Galerie Almine Rech, Paris 2012 and 2009, Almine Rech Brussels, 2010, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, 2010, Galerier de Jour AgnesB, Paris 2005. Group exhibitions include Imagine the Imaginary, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012; Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, MoMA, New York, 2012; Traces du sacré, Centre Pompidou, 2008; Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Centre, London, 2008. Giorno has been a prolific performer since the 1960s, and as Giorno Poetry Systems he released more than 50 albums of music and poetry. He famously was the subject of Andy Warhol’s first film, Sleep. He is the author of several poetry collections including Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems, 1962–2007. Giorno’s work is part of important public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; MUDAM, Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Giorno will be the subject of a major retrospective of his life and work at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2015.

20/11/13 - 18/01/14