Ken Price, indagine fra sculture e disegni

Presso la sede londinese di Hauser & Wirth al 23 di Savile Row è in corso fino al retrospettiva sul lavoro artistico di Ken Price fra il 1959 e il 2006. 

Sono proposti sia le opere scultoree che i disegni, spesso progetti ma anche opere compiute. Si può così percorrere gran parte del lavoro artistico con le diverse fasi che caratterizzarono la sua ricerca miscelata dagli stimoli del Bauhaus alle ceramiche giapponesi. 

Un'estate a Somerset

Somerset d'estate è un appuntamento fisso con questo magico spazio della Hauser & Whirth Gallery, che per propone una doppia personale con le opere dell'artista Phyllida Barlow e  il paesaggista Piet Oudolf

Hans Arp da Hauser & Wirth in Londra

Fino al 1 Marzo è in corso da Hauser & Wirth, in Savile Row a Londra, una stupenda mostra su Hans Arp, una vasta raccolta delle sue opere più articolate presentate in un fantastico colpo d’occhio unico.

 

Press Release

Curated by Julian Heynen, this exhibition examines the relationship between form and chance in a selection of Hans Arp’s important but rarely seen sculptures from 1947 to 1965. In an unusual approach, Heynen positions Arp’s work alongside Passstücke (Adaptives) by Franz West, examining the shared creative principle of the two artists. A selection of Arp’s poetry will be installed on the walls and broadcast throughout the gallery.

Hans Arp is a familiar figure of classical Modernism and was a key contributor in the development of Dada and Surrealism in the early twentieth century, yet it was during the following decades that he would articulate the forms to which he would persistently return. Although his later practice is often overlooked, Arp continued producing sculpture and poetry in a continuation of the Dada tradition until his death in 1966, during which time he built up an incredible body of work.

‘Chance – Form – Language’ comprises twenty sculptures from Arp’s later period, cast in the artist’s preferred materials of bronze, marble and aluminium. The sculptures are broadly figurative and demonstrate a loose continuation of classical traditions, depicting curved organoid shapes which originate from an observation of nature combined with an element of fantasy. Arp’s creative process was guided by intuition and informed by chance; burgeoning, abstract forms encounter complex, introverted figures, revealing an unique visual vocabulary with a basis in biomorphism.

‘Ptolemy II’ is a seminal example of Arp’s approach to sculpture in his later period, revealing an exploration of form through a sensual language of opposites – inside and outside; solid and void; presence and emptiness, human and nature. The sculpture is a singular, timeless form that both draws on and transcends sculptural abstraction and the history of art, becoming autonomous and placeless, freed from commissions with an intrinsic beauty of its own.

Within this exhibition Arp’s works are presented in a dense but irregular installation, forging connections between individual sculptures while becoming immersed in an almost endless metamorphoses of shapes. Arp’s poetry, an intrinsic part of his practice, is given equal importance in the exhibition. Over 20 of his poems will be broadcast into selected areas of the gallery through ceiling speakers. Excerpts from another group of 27 poems will be installed directly onto the gallery walls. The concurrent presentation of Arp’s two spheres of artistic activity in a single space will awaken a sense of consistency across his work as a whole, demonstrating how his material and linguistic forms interpenetrate and complement each other.

Works by Franz West punctuate the exhibition to shed an unexpected light upon Arp’s practice. Franz West’s Passstücke invite interpretation through human participation. As in Arp’s late work, the sculptures themselves are ambiguous semi-organic forms – meaning evolves through the way humans intuitively engage with the pieces, introducing an element of chance to the work.

‘Arp’s criteria in his search for form is often perceived as a kind of positive aimlessness. This was what led us to turn to a contemporary artist ‘for advice’, as it were, and incorporate a few of his works in the exhibition. Five sculptures by Franz West (1947 – 2012) are mixed in as visual footnotes to the works of Hans Arp. Most are examples of his so-called ‘Adaptives’, or ‘Fitting Pieces’. With them West makes it impossible to overlook the (seemingly) arbitrary aspect of form; these sculptures were intended to be used by viewers in combination with their own bodies as instruments for self-exploration.’ – Julian Heynen

In displaying Arp’s sculpture alongside his poetry and works by Franz West, this exhibition proposes a new examination of Arp’s art, where chance is viewed as an active component in the creation of both his sculptural and linguistic forms.

Sempre più grandi - da galleria a museo …

Galleria Gagosian mostra di Calder/Prouvé

Ha iniziato la White Cube, due anni fa con una galleria di 58.000 metri vicino alla Tate Modern, seguito a ruota dalla Gagosian con lo spazio di Le Bourget a Parigi, dove anche la Thaddaeus Ropac ha portato a 50.000 metri quadrati le sue possibilità espositive a Patin.

Quest’anno a New York, nel quartiere di Chelsea, la galleria Hauser & Wirth ha trasformato in galleria una pista di pattinaggio, segnali che rendono sempre più evidente che la moda per gli spazi vastissimi ha preso piede nel mondo delle gallerie d’arte. Ora anche la tedesca Galerie Max Hetzler ha aperto due nuovi spazi a Berlino Ovest, uno al Bleibtreustraße 45, e l'altro in Goethestraße 2/3, mentre il prossimo anno ha annunciato che aprirà una nuova sede a Parigi vicino al Centro Pompidou.

Spazio Pantin della Galleria Thaddaeus Ropac mostra di Georg Baselitz  

In tal modo, sempre più queste realtà, possono proporre diverse tipologie di arte e suscitare attenzione da parte di un vasto pubblico “gareggiando” con i musei che spesso non riescono ad avere le stesse dinamiche capacità organizzative. 

Life Cast - Paul McCarthy da Hauser & Wirth

Fortemente inquietante la nuova mostra di Paul McCarthy da Hauser & Wirth, dove la sua cifra ironica prende una declinazione dalla forte valenza critica. 

Also opening to the public on 10 May at Hauser & Wirth’s townhouse on 69th Street, ‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’ (on view through 26 July) showcases highly developed themes and narratives coursing through and connecting different areas of McCarthy’s vast and complex practice. Here those themes are revealed through platinum silicone life casts – bravura replicas of the artist and Elyse Poppers, one of the key performers in his most recent projects ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ and ‘WS’.

‘Horizontal’ (2013) is a haunting depiction of the artist in uncanny full-scale replica, naked and prone in the gallery’s skylit ground floor south room. ‘Horizontal’ is a recent ‘repetition-variation’ of the 2005 work ‘Paul Dreaming, Vertical, Horizontal’, in which the artist’s own body was molded standing upright. Defined by gravity’s pull, that earlier sculpture was half-clothed and subtly distorted, its belly and penis distended outward. While ‘Paul Dreaming’ elicits thoughts of death, it also suggests that the artist is very much alive and a bit of a bearded buffoon in socks and shirt, but no pants. ‘Horizontal’ presents an altogether different avatar and, in the artist’s words, ‘makes no bones about the fact this is someone dead, without the mask of a clown or the possibility of sleep and dreaming’. Cast with McCarthy in a prone position, this morgue-like caricature strikes a subversive note in which absurdity and pathos echo one another.

‘Horizontal’ was presaged by one of McCarthy’s earliest exhibited works, the hollow metal ‘Dead H’ (1968). ‘Dead H’ – at first glance a Minimalist sculpture in the then-prevailing style – slyly mimics a dead body (and, coincidentally, a toppled twin of the first letter in Los Angeles’ famous Hollywood sign).

An ironic comment upon vanitas and the ambitions and fables of art and culture, McCarthy’s ‘Dead H’ is a fallen hero. Forty-five years later, the artist’s study of the body as a vehicle for liberation and exploitation continues full force. Works on view at 69th Street also include ‘Rubber Jacket Horizontal, Rubber H’, a poignant fragment from the life casting activities of the past year that captures a sunken and hollow portion of the artist’s own torso.

‘Paul McCarthy: Life Cast’ also presents four female figures of uncanny verisimilitude. All are life casts of Elyse Poppers achieved through a series of painstaking processes at the leading edge of special effects technology. ‘T.G. Awake’ (T.G. is an acronym for ‘That Girl’ and refers to another feminine icon, aspiring actress namesake of a hit 1960s situation comedy) is comprised of three life-sized casts of the actress in similar sitting positions, with her legs spread open to varying degrees and eyes cast in different directions. Together these static variations reference the magical effect by which a series of still images can be joined together to become film. ‘T.G. Awake’ found its origins in drawings that McCarthy made of his wife Karen in the 1960s and relates to the first White Snow pencil drawings of 2009. The sculpture ‘T.G. Asleep’ presents the same woman prone, her body curved and hands cupped, a counterpoint to the dead figure of ‘Horizontal’.

The exhibition also includes ‘That Girl’, a four-channel video installation based in the process by which ‘T.G. Awake’ and ‘T.G. Asleep’ were achieved. Capturing the molding process, the model’s live movement studies, and the documentation of these through deliberately positioned cameras, this work brings viewers into the action through which the sculptures on view were made. ‘Life casting liberates the literal through a kind of unifying monotone,’ McCarthy has said. ‘It creates a different representation of the original thing that lets me explore where reality and abstraction intersect’.

Mentre si conferma nella sua cifra più classica presso lo spazio di 511 West 18th Street

On 20 June, Hauser & Wirth’s 18th street space will re-open with the third of the gallery’s spring 2013 exhibitions: ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a collaboration between Paul McCarthy and his son Damon McCarthy. On view through 26 July, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a large and complex installation and video projection work originally inspired by both Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Hollywood film ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and the furious rumors that swirled around the off-set relationships between its director and his stars James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. This densely layered opus confronts definitions of power and role-playing, and expands far beyond the ’50s movie and related legends. Ultimately, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ is a meditation upon the archetypes and Oedipal tensions that define family dynamics as they have been played out in private homes, in the evolution of art history, and in the role of the entertainment industry in shaping our expectations and self-images.

At 18th Street, visitors will discover the gallery dimly lit and transformed into a hullabaloo of clanging and clamor, yelling and coital grunting. This barrage of sound envelops two large stage sets installed in the soaring space. One of these is a full-scale two-story house constructed by the McCarthys as a stand-in for Nicholas Ray’s now infamous Bungalow 2 at the Chateau Marmont. For James Dean and the 16-year old Wood, both of whom hailed from unhappy families, Ray’s cottage became a surrogate household with the director as its unconventional patriarch. Rumors abound of quasi-incestuous affairs between Ray and his actors, of swimming pool orgies and champagne bathtub freak-outs. It is these scenarios that are the basis for ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’. On the back of the two-story wooden house, a replica of the Hollywood sign is mounted – upside down. The second stage set is a replica of the living room staircase in the home of Jim Stark, the central character played by James Dean in the original ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and by James Franco (who also plays Dean) in ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’.This set is turned on its side, with props and the residue of filming strewn exactly where they were left at the end of shooting.

Video projections of scenes are presented on and around these sets. In those projections, Paul McCarthy and his actors play hybrids of both Nick Ray’s cinematic characters and the actors who performed as those characters, and segue into universal familial roles – father, mother, daughter, and son. Thus McCarthy plays both Nick Ray and the Father of Jim Stark, as well as the archetype of Father; James Franco is both Jim and James Dean; Elyse Poppers is Judy and the actress who portrayed her, Natalie Wood, as well as the embodiment of Daughter. Jay Yi appears as both Plato and Sal Mineo, the actor who played Plato in the original movie. And Suzan Averitt performs as the Mothers of both Jim Stark and Natalie Wood. With its mind-bending series of doubles, binaries, and inversions, ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ presents perversions of interchangeable roles and fetish relationships. In the process, it investigates parallel icons in the history of art – from Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ to Vito Acconci’s infamous performances – and plays with the psychology of the family.

‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ reflects an important shift in Paul McCarthy’s engagement with the fantastical tropes of such bodies of work as White Snow, Pirates and Pinocchio, toward more modern and thoroughly American 20th century pop culture mythologies. As with the two sculpture exhibitions presented by Hauser & Wirth New York this spring, this ambitious and challenging tour de force delves deeper into the structures by which fiction successfully presents itself as reality.

Hauser & Wirth nuovi spazi a New York

Hauser e Wirth inaugura in 511 west 18th street a New York dei nuovi stupendi spazi e per l'inaugurazione ha scelto le opere di Dieter Roth e Bjorn Roth. 

Comunicato stampa:

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, collagist, poet, diarist, graphic designer, publisher, filmmaker and musician, German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998) has been described as ‘a performance artist in all the mediums he touched’. Everything Roth made involved acting out a central concept of art and life as utterly indivisible – a single enterprise in which material stuff is subservient to the emotional and sensual experience for which it stands. Roth was not an artist who tolerated boundaries. In seeking to pulverize them, he elevated the processes by which things happen, embracing accidents, mutations, and accretions of detail over time; inviting nature to have its way with unstable mediums, including fruit, chocolate, and sugar; and perhaps most boldly, inviting the dilution of his own authorship through constant, intensive collaboration with other artists. Those partners included such significant figures as Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. But it was Roth’s long and symbiotic collaboration with his own son, artist Björn Roth, that stands as testament to the enormous and enduring potency of his restless, relentless process.

On 23 January 2013, Hauser & Wirth New York will open ‘Dieter Roth. Björn Roth’, a landmark exhibition of masterworks that highlights this remarkable twenty-year collaboration and, through it, the diversity of the practice that has established Dieter Roth as one of the most inventive and influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. ‘Dieter Roth. Björn Roth’ culminates Hauser & Wirth’s 20th anniversary and inaugurates the opening of the gallery’s new, second exhibition space in New York City, at 511 West 18th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Moreover, the exhibition sets the stage for major exhibitions to be presented at 18th Street in 2013 by three artists – Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn and Matthew Day Jackson – who claim Roth as their touchstone.

Organized with the cooperation of the Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg, Germany, ‘Dieter Roth. Björn Roth’ presents more than 100 objects created since the 1970s, including numerous works never before exhibited in the United States. Among these will be ‘The Floor I (Studio-floor from Mosfellsbaer, Iceland)’ from 1973 to 1992; a series of wall-mounted works form the 1980s comprised of such at-hand materials as toys, sweets, tools, refuse, and dead insects in plastic tubes; and key works from the ‘Tischtücher’ series of paintings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s from used tablecloths. Key examples of Dieter Roth’s poignant ‘Kleiderbilder’ paintings, made from the artist’s own clothes, also will be on view, as will the installation ‘Grosse Tischruine (Large Table Ruin)’, created by Dieter and Björn Roth with Eggert Einarsson between 1978 and 1998.

Tutti in campagna ...

La moda delle gallerie sparse per luoghi distanti dai centri urbani sta sempre più prendendo piede, e anche Hauser & Wirth sta realizzando uno spazio culturale nella quiete di una fattoria nel Somerset, fuori da Londra. 

Questo spazio aprirà nel 2012 e sarà un luogo di cultura aperto a ogni declinazione dell'estro artistico, dalla poesia al cinema.