VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Enrico David.
Anthropologists relate smiling to the baring of teeth. So in Enrico David’s work, there is an inextricable bond between hysteria and the terror of human existence. For his exhibition at VW, Enrico David has created a harrowing body of work that confronts physical decay, vulnerability, voyeurism, and shame. The artist’s latest paintings, drawings and sculptures are enigmatic representations of the human body, often distorted or fragmented to humorous and horrifying effect. The works draw on personal memories and private experiences informed by historical references from Art Deco and Wiener Werkstätte to Joseph Beuys. There is an element of theatricality to the exhibition, in which works are deliberately staged in dialogue with one another.
“On the brink of not being ready to be born,” is how Enrico David has described the condition of his works. They evoke a disquieting state of evolution and entropy, devoid of choice – an inherent awkwardness.
Since spring 2010 Enrico David has been artist in residence at Stiftung Laurenz Haus, Basel, where this new body of work was created. This is his first solo exhibition since the highly acclaimed “How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?”, presented at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 2009. Recent major solo exhibitions include “Bulbous Marauder”, Seattle Art Museum; “Ultra Paste”, ICA London and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; and “Chicken Man Gong” at Tate Britain, London, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Enrico David was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2009. In June 2011 Enrico David will present new works in a solo exhibition at Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice.
The exhibition opened January 15 with a reception for the artist and continues through March 4.
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by mousse
December 26~2010
Just a stone’s throw from the new Whitechapel Gallery — even less, if you take the Central, Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith & City line to the Liverpool Street stop — Raven Row is a non-profit space that opened its doors in 2009, sparing no expenses. Not that there was a need to. Director Alex Sainsbury is, after all, the son of Sir Tim Sainsbury, i.e., head of the second richest family in Britain. In a building that was constructed by the silk mercers who set up shop in the area around 1750, seriously damaged by fires between 1950 and 1970, and then abandoned for a decade, the renovation by 6a Architects studio has left the traces of its history still visible—accentuated them, actually. The gallery’s programming is designed to be as appealingly scrupulous and selective for specialists as it is tantalizing for the art-curious public, with a particular focus on established international artists who somehow have not become well-known or received proper attention in England.
After Ray Johnson, Harun Farocki and Eduardo Paolozzi — just to cite the first names that come to mind — the spaces of Raven Row will be turned over to filmmaker and photographer Hilary Lloyd, who has developed the exhibition project by following the evolution of the space over the last three years. (Antonio Scoccimarro)
56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS
www.ravenrow.org
by mousse
December 7~2010
In 1977, Judith Bernstein made two installation works in the living room and the bedroom of William Copley’s townhouse near the Guggenheim Museum. As she explained “I kept thinking I was going to trash Bill’s place with his extensive Surrealist collection and get the results that Whistler had with his Peacock Room.” The domestic installation included iterations of her massive, iconic, phallus image. The baloneypony appeared iconoclastic and, yet, at the same time integrated with this luxury interior. Now she faces Alex Zachary, a decadent anomaly of a gallery that costumes a breathtaking garden-level, open-air-plan duplex apartment with eighties-modernist architectural embellishments. Bernstein has become most well known for her series of drywall screw-cum-penis drawings she started in 1969. Judith is a pre-nine-eleven feminist who has worked in New York for decades on issues of social subjugation. The drawings, alongside her more articulate collages, intend to empower the subjugated and, simultaneously, critique the dominant form. The massive hardware store dick drawings render the male exclusive object into an abstract form that now appears as a weapon that “draughtswomen” have equal right to bare. At the same time this theolo-totemic “third-leg” appears absurd as a form that holds sway in the distribution of power. Judith has plans for a massive charcoal drawing of her signature that will run across the townhouse gallery. The 1958 movie, “The Horse’ mouth” is projected in the large living-area downstairs. Sir Alec Guinness plays a wild British artist who trashes a patron’s home and winds up having an exhibition at the British Museum. The motion picture should work less as a cinematic ready-made and more at the service of setting the attitudinal register in which to comprehend Judith’s tactile works in the exhibition.
November 10 , 2010 — January 15, 2011
www.alexzachary.com
by mousse
December 2~2010
Larry Clark, Jonathan Velasquez, 2004.
Courtesy: the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London.
The first major retrospective in France dedicated to the work of photographer and cult director Larry Clark has managed to draw national attention — even international, one might say, since quite a few media outlets have talked about it even here in Italy — due to the protests by several Catholic associations that preceded its opening.
Mindful of what happened in Bordeaux, where in 2000, a child protection group brought charges over the “Présumés innocents” exhibition organized at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Bordeaux — whose contents and references were accused of presenting pedophilia in a “favorable” light — leading to a drawn-out court case that lasted about ten years, the city has decided to make the retrospective off-limits to those under 18, the first time a French museum has ever taken such a measure. In the prevailing witch-hunt climate, even the publisher of the catalogue that was supposed to accompany the show has beaten a retreat.
Getting back to the exhibition, one can say it has been structured as a complete overview of Clark’s work and his 50-year career, all the way from Tulsa, to ghetto skateboarders in Los Angeles, through over 200 prints that show the artist’s epic obsession with teenagers, divided between sex, drugs, and “rock ‘n’ roll”. The usual stuff. The good news, though, is that visitors to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris will be able to enjoy the exhibition without the rowdiness or subtly perverse giggles of the umpteenth truckload of teenagers on educational trips, with their normal, healthy hormone surges.
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Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris
www.mam.paris.fr
