Vera Lutter, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Vera Lutter

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

March 30 - May 13, 2000

Fraenkel Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of the large-scale camera obscura images by VERA LUTTER. Born in Germany, she resides in New York. Vera Lutter's work is currently on view at Dia Center for the Arts through the 18th of June 2000.

Using the architecture of the camera obscura as her photographic mechanism, Vera Lutter becomes the transcriber of outer architectures, facing buildings and industrial sites. Interested in places which reference particular historical moments or which have adopted an iconic stature, she transforms rooms which look upon her pending subjects into cameras, often inhabiting them during the length of each exposure. Her images often reference movement over the hours or sometimes weeks of each exposure's duration; in so doing she speaks to the transitory nature of the built environment itself. The photographs display the microcosms of sites that are built and become altered over a course of time.

Vera Lutter considers the original transcription of each place, which is created within the camera obscura, as its ultimate representation. She chooses this, rather than using the rendered negative as an intermediate to an ultimate positive. Her only amendment is to right each image, flipping it from its original, inverted recording. The images give a visceral sense of what it is to see the way a camera does.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

Mona Hatoum at Tate Britain, London

Mona Hatoum

Tate Britain, London

24 March - 9 July 2000

An exhibition of new work by MONA HATOUM is on view at Tate Britain in the Duveen Galleries. This is her first major solo show in London and the first in a new series of sculpture displays by British artists in the Duveen Galleries. The series highlights Tate Britain's strong commitment to contemporary art and artists.

Responding to the architecture of the galleries, Mona Hatoum has created large scale works which reflect her current interest in everyday objects. These sculptures, focusing on household objects, emphasise and yet undermine their character as aids to domestic comfort and efficiency. Mouli-Julienne (x 21) is based on the French kitchen device for slicing or shredding vegetables, but is dramatically enlarged. The threatening scale of this piece reinforces the intensity of the object, where the shredding drum is intentionally large enough to accommodate a human body. The artist's transformation of this and other domestic tools renders them beautiful, yet malevolent. Another new work uses domestic furniture and kitchen implements but the additional element of live electrical currents running through the objects makes them sinister.

The confrontational themes that Mona Hatoum focuses on, such as violence and oppression, often make powerful reference to the human body, its vulnerability and resilience. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, Mona Hatoum aims to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.

MONA HATOUM was born a British citizen, to Palestinian parents, in Beirut in 1952. She settled in London in 1975 after civil war broke out in Lebanon while she was on a visit to Britain. After studying at the Byam Shaw and Slade Schools of art, she first became known in the early 1980s for a series of performance and video pieces which focused with great intensity on the body. Towards the end of that decade her work shifted towards installation and sculpture including the video installation Corps étranger 1994 an endoscopic journey through the artist's body.

Mona Hatoum's work has been exhibited widely. In 1998 a solo exhibition, initiated by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago toured to The New Museum, New York, MoMA, Oxford, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Other solo exhibitions include Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994) and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999). Hatoum's work was included in Rites of Passage, Tate Gallery, London (1995) and in the same year she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

An illustrated catalogue is available with essays by cultural critic Edward Said and Sheena Wagstaff, Head of Exhibitions and Display, Tate Britain (32pp, £12.99). 

The exhibition is curated by Sheena Wagstaff with Clarrie Wallis, Programme Curator, Tate Britain.

TATE BRITAIN

Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

www.tate.org.uk

Joachim Koester, Galeri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen - Row Housing

Joachim Koester: Row Housing

Galeri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

March 24 - May 6, 2000

Galeri Nicolai Wallner presents an exhibition with new works of Joachim Koester.

In the main gallery: The 30 photographs that makes up Row Housing is an attempt to narrate a specific space and it's history while at the same time pointing to the boundary of the photographic image. The location is Resolute on Cornwallis Island in the far north of Arctic Canada. An area made famous through Sir John Franklin's disastrous attempt to find the Northwest Passage in 1843. With images of Franklin's winter camp, abandoned military stations from the cold war, and the only building completed as part of the Swedish architect Ralph Erskine's model town, the photographs from Row Housing aim at capturing the ghost frames resonating in and around the town of Resolute. The images depict the area suspended between visible and invisible traces of history, and the newly gained independence as part of the Inuit state Nunavut in 1999.

In the back gallery: Four photographs from Greenland as a part of the larger work Nordenskiold and the ice cap. An installation about the explorer Nordenskiold's and his expedition to the Greenlandic ice cap in 1870.

GALERI NICOLAI WALLNER

Njalsgade 21, Building 15, 2300 Copenhagen

www.nicolaiwallner.com

Borromini / Edward Burtynsky, Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal

Vues et points de vue : l'architecture de Borromini dans les photographies d'Edward Burtynsky
Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal
15 mars - 7 mai 2000    

Le Centre Canadien d’Architecture présente l’exposition Vues et points de vues : L’architecture de Borromini dans les photographies d’Edward Burtynsky. Un choix de 27 photographies et gravures nous offre l’occasion de redécouvrir des bâtiments construits à Rome par l’architectecte baroque Francesco Borromini, dont on célébrait le 400e anniversaire de naissance l’an dernier.

Vues et points de vues propose un dialogue entre deux média et entre les deux approches différentes qui en découlent, pour représenter les oeuvres construites de Borromini: la photographie contemporaine et des gravures datant des 17e et 18e siècles. Les photographies de l’exposition font partie des acquisitions du CCA; elles ont été prises à Rome par le photographe torontois Edward Burtynsky en 1999. Elles sont présentées conjointement avec des gravures des mêmes édifices, dont des tirages dérivés de Borromini lui-même publiés après sa mort.

Cette rencontre romaine ne doit rien au hasard. Les bâtiments de Borromini joignent une grande expressivité plastique à une rigoureuse alliance entre géométrie et architecture. Ils constituent un défi particulier pour le photographe et pour le graveur: il faut traduire à la fois le revêtement extérieur de l’édifice et sa structure. De plus, les choix d’angle de vue et de cadrage du bâtiment ainsi que l’aptitude du photographe ou du graveur à maîtriser son art joueront des rôles décisifs dans sa capacité à transmettre une expérience qui s’apparente à celle des édifices concrets.

Dans la lignée de ceux qui ont fait le voyage à Rome pour y photographier ses chefs-d'œuvre, Edward Burtynsky a travaillé avec le spécialiste le plus en vue de l’étude de Borromini, Joseph Connors de l’université Columbia. Les tirages obtenus, quoiqu’ils refusent les effets d’ensemble et se concentrent sur des détails, démontrent l’esprit inventif extraordinaire des motifs architecturaux et ornementaux de Borromini. L’approche de Burtynsky lui permet également de saisir la dynamique spatiale qui caractérise le travail de l’architecte. Chaque détail découpé par le geste du photographe nous rappelle l’espace architectural contigu.

Cette sollicitation constante du spectateur à réfléchir au delà des limites du champ visuel a été délibérément accentuée dans l’exposition par le jeu des formats et de l’accrochage, par la juxtaposition de tirages photographiques et numériques, ainsi que par le contraste entre les tirages en couleur et en noir et blanc. Les oeuvres sont présentées dans la salle octogonale du CCA - elle-même inspirée par la coupole de l’église Saint Yves de Borromini.

C’est à un registre plus technique que nous convient les planches gravées de l’œuvre de Borromini. Elles utilisent les ombres portées et la juxtaposition pour surmonter la difficulté inhérente à l’estampe à traduire les effets de profondeur. Les nombreuses sources d’information graphique dévoilent l’intelligence du trait de l’architecte dans les dessins originaux. C’est pourquoi les recueils d’estampes joueront un rôle important dans la diffusion du baroque romain en général et, plus particulièrement, de l’oeuvre de Borromini.

CCA - CENTRE CANADIEN D'ARCHITECTURE
1920, rue Baile, Montréal, Québec H3H 2S6
www.cca.qc.ca

Edward Ruscha, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - Powders, Pressures and Other Drawings

Edward Ruscha: Powders, Pressures and Other Drawings
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
March 16 -  April 29, 2000

John Berggruen Gallery presents an exhibition of drawings by Los Angeles artist, Edward Ruscha. The exhibition includes over thirty early drawings by Edward Ruscha. The works in the show range in date from 1965 to 1981 and displays his unique juxtaposition of words and usual images as well as his superb draftsmanship. These works includes pastel, watercolor, graphite and, the unconventional, gunpowder on paper.

Edward Ruscha has been referred to as one of the most internationally renowned American artists. Edward Ruscha's work is included in numerous public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

An illustrated catalogue will be available.

JOHN BERGGRUEN GALLERY
228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.berggruen.com

Maria Porges, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

Maria Porges, Acts of Deception: Art + Magic + Science
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
March 16 - April 29, 2000

John Berggruen Gallery presents an exhibition of recent work by Maria Porges. 

In her third one person show at John Berggruen Gallery, Maria Porges explores the place where art, science and magic overlap or collide - magic meaning sleight of hand and science referring to the fundamentals such as chemistry and physics.

Maria Porges, who thinks of herself primarily as a sculptor, exhibits cabinet and shelf pieces as well as several free-standing works. Many of her works continue to include cast bottles made of tinted beeswax with elements of image and text on their surfaces.

Maria Porges lives and works in the Bay Area and was a recipient of the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries, museums and alternative spaces in the Bay Area and around the USA.

An illustrated brochure will be available.

JOHN BERGGRUEN GALLERY
228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.berggruen.com

Updated 06.07.2019