Claudio Parmiggiani @ Bortolami Gallery, New York

Claudio Parmiggiani
Bortolami Gallery, New York
12 January - 24 February 2018

Bortolami presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition of works by Italian artist CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI. The show focuses on his Delocazione series. Translating literally to “delocation”, the artist creates these works by igniting a controlled combustion at close proximity to a panel mounted with objects. Claudio Parmiggiani coaxes the flames for several hours, and the fire covers everything in its reach with diffused smoke and soot. When the blaze is extinguished, he removes the objects, thus leaving a shadow behind. For this exhibition, the artist made imprinted panels of a violin, an hourglass, classical figurative sculptures, and shelves populated with bottles, all with his signature process.

Claudio Parmiggiani has been superimposing these evocative images onto real spaces (walls, corners) as well as standalone panels since 1970. The shadowy outlines in his work signify the existence of concrete objects linked not just to human presence, but also a specifically Italian concern with classical, secular humanism. The paintings, sculptures, and books that appear in his works are made and used by man, and connote the fundamental basis of Greco-Roman intellectual traditions. Though these emblems have disappeared, the memory of their presence remains.

Georges Didi-Huberman, a devoted interpreter of Claudio Parmiggiani’s work, defined the imprint as the “dialectical image:” “something that speaks of both the contact (foot sinking into the sand) and the loss (the absence of the foot in its footprint).” Indeed, each of Claudio Parmiggiani’s Delocazione works establishes both a dialectic and a dual nature of time within its layers of smoke and soot. They are indices of objects no longer present, and objects in and of themselves.

Claudio Parmiggiani is concerned with memory, nostalgia and ephemerality. His work is melancholic, but not in a subjective sense that suggests bereavement or suffering. Rather, it subtly intimates the deep and indelible structures that, after every loss, continue to exist.

CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI (born 1943, Luzzara, Italy) worked as an assistant for Giorgio Morandi in Bologna between 1958 and 1960. He had his first major exhibition at Líbreria Feltrinelli, Bologna in 1965. Parmiggiani has since exhibited widely, including six presentations at the Biennale di Venezia (1972, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1995 and 2015). A retrospective of his practice between 1960 and 1995 was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (1995). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galleria d’ Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna (2003), The Grand Palais, Paris (2005), The Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes (2007), the Collège des Bernardins, Paris (2008) and the Palazzo del Governatore, Parma (2010), and Accademia di Francia Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2015). 

BORTOLAMI
39 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
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Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris @ Bortolami Gallery, New York

Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris
Bortolami Gallery, New York
8 September - 21 October, 2017

Bortolami presents PARTI PRIS, BARBARA KASTEN’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Endlessly experimental and now in her eighth decade, Barbara Kasten presents three recent bodies of work: an extension of her colorful, large scale photographs, Collisions, and new sculptural, photographic hybrids entitled Progressions. She also presents Parallels—her first freestanding sculpture since the early 1970s. In architectural terminology, the parti pris is the chief organizing principle of a project. Barbara Kasten utilizes the structural principles of architecture and process in her new works, which can be read within the realm of architectural diagrams.

Barbara Kasten’s inventive Progressions, composed of face-mounted photographs with geometric acrylic shapes affixed to the surface, emphasize the duality of the photograph and of the relief’s sculptural forms. Transitioning from photographic representation as in the Collisions to address spatial ambiguities, Barbara Kasten incorporates concrete materiality while maintaining each element’s mysterious and elusive qualities. The image in the photograph depicts space and even recedes into the depths of implied space, while the three-dimensional components extend outward. Both features—the image and the acrylic fragments—act as a bridge between dimensions.

As photographic hybrids, the Progressions are abstract objects, and the relationship between the two components ceaselessly oscillates back and forth. With both elements of sculpture and photography, the new works become something else entirely, depending on and informing one another. The shapes and shadows that they cast are crucial; creating what Barbara Kasten deems a “temporary photogram.”

These new works conceptually relate to her AMALGAMS of the late 1970s; gelatin silver prints that fused photogram, photograph, and drawing. As photograms of transparent objects on light-sensitive prints, the AMALGAMS are three-dimensional arrangements translated into two-dimensional form. Nearly 50 years later, Kasten is now inverting this translation, turning the two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional forms.

Finally, Parallels, the large sculpture central to the exhibition, brings the transparency of form that exists in Kasten’s images fully into the viewers’ space and experience. In Parallels, she pushes the modernist, formal geometric order of these cubic constructions askew, utilizing a point of balance for its form. The fluorescent, acrylic components of Parallels are cantilevered on top of one another, each depending on the other, relying on the tension between each element and reaffirming an intuitive process.

BARBARA KASTEN was born in 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Most recently, Barbara Kasten was the subject of a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that travelled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Centre Pompidou, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. among many others.

BORTOLAMI GALLERY
39 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
www.bortolamigallery.com

Barbara Kasten: Set Motion, Bortolami Gallery, New York

Barbara Kasten: Set Motion
Bortolami Gallery, New York
2 April – 2 May 2015

Bortolami presents SET MOTION, the first solo exhibition with Barbara Kasten at the gallery. This show coincides with a survey exhibition — covering five decades of Barbara Kasten’s career — which is currently on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

A restlessly inventive and experimental artist, Barbara Kasten began making art in the 1970s, engaging with Bauhaus pedagogy, Constructivism, the California Light and Space Movement, and Postmodern architecture and design. Her work sits at the intersection between photography, sculpture and installation, and this exhibition at Bortolami brings together two important bodies of photographic works — a series of Amalgams from the 1970s and a new series of large Transpositions — as well as a new video installation, Sideways.

The Amalgams are a particularly significant group of works within Kasten’s oeuvre. Made in the late 1970s, between her Photogenic Paintings (cyanotypes) and Polaroid Constructs, the Amalgams are unique silver gelatin prints created in the darkroom, with a novel combination of camera-less image-making (objects placed directly on photographic paper) and the traditional tools of photography (light sensitive paper, an enlarger, and a negative.) In some cases, Kasten then drew or painted on top of the resulting images. “At its core,” Alex Klein writes, the Amalgams are “a consistent and rigorous investigation of materiality and perception.”

Recalling an experience she had in the 1960s at Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, Barbara Kasten’s new Transpositions mark the return of color into her work. In each image sheets of Plexiglas, which adopt the building’s distinctive color scheme, both reflect light and cast dramatic shadows, seeming to float in a disorienting environment that skews scale and perspective. Produced in her studio, these works extend the investigations that Kasten began in her Constructs, photographs of sculptural, setlike constructions that dissolve space into geometric forms, planes of color, light, and shadow. Sideways, Barbara Kasten’s newest moving image work, engages directly with the architecture of Bortolami; projected across the back wall of the gallery, this black-and-white video makes the space itself appear distended, in constant motion.

Coinciding with her retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, a new monograph on Barbara Kasten’s work will be published in late April by JRP Ringier, with essays by Alex Kitnick, Jenni Sorkin, and Alex Klein, as well as a conversation between the artist and Liz Deschenes. Barbara Kasten: Stages, curated by Klein, will remain on view at the ICA through August 16, 2015.

The work of Barbara Kasten (b. 1936 Chicago) has been exhibited extensively since the late 1970s. Most recently, in the exhibitions A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Will to Architecture, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Material Image, curated by Debra Singer at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; and Section IV: Lens Drawings, curated by Jens Hoffmann, at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris. Her work is included in numerous museum collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SF MoMA, San Francisco; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London. Kasten has been awarded several grants, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Fulbright Hays Fellowship, among others. She lives and works in Chicago. 

BORTOLAMI GALLERY
520 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.bortolamigallery.com