Simon Denny at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC

Simon Denny
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
November 10 - December 22, 2011

SIMON DENNY's inaugural exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery shares its title with a trade magazine. Published from 1988 to 1990, in the wake of the market crash, “Corporate Video Decisions” was distributed to video departments within corporations, who were responsible for making videos with the intention of both boosting internal morale and managing their public image.

This magazine serves as the content for different media transpositions, which result in different types of hybrid objects. One side of the gallery wall is lined with a scatter of canvas-reliefs printed with photographs of digital collages displaying selected issues of the magazine. Each work includes two canvases printed with the same image, superimposed with spacer bars. Emphasizing the effects of remediation, the moire pattern on the surface of the photograph, a result of submitting the screen to photographic reproduction, resonates with the weave of the canvas.

Simon Denny has also worked with a professional corporate DVD designer to produce a 3-D graphic interface for a digital archive of “Corporate Video Decisions,” which is navigable in a manner comparable to an iTunes library. This archive has been loaded onto the same Samsung monitors which were photographed to create the canvas-reliefs.

Facing these two series of works is a large trading table, imported from a decommissioned office in Germany, disassembled into its constitutive parts and arranged vertically in a manner suggesting a bar graph.

In the rear office space of the gallery, Simon Denny has materialized the website of Diligent Board Portals, a successful designer of paperless presentation software for boardrooms.

Each section “header” of the website (Home, About Us, Diligent Boardbooks, Security, Global Support, Clients, Investors, In the News, Demo, Corporate, Windows) has been translated onto canvas and encased in plexiglas boxes, protruding from the walls like signs. All content (text, images, and downloadable PDFs) are packaged in plastic bags. The inert, packaged quality of these objects contrasts with the interactive structure of both the immaterial online pages and the software sold by Diligent Board Portals.

If the magazine “Corporate Video Decisions” provides a snapshot of commercial video culture around the economic slump of the late 1980s, the website of Diligent Board Portals is a piece of ephemera which fulfills a similar function with respect to the present.

Duplicating the geographic structure of Diligent Board Portals, which is based in Christchurch, New Zealand and New York City, this exhibition follows an exhibition of the same title at Michael Lett in Auckland, New Zealand. –Michael Sanchez

Friedrich Petzel Gallery
537 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011
www.petzel.com

Nicola Tyson, Friedrich Petzel, NYC

Nicola Tyson, New paintings and sculptures 

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 

Through November 5, 2011

NICOLA TYSON exhibits a group of new large-scale paintings that depict two figures locked in a separate but tense relationship to one another. Each figure is rendered in the artist’s chromatically intense palette and commands its space within the canvas frame. The figures are both animated and permanently fixed by the painted surface – a trick that only paintings can readily perform. These figurative “characters” present strange physical amalgams and morphological complexities that describe an anarchic freedom rather than violence, genetic engineering or alienation. Bizarre yet strangely credible, these characters originate from fertile but exiled parts of what we might inadequately term the “subconscious” or “imagination” – some place in the complex space of the mind, beyond the reassuring confines of “reason.” The figures are filtered and translated into a kind of readable and familiar lexicon of gestures and appendages. These images are often a surprise to the artist herself. The result is playful, humorous, disturbing as well liberating.

Technically, the paintings evolve out of rapid sketches that are scaled up to the size of the canvas. Tyson’s taut color decisions and very visceral, yet “dry” paint application are key ingredients in establishing the final painting. Nicola Tyson sees herself as operating in relationship to British satirical tradition going back to the 18th century caricaturist James Gillray, who himself identified a national urge towards what he termed “Mock Sublime Mad Taste” – a pushing beyond satire into anarchic freedom, an impulse that was picked up at the end of the 19th century by the Belgium artist James Ensor.

A show of small sculptures at the adjacent gallery space introduces a new direction of investigation for Nicola Tyson’s work. Tyson overcomes the limitations of two-dimensional space as she pops her figures from the flat surface and engages with them in the round. The small delicate sculptures have the immediacy of a sketch, much like her Sketch Book Drawings (last exhibited in 2007 in the same space). Each piece is created rapidly in a fast drying modeling compound but they nevertheless possess a formal weight and complexity, and intuitive attention to space. The group includes one piece cast subsequently in bronze in complete contrast to the original incredibly lightweight modeling compound.

NICOLA TYSON’s work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Corcoran Gallery of Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Gallery, London. In 2010 she was nominated for the Royal Academy’s prestigious Charles Wollaston Award.

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY NYCwww.petzel.com

Willem de Rooij: Crazy Repelled Firelight - Exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC

NYC Contemporary Art Exhibition: Willem de Rooij, Crazy Repelled Firelight  

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Chelsea, NYC

Crazy Repelled Firelight is a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Willem de Rooij in New York City at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Since 2007, Willem de Rooij has been producing abstract weavings that aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. The first weavings of this kind, originally produced for the 2009 Athens Biennale and shown in this exhibition, titled Silver to Gold (2009/2011). This artwork was industrially produced at Van Maele linen manufactures outside of Brussels and consists of five stretched pieces. The material developed for this work is a mixture of unbleached Belgian Linen and silver and gold-colored polyester threads. Through a step-by-step transition the monochromatic silver panels gradually change to gold through adjustments in the mixture.

Joining Silver to Gold in his exhibition, Willem de Rooij has produced four new handwoven works. These works show a gradual transformation in color through the production of the material they are made from. The first handwoven artwork, Black to Black (2011) gradates from shiny black to matte black. Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, this fabric panel is woven on a loom by placing black cotton lengthwise (the warp) and weaving 10 different mixtures of polyester sewing thread as well as reflecting synthetic strips crosswise (known as the woof). 

The second woven panel, Black to Brown (2011) also has a black cotton warp as a base that is then shot through with 10 different mixtures of black and brown polyester sewing thread, producing a slow gradation from black to brown. 

A third artwork, Digot Lovers (2011) an anagram of the words “silver to gold,” combines unbleached linen with silver and gold-colored polyester threads, gradating color from the unbleached linen to a combination of silver and gold thread which approach from either side of the lozenge. 

The fourth handwoven work on display, Mechanize Her Jenny (2011), is a pink monochrome produced from unbleached linen and a woof plied of 10 different shades of pink polyester sewing thread, so that the resulting image fluctuates in color depending on the physical position of the viewer. 

These four artworks were produced by Ulla Schünemann on a 200-year old loom at Handweberei Geltow outside Potsdam, Germany.

Willem de Rooij’s work is determined by the selection and combination of images in diverse media, such as sculpture, film, photography and text. His work analyzes the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between socio-political and autonomous image production. Where early film installations already had a sculptural quality, de Rooij's most recent exhibitions became works of art in their own right, often incorporating found materials or appropriated works of art. 

Bantar Gebang (2000), a 10-minute single take 35mm film, shows an early morning scene in a slum area in Jakarta, Indonesia. While the sun rises, the colors of the landscape are in constant flux. 

Orange (2004), a slideshow comprised of eighty-one 35mm slides that are all a different shade of orange, was shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006. A wall text that accompanies this work associates prisoners’ attire on Guantanamo Bay with national identity in general and that of the Netherlands in particular. 

Bouquet V (2010) is a flower arrangement that exists of 95 different flowers, each individual species or type being present only once. 

Bouquet VI (2010) juxtaposes 100 black tulips with 100 white tulips. These works all test the capacity of supposedly objective entities (color, form, material) to simultaneously evoke and question social and political structures: difference, individuality, majority, change, and polarization. 

The notion of referentiality, and more specifically the development of strategies to bypass external references became important parameters in Willem de Rooij’s work over the last 5 years. Intolerance, shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the autumn of 2010 is the most recent in a series of temporary sculptural installations that investigate whether it is possible to produce new works out of existing objects and artworks, rather than to use them as references.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: WILLEM DE ROOIJ (born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Holland) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam from 1990-95 and at the Rijksakademie from 1997-98. He has been a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002 and Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. De Rooij lives and works in Berlin. De Rooij worked and exhibited together with Jeroen de Rijke untill 2006, followed by exhibitions at K 21, Düsseldorf (2007) and at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008). He received a Robert Fulton Fellowship at Harvard University in 2004 and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MUMOK, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Rooij will participate in group exhibitions at the Kröller Möller Museum, Otterloo, the Centro Galego de Arte de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostella, and PS1, New York later this year. A new installation at Bentheim Castle, Gemany and a large solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich, Germany will open early October.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 & 537 West 22nd Street, in Chelsea between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York, NY 10011. 

Website: www.petzel.com

Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij 
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 
January 19 - February 18, 2006 

Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC presents the first solo exhibition in New York by Dutch artists, JEROEN de RIJKE and WILLEM de ROOIJ. This show features a slide projection titled Orange, a bouquet of flowers and its black-and-white photographic representation, Bouquet IV, as well as two large-scale photos, titled Light Studies V and VI.

The slide projection, Orange, consists of a series of 81 monochrome slides, projected in succession on a white wall. Because the color orange, when used in a photographic realm, tends to altar skin tones towards an unrealistic pink hue, film is frequently developed to avoid the color orange in its spectrum. Through the use of an orange filter, this piece captures a range of orange shades through layering papers, sheets and gels.

"Our initial aim was to approach the color of overalls worn by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay... At the same time, we are confronted with nationalist sympathies gaining importance in post-populist neo-conservative Holland on a daily basis. While Dutch immigration policies reached an unprecedented ideological extreme as the Balkenende administration came to an agreement in February 2004 to expel 26,000 illegal immigrants from the country, popularity polls indicated 84% approval among Dutch citizens of monarchy as the ideal form of state. Not since World War II has there been such interest in Queen Beatrix and her family, the House of Orange." 

Bouquet IV, which consists of a specific flower arrangement, as well as a black and white photograph of the arrangement in a matte aluminum frame, "was organized so that its colors in black and white reproduction translate into a relatively small range of grey-shades, resulting in an even spread of tones from which high contrasts and extremes on either side of the spectrum are excluded." This conceptual play on the black and white image, which is typical of traditional photography, also characterizes the works Light Study V and Light Study VI.

De Rijke / de Rooij make work that revolves around questions of representation relating to imagery taken from cultural and historical artifacts, socio-political forms, as well as images from both media and artistic sources. Through the use of photographic images, and the play of reality and virtuality, the artists blur the lines between what is seen and what is perceived.

The artists have been working together since 1994. Their collaborative work has been the focus of gallery, museum, and institutional shows in the United States and throughout Europe. Recently, their film, Mandarin Ducks, was featured in the Dutch pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale and they were nominated for the 2005 Hugo Boss prize. In late 2005, they had exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Vienna Secession, Austria.

Jeroen de Rijke was born in 1970 in Brouwershaven, Holland, and Willem de Rooij was born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Holland. Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij both studied at the Rietveld Akademie and then the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The artists currently live and work in Amsterdam.

The exhibition opens in FRIEDRICH PETZEL' NEW GALLERY SPACE, 537 W 22 S, NYC 10011

www.petzel.com

Philippe Parreno, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC - One Thousand Pictures Falling From One Thousand Walls

Philippe Parreno: One Thousand Pictures Falling From One Thousand Walls 
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
April 10 - May 5, 2001

Friedrich Petzel Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition by Paris based artist Philippe Parreno. One Thousand Pictures Falling from One Thousand Walls, consists of two video installations, Credits 2000 and Anywhere Out of the World 1999 and a carpet inlay that draws the projection of sounds on the floor.

Credits suggests an urban landscape and the play areas of housing projects built during the 1970s in France. Credits begins with a dark screen from which the image of bare trees with brightly colored plastic bags fluttering from their empty branches slowly emerges. Apartment buildings appear in the distance. The scene is never viewed in daylight. Playing in the background of this artificial landscape is a piercing guitar riff by Angus Young. At the end, when the movie fades to the black, the gallery lights go on revealing a picture of a young boy named Gerard Philippe, photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

Credits is the results of a large collaboration of artists, technicians and a series of personalities who were influential during the 1970s, such as Angus Young, the lead guitarist of AC/DC; Alain Peyrfitte, the former French Minister of the Interior in the Charles de Gaulle cabinet, and MIKO an ice-cream maker. More specifically this film is an investigation into the history of a type of housing project called Les Grands Ensembles, from the late 50s-60s. Credits was exhibited previously at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The second video installation is titled Anywhere Out of the World. Last year, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights of Annlee, a Japanese Manga character. This collaborative project, titled No Ghost Just A Shell began with two episodes made respectively by the two artists. Anywhere Out of the World is Philippe Parreno's contribution, while Pierre Huyghe's contribution was exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York last fall. Throughout the four-minute video, Annlee talks frankly about her situation as a simple, empty commodity within the Japanese animation world. As a nameless figure, Annlee easily could have been disposed of and forgotten, but was "rescued" and given life.

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.petzel.com