Jannis Kounellis at Modern Art Oxford

Jannis Kounellis 

Modern Art Oxford  

15 December 2004 - 20 March 2005 

Italian artist Jannis Kounellis, a major figure in contemporary art for over forty years, will create a unique installation of new and earlier works, specially conceived for the gallery spaces at Modern Art Oxford. It is his first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery for more than ten years.

Poetic and deeply stirring, the paintings, sculptures and carefully staged installations of Jannis Kounellis evoke shared experiences of people, places and history. His signature materials of steel, cotton, coal, coffee, wood, stones, burlap sacks and gas lamps, form the basis of an artistic language developed by Jannis Kounellis since the 1960s.

Recent interventions, both in 2004, includes a steel labyrinth at the EMST Museum in Athens and a major installation in the interior of Sarajevo's National Library, bombed during the war in Yugoslavia, in which Jannis Kounellis blocked the library's hexagonal Byzantine structure with walls of books.

At Modern Art Oxford, Jannis Kounellis will create a stunning new work for the upper gallery. Earlier works, from the 1960s to the 1990s, will be presented in the Gallery's four other spaces.

The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nairne. 

A fully illustrated publication featuring new essays by Suzanne Cotter, Andrew Nairne and Art Historian Adachiara Zevi accompanies the exhibition.

JANNIS KOUNELLIS was born in 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. From 1956 he has lived and worked in Rome. Associated with the Arte Povera (literally 'poor art') group of artists in Italy in the 1960s, he has gone on to exhibit his work throughout the world. Included among Kounellis's many solo exhibitions internationally are retrospectives at the MusŽe d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (1980); Whitechapel Art Gallery (1982); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1986); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1996). Group exhibitions include Arte Povera e IM spazio, Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa (1967), curated by Germano Celant, When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle, Bern, the groundbreaking exhibition curated by Harald Szeeman in 1969; Documenta V, Kassel (1972); Italian Art in the Twentieth Century, Royal Academy, London (1989); and Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Tate Modern (2001).

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito @ Modern Art Oxford - "Real World: The dissolving space of experience"

Real World

The dissolving space of experience

Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito

Modern Art Oxford

25 September - 28 November 2004

Six artists working internationally reconsider the nature of the sculptural object and its relationship to space in this new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. The work of Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema and Hiroshi Sugito engages with the articulation of image, information, and cultural and social economies that shape contemporary perception. Their built up and assembled objects, structures and spatial scenarios suggest new artistic attitudes in which indeterminacy, resistance and the convergence of multiple spheres of experience are the new creative conditions for understanding space and the way we inhabit it.

Katie Grinnan [b. 1970, Richmond, lives in Los Angeles] creates complex and fantastical sculptures from photographs, found, moulded and modelled objects. Distorted space, actual space and remembered space are activated and collapsed into new constructed forms. In Real World, the artist presents a new sculptural work consisting of dissolving figures, magic brews, and a New Age constructivist tower which she will install in the galleries.

Wade Guyton [b. 1972, Hammond, Tennessee, lives in New York City] describes his sculptures and drawings as Ôacts of protestÕ. The relationship between image and object is central to his work which ranges from crossed out images of vernacular architecture and modernist abstract sculpture to elegant plywood constructions and vast impenetrable objects.

Christina Mackie [b. 1958, Oxford, lives in London] describes her mixed media installations of sculpted and assembled objects, drawings and videos as paintings. Her elaborate works articulate interests in parallel worlds of knowledge and experience and the points at which they intersect. Integral to her installations is the experience of the viewer, which is often orchestrated around structural props and stages.

In his compelling sculptural explorations Paul Sietsema [b. 1968, lives in Los Angeles] unravels and reconfigures relationships between spaces and the objects inhabiting them. His mesmeric film, Empire (2002), presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003 and included in Real World, is a journey through historically specific spaces from the eighteenth century rococo interior of the Hôtel Soubise in Paris, to the 1960s modernist apartment of art critic Clement Greenberg. The figures and interiors, all seemingly real but in fact meticulously crafted by the artist, fade in and out of an absorbing prismatic haze. Drawings and a new sculptural work relating to Empire will also be presented in the exhibition.

At the heart of the work of Bojan Sarcevic [b. 1974, Belgrade, lives in Berlin] is a displacement of materials, places, people and things to create situations that are dysfunctional or incongruous. Moving between sculpture, architecture, photography and film, his works are melancholy encounters between object, space and viewer. The exhibition includes Sarcevic's large-scale sculpture, Ou la main nÕentre pas, la chaleur sÕinsue (Where the hand doesn't enter, heat infuses) (2002) and 1954 (2004), a series of 78 photographic collages in which the artist has incised and reassembled views of modernist interiors with a fractured appliquŽ of image and forms.

Hiroshi Sugito [b. 1970, Nagoya, lives in Nagoya] makes enigmatic paintings in which images and spaces float in a visual reverie of remembered experience. Trained by Yoshitomo Nara in the school of traditional Japanese painting, Hiroshi Sugito builds up his images of vaporous views of dreamlike interiors and hazy sea and landscapes through a meticulous process of layering and covering over. Working from the minute to the monumental in scale, his paintings are a meditative conversation on the motif which seems to separate itself from its pictorial support to declare itself in the world of three dimensional objects.

Real World. The dissolving space of experience is curated by Modern Art Oxford's Senior Curator, Suzanne Cotter.

A fully illustrated book featuring reproductions of work by the artists and new essays by writer and critic Michael Archer and Suzanne Cotter is available from 1 October 2004.

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Jake & Dinos Chapman: The Rape of Creativity, Modern Art Oxford

Jake & Dinos Chapman 

The Rape of Creativity 

Modern Art Oxford 

12 April - 8 June 2003 

Authenticity and the creative act are central themes of this exhibition of new work by Jake and Dinos Chapman at Modern Art Oxford (previously Museum of Modern Art Oxford).

Enfants terribles of British art, the Chapman brothers are known for their aesthetic of shock and provocation and for their consummate skill as draughtsmen and object makers. From sculptural tableaux and drawings inspired by Goya, to their sexually reconfigured mannequins sporting Nike trainers and the epic sculptural work Hell, the artists create works of weird beauty, horror and excess.

For their exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, the Chapmans present sculptures, paintings, drawings and a major new installation in the main Upper Gallery. The exhibition develops on the artists delight in cultural confusion and in challenging our assumptions about taste and meaning in art, explored most recently in The Chapman Family Collection; a faux-museographic display of hand-carved wooden fetish objects infected with the iconography of the global food outlet McDonalds.

All of the work in The Rape of Creativity are presented in the UK for the first time. 

The exhibition is organised by Modern Art Oxford.

A fully illustrated publication featuring newly commissioned essays, produced by Modern Art Oxford, accompanies the exhibition. A limited edition print are available to purchase. Jake and Dinos Chapman's last solo exhibition in a public gallery was Chapmanworld at the ICA in 1996.

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk