Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc @ MKK Frankfurt : Mefloquine Dreams

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc:
Mefloquine Dreams
MKK 1 - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
19 November 2016 - 8. January 2017

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015

Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist

© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

The French artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (b. in 1977, lives and works in Rome) is the recipient of the 17th Baloise Art Prize, which has been awarded to emerging artists every year since 1999. In conjunction with the award presentation, Abonnenc’s work Sector IX B (2015) will be on view in an exhibition at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, and will enter the museum’s collection as a gift from the Baloise Group.

With the Baloise Art Prize, the Baloise Group enables the young recipients to continue their work with the aid of the prize purse, while also – by means of the associated purchases and donations – offering them a platform for the presentation of their art.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015

Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist

© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015

Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist

© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc received the prize for a workgroup bearing a relation to a broadly-based research endeavour on a collection of ethnographic objects. The gift – the film Sector IX B (2015) – is one element of that workgroup, which has not yet been carried to completion. To develop his multifaceted œuvre of film, photography, drawings and sculpture, the artist takes as his point of departure extensive research on artefacts of colonial and post-colonial history. They serve him as representatives of complex global interrelationships and the impact of the latter on the construction of cultural identity.

The film forming the core of his presentation at the MMK 1 was first presented at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. It tells the fictive story of an ethnologist who, in the course of her research, begins to question the fundamental conditions of her discipline.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015

Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist

© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s interest in the subject goes back to biographical research on a collection of ethnological objects belonging to his grandfather Émile Abonnenc, who served in Gabon and French Guiana in 1931 as a health commissioner and collected ethnological objects there. In order to expand their ethnographic collections back home in Europe, the administrations of the colonial powers urged their citizens who lived and worked abroad to collect artefacts. The latter, which were obtained in very different ways often impossible to reconstruct, are today found in many European museums. The routes by which they entered the colonial powers’ museum holdings thus inevitably provoke questions as to the extent to which modern scientific findings were linked with – and sponsored by – the respective colonial rule and its interests. With the aid of visual analyses of various colonial and post-colonial artefacts, Abonnenc’s work sheds light on the widely diverse relationships between past and present, and between personal and collective history.

The exhibition is being sponsored by Baloise Group

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
Website: mmk-frankfurt.de

Laure Prouvost @ MMK, Frankfurt

Laure Prouvost – all behind, we’ll go deeper, deep down and she will say:
MMK - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
3 September 2016 — 6 November 2016

Laure Prouvost

Wantee, 2013

Video Installation

Courtesy of the artist

and MOT International, London & Brussels

Photo: Tim Bowditch

Laure Prouvost

Wantee, 2013

HD-Video Production still

© Laure Prouvost, Courtesy of the Artist 

and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels) 

and Carlier-Gebauer (Berlin)

Starting in September, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst will present the Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost (b. 1978) with her first comprehensive solo presentation in Germany. Under the title “all behind, we’ll go deeper, deep down and she will say:”, the artist will create an environment transforming the entire MMK 3 exhibition space into a large-scale installation. In this setting, she will unite several of her filmic works of the past years with sculptural and painterly elements to create an overall narrative. Hybrids oscillating between technical apparatuses and human figures will serve as the installation’s main architectural structure.

Laure Provoust 

It, Heat, Hit, 2010

Video Installation

Courtesy MOT International London & Brussels

and Taipei Fine Arts Museum

The point of departure for the presentation is a story invented by the artist about her fictitious grandparents. The grandfather, a satire on the heroic artist figure, has dug a tunnel within the framework of an art project, disappeared inside it and never turned up again. The actual protagonist, however, is the grandmother, who – with the aid of relics of their shared past – tells of her own fantasies, hopes and dreams.

Laure Prouvost creates a bizarre realm of the imagination that captivates the viewer on various sensory levels. The boundary between reality and fiction grows ever hazier. The artist’s concern is with penetration of unknown worlds, escape from everyday life, and the conscious loss of the self in the hope of ultimately finding one’s way back to it again.

The exhibition at the MMK 3 is the second and central chapter of a three-part survey of the work of Laure Prouvost. It began at the end of June with the installation “Dropped here and then, to live, leave it all behind”, staged in a labyrinthine structure at Le Consortium, Dijon. In Frankfurt the story will glide into a timeless world dominated by parallel narrative threads. At the end of October, at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, it will emerge again from darkness into light in a presentation entitled “and she will say: hi her, ailleurs to higher grounds”. Although the show’s three venues share a common theme, each also stands alone and offers its visitors a self-contained and independent exhibition experience.

Laure Prouvost

We Will Go Far

Installation view Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania

© Laure Prouvost, Courtesy of the Artist

and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels)

and Carlier-Gebauer (Berlin)

The exhibition is being realized in collaboration with Le Consortium, Dijon and the Kunstmuseum Luzern and in close cooperation with the artist. It is being made possible by the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung. With support from the Institut Français.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (DE/FR), the first publication ever to provide a complete survey of the artist’s œuvre to date.

MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
Website: mmk-frankfurt.de

Andy Warhol Headlines Exhibition 2011 2012 NGA

Warhol: Headlines
National Gallery of Art, Washington
September 25, 2011 - January 2, 2012

 

ANDY WARHOL, A Boy for Meg, 1962, oil on canvas. One of the artist's earliest hand-painted headline canvases. © National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

 

The first exhibition to examine works that Andy Warhol created on the theme of news headlines will premiere at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. On view from September 25, 2011, to January 2, 2012, WARHOL: HEADLINES will define and bring together works the artist based largely on the tabloid news, demonstrating his career-long obsession with the sensational side of contemporary news media. Source materials for the art will be presented for comparison, revealing Warhol's role as both editor and author. The exhibition is organized by Molly Donovan, associate curator, modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

The rich headline motif will be traced through some 80 works representing the full variety of its treatment in Warhol's practice, ranging from paintings, drawings, prints, photography, and sculpture to film, video, and television. A major, yet previously unexplored theme running through Warhol's entire career, the headline encompasses many of his key subjects, including celebrity, death, disaster, contemporary events, and the artist as subject.

After Washington, the exhibition will be on view at:

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
February 11 - May 13, 2012

Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna, Rome
June 11 - September 9, 2012

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
October 14, 2012 - January 6, 2013

ANDY WAHROL (1928-1987) is often cited, next to Jackson Pollock, as among the top American artists of the last century. Others name him, alongside Pablo Picasso, as one of the most important 20th-century artists in the world. Wherever one places him, Warhol's reach is indisputable. His visual vocabulary has become a part of the vernacular from which it originally came. Even his prescient 1968 statement "in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes" has become as ubiquitous as the 24-hour news cycle itself.

"Andy Warhol continues to inform our culture in limitless ways through a variety of media," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are proud to offer this scholarly, visually compelling exhibition and catalogue of one of the world's most famous and influential artists, providing new information and insights to all visitors, from Warhol specialists to the general public." .

Warhol obsessively scoured newspapers for their stories and images, and he kept many of them in his Time Capsules, most of which he never made into works of art. Those he elevated to the status of art, however, tell a tale that parallels and intersects the artist's own life story at times, collapsing his life and work into one epic account of post-World War II America.

The exhibition opens with the artist's earliest hand-painted headline canvases, including the National Gallery of Art's A Boy for Meg (1962), based on supermarket tabloids—a major influence on American mass culture. From his drawings in the late 1950s while working as a commercial illustrator through his transition into the fine arts in the early 1960s, Warhol explored the powerful underside of journalistic culture. By featuring stories on the joys of celebrity royals, as in A Boy For Meg; Hollywood scandals, such as Eddie Fisher's breakdown in Daily News (1962); and the tragedies of everyday people, as in 129 Die in Jet (1962), in equal measure, Warhol revealed the commodified news value assigned to the passions and disasters of contemporary life. In 1968 Warhol himself became the subject of front page news after he was shot by actress Valerie Solanas. On the occasion of his death in 1987, Warhol was again the subject of the headlines owing to his own celebrity.

Throughout his career, Warhol devoted himself to time-based media (film, video, and television) and even launched his own cable television show (Andy Warhol's T.V.). The exhibition will present the three Screen Tests in which the sitters are reading the newspaper and will show for the first time the artist's 1974 video diary of Factory superstar Brigid Berlin reading the news. Also to be seen for the first time is an outtake from an episode of Andy Warhol's T.V featuring Keith Haring discussing his own use of found tabloid headlines in his first street art interventions.

Later works include black-and-white photographs of newspaper boxes, Warhol's grids of "sewn" photographs featuring newspaper headlines, silkscreened paintings, and his collaborations from the 1980s with younger artists Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

The exhibition catalogue will include scholarly essays by Molly Donovan; John J. Curley, associate professor of art history, Wake Forest University; John Hanhardt, senior curator for media art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Matt Wrbican, archivist, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.

The exhibition is organized by the NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, Washington DC

www.nga.gov