Josephine Meckseper @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong - Objects Synthesis

Josephine Meckseper: Object Synthesis

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

4 November 2022 – 7 January 2023

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

The Anthropological Sleep, 2022

Acrylic on canvas. 152.4 x 121.92 x 3.81 cm (60 x 48 x 1 1/2 in.)

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

Empire of Signs, 2022

Acrylic paint on glass, acrylic paint on mannequin leg, 

acrylic paint on canvas (double sided), oil paint on wooden hand form

in painted steel and glass vitrine with LED lights and acrylic sheeting 

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new works by JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER. This exhibition comprises new paintings, a vitrine, and a film work informed by the evolution and surroundings of her work practice.

Throughout her career, Josephine Meckseper’s large-scale vitrine installations and films have melded the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own imagery of historical undercurrents. Her works, encompassing sculpture, painting, photography, and film, simultaneously expose and encase cultural signifiers and everyday objects to form an investigation into the collective unconscious of our time. The works for this exhibition, made between 2020 – 2022, come together to explore the concept of recycling, tracing, and capturing matter and memory as experienced by the artist during these unprecedented years.

Amongst the works on show is The Empire of Signs, a wood and glass vitrine titled after Roland Barthes’s eponymous book. In The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes describes a “novelistic object” that allows him to remotely isolate a certain number of features somewhere in the world, out of which a new system of signs emerge. Similarly, the vitrine encases a collection of objects between which a network of subtle correlations exists - connected loosely by their previous or current functions, location, and relation to other objects within the exhibition.

Spray-painted canvases continue the rhythm of the objects assembled in The Empire of Signs. These works chart the contours of the objects encased within the vitrine to form images reminiscent of abandoned dinner table settings and shelf displays. Their hand-painted textured surfaces evoke Roy Lichtenstein’s half-tone Ben-Day dots and Sigmar Polke’s “dot” paintings, as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s early blueprints and cyanotypes conceived in collaboration with Susan Weil. Josephine Meckseper’s new paintings, titled after chapters of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, from 1966, point to his thesis of an “archaeological” approach to the history of meaning and representation – suggesting that words are now entirely transparent and arbitrary counters. Consequently, to name things is to put them in a kind of necessary order.

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER was born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany, and lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. In 2022 Meckseper received the Annual Guggenheim Fellowship and was appointed a Princeton University Visiting Fellow, and in 2021 she undertook the Elaine de Kooning House Residency, in East Hampton, NY. Josephine Meckseper’s work has been included in two Whitney Biennials (2006 and 2010); the Sharjah Biennial (2011); the Taipei Biennial (2014) amongst other biennials; and the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (2017–18). Josephine Meckseper’s large-scale public project, Manhattan Oil Project, was commissioned by the Art Production Fund and installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square in New York, in 2012. Notable solo exhibitions include Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (online) (2021); Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, and Hab Galerie, Nantes, France (2019); MOSTYN Contemporary Art Gallery, Wales, UK (2018); Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France (2016); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2014); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2013) and Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2009), a survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2007). Her work has been included in major group exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2020); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022, 2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2015); and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2014). Her work is held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Migros Museum, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Perez Museum of Art, Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Josephine Meckseper: Object Synthesis is the artist's first solo exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong.

SIMON LEE GALLERY

304, 3/F The Pedder Building , 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Sonia Boyce @ Simon Lee Gallery, London - Just for the Record

Sonia Boyce: Just for the Record

Simon Lee Gallery, London

12 October – 16 December 2022

Simon Lee Gallery presents Just for the Record, SONIA BOYCE OBE RA’s inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition coincides with Sonia Boyce’s Cork Street Banners commission which will be unveiled on 13 October 2022.

Since 1999, Sonia Boyce’s Devotional project has worked in dialogue with the public to collectively gather the names and memorabilia of black British women in music. Just for the Record presents a series of new works that both extend this project and turn memorabilia into material through which ideas of appropriation, play and chance in the artmaking process are explored.

Geometric wallpapers cover three of the gallery’s walls, with their designs created from Sonia Boyce’s growing mobile phone archive of found imagery. Transformed by the artist into patterns using mirrors, these designs are crucially arrived at by chance - the result of playful experimentation. Alongside these wallpapers Sonia Boyce presents large-scale photographic prints of fly-posters advertising the concerts, music festivals and album releases of performers who make up the Devotional collection. Shot by the artist on her travels through towns and cities across the UK, the prints raise questions of appropriation, but also consider the ubiquitous presence of popular performers in our everyday lives and in the public realm.

A short silent film titled Just One Minute More, a re-animated appropriation of Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest (1979), is also debut alongside In the Mix, an installation of wallpapered sculptures adorned with music memorabilia. Pitting colours against patterns against objects, the sculptures create tension at the centre of the gallery space with the abundance of visual information competing for our attention. 

Sonia Boyce’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery is the artist’s first solo presentation since FEELING HER WAY, a major new commission for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Following this historic win, the works in Just for the Record come together to offer unique insight into the artist’s contemporary practice.

SONIA BOYCE OBE RA (b.1962) was born in London, UK where she continues to live and work. In 2022, Sonia Boyce represents the UK at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with FEELING HER WAY, a major new commission for the British Pavilion, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In 2019, the artist received an OBE for services to art in the Queen’s New Year Honours List, as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art. In 2016, Sonia Boyce was elected a Royal Academician, and received a Paul Hamlyn Artist Award. Between 2012 - 2017, Sonia Boyce was Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and since 2014 she has been Professor at the University of the Arts London. As the inaugural Chair of Black Art & Design she led on a 3-year research project into Black Artists & Modernism, which led to a BBC documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History (2018).

Recent solo exhibitions include In the Castle of My Skin, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2020), which toured to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough, UK (2021); Sonia Boyce, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2018); Sonia Boyce: We move in her way, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK (2017) and Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre (Dada Nice), Villa Arson, Nice, France (2016). In 2015 she was included in All the World’s Futures, the International Exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London, UK; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; The Government Art Collection, London, UK; British Council Collection, London, UK and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK.

SIMON LEE GALLERY LONDON

12 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DT

www.simonleegallery.com

Dexter Dalwood @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong - 2059

Dexter Dalwood: 2059

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong 

Through October 30, 2021 

DEXTER DALWOOD

2059, 2020

Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 cm (23 5/8 x 28 3/8 in.) 

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents a series of new paintings by British artist DEXTER DALWOOD on the occasion of his second exhibition at the Hong Kong space.

In these recent works, Dexter Dalwood looks nearly four decades into the future, to the year 2059; something that the title of each painting in the exhibition makes reference to. In spite of this nominative forward-looking approach, the artist resumes his longstanding commitment to the construction and interpretation of history in painting: each work is composed out of a network of interrelated references and sources from across the annals of art, politics, literature, as well as Dexter Dalwood’s own biography. The mix of brutalism and elegance, the old and the new depicted in this latest series creates visual paradoxes that echo a version of the future that simultaneously reflects on the present.

Although Dexter Dalwood’s lexicon remains deeply embedded in the history painting genre, these new works dispense with diagrammatic attitudes towards pictorial space, instead bringing together various, often disparate, elements. Ultimately, Dexter Dalwood prioritises the overall consonance of the painting over any preconceived notion of composition, sacrificing linear perspective in the pursuit of an overall approach to painting as object that takes negative space, the edge of the canvas and the temperament of the paint – amongst other elements – into account.

Nonetheless, Dexter Dalwood continues to allude to the art-historical canon: each work is similar in scale to Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The House of Cards, offering compositional references both to this painting and Cezanne’s The Card Players. Appearing throughout the series is a circular motif that materialises in astronomical configurations of planets, or as in 2059 (portal), a classical still life fruit bowl. From Giotto’s perfect, free-hand O to a symbolic link between heaven and earth, the circle in art history conjures a myriad of associations. Painted over the course of the past year, Dexter Dalwood communicates with this imagery something of the insularity of life and the circularity of existence.

DEXTER DALWOOD was born in 1960 and lives and works in London, UK. He received his BFA from Central Saint Martins, London and his MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions include What is Really Happening, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2019); Propaganda Painting, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong (2016); London Paintings, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2014); Dexter Dalwood, Kunsthaus, Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland (2013); Orientalism, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2012); Dichter und Drogen, Nolan Judin, Berlin, Germany (2011) and a major solo exhibition Dexter Dalwood, Tate St Ives, UK (2010), which travelled to FRAC Champagne Ardenne, Reims, France and CAC, Malaga, Spain (2013). Recent group exhibitions have included Marx Collection, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2018); Painters' Painters at Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2016); Mon art à moi, Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland (2016); The Painting Show, a touring exhibition by The British Council, London, UK which travelled to Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland (2017) and CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania (2016); Fighting History, Tate Britain, London, UK (2015); The Venice Syndrome – The Grandeur and Fall in the Art of Venice, Gammel Holtegaard, Denmark (2014), Not Being Attentive I Notice Everything: Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2014); Le Corps de l'Absence, FRAC Champagne Ardennes, Reims, France, Setting the Scene, Tate Modern, London, UK (2012); and Dublin Contemporary, Dublin, Ireland (2011). His work is in major private and public collections including Tate, London, UK, The British Council Collection, London, UK, The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, FRAC Champagne-Ardennes, Reims, France and Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland. In 2021 Dexter Dalwood presents solo exhibitions in Mexico at Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City and Centro de las Artes San Agustín, Oaxaca in 2022.

SIMON LEE GALLERY HONG KONG

304, 3/F The Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Claudio Parmiggiani @ Simon Lee Gallery, London

Claudio Parmiggiani 

Simon Lee Gallery, London 

Through 25 September 2021 

CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI

Scultura d'ombra, 1999 

Smoke and soot on board 

150 x 115 cm (59 1/8 x 45 1/4 in.) 

Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Italian artist CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI in London.

For the past 40 years Claudio Parmiggiani has concentrated his practice on themes of memory, absence and silence, in his search for an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universal, existen- tial truth.

For his fourth presentation with the gallery and his third exhibition in the London space, Claudio Parmiggiani presents a suite of new Delocazione works. These panels, painted with smoke and soot, filled with the shadowy imprints of books, transform the empty gallery walls into a ghostly library. The volumes that line each shelf appear burnt, dematerialised from physical object to residual outline. An additional single Delocazione panel embodies a human figure; the imprint of a vanished presence that haunts the artist’s library. Since Claudio Parmiggiani initiated the Delocazione they have become a recurrent and fundamental element of his oeuvre, amongst his most powerful expressions of absence.

A cast iron bell hangs from the ceiling but rests immobile. Rendered mute by its stasis, its silence has a near physical impact. The stillness of the bell echoes through the gallery, magnified by the shelves, which house charred books similarly void of sound – their words eradicated. Claudio Parmiggiani has defined his installations as theatres in which silence is the performance. These works situate the potential of sound at the heart of silence: a silence of plenitude. A secluded Delocazione hides away at the end of gallery, here Parmiggiani immortalises a cloud of butterflies as they rise in flight, vividly eternalised in their silent journey their delicate wings flutter in stillness.

Over the course of his career Claudio Parmiggiani has developed a concise and powerful vocabulary, gathering objects, fragments and images which he chooses for their evocative power. The artist refers to the sources in this repository as ‘presences’. Books, bells and butterflies are an essential part of this lexicon and recurring motifs in his work. Presented in dialogue, they reinforce one another’s symbolic significance, revealing new connections in their elucidation of timelessness, humanity and antiquity.

In these new works, Claudio Parmiggiani ultimately articulates an ongoing commitment to his investigation into the human condition and the footprints we leave behind; they invite us to reflect on our quest for knowledge and the fleeting impression we leave in the annals of history.

CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI

Claudio Parmiggiani was born in Luzzara, Italy in 1943 and lives and works in Parma, Italy. Claudio Parmiggiani’s work has been widely exhibited in international museums and collections. His work has been shown six times at the Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1972, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1995 and 2015). Solo exhibitions have been held at the Frist Museum, Nashville TN (2019); Accademia di Francia Villa Medici, Roma, Italy (2015); Ex Oratorio di San Lupo, Bergamo, Italy (2014); Chiesa San Fedele, Milan, Italy (2014); Palais des Beaux Arts - BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Palazzo del Governatore, Parma, Italy (2010); Collège des Bernardins, Paris, France (2008); Palazzo Fabroni Arti Visive Contemporanee, Pistoia, Italy (2007); The Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Nantes, France (2007); The Grand Palais, Paris, France (2005); Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna (2003); Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel (2003) and Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France (2002). His work is part of the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Museo de Bellas Artes of Havana, Havana, Cuba; The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland; Mamco - Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy and Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy.

SIMON LEE GALLERY

12 Berkeley Street, London WIJ 8DT

www.simonleegallery.com

Valentina Liernur @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong - Juro Que

Valentina Liernur: Juro Que

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

25 June - 7 August 2021

VALENTINA LIERNUR

Señora rosa y perro, 2021 

Oil on canvas , 167 x 125 cm (65 3/4 x 49 1/4 in.) 

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Photo: Santiago Ortí

‘Liernur is something like a contemporary flâneuse, carefully observing women [in her work]. Motivated by the pleasure that comes with concealing one’s identity as a painter, Liernur’s observational processes become both sly and sneaky’ – Ana Vogelfang, Texte Zur Kunst.

Simon Lee Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by the Argentinian artist VALENTINA LIERNUR. The exhibition is the artist’s debut show with the gallery and marks the first time her work has been presented in Asia. 

Valentina Liernur’s practice is rooted in an ongoing exploration of the ways in which material can be rendered in the pursuit of painting. Often working in groups of work defined by a single medium, Valentina Liernur considers the physical qualities and mark-making capacity of oil paint on canvas in the same way she engages with less conventional materials such as denim and gabardine in other series. Shifting between abstraction and figuration, and often encouraging tensions and slippages to emerge between these modes of painting, Valentina Liernur seeks to manipulate and enhance the materiality of her chosen medium, embedding each work with a distinct, visceral quality.

For her exhibition in Hong Kong, Valentina Liernur presents a series of new paintings that continue her interest in recent years of depicting female figures in everyday scenarios. Valentina Liernur’s observations are based on photographs of friends, family and strangers taken in various settings including domestic spaces, public transport and city streets. Although not conceived as such, the works together form a loose sequence that the artist refers to as an account of a stroll through an urban environment. Valentina Liernur often takes the photographs that inform her paintings surreptitiously, resulting in works that capture fleeting moments that have an abrupt, confrontational and, at times, voyeuristic dynamic between the figures in the painting and the standpoint occupied by Liernur and subsequently the viewer. This awkward interaction is heightened by the prominence of sunglasses worn by many of Liernur’s subjects and the way their faces are often obscured by shadows, denying the viewer any sense of connecting and identifying with the women and girls that occupy Liernur’s works.

While the paintings in the show borrow from the language of figuration and portraiture, for Liernur the true subject of her work is the paint she uses rather than the image she creates. Valentina Liernur works intensively on each canvas, building multiple layers that shift between rough, spontaneous brushstrokes and slow, carefully executed details. Thinking of paint as information, Valentina Liernur likens her method of painting to the impulsive process of capturing thoughts in written form and the consequent, more methodical act of editing.

Valentina Liernur’s use of colour defines her work and the way the viewer experiences it. Despite starting each work from a photograph, Valentina Liernur’s choices in executing the work are more akin to the effects used in post production. In some works, flashes of lurid and luminous colours make a jolting appearance in an otherwise dark and muted palette. Elsewhere, paintings have a solarised quality or are rendered almost entirely in evocative hues of pinks and reds. Valentina Liernur’s paintings take on a dream-like quality, capturing fleeting moments in paint that speak to the experience of being deep in thought and glimpsing a sudden, incomplete aspect of reality.

VALENTINA LIERNUR was born in 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she lives and works. She studied between Beca Kuitca, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany; and in 2013 completed the Artist in Residency program with FAAP, São Paulo, Brazil. Liernur’s work has been shown internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Scarlata, Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); Sumisión, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, NY (2016); MEGA POR NO, Colmegna Spa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015); Ahhhhhhh, Campoli Presti, Paris, France (2015); Ahh...Ah..., Campoli Presti, London, UK (2014); Corruzione, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, NY (2014) and Fiebre, Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2010). Group exhibitions include four corners of the landscape, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Call Giovanni, Revolver Galeria, Lima, Peru (2019); The Vitalist Economy of Painting, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany (2018); Theft Is Vision, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2017); United States of Latin America, Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit, MI (2015); Faux Amis, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2015); Seven Reeds, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles, CA (2014); Broken Windows, New York Gallery, New York, NY (2013) and FSPC, Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami, FL (2012).

SIMON LEE HONG KONG

304, 3/F The Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Alex Hubbard @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong

Alex Hubbard 

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong 

15 January - 13 March 2021 

ALEX HUBBARD

You're a thing, 2020

Acrylic, urethane, epoxy resin, fiberglass oil on canvas 

147.3 x 162.6 x 5.1 cm (58 x 64 x 2 in.) 

Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist ALEX HUBBARD. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery and his inaugural presentation in Hong Kong. 

Alex Hubbard’s work encompasses video art, sculpture and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates an array of media in new and inventive ways. In his painting practice, the artist brings together a range of industrial materials, such as resin, urethane, oil and wax, using traditional techniques to pour, pull and drip his media across the canvas, sometimes with the assistance of a squeegee. Fields of colour underlaid with industrial prints are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured resin and oil paint. Working with fast-drying materials, Alex Hubbard embraces chance happenings, revealing the autonomy of his chosen media. Nonetheless, compositional spontaneity is achieved through meticulous layering that results in unexpected formal and chemical combinations. His latest process involves UV printing technology that unites the languages of abstraction and figuration in a single canvas via underlying prints of machinery and everyday items.

ALEX HUBBARD was born in Toledo, OR in 1975 and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has been the subject of solo museum presentations at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2014) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Major group shows include Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2018); De La Cruz Collection, Miami, FL (2017); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2016) and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014). In 2010 Alex Hubbard was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. In 2013 Alex Hubbard was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. His work is housed in prominent international collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia; Colleción Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

SIMON LEE GALLERY, HONG KONG

304, 3/F The Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

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Bas Jan Ader @ Simon Lee Gallery, London

Bas Jan Ader
Simon Lee Gallery, London
24 June - 26 August 2016

Simon Lee Gallery presents a solo exhibition of work by Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, one of the most influential artists of his generation. Forty years after the end of his brief career, his concise body of some thirty-five works created between 1969 and 1975 continues to inspire artists, writers, curators and critical thinkers.

This exhibition includes five of Ader’s short ‘falling’ films, shown in their original 16mm format, alongside the key film from 1974, Primary Time. It also includes related photo works and the seminal work, I’m too Sad to Tell You, (1971). The works exhibited reveal the depth of Ader’s investigation into questions of control and its surrender to the forces of nature, particularly in relation to the creative process and strategies of composition.

“When I fell off the roof of my house, or into the canal, it was because gravity made itself master over me”.

In the film Fall 1, Los Angeles, (1970), the camera is focused on the front of Ader’s home in Claremont, with the artist sitting on a chair straddled across the top of the roof before falling and crashing into the garden. In Fall 2, Amsterdam, (1970), Ader framed for camera a section of the Reguliersgracht canal, a canal bridge, path and trees, with the wall of the canal bisecting the picture to provide a horizon line. Ader appears in the frame from a side street, gripping his handlebars with a bunch of flowers clutched in one hand before appearing to lose control of his bicycle and plunge into the water, along with the bike and flowers. The composition, and Ader’s precisely timed action reveals the tension between will and determinism, literally destabilising the subject in an attempt to extend the material limits of art.

Ader also found in Mondrian, as the venerated patron saint of Modernism in the Netherlands, fertile ground for an interrogation of formal and compositional systems and strategies. Several works in this exhibition reflect his enquiry into Mondrian’s theories, and analysis of the modernist project. The film Broken fall (geometric), Wekstkapelle, Holland, (1971) sees Bas Jan Ader standing next to a black sawhorse, on a brick path leading to the Westkapelle lighthouse in Zeeland, the subject of an early series of Mondrian paintings. Ader’s position aligns him directly parallel to the lighthouse in the background. He momentarily staggers, then falls sideways against the sawhorse and into the bushes. The act recalls slapstick but also sees Ader literally embodying Mondrian’s black line, the sawhorse a reference to Mondrian’s fellow De Stijl member Theo van Doesburg, who introduced the diagonal into the neoplasticism debate. The film reveals a particularly concise opposition between the forces of nature and the logic of compositional control.

The film Primary Time, (1971) begins with a vase holding a bouquet of primary colour red, yellow and blue carnations. After a few seconds Ader appears dressed in black, (with his head never appearing in the frame) and systematically begins to add and remove flowers until he has arranged an exclusively red, then yellow and finally blue bouquet, literally revealing his hand as an artist constructing and deconstructing the image. Between arranging each he disappears briefly and the film ends with a return to the three coloured bouquet.

The series of twenty one photographs Untitled (Flower Work), (1974) utilises the same camera position as the film but comprises three series of seven framed images, with the final image an exclusively blue bouquet. In mixing these man-made natural forms, (a Dutch national symbol) as a painter mixes paint, Ader challenges Mondrian’s radical abstraction and suggests that it might never live up to the beauty of nature.

SIMON LEE GALLERY
www.simonleegallery.com

Christopher Wool, Simon Lee Gallery, London

Christopher Wool
Simon Lee Gallery, London
October 11 - December 22, 2006

Simon Lee presents new painting and works on paper by Christopher Wool.

Christopher Wool has punctuated the art world with works that have reinvigorated recent contemporary debate on the changing status of painting. He belongs to a generation of artists (Robert Gober, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince) who in the early 1980s were looking for new possibilities in painting and sculpture. Within his particular oeuvre, Christopher Wool has transposed elements from mass culture such as print media, advertising, music and film as a means to create a collision between painting and printing.

The processes of painting, the physical properties of paint and techniques of reproduction underpin Christopher Wool’s practice. Crucial to Wool is his impulse to exploit the limits of painting. In previous works he has used a plethora of media comprising aluminium, silkscreen, varnish, photography, paint rollers and stencils with industrial procedures and techniques made available by mass production. Wool used these procedures in combination with painting to play with the ideas and techniques of reproduction.

For Christopher Wool’s current body of work he employs silkscreen and spray paint that is meticulously built up and then partly removed. Wool has returned to painting in a reductive format to emphasis elements of painting and erasure, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. Chiefly using black spray enamel Wool draws out the tensions that are at play with form, line and colour. The action and erasure that become apparent highlight Wool’s unique form of mark making on the picture plane. By spraying the canvas, retracing the line with solvent, blending and then erasing the line of spray paint Wool maps out and retraces his line across the canvas. Wool’s medium of choice makes reference to the urban environment and graffiti, however the works sidestep hasty interpretation and the surface qualities allow the viewer focus on the retinal impact of the paintings.

Christopher Wool's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including, most recently; Christopher Wool, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2006), Christopher Wool, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France (2006), William Gedney-Christopher Wool: Into the Night, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island (2004), Christopher Wool, Camden Arts Centre, London (2004), Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, Lyon (2003), Crosstown Crosstown, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee / Le Consortium, Dijon (2003 / 2002) and Secession, Vienna (2001).

SIMON LEE GALLERY
12 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DT
www.simonleegallery.com