Lara Favaretto

Lara Favaretto. Gummo. 2007. 

Carwash brushes, iron, electrical motor, electrical box, electrical wire. 200 x 369 x 120 cm. 

Installation view: Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 2008. 

Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin. Photo: Paolo Pellion. © 2012 Lara Favaretto.

Lara Favaretto. Momentary Monument IV (Kassel), Documenta 2012.

I select objects that add parallel lives to my installations, objects that already have a history, especially those that have been submitted to various kinds of energy, power, and weather conditions—all agents that intervene on the materials that compose each artifact. Central to the exhibition is the overhead scaffolding, Grid After Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1921: a site-specific installation arrayed in the ceiling space of each gallery. Taken together, the orthogonal geometries of the pipes, threaded through with wool yarn in shades of red, yellow, blue, black, and white, replicate a 1921 composition by Piet Mondrian. I did not select the pipes: They were just there in my studio, having been procured from local building companies. Because I work with secondhand and found materials, my choices are limited to whatever is currently available. I can never determine in advance the characteristics (shape, color, size, etc.) of the materials that I am looking for. Sometimes I get objects that I really don’t like, and I could perhaps cheat and choose something nicer, or buy something new and make it look worn—but of course I can’t, because that element of randomness is central to my practice.

When installing this show (Just Knocked Out at MoMA PS1), I never felt physically present when positioning the work, at that moment of selection. Like a dictator, the scaffolding’s grid decided the placement for me. Hence the title, “Just Knocked Out,” which can mean “only” or “merely” knocked out, or it can allude to that moment in boxing when one falls and completely loses consciousness, waking at a loss of where they are, what they were doing, and where they are from. This is precisely the feeling that overcomes me when I stand beneath the scaffolding.

A deep sense of frustration persists in my work. While at first glance it may appear carefree and lighthearted, these qualities subside as one moves into each piece. For example, Tutti gia per terra (We All Fall Down) is a sealed room filled with confetti and four stage fans. The confetti may initially amuse, but you soon sense something that you can’t reach. Cordoned in a sealed room, the confetti circulates without end, forming a system with its own internal logic that cannot be breached. The viewer has the option to experience the work on a superficial or critical level: It is pegged to the individual’s desire, the extent to which he or she wants to enter the work.

So often, art is made to be put in an institution and preserved in perpetuity under Plexiglas. Yet, to me, this model no longer makes sense. When the boat was shipping my work from Italy to New York, I was hoping that it would sink and that my work would be destroyed. At MoMA PS1, the exhibition is very strong, but it’s also safe: The chances of an unexpected occurrence or effect are minimal, and as a result, the show becomes a matter of placing one piece here, one piece there. But if the boat had sunk, the exhibition would have begun afresh, with a much stronger energy and power. It would be, precisely, the absence of objects. Which is a controversial idea, of course.

Lara Favaretto, Artforum, June 2012
Galleria Franco Noero | Lara Favaretto

Alison Wilding

Assembly, 1991. 

Powder coated steel and PVC, 1250 x 1740 x 5470mm

This entry is partly based on an interview with Alison Wilding held on 4^th November 2003.

The two parts of this sculpture are similar in shape and size but completely different in materials and character. One is a dead-end tunnel formed from four sheets of mild steel which have been powder-coated black and the other is a complex three-dimensional grid, assembled from strips of brown, transparent PVC three mm sheet, which sits in front of the tunnel in the same orientation with the tips of the bottom layer of PVC strips just inside the tunnel entrance.

In an interview in November 2003, the artist said that the forms in Assembly arise partly from the idea of monocoque (French for "single shell") construction. This technique uses the external skin of an object to support some or most of the load on the structure as opposed to using an internal framework that is then covered with a non-load-bearing skin. Looking at the two forms inAssembly, it is clear that the artist is not using this type of construction literally. She said “I wanted to start making a work that didn’t rely on the surface. I think up until that point I’d been using a lot of sheet metal. All the works contained a space so you encountered the exterior and within the exterior there was this volume or void. I completely wanted to change the way that I was working ....It’s very hard to make a new direction but in this case I wanted to turn it inside out, to make the surface what was also the core of the work”.

The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns | Barbican

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-23,

reconstruction by Richard Hamilton 1965-6, lower panel remade 1985

3 Stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913-14, replica 1964, 

Wood, glass and paint on canvas, 400 x 1300 x 900 mm

John Chamberlain

Dolores James, 1962.

Welded and painted steel, 72 1/2 x 101 1/2 x 46 1/4 inches (184.2 x 257.8 x 117.5 cm)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 

John Chamberlain | Choices at the Guggenheim

600 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY

Andy Goldsworthy

The Historical Box, Hauser & Wirth, London

The War Room, Wally Hedrick, 1967—2002

Oil on canvas

8 parts, 335.2 x 167.6 cm / 132 x 88 in each

 Jouster, Robert Mallary, 1960

Wood, steel, cardboard, tarpaper, dirt and polyester resin

259 x 126.3 x 22 cm / 102 x 49 3/4 x 8 5/8 in

Illuminations Drawings, Simone Forti, 1972

Charcoal and ink on newsprint

3 parts: 61 x 48.3 cm / 24 x 19 in

3 parts: 48.3 x 61 cm / 19 x 24 in

6 Film Stills, Stan VanDerBeek, 1957—1965

16mm films transferred to DVD, Exhibition Loop

The Historical Box, 23 May - 28 July 2012, Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London

‘The Historical Box, curated by Mara McCarthy, director of The Box, Los Angeles showcases key pieces by influential American artists including John Altoon, Judith Bernstein, Simone Forti, Wally Hedrick, Robert Mallary, Barbara T. Smith and Stan VanDerBeek. This exhibition brings together a collection of important performance, film, dance, drawings and sculpture created during the political and social turmoil of the Sixties and Seventies in the USA. It aims not only to broaden the canon of art history, but also to highlight the contemporary relevance of the issues which these artists confronted over three decades ago.

Le Cartel | 23 June - 12 July 2012. Galerie You-Ads Dupin, Paris Julie Le Guern, Valérie Le Guern, Caroline Rennequin et Vincent Villard

www.atelierdesevres.com

Tom Burr Deep Wood Drive | Bortolami Gallery NY

Untitled Pink Piece, 2012
Wool blanket and upholstery tacks on plywood 72 x 72 x 3 inches

Berlin Blue, 2012

Wool blankets and upholstery tacks on plywood 72 x 72 x 3 inches

An Orange Echo, 2012

Plywood, mirrored plexiglas, used theater seats 72 x 42.5 x 36 inches (each)

In Deep Wood Drive Burr continues his visual exploration of the physical and psychological dimension of objects, and the fantasies we project upon their surfaces. Integral to the exhibition are works from the new series of “Clouds,” which are wooden wall panels covered with woolen blankets meticulously arranged and pinned to convey states of comfort and discomfort, order and disarray. These works are shown alongside floor-bound sculptural works that engage notions of containment, biography, and protectionism in the context of public view.  The title of the exhibition refers to a childhood location where Burr grew up, where particular instances of trauma and ecstasy were played out, remembered, and then restaged at various moments in the development of his work. This exhibition refers back to that childhood moment, but also to subsequent stages of it’s reimagining, with several of the works are being conscious re-visitations of earlier themes, brought together with the “Clouds.”Burr describes the “Cloud” series as “imprints, instead of having the neutral associations that various materials hold: canvas, fabric, paint, ink, etc., the blankets hover solidly between being a utilitarian object and a material that conforms to the work of a painting. Or a painting that is impersonating a sculpture, or inversely, a sculpture impersonating a painting. Another focal point of the exhibition is a large eight-foot black metal cage, a theme that the artist has employed before. This piece, entitled Baited like Beasts, will sit in the center of the gallery’s main room, both blocking the space and framing it. There is no door to the cage, instead there are openings on each side, cut outs, or windows through the bars, allowing clearer views into the interior on the cage, and through to the surrounding exhibition.

DEEP WOOD DRIVE BORTOLAMI PRESS RELEASE 

Robert Morris Untitled (L-Beams) 1965

Ellsworth Kelly | Reliefs 2009 - 2010, Matthew Marks Gallery, LA

Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”  Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”

Matthew Marks Gallery

Cyprien Gaillard | Centre Pompidou

Yayoi Kusama | Centre Pompidou

Andrew Lord

 Listening, 1996-1998

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

I: 28 x 16 x 15 1/2"

II (with lid) 29 x 15 1/4 x 15 1/2

Biting, 1995-1998

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

Vase 1: 30 x 21 x 21"

Vase 2: 29 x 16 x 14"

Swallowing, 1999-2007

Ceramic, epoxy, gold leaf, Encre de Chine

Jug: 24 x 12 x 16 1/5"

Vase: 27 3/4 x 13 x 12 1/2"

Three-Legged Plate: 21 x 20 x 20"

From his earliest exhibitions in the late seventies and early eighties, Lord has used clay as a medium of fine art to explore various subjects. While these subjects are as varied as silhouettes of artists and writers traced by the outer contours of a vase or pendent fragments modeled from his own body, Lord’s work grasps sensation as physical form. He translates the action of the senses—hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling—from their liminal states into objects, both tactile and visual.

In this new body of work, Andrew Lord approaches memory as a sense itself, creating sculpture in clay and plaster based on landmarks from Whitworth, England, where he grew up. Just as he used his own body as an implement to show the physicality of sensation, he treats the act of remembering as a capacity with corporeal potential. He said that “making this work has been a process of finding lost places”; and in reviving genius loci through his own hand, Lord has created a sculptural map of the town, navigating a personal history through the locatable and recognizable features of Whitworth’s geography. In addition to sculpture, this exhibition marks Lord’s first exploration of film, having created a video work based on a recent visit back to Whitworth. While the juxtaposition of the film may initially seem like a corrective to the more subjective sculptural survey, neither represents a standardized view; rather, both incorporate the aura of the artist’s own memory, discovery and desire.

Andrew Lord was born in 1950 in Whitworth, England, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Art & Project, Amsterdam; The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA; Camden Arts Center, London; and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. He has also been included in group exhibitions including “Atelier 15,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; “Westkunst-Heute,” Museen dr Stadt, Köln; “Anderer Leute Kunst,” Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; 1995 Whitney Biennial; “Site and Insight” PS1, New York.

Robert Morris | Felt Pieces

Robert Morris, Untitled, 2010

Felt, 261.6 x 256.5 x 94 cm

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1996

Grey Felt, Steel Bar, 199 x 400 x 124 cm

Robert Morris, Untitled (Pink Felt), 1970

Felt pieces of various sizes, overall dimensions variable

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection  91.3804

© 2009 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: David Heald © SRGF

In 1964, at New York’s Green Gallery, Robert Morris exhibited a suite of large-scale polyhedron forms constructed from 2 x 4s and gray-painted plywood. This kind of simple geometric sculpture came to be called Minimalist because it seemed to be stripped of extraneous distractions such as figural or metaphorical reference, detail or ornament, and even surface inflection. Sculptures like the Untitled (Corner Piece), one component of the 1964 suite, boldly delineate the space in which they are located, thus defining the physical and temporal relationship of the viewer to the sculptural object.

Morris’s sculptures often consist of industrial or building materials such as steel, fiberglass, and plywood, and were commercially fabricated according to the artist’s specifications. The value of the “artist’s hand”—the unique gesture that defines an individual’s skill and style—was inimical to Morris, and the work of art became, in theory, not an “original” object but a representation of the idea from which it was conceived. This notion allowed for the creation and destruction of a piece when necessary; Untitled (Corner Piece), for example, can be refabricated each time it is to be exhibited.

In 1968 Morris introduced an entirely different aesthetic approach, which he articulated in an essay entitled “Anti-Form.” In this and later writings he reassessed his assumptions underlying Minimalist art and concluded that, contrary to earlier assertions, the construction of such objects had relied on subjective decisions and therefore resulted in icons—making them essentially no different than traditional sculpture. The art that he, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and others began to explore at the end of the 1960s stressed the unusual materials they employed—industrial components such as wire, rubber, and felt—and their response to simple actions such as cutting and dropping. Untitled (Pink Felt)(1970), for example, is composed of dozens of sliced pink industrial felt pieces that have been dropped unceremoniously on the floor. Morris’s scattered felt strips obliquely allude to the human body through their response to gravity and epidermal quality. The ragged irregular contours of the jumbled heap refuse to conform to the strict unitary profile that is characteristic of Minimalist sculpture. This, along with its growing referentiality, led Morris’s work of the late-1960s and early 1970s to be referred to by such terms as Anti-Form, Process art, or Post-Minimalism.

Jennifer Blessing

Gabriel Orozco | Sand on Table 1992-93

Sand on Table, 1992–93, Gabriel Orozco
Silver dye bleach print

12 1/2 x 18 3/4 in. (31.8 x 47.6 cm)

© Gabriel Orozco, Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Orozco works in sculpture and photography in a style that is elegant, minimal, and antimonumental. His sculptures are often ephemeral—in this case, a table on a beach topped with a pyramid of sand—and his photograph of it gives the constructed situation a longer life. This work encourages an awareness of the temporal fragility of our accomplishments as well as of the richness of the resources available if we would but use the ordinary in poetic ways.

Robert Smithson | Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea 1966

PROPOSAL FOR A MONUMENT ON THE RED SEA
(formally known as Cube in Seascape), 1966

Paper on gelatin silver print

Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York

Picasso: Guitars 1912 - 1914

Pablo Picasso. Still life with Guitar. 

Variant state. Paris, assembled before November 15, 1913. Subsequently preserved by the artist. 

Paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire installed with cut cardboard box

Overall: 30 x 20 1/2 x 7 3/4" (76.2 x 52.1 x 19.7cm). 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of the artist

Sometime between October and December 1912, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) made a guitar. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued, Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before. In 1914 the artist reiterated his fragile papery construction in a more fixed and durable sheet metal form. These two Guitars, both gifts from the artist to MoMA, bracket an incandescent period of material and structural experimentation in Picasso’s work. Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores this breakthrough moment in 20th-century art, and the Guitars’ place within it. Bringing together some 70 closely connected collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs assembled from over 30 public and private collections worldwide, this exhibition offers fresh insight into Picasso’s cross-disciplinary process in the years immediately preceding World War I.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 is on view from February 13th to June 6 at the Museum of Modern Art;  moma.org.

When Picasso Changed his Tune New York Times Review

Dan Mort

Celestine, 2008. Book, replica fruit, polystyrene, plaster, varnish, ink, 23 x 15 x 9 cm

Counterfactual, Dan Mort, 2008. Electrical cable, mug, 31 x 8 x 8cm

Jost Muenster: Ground Control at Museum 52

Forever Young, 2009 Acrylic Paint, Wood, 100 x 44cm

Anlage, 2010. Acrylic Paint, Wood, Spray Paint 74 x 35 x 8cm

Things Have Changed, 2009. Acrylic Paint, Wood 61 x 16 x 32cm

Spot, 2009. Acrylic Paint, Wood 61 x 46cm

Lift, 2009. Acrylic Paint, Wood, Paper 37 x 65 x 124cm

Jost Münster's works experiment with colour and the painted surface exploring the reaches of representation. Working from his urban surroundings, Münster strips away pictorial detail, flattens and collages surfaces with abstract, mosaic-like colour swatches and backgrounds. Using shapes and silhouettes derived from the interplay between architecture and the painterly aspects of the everyday, Münster forges a new and subtle vocabulary of forms and references.

With a distinct musicality Munster's interplay of forms, textures and rhythms creates both a series of individual works, but equally an installation bound by his varying use of speeds, punctuations and chords of colour, which move seamlessly through the works. His work offers a playful and subtle figuration; by continually subtracting points of reference, the work treads a fine line between being weathered and depleted, and conversely, entirely full of fresh content; the painterly marks that obscure and delete become potent and colourful scapes.

These works both invite a genuinely formal response but also question their own status as either paintings or sculptures. This type of distinction establishes the backdrop to Münster's oeuvre as the presence of a set of possibilities that remain significantly undefined.

The origin of all the works is in the painted surface and a very pure interaction with colour and its formal interplay. Münster presents points of departure, several layered chords, all building towards a cadence of colours, textures and forms, which explore the depictions of space. This elegant balancing of the planes of vision makes the space in front of and behind the works seem to fold in and out simultaneously. Solidity gives way to emptiness, constructions are replaced by proposals or suggestions of form as paint is diluted, washed and simultaneously pushed within the surfaces.

Jost Münster was born in Ulm, Germany. He studied at The Fine Art Academy in Stuttgart and Goldsmiths College in London. He currently lives and works in London. He has exhibited in both Europe and the US, with a recent solo exhibition at the Kunstverien Friedrichshafen, Germany.