Bruce Conner

A seminal, deeply American artist, Conner (1933–2008) was a master of irony and juxtaposition. Arguably the inventor of the found-footage film genre, he created films that are veritable X-rays of the 20th-century American mind, exposing and describing collective fantasies and fears while ultimately remaining deeply personal, intimate, and darkly elusive.
Conner played a significant role in the underground art movement that originated in the US towards the end of the 1950s, though he might have been better known and wealthier had he been less suspicious of the "conservative art gallery system", stayed off the booze and drugs, and concentrated his energies.
Although his work ranged from assemblage pieces - collage sculptures made from nylon stockings, parts of furniture, broken dolls, fur, costume jewellery, paint, photographs and candles, reclaiming objects that had been discarded and neglected - to mysterious mandala designs, photograms of his own body, ink-blot, Rorschach-like drawings and avant-garde films, all had a blend of humour, iconoclasm and intransigence.
Always afraid of selling out, Conner, as a committed oppositional artist, gradually withdrew from the art world in the late 1970s after he became part of the San Francisco punk scene, working as a staff photographer for the "punkzine" Search and Destroy. During that time, he spent most of his nights at a club called the Mabuhay. "I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay," he explained. "What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock'n'roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that." Yet, despite the woozy atmosphere, he delivered sharp and characterful photos.

Cy Twombly: Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms

No. I 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. II 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. III 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. IV 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. V 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VI 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VII 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. VIII 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. IX 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

No. X 1974
Lithograph and mixed media on paper
support: 758 x 558 mm, on paper, unique

This is one of two portfolios made in the mid 1970s, the other being ‘Natural History Part II (Some Trees of Italy)’ 1976. Twombly uses a quasi-scientific presentation with his characteristic expressive, gestural graphic language; the prints contain a variety of different lithographic printings with collaged sheets of paper and photographs.

American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He studied from 1948 to 1951. In 1951–2 he spent a semester at Black Mountain College, an important period for his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. Action painting in particular, became his point of departure for the development of a highly personal ‘handwriting' that served as a vehicle for literary content.

In Untitled (1952; Basle, Kstmus.) Twombly used long brushstrokes in contrasting tones against a dark background, only to paint partly over them again. This alternation between the visible and the hidden has been interpreted as a struggle between memory and oblivion.

In the mid 1950s Twombly began working also in chalk and pencil and his paintings assumed a more graphic character. The stylistic changes in his paintings were subsequently registered more or less simultaneously in his prolific production of drawings and prints. The potential of gestural brushwork as a form of handwriting was not exploited by Twombly until he settled in Rome and found inspiration in classical landscapes and literature.

In the 1960s Twombly made particular use of subjective, erotic signs in his paintings, and he began to use more intense and denser colours.

From 1976 Twombly again produced sculptures, lightly painted in white, suggestive of Classical forms. In the mid 1970s Twombly began to evoke landscape through colour (favouring brown, green and light blue), written inscriptions and collage elements, often distributing these features across the surface by means of right angles that emphasize the legibility of the image and its narrative character.

Miroslaw Balka: Oasis (C.D.F.) 1989

Oasis (C.D.F.) 1989
Mixed media, displayed: 3730 x 3763 x 4510 mm, sculpture

This multi-part installation is composed of fourteen wooden parts, one of which is attached to the end of a rain pipe and supports a small metal tray which contains an electric water pump that has milk running from it. A free standing bed unit is partially filled with pine needles and a doorsill sits on the floor in the foreground. Some of the parts are mounted on a wall while others sit directly on the floor in positions determined by the artist.

In response to a questionnaire sent in November 1999, the artist revealed that he used old, weathered wood from his house in Otwolk. The pieces of wood are rough and textured with cement residues, plaster and other filling materials. There is also some paint in localised areas. As the artist explained in January 2000, he applied black paint on the top of the coffin and painted the black leaves himself. The bottom left vertical plank of the house frame is decorated with a fixed metal flower ornament whereas the equivalent right-hand plank is decorated with a pencil drawing of another flower. The coffin piece comes from another sculpture, River, which the artist modified by cutting and assembling it. The sculpture has been assembled mostly using nails. The tin-plate metal tray has welded joints and is meant to slide in and out of the drain pipe section that supports it. Screws are used to fix the parts that are mounted on the wall.

There are hand-written inscriptions on the back of most of the wooden pieces and on the cardboard pieces under the plywood in the bed, mainly giving the artist’s name, work’s title and instructions for installation. Most of the planks have been given a letter and indications as to where to position them.

When the work arrived, the metal tray was quite rusted. The existing water pump (not original to the work) and wiring were considered dangerous. There was a small broken and detached piece at one extremity of the drain pipe and some of the wooden pieces had noticeable splits. There was flaking of filling and paint materials, and some pine needles were falling through the gaps along the interior sides of the bed. However, the artist wants to maintain the weathered aspect of the work. The metal tray was cleaned and the holes in the tin plate repaired by soldering. The surface was then coated for protection. The water pump and wiring were replaced and the broken piece was repositioned and fixed. Brown tape was installed along the interior edges of the bed in order to prevent the pine needles from falling through the gaps in the plywood board.

Gabriel Orozco at MOMA

"I don't like a big enterprise of people working for me," he said. "I don't want to be a master. I want to be a kid. To keep making art, you have to put yourself in the position of a beginner. You have to be excited by a stone on the sidewalk or, like a child, the flight of a bird."

In 1993, the year that he created "La DS," Mr. Orozco's career took off with multiple exhibitions. Among them was one that Marian Goodman arranged at the Venice Biennale, where he showed "Empty Shoebox," an open cardboard box left on the floor to be kicked about. "It shocked everybody," Ms. Goodman said. "He has a lot of courage in what he does and can be quite radical."

"La DS," a well-polished silver Citroën sliced lengthwise and reassembled without the middle third, is Mr. Orozco's signature work, a totemic French car remade in a Peugeot garage on the outskirts of Paris in 1993.

Villa Julia designed by Mariscal 2009

A small cardboard house designed for Magis by Javier Mariscal.

Kehinde Wiley: Black Light at Deitch, 76 Grand Street, New York

Kehinde Wiley

Enokura, Nomura, Takamatsu: Photographs 1968 - 1979 at McCaffrey Fine Art, New York

Detail of The Earth Rotation, Nov 19. 1979 14:16 - 14:46, 90x90cm. Hitoshi Nomura

Koji Enokura (1942-1995), Hitoshi Nomura (b. 1945), and Jiro Takamatsu (1936-1998) were and are non-traditional practitioners of photography working in genres including performance, sculpture, painting, music, and video. They are part of a generation of artists that emerged during the later 1960s who used the precision of photography’s registration of time, motion, and space to reveal physical truths and structures of meaning that are otherwise unapparent.

Nomura began his career by using photography to examine chance composition and transformation in his sculptural works such as Tardiology, 1968-69. In 1972 he embarked upon a ten year long project documenting his day-to-day existence using a film camera set to slow shutter speed called Ten Year Photobook or The Brownian Motion of Eyesight. Later a deepening engagement with science is reflected in The Earth Rotation series of 1979, where Nomura's long exposures of blurred seascapes and landscapes against a motionless sky contradict our Ptolemaic perception of the world.
To make Photograph of Photograph, Takamatsu commissioned a professional photographer to re-photograph a series of prints from his family album in compositions that he had arranged. Each photograph was taken from an acute angle to articulate deep shadows and bleached-out highlights, making plain the abraded dog-eared corners and dents in the photographic emulsion. Takamatsu's Photograph of Photograph examines our ritualistic reenactment of memories and our struggle against their loss through photographs. It further reveals how vintage prints acquire their own unique history and narrative that is separate from their mimetic function.
Enokura's photographs from 1972-74 are designated as performances and sculptures called Symptoms and more interrogatory photoworks identified by the subtitle P.W. The Symptoms series explore physical and existential concerns as Enokura traces the point of contact between man and matter, and the permeability of these borders in works such as Symptom - Sea, Body, 1972. In the P.W. series humble objects are photographed in the absence of an explicit narrative, conveying a pervasive sense of quietude and emptiness where differentiation and naming cease and a simple formal beauty resonates.
Hitoshi Nomura's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications. Major retrospective exhibitions have taken place at the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka (1987); Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture (2000); The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2001); and most recently at The National Arts Center, Tokyo (2009). Jiro Takamatsu was a co-founder of the art collective Hi Red Center and later was a member of the Mono-Ha movement. He has had one man exhibitions at the Niigata City Art Museum (1996); the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1999); and Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (2004). Koji Enokura (like Nomura) first received international recognition in the 1971 Paris Biennial and subsequently exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1980. Most recently his work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2005).
Enokura, Nomura, Takamatsu: Photographs 1968 - 1979 an exhibition at McCaffrey Fine Art of ground-breaking conceptual photoworks, on view from August 11th - September 26th 2009

Winter Works on Paper

John Lennon & Paul McCartney Anonymous, c. 1964

Simon Faithfull Gravity Sucks at the BFI

Double Object at Thomas Dane

Double Object was first conceived and staged on 14 June, 2008 at Occasionals, an artist run project space organised by Philomene Pirecki in her studio (www.occasionals.co.uk). Leigh Robb invited six London-based artists to respond to the idea of the double object: Bradford Bailey, Vanessa Billy, Jason Dungan, Elizabeth McAlpine, Sam Porritt and Maria Zahle. Also included were works from the 70s by Dieter Roth and Barry Flanagan, as well as more recent pieces by Glenn Ligon and Michel François.

For the Thomas Dane show, the Occasionals exhibition will be re-staged in one of the gallery spaces. Becoming a double object itself, the show will include new works by the original group of artists. It will also be expanded to include work by Philomene Pirecki and historic pieces by other artists whose use of doubling or pairing is integral to their practice, such as Roni Horn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bob Law and Dieter Roth/Richard Hamilton.

This exhibition becomes an expanded site of research. Many of the artists are presenting new works which further investigate the potential of the double, and how such a simple construct can open up a more complex field of possibility both formally and conceptually. From a pair, copy or diptych to studies in repetition, synchronicity and comparison, the double is a structure that forces questions of singularity and difference. This exhibition is an opportunity to think about why it recurs as a pivotal strategy both historically and for artists working today.