Horsfield‘s Seven Panels are beautiful, intriguing images made more intense and mysterious by the very method and material they’re made of. He's a true pioneer, restlessly experimenting with new media (as some great artists do), in this case gesso coated oak panels, printed with layer upon layer of ink and coated with wax. The build up pushes the image forward so that it feels hyper present; a peony becomes intensely delicate or the dead fish intensely wet. These works link to still life paintings that have been made over the centuries, by artists such as Manet, Melendez, Dürer or Velazquez - whose paintings Horsfield, who is associated with the development of ideas of relation and slow time, has studied through a lifetime, attentive to the form, the disturbance, the vision each artist brings and their search to find a way of making an image that will be completed by every viewer who sees it over time.
 
Craigie Horsfield (*1949) has had major exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 2012), M HKA (Antwerp, 2011), Museo di Capodimonte, (Naples, 2008); Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2007), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2006), Centro de ArteModerna – Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2006); he participated in Documenta X and XI (Kassel, 1997, 2002) and the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2004). His work is in many public collections (including the Tate Gallery, London; Whitney Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), along with private collections worldwide. In 1996 Horsfield was nominated for theTurner Prize.

Jean-Baptiste Bouvet
Karl Burke
Jonas Dahlberg
Dean Hughes
 
{ } – The Empty Set is a mathematical expression to describe nothingness. It also applies philosophically as a tool to debate null. The empty set is not the same thing as nothing; rather, it is the framing of nothingness. Once acknowledged, it stops being anything and nothingness becomes something.
 
For further information please contact the gallery info@mariastenfors.com

Maureen Paley is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work at the gallery by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
Tim Rollins is an artist, teacher and activist who began his career as the assistant of the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. In 1979 he co-founded Group Material in New York. In the early 1980s, he taught students at Intermediate School 52 in the Bronx and went on to create the Art & Knowledge Workshop. His highly acclaimed collaboration with the members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) continues to this day. Rollins combines lessons in reading and writing with making artworks. The source material laid out and studied by the students generally relates to literary or musical classics, such as works by William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison or Franz Schubert, but can also include comics or legal documents.
 
Their collaborative work takes the form of drawings, photographs, sculptural objects and paintings on canvas and paper. The backgrounds of works are often comprised of pages of books pasted into a grid. The results blend elements of Minimalism with an interest in the revival of painting that took place in the 1980s and in art that is socially and politically engaged. Rollins has said: ‘What we’re doing changes people’s conception about who can make art, how art is made, who can learn and what’s possible, because a lot of these kids had been written off by the school system. This is our revenge.’
 
Inspired by the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells‘ The Time Machine (1895) the group have endeavored to explore this idea in their exhibition and have made work based on imaginary ’visitations‘ with Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Darwin and Strauss.
 
Their journey begins in 1590 at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and simultaneously in 1826 when Mendelssohn at 17 years of age began work on his own score for a production of this play. In their work A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare, 1590-1596 and Mendelssohn 1826–1842) they invited young people to transform into the character of Puck, painting flowers and blossom over sheet music from Mendelssohn‘s score that was completed in 1842. Next they imagined the first performance of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn in 1786 and created seven paintings that use black Spinel pigment that they applied onto pages from this score. They then visited Charles Darwin in 1837 as he began sketching out his idea of a ’Tree of Life‘ in one image that would be developed into his theory of evolution described in On the Origin of Species published in 1859.
 
In 1945 they meet with Richard Strauss in the final days of WWII while he was composing his elegiac and mournful Metamorphosen (in Memorium). This music created a deep desire within the group to reflect on their experiences working in the South Bronx that brought up feelings of tragedy and transformation, destruction and rebirth. They have created a meditation in this new body of work that memorializes, researches and remains hopeful by existing in past, present and future tenses.
 
’We embrace the idea of the arena of art existing in the fourth dimension of a social imagination beyond space and time, contingency and possibility.‘ Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
’The past is not dead. In fact, it‘s not even past.’ William Faulkner
 
Tim Rollins was born 1955 in Pittsfield/ME, USA and lives and works in New York. The current member of the K.O.S. are Angel Abreu, born in Philadelphia/PA, USA 1974; Jorge Abreu, born in New York/NY, USA 1979; Robert Branch, born in New York/NY, USA 1977; Daniel Castillo, born in New York/NY, USA 1982; Nelson Ricardo Savinon, born in New York/NY, USA 1971 and Bryce Zackery, born in Rochester/MN, USA 1984.
 
Solo Exhibitions include Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - The Black Spot, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, GAMeC - Galleria d´Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy, 2011; What Matters, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester/MA, USA, 2010; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Great Britain, 1998; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington/DC, USA, 1992; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/CA, USA, 1990; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis/MN, USA; 1988.
 
In 2012 they contributed to the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London and they will collaborate with the School of Visual Arts and students from public schools and programmes in New York's Chelsea neighborhood to create a work for the High Line Park in New York in 2013.

Food is essential for life and energy. For millennia it has been intrinsic to human culture and our relationship with it often reveals much about our lives. Yet, food is also a conundrum. For many it is pleasure, comfort or joy but for others it is pain, anguish and hardship, being both greed and hunger.
 
Through drawing and printmaking, Mary Dalton’s work is informed and enthused by stories and personal life experiences, from teaching the homeless, working at London’s renowned Borough Market to living close by a major pheasant shooting woods. The response is often personal, sometimes political, inspiring her to produce abstract, intricate and often dark narratives. Dalton is not afraid to confront the darker side of our relationship with food letting her works throw new light onto our need for food consumption and the enigma’s it can sometimes cause.
 
Exhibiting alongside the works will be Dalton’s first book, ‘Embracing the Surplus and the Unwanted’ and several textile pieces. Typeset by the award winning Whittington Press, the book contains numerous hand printed pages and illustrations focusing on our need and waste for food. The textile pieces are an extended canvas from the printing press, a second outcome for a larger narrative. The fragility of embroidery and disembodied figures play homage to and fully encapsulates the spirit of this exhibition and encourages us to think differently about the way we use food in daily life.

Preview Friday 31st May, 6 to 9pm
 
Opening in the presence of the artist: Friday 28 June, 6 to 9pm
 
Im Wald, im Wald! da konnt ich führen
Ein freies Leben mit Geistern und Tieren;
Feen und Hochwild von stolzem Geweih,
Sie nahten sich mir ganz ohne Scheu.
 
Heinrich Heine (from Waldeinsamkeit)
 
(In the woods, in the woods! There I could lead /A free life with spirits and animals; /Fairies and deers with proud antlers /they approached me without fear)
 
The times you wish to walk out, withdraw, pull out of the game because it has become just a game. Disengage…
Suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, Heinrich Heine spends the last years of his life semi paralysed and partly blind in Paris. There he composes Waldeinsamkeit, in which he recalls a nature retreat in Helgoland shortly before his decision to divert his Romantic energies away from poetry and into the political battles of restoration Europe. Twenty years on, 1851, looking back, the incompatibility he used to make between poetry and his philosophical and political writing seems nonsensical; he now assesses, through his renewed poetic drive, that the revelry, the myths, the magical world of tales and the private realm of the imagination, are in fact an essential part in the struggle against the reactionary -religious or Jacobins- forces of his time.
 
Around the same time in Concord, USA, a man sets out to live in a forest for two years, two months and two days. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”. In Walden or a life in the woods, this man, Henry David Thoreau argues the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in finding the true self and transcending “the life of quiet desperation which most men lead”.
 
The creation of public parks attempted the reciprocal taming of nature and men, offering “public walks calculated to promote the health and comfort of the inhabitants”, because “want of recreation generated incipient disease, discontent; which in its turn led to attacks upon the Government”. But from the outset, parks were used in ways which deeply disturbed some public minds. Ensuing moral panics, regulation and further, constantly shifting, uses, they remained ideal spaces of appropriation, contestation and debate; where norms of behaviour could be forged, contested or established; and where behaviour beyond the norms could retain the Romantic appeal of transgression.
 
“A Walk in the park” is a feature length work by Stefan Hoderlein filmed using a thermographic camera. This technology developed for security and military purposes is used here to capture the perimeters of a bucolic cruising ground near Düsseldorf.
 
The camera operates outside the spectrum of visible light: it maps the territory of heat. All objects emit a certain amount of infrared radiation as a function of their temperature. Trees, benches, people. The film’s thermal images are bright, intense colours, pseudo-colours. Each colour represents a different temperature: white and red, traditionally but subjectively, used for higher temperatures, to green, blue and violet for colder ones. Darkness transforms into light. For Hoderlein, directness, honesty, the celebratory and rude pride. By other means, what can’t be seen will be made to be seen.
 
The individual with intentional stance enacts a temporary walkout; performing the pragmatic in the face of impossibility, joining in an irrational illusory social loophole, celebrating the joy of this delimited pastoral precinct, where the weight of society is lifted collectively in the company of men.
The halted traveller surveying the countryside; the hermit in the undergrowth, shed of his possessions, seeking simplicity in the poverty of connections; the nature, empty screen to project our grief; the hunter in the solitude, cock as bait, catching a reflection of himself; the magical pull of some untamed wilderness, domesticated; and the moments of madness; trolls and living nightmares caught between the liminal dreamscape, fog and redemption, wanderlust in a timeless idyll; and the walker slow-pacing with affected nonchalance, measuring the territory, roaming down utopia drive; the loneliness, the eternal pain, the horror, awe; the bug chaser catching his death; desire and apprehension, the ritualistic and the kinship.

‘Photography is art without a sense of doubt. To photograph is to paint using the available light, and to try to keep alive old techniques, to produce work in very small, qualitatively valuable editions. Each print or glass plate is a unique, one-off piece…’
 
Julieta Schildknecht’s exhibition at The Piper Gallery is an installation of photographs presented in a ‘back-stage’ gallery space. Works reserved for such areas - whether at galleries or art fairs - are often rarities and are brought for viewing by special request. When thinking about this, another resonance for the artist is the work of Pina Bausch, whose dance shows, though never publicly advertised, were always sold out, their popularity spread entirely through word-of-mouth and personal text messaging between those in the metier. In this installation, some photographs are presented veiled – as hidden images, reminiscent of the way that pornography used to be hidden behind curtains, other works are to be viewed by climbing a ladder, three works can be viewed from the distance of the balcony. Origami pigeons lead the way from the front door to the exhibition entrance...
 
At a time when film manufacturers and photo labs are in decline, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of photography.