In conjunction with the May release of the beach-bag-size edition of Life’s a Beach, Aperture is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the best selections from Martin Parr’s beach photography.
 
Parr has been photographing beaches for thirty years, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool.
 
What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and, of course, the UK. The exhibition brings to the fore Parr’s engagement with a cherished subject matter—that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.
 
This selection of photographs shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.
 
Martin Parr (born in Epsom, England, 1952) is a key figure in the world of photography, recognized as a brilliant satirist of contemporary life. Author of over thirty photography books, including Common Sense, Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight, and Boring Postcards, his photographs have been collected by museums worldwide, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, London. A retrospective of his work continues to tour major museums around the world since opening at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. Parr is a member of Magnum Photos.
 
RELATED EVENT:
Portrait Shoot and Beach Party with Martin Parr
Saturday, May 18, 9:00 am-6:00 pm
For more details, visit www.aperture.org/events

Friedman Benda presents Campana Brothers: Concepts, the renowned Brazilian designers’ first solo gallery show in the U.S., from June 5-July 3, 2013.  An opening reception will be held at the gallery on June 5, from 6-8 PM.
 
Loose and experimental in nature, Concepts will see the Campanas exploring a series of new approaches to their practice while overturning previously held certainties and expectations. They will introduce several new bodies of work that demonstrate a different direction, while offering a complex and in-progress view of their practice as it stands during a pivotal moment in their careers.
 
The five new series exhibited at Concepts include:
 
Boca series—cowhide wall-mounted bookshelf, table, and standing shelf
 
Racket collection—chairs and a screen in bent brass with a nylon stitched base and a hand-stitched motif made from remnant Thonet chair backings
 
Fitas —a buffet, cabinet, and table made from bent steel
 
Ametista collection—a series of glass hanging panels adorned with Sao Paulo-sourced amethyst rocks
 
Alligator — new banquette this time created out of a series of life-like stuffed alligators

The Battle of Carnival and Lent, Judith Schaechter‘s new exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery, tackles one of the most  fundamental struggles known to man, the war humankind wages between good and evil.  Dancing on the psychological border between spiritual aspiration and human suffering, the Artist questions the association of an environment of confinement/reflection in the name of self betterment and the harsh realities of the physical experience of imprisonment; She is  speaking about the ’prisons‘ we all encounter, be they mental or physical.
 
Schaechter’s title window in the exhibition (and the largest in scale), inspired by the 16th century Brugel painting with the similar name “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, contains 96 figures (almost all previous Schaechter works  contain only a single figure) locked in a mythic battle between virtue and vice.  Depicted here by somber monks and garish clowns, hilarity and mayhem seduce impulse control; no blood is spilled in the Artist‘s rendition; here, softened by humor, we see the constant battle we face between our will, our desires, and our choices.
 
Inspired by the history of Philadelphia’s notorious gothic castle-like structure,  Eastern State Penitentiary, where they were on temporary exhibition, these 17 works draw on mythology, the Bible, and even famous works of art from ages past.  Schaechter‘s archetypes struggle with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, exploring in turn the stories of Atlas, Prometheus, Noah, Icarus, Mary Magdalene and Andromeda.
 
Along with the figurative/narrative windows, there are a matching number of purely decorative patterned works which Schaechter calls “militant ornamentalist”, a nod to the great strength of 13th century European cathedrals, such as Chartres.  Although ornamentation suffered in popularity during the Modernist period of art history, its power to move people has not been diminished.  One has only to look to the great traditions of Islamic or Asian art to see the hypnotic and spiritual relevance ornamentation has.
 
Elisabeth Argo, Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says of the work, “When I saw Judith’s new works, my thoughts went to Guernica, Bruegel and Diego River‘s murals on industry or Otto Dix’s paintings looking at war.  She‘s (Schaechter) looking at this moment and the issues of humanity and those artists were too.”
 
Says Schaechter of these works: I have strong feelings about this work appealing to those who are in transition, those who have known pain, grappled with despair.  The parallels between cell and cathedral go beyond just appearances.  In a church the windows are charged with profound meaning; the “windows” here are more than a mere “ray of hope” for the churchgoer and incarcerated alike.
 
Judith Schaechter’s works of art are included in the permanent collections of many important museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K. She has been included in preeminent Biennales including the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Among other prestigious awards, Ms. Schaechter is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and two NEA grants.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
 
PETER ALLEN HOFFMANN OUTER SPACE @ FREIGHT+VOLUME, MAY 30-JULY 6, 2013
 
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
― John Berger
 
In John Berger’s classic treatise on art and artists (and subsequent popular BBC television series) Ways of Seeing, he describes how the act of looking at an object, person or landscape with fresh eyes each time enables the viewer to actually convert the subject through his own vision, giving meaning by the act of seeing. In a later essay, The Shape of a Pocket, Berger states: The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles. Nowhere is this pursuit more evident than in the paintings of Peter Allen Hoffmann, bringing his first solo show in five years to Freight+Volume with a new body of work, Outer Space, at the end of May.
 
About the show’s title, Hoffmann writes, I‘m fascinated by the ways in which an image or object can be a symbol which is universally understood, and yet cannot be considered a cliche…The concept of outer space is a projection of our own feelings of possibility, as well as a projection of our fears— whether it’s imagining aliens, nothingness, or death. It‘s the spatial equivalent of the other, a mirror of ’inner‘ space.
 
The canvases in Outer Space range in size and subject matter, even style, dramatically – from formal abstractions steeped in color theory, such as Viibryd, to lush, old master-style renditions of bucolic pastoral scenes and still lives. The majority of his larger abstract work is influenced by American pieced quilts, while scenes like Ithan Creek, At Ballybawn or Still Life with Pomegranate seem lifted from prints in dusty museum catalogs or nineteenth century artist collectives, with particular references to Courbet, Rembrandt and deMolijn. About the quilt-paintings, he writes,
 
The process of crafting these quilts is similar to how I approach the paintings— a lengthy process of detailed planning, and then execution. Women worked from existing traditional patterns, but also processed and interpreted these patterns based on their own personal, religious, regional, and historical context…the metaphor of the pieced quilt extends to the other work as well. While the sources of the imagery are disparate — art historical, observed from life, abstraction — they exist for me equally as images I have experienced, continue to experience, and for whatever reason, cannot let go.
 
But whether realist, landscape, or abstracted subject matter, the theme remains consistent: the artist is in a constant process of revising and revisiting his own and other artists’ work. What seems to be a landscape is a really a painting of another artist’s 19th century version of a landscape; what appears to be five color stripes on a canvas is actually an interpretation of another geometric canvas, from another era. The role Hoffmann plays is to sample these various eras and techniques and styles, much like a rapper or composer edits and samples snippets of other musicians’ work into his own composition. Never exactly copied or appropriated, these works are distinctly painted with Hoffmann’s unique brushwork and paint handling. Despite his multiple degrees of removal from the subject, his specific approach lends an indelible stamp of personality on each one. He sums it up this way: I don’t see the distance between the historical and the contemporary in art as being significant: the context may change, but the content remains the same.
 
Hoffmann conceptually and radically expands the expression “a painter’s painter” into three or four dimensions – a painter’s painter’s painter, and so forth – implying that artists tend to paint the same scene over and over, copying each other through the centuries, until the source is obscured entirely. In one work in particular, 9 Years, he has worked and reworked the same canvas for literally nine years. Hoffmann seems to say, despite the existence of cave art, there is no original, “first” painting any more than an original, first artist; the evolution of art is about repetition and constant self-referral, a continued sampling – back and forth – of what came before and what will come to be.
 
Peter Allen Hoffmann received his MFA from Hunter College of CUNY in 2005, and his BFA from Bard College in 2001; he has had numerous solo and group shows at Freight+Volume, The Painting Center in NY, Thomas Robertello in Chicago, the Wexford Art Centre in Ireland among many others. He has received awards and travel grants from Hunter College, CUNY and Cow House Studios in Ireland. His work has been reviewed extensively in a variety of national and international art and literary publications, including Art Korea, The Chicago Tribune, and Useless magazine. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
Please join us for a public reception with the artist on Thursday, May 30th from 6-9pm. For more information please contact Nick Lawrence @ 212-691-7700 or nick@freightandvolume.com.

The Cut
 
The cut on her face
The blood from under her skirt
A red fountain carries me
Towards my destiny
 
The cut in the sky
Out pour father‘s eyes
Dive deep in the snow
Cold seed for the spring
Harvest of my creativity
 
The cut on her face
Portal of our race
Spurned majesty sighs
For that cut!
 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present The Cut, a solo exhibition of work by Antony on view from May 31st through July 12th, 2013.
 
Antony has created a body of work including drawing, collage, and sculpture alongside his critically acclaimed musical career as both a singer and composer. Both his music and visual art are marked by intuitive and accumulative practices that reflect a shared visual and psychological vocabulary. The initial inspiration that provided the framework for the exhibition was a poem written by the artist entitled The Cut, which describes the source of creation as a slit in the sky. The marks that the artist makes on the surface of his artwork can at once be understood as scars as well as applications that have the ability to heal the surface of the paper, fabric, or canvas. A delicate line can be juxtaposed with a harsh application of paint or a torn edge. Many of the works are intimate in scale and ephemeral in their materiality, but they are monumental in the emotional depth that they convey. Like Joseph Beuys, Antony’s work originates in personal experience yet it also addresses universal artistic or social ideas and poetically suggests the healing potential of art.
 
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971, Antony currently lives and works in New York. Since 2000, he has released four studio albums with his band Antony and the Johnsons. A special edition of the band’s 2010 album Swanlights was accompanied by a book published by Abrams Image featuring drawings and collages by Antony as well as photographs by Don Felix Cervantes in collaboration with Antony. Solo exhibitions of his artwork have been presented at Isis Gallery, London in 2009 and The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles in 2012. His work was included in It’s not only Rock’n’Roll, Baby! presented at BOZAR, Brussels in 2008 and at the Triennale Bovisa, Milan in 2010. In 2009 he curated the group show 6 Eyes at galerie du jour agnès b., Paris. Antony’s performance projects include Miracle Now (1996); TURNING (2004/2006), in collaboration with Charles Atlas; and The Crying Light (2009). Antony was musical director of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011) in collaboration with Abramović and Robert Wilson. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his performance Swanlights debuted at Radio City Music Hall in 2012.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present I Am The Magic Hand, a group exhibition organized by Josephine Halvorson that brings together the work of Allison Katz, Carmelle Safdie, Jane Corrigan, John Gutmann, Lisa Milroy, and Paula Wilson. The exhibition takes its title from a chalk inscription on a wall that appears in John Gutmann’s 1937 photograph of the same name. The outline of a hand and the inky stains of handprints surround the text, drawing attention to human presence and the animate nature of the wall itself. The works in this exhibition, like the wall, show traces of their makers yet speak in the first person. They emit their own liveliness.
 
Heads of cabbage pose for their picture in Allison Katz’s canvasses, which sit atop shelves made by Liudvikas Buklys. The cabbages’ untrimmed, languid leaves suggest natural informality, yet they’re in the spotlight, confidently attracting the attention of a man as he breathes in their earthy scent. On one hand, these are amorous images placed as keepsakes on shelves for visitors like us to notice. But on the other, painting itself is nature morte. Like cabbage, it exists in a vegetative state: aroused but not necessarily conscious.
 
Carmelle Safdie’s long banner-like rubbings evince a literal closeness to the individuals whose graves they mark. The gravestone, newsprint, chalk pastels, and Safdie’s gestures fuse together, creating a new layer of experience between the artist and the dead. What we see are instances of this encounter, preserved in pigment, and a metaphor for art. These color studies, as Safdie refers to the works, shift between the inert and the animate.
 
In Jane Corrigan‘s shoulder-width paintings, strokes of oily color become figures in action, forever unaware of being watched. Like a dream, these scenes are conjured yet undetermined, where Corrigan is a viewer into a world that she herself creates. The discernable paths of the paint and the enigma of the narrative form a riddle that Corrigan hands to us in a shared pursuit of interpretation.
 
Lisa Milroy’s life-sized painted dresses step away from flatness towards a willing body. We are made aware of our own nakedness and the way fabric feels against skin. The passive stance of painting is inverted: personal space is threatened, a seduction forthcoming. Or, the dress steps back into the frame of the pictorial after being out in the world, embodying memories of its wearer, a vestige of another time and place.
 
Between Two, Paula Wilson’s freestanding tapestry made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, takes an impression of an urban façade. Felt, canvas, and paper blot the living history of two buildings, their residents, and passersby, picking up in relief architectural details and the sense of accrued time. Brick by brick, the seams of labor construct a composite identity, whose portrait is made by Wilson, and recognized by us.
-Josephine Halvorson
 
I Am The Magic Hand is organized by artist Josephine Halvorson. Halvorson works on site, collaborating with the environment to make paintings that become records of experience and time. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including a US Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, ParisArt, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. A recent article written by Halvorson appears in the Winter 2012 issue of ArtJournal. She teaches painting at Princeton University and The Cooper Union, and is a critic in the MFA program at Yale University. Halvorson lives and works out of Brooklyn, New York.

FEATURING
Matthew Brandt
John Chiara
Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk
Agnes Eperjesi
Curtis Mann
Klea McKenna
Amanda Means
Floris Neusüss
 
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present UNIQUE, a group show of non-editioned photography. Often made without negatives or a camera, the exhibited work is created with unique and diverse techniques that result in one-of-a-kind photographs. The included artists represent several generations, including Pierre Cordier and Floris Neusüss, who have been pioneers in the field of camera-less, unique photography since the 1950s.
In 1956, the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier invented the chemigram, a technique that employs resists to protect areas of the photosensitive paper from successive submersion in developer and fixer. Since 2011, Cordier has collaborated with the Austrian painter Gundi Falk. Floris Neusüss, a German photographer, explores the technical and visual possibilities of the photogram to create an innovative body of work that includes ethereal silhouettes of nude women and mysterious images of the natural world at night. Cordier and Neusüss share a spirit of experimentation and a desire to explore the infinite possibilities inherent to the chemistry of photographic paper and processes with the younger artists in the show. Following in Cordier’s chemigram tradition, Amanda Means delicately scores light-sensitive paper with a grid pattern and flows developer over it, creating organic abstract compositions that are inspired by her close connection with nature. Means worked for many years as a master printmaker for other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the fluid process she employs is liberating in contrast with the exacting precision that work required. Matthew Brandt uses the subjects of his Western landscape photographs as ingredients in their production. He soaks images of lakes in water from the same source, distorting colors and abstracting the captured vistas. John Chiara travels the California coastline with a room-size camera obscura of his own creation hitched to his car, capturing landscapes directly on photographic paper. His method invites exposure and processing anomalies, making the process part of the imagery. Although he starts with representational photographs, like Brandt and Chiara, Curtis Mann moves toward abstraction by obstructing journalistic scenes of conflict with chemically etched circles and stripes. Drawing on the tradition of photograms of the human body and of the natural world that Neusüss explores, Klea McKenna uses light-sensitive paper to capture images of elements, such as raindrops, while the Hungarian photographer Agnes Eperjesi projects multilayered and brightly colored shadows of hands, flowers, and household objects.
 
For further information or visual materials, please see vonlintel.com or contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or gallery@vonlintel.com.

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present Carolyn Case & Jens Schubert, a two-person exhibition of paintings and prints. Each artist combines an omnivorous interest in symbolic systems derived from ancient, contemporary, and religious iconography with rigorous technique. Case, American-born, has studied and travelled in multiple cultures, and found inspiration in Indian miniature painting, Andean textiles, Persian palaces, and trans-cultural conceptions of mortality and the afterlife. Schubert, a young German artist, similarly points to the ubiquity and perpetuity of signs and symbols as they reappear across time, and today in music, video games, anime, fashion and other forms of pop culture.
 
Case‘s paintings, while intimate in scale, present grand universes of limitless space, overlapped by areas of teeming detail, such as tiny dots on stalactite-like drips. Flat silhouettes of ancient urns and vases float through each painting. Schubert’s graphic linocuts of overlapping geometry and repeated images explode with color, pattern, and texture. His series “Realms of Heaven” explores the different meanings and associations of heaven and sky, starting with the premise that in German, the word is the same for both “sky” and “heaven”. Schubert‘s series of unique prints explore the traces of old myths within our current imagination, while disrupting the desire for narrative.
 
Schubert and Case strategically confound and even erase the specific national or cultural origin of each inspiration in order to create a post-modern quilt of imagery. Each artist travels far to get to a personal place where, as suggested by cultural thinkers such as Robert Campbell or Carl Jung, we can each access a subconsciously embedded understanding of basic archetypes.
 
Carolyn Case lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Originally from California, Carolyn Case earned her MFA from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD, and her BFA from California State University in Long Beach, CA. She has shown throughout the Mid-Atlantic area, with solo exhibitions at Loyola University, McLean Projects for the Arts, and The Art Registry in Washington D.C. She has also participated in two-person and group exhibitions at Joyce Goldstein Gallery, John Fonda Gallery, and the Delaware Museum of Art. Residencies include the School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kanoria Art Center in Ahmedabad, India. Case's works are featured in the Spring 2013 New American Paintings, and have been reviewed in the Baltimore Sun.
 
Jens Schubert was born in 1983 in Schwarzenberg, Germany, and lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, and has had solo exhibitions with Mewo Art Gallery, Memmingen, M2A Gallery, Dresden, and Bongout Gallery, Berlin, among others. Group exhibitions include Instituto de Artes Gráficas, Oaxaca, Mexico, the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Museum of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig, and Biksady Gallery, Budapest. His work has been exhibited at the Volta Art Fair, NY, and the Preview Art Fair, Berlin, in 2012, and in 2011 he received the Marion Ermer Prize.

Guided by Invoices is pleased to present Signature Works, a group exhibition of work from gallery artists.
 
The exhibition will include recent paintings from Charles Andresen, Cora Cohen, Nora Griffin, David Rhodes, Sean Scherer, Carol Szymanski, and Rafael Vega. Additionally on view will be new curved-crease origami from Erik and Martin Demaine, a sound installation by Sebastien Leon, and in situ work on the gallery’s windows by Stephen Pusey.
 
Fluorescents after dark, the palette of satellites, Isaac Newton’s solfège rainbow, and hyperbolic origami in red, white and blue: I guess it’s Summer 2013.
 
For further information, please contact info@guidedbyinvoices.us or visit the website www.guidedbyinvoices.us.

Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to present Disco Lemonade, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Canadian artist, Heidi Spector. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York and follows a small installation of her works last year at the gallery in the project room. Her paintings, composed of liquitex acrylic painted as bands of color on Russian birch, are topped with resin, creating a surface where candy-like colors pulse and dance together, alluding to the impact of popular music on her work.
 
Referred to by the artist as “geometric minimalism,” Spector purposefully avoids injecting specific emotional content to her paintings, instead opting for bold color choices that quickly establish an upbeat and lively mood. Her shining repetitive pattern of vertical or horizontal stripes project a natural sense of optimism and joy informed by the techno beats and self-absorption of club life.
 
Many of the paintings on view are influenced by popular music, taking on titles based on song lyrics by artists as varied as Duke Ellington, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse and DJ Tiesto. The color palette of each painting is in part a response to each song, infusing the group of works with the sensation of being an audio/visual playlist.
 
The geometric opticality and slick surfaces of Spector’s paintings connect her works with a tradition of hard–edge painters, such as Bridget Riley and Frank Stella. Her vision of the paintings as objects of desire and joy, however, also place Spector’s work alongside contemporary pop artists embracing kitsch as profound.
 
Heidi Spector lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She has shown in galleries nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Montreal, Los Angeles, and New York.

Thatcher Projects, in collaboration with Schroeder Romero, is pleased to present works by American artist Karin Waskiewicz. Known for her excavated, carved and rebuilt surfaces revealing thick layers of acrylic paint, Waskiewicz’ paintings feature hundreds of small, imperfect circles clustered in sprawling groups. The resulting patterns recall organic systems and serve as an exploration in both mark-making and the physical qualities of her materials.

Curatorial Statement by A.E. Benenson:
At the birth of modern computing, a paradox: only after Alan Turing theorizes an infinitely large computer do we begin to plausibly imagine how our world could be digitally remade as small as possible. That is, it’s
only after Turing fixed our technological gaze outwards onto infinity that we began our relentless dwindling inwards, towards miniaturized circuits and virtualization. Taking this contradictory movement as both its content and form, the exhibition Vanishing Point presents views of a contemporary digital vastness that is both boundless and barely there.
 
By understanding computing as an ongoing experiment in the incommensurate, the artists in this exhibition draw the discipline of computing into various unlikely associations: outer-space, the afterlife, Abstract Expressionism, Greek Tragedy. And yet at the same time, there is a move to deconstruct the traditional aesthetic associations with the infinite (e.g. “the sublime”) in terms of a contemporary virtual sprawl that is often pathetically insignificant, banal and quotidian. These analytical impulses are tempered with modes of address that are more lyrical, less direct; formal experiments within the contradictions of a new vastness that is simultaneously too large and too small to be fully apprehended.
 
Here, “vanishing point” refers not only to the infinitely distant and small destination where everything rushes to converge, but also to a potential moment of disappearance – an event horizon where technology swallows something once and for all…what exactly – irrationality, expressivity, scarcity, suffering? Nothing in this exhibition claims to know with certainty. The objective is not to make predictions, but to press ourselves a little closer to the arc that bends towards the limit.
 
the universal Turing machine, 1936
 
Exhibited Works:
Annie Dorsen, “Hello, Hi There”, 2011-2013
Kyle McDonald, “Only Everything Lasts Forever”, 2009
Boris Meister, “Above the Cloud – Archaeology of Social Networks”, 2012
RAND Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, 1955
Elaine Reichek, “SETI”, 2004
Sebastian Schmieg, “Search by Image”, 2011-ongoing
Mungo Thomson, “Einstein #1”, 2008
Clement Valla, “Paintings from Wushipu”, 2009
Siebren Versteeg, “doorformsbitman6000x6000_323 (2x3)”, 2013
 
This exhibition marks the US debut of artist Boris Meister, and the NYC premiere of recent works by Kyle McDonald, Sebastian Schmieg, Clement Valla and Siebren Versteeg.
 
Public Program:
A tour of the exhibition with curator A.E. Benenson will take place Thursday, June 27, at 5:00 PM.
It is free and open to the public. RSVP: info@bitforms.com

October 18, 1977 opens at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert 524 West 19th St, New York, NY on Thursday, June 20, 2013- Friday, July 19, 2013. Summer hours start July 8: Mon-Fri 10 am – 6 pm
 
An exhibition organized by Birgit Rathsmann in collaboration with Michele Abeles, Erica Baum, Neil Bender, Becket Bowes, Tania Cross, Grayson Cox, Anthony Lepore, David Lukowski, Oliver Kossack, Jessica Mein, Filip Noterdaeme, Dominic Nurre, Paul Pfeiffer, Jochen Plogsties, Claudia Pena Salinas, Daniel Rich, Siebren Versteeg, Jenny Vogel, Kristof Wickman and Jeff Williams.
 
New York, NY April 18, 2013 — On a single night, three terrorists in a high-security prison die, allegedly by their own hands; a fourth is hospitalized with allegedly self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest. Ever since, the events of the “Death Night” of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group have reverberated through German society and culture. But what might those events mean to artists in another country gripped by fear of radical terrorists, albeit a generation removed and an ocean away? How might today’s artists respond to iconic pieces that addressed the events in their immediate aftermath? Those are the questions that guided Brooklyn artist Birgit Rathsmann as she worked with 19 other artists from the U.S. and Europe to develop October 18, 1977. The exhibition is a meditation on that infamous night when Andreas Baader and three others were found dead or wounded in their prison cells — as well as on the images that earlier artists created in response to the events of that night. Rathsmann “commissioned” new pieces and collaborated to varying degrees with the participants in the exhibition. This created a dialog among artists who share Rathsmann’s interest in the questions raised by the events of October 18, 1977 and those raised by earlier artworks that address those events. In other words, Rathsmann didn’t curate this show; she served as its catalyst. Many of the questions she and the exhibition’s other artists examine have lingered for 36 years: Did the terrorists have a suicide pact? Was it set into motion when they learned that a hijacking intended to win their freedom had failed? If so, how did Andreas Baader and another terrorist manage to get guns into the isolated, high-security cells where they were held in solitary confinement? How did Baader manage to shoot himself in the back of his head? Why were there no fingerprints on either of the guns? How was the sole survivor of that night able to stab herself in the chest four times? Is there evidence to support her allegation that the deaths were summary executions rather than suicides? Those and other questions about that night encapsulate the dramatic relationship between the state and violent non-conformists — a relationship that becomes more relevant with each new act of mass violence. A number of works in October 18, 1977 respond directly to the eponymous cycle of 15 paintings by Gerhard Richter which depict the dead terrorists and the prison where they died. The paintings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (169.1995), far from the location of their creation and the events that inspired them. Other works in this exhibition directly address specific aspects of the deaths and their cultural setting: the psychological effects of prolonged solitary confinement, the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century German institutional architecture, and the era’s proliferation of ‘zine-like publications that openly expressed sympathy for terrorist organizations. Some works even go so far as to imagine alternative histories. Taken together, the works in the exhibition present a multifaceted examination of that confounding historical moment in the Germany of 1977 and its lingering cultural influence — an examination that’s especially relevant in New York City of 2013.
 
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For more information please contact: HYPERLINK “mailto:gassergrunertsummer@gmail.com” gassergrunert@gmail.com 646.944.6197 For press inquiries and images contact: Margaret Fasel HYPERLINK “mailto:margaret@gassergrunert.net” margaret@gassergrunert.net 816.289.2693