Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present Monica Bonvicini‘s Disegni – the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery – over the coming Gallery Weekend. An extensive body of works from the last thirteen years is being shown for the first time in Berlin. They afford an insight into the artist’s complex, multifarious production of textual images, cut-outs, assemblages and drawings – works which have both emerged as an accompaniment to her installation output and have been created as independent productions in their own right.
The exhibition title evokes first of all associations with the universal geniuses of the Renaissance, with ‘disegno’ as both drawing and blue-print, source of inspiration and work-plan, for all-round artists-cum-architects. Above all, however, what are deployed in Bonvicini’s referential games are the experimental techniques of the artistic and literary (neo-)avant-gardes of the past century – for instance the collage as montage principle. The sheets on display reveal that here is an artist who systematically employs drawing as a conceptual medium.
 
With its rich-colour tempera strokes and correction tape, the triptych Untitled (Harness) (2006) shows body harnesses from Bonvicini’s hanging installation Identify Protection (2006), the pitch-black tempera seen oozing from the arrester loop eyelet in the hip and stomach area accentuating the SM connotations. Black is also the colour of the organic-seeming daubs in the 60“ series, which offers a fresh take on Lawrence Weiner’s gesture in his ‘Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can’ (1968). Bonvicini’s experimental order refers to the chassis paint colours of the eponymous car manufacturers (e.g. 60“ Ford, 60“ Fiat, 60“ BMW).
 
Tempera and spray paint are also the constituents of the large-scale, hovering detached house facades in Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes (2007), works created on the basis of photos taken by the artist in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In Off the Grid (2011-2012), diagonal wavy lines criss-cross the large-format work in a manner that takes the title at its word – they counteract the grid as a trope of modernism.
Bonvicini’s strategy of the fetishistic inversion of all male-connoted work-tools from (the construction) industry expresses itself above all in language games with props derived from the day-to-day culture of late-capitalist, post-industrial societies. In some series, the slogans and theorems of architects are alienated by word collages of the artist’s own creation. In Architecture is … (2002), the artist pithily completes Bernard Tchumi’s rambling quote on the nature of architecture as ultimate erotic act. The large-format tempera drawings gathered together as Untitled (2006) portray construction workers with their work-tools. They are based on photographs acquired via a Google search under the search heading ‘construction workers’.
 
The medium of drawing takes on greater density through the method of montage – especially when Bonvicini adds new levels of representation which restrain and hamper customary narratives via an element of disorientation and disruption. In the series Untitled (Betrayal) (2002), which was a working template for the stage set to Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, bodily fragments of lovers appear like captive prisoners in the cold, grid-shapes of the scenery.
 
Bonvicini’s drawings combine signs in a manner that confuses and confounds formal and narrative conventions, arousing feelings of both pleasure and aversion in the beholder. One example would be the mental short-circuit caused by combining a hammer-impact drill shot through with line compactions and the pornography-born concept of a ‘Blind Shot’ in the work of that title; another would be Blind Date (2004), where the artist brings the well-known term into association with an electric handsaw.
 
Alongside the shifting of conventional signifiers which can generally be ascribed to visual poetry, the prominent feature of these and other word-pictures is finally the recourse to modes of graphic design, for example the use of striking letter stencils. For the 24-part series Run (2000) Bonvicini collected songs, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s, in whose titles the word ‘run’ appeared, and transposed her selection onto tracing paper by means of stencilling letters. The song-titles initiate a semantic play on variations which reverberates in the beholder’s mind. Alongside ‘Burn to run’, Bonvicini’s brutal version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to run’, the cheesy dead-end hopelessness of Tanya Tucker’s ‘Can’t run from yourself’ resonates all the more strongly as the visitor leaves the exhibition.
 
Monica Bonvicini (*1965, Venice) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin and at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Since 2003 she has been professor of performing arts and sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been Desire Desiese Devise at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, A BLACK HOLE OF NEEDS, HOPES AND AMBITIONS at Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Málaga, Spain and BOTH ENDS at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. She participated in numerous international well-known group shows, most recently at the Belvedere, 21er Haus, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany and in fall 2013 at Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington. Monica Bonvicini was awarded with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 1999 and she was honoured with the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin 2005.
Text: Elena Zanichelli
Translation: Richard Humphrey

Maria Lassnig
April 26 - June 18, 2013
Opening Friday, April 26, 6 - 9pm
 
Capitain Petzel is delighted to announce the first solo-exhibition by Maria Lassnig at the gallery in Berlin.
 
Maria Lassnig counts as one of the most important artists of the present and has set new standards for
generations of artists in both her subject-matter and her radical presentation of it, in drawing and painting as
well as film and video. The artist achieved international recognition through her participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale, the documenta 1982 and the documenta 1997. Large-scale solo exhibitions of her work were mounted most recently at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, the MUMOK Vienna in 2009, the Lenbachhaus, Munich in 2010 and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2011. Maria Lassnig was born in Kappel in Krappfeld (Austria) in 1919 and today lives and works in Vienna and Carinthia.
 
Since the 1940s Maria Lassnig has dealt, through painting and drawing, almost exclusively with the visualization
of internal sensations of the body, a theme she terms “Body Awareness-Drawings and -Paintings”. Through this
approach she has created a lifetime’s body of work which takes as its starting point a recognition of the human body’s potential as a medium for generating images.
 
In 1980, after residing for many years in Paris and New York, the artist returned to Vienna, where she was
appointed to a post at the Academy of Art, becoming the first female Professor of painting in a german-speaking country.
 
Capitain Petzel shows ten paintings, most of which were created in the last three years. All canvases come directly from Maria Lassnig’s atelier and are presented in public for the first time.
 
In these new large-format works Maria Lassnig investigates themes including gender-roles, with figurative elements presented against monochromatic backgrounds in a colour-palette characteristic of the artist‘s work. The spectrum of motifs ranges from a double-portrait (“Adam und Eva“, 2010) and the presentation of a couple in the act of love, an amorphous green creature seeming to float above them (“Die Inspiration“, 2010), to a half-portrait of a young man who literally reveals his innermost, insofar as he opens up his chest with his own hands (“Der Jüngling“, 2011).
 
The exhibition “Maria Lassnig – Der Ort der Bilder“, jointly-produced by the Neue Galerie Graz and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, can be seen in Graz until the 28th of April, 2013, after which it will continue in Hamburg, from the 19th of June, 2013 onwards.
 
Press Contact I Capitain Petzel
Kathleen Knitter I Phone: +49 30 240 88130 I Email: knitter@capitainpetzel.de
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 6 pm

PETER SAUL: NEPTUNE AND THE OCTOPUS PAINTER
26 APRIL THROUGH 29 JUNE 2013
 
VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to present Neptune and the Octopus Painter, an exhibition of new works by Peter Saul. Saul is a vital and polarizing figure in post-war American art, a rare history painter whose ambivalent politics and lurid imagery make him difficult to categorize. He remains outside the canon yet continues to exert profound influence on younger generations of artists.
 
Peter Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934. Following his studies at both the California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis, Saul settled in Paris for six years. It was there, in the late 1950s, that his influences and obsessions - Mad magazine, 19th century academic French painting, Paul Cadmus and Rosa Bonheur - coupled with his total disbelief in the Existentialist artspeak of the time crystallized into a unique style. Saul‘s paintings of common household objects, rendered with an intense palette and a gesture reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, clearly anticipated Pop Art, a movement that would not emerge as such until 1962. His work rapidly progressed from quasi-abstract pictures of iceboxes and so-called ’pop‘ imagery to a caustic and unflinching take on contemporary history painting. Embracing humor, irony and the grotesque at a time when painting was supposed to be deadly serious, Saul’s work did not fit anywhere easily. In 1967, Saul said, “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture”, and it is with this attitude that he continues to satirize the political, social and cultural events of his time.
 
Neptune and the Octopus Painter features new large-scale works on canvas and a selection of recent works on paper, a body of work created during the past two years. Drawing as much on the imagery of Walt Disney as on traditions of classical painting, Saul's recent works again look to genres of history and self-portraiture, dissecting to humorous, gruesome and deliberately offensive effect, a range of subjects and attitudes.
 
Peter Saul presented his debut solo exhibition in Chicago in 1961 and has exhibited his work internationally since that time. His most recent solo museum exhibition was presented last year at Fondation Salomon, Alex, France. His works are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.
 
Peter Saul: Neptune and the Octopus Painter opens on Friday 26 April from 18:00 to 21:00. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM to 6PM. Please call the gallery or visit vwberlin.com for more information.

The main work of Hans-Peter Feldmann consists of books. In our five Hans-Peter Feldmann solo
exhibitions since 1995 the focus has been repeatedly put on his bookwork – for example, in 1998 we showed in our gallery the book “Die Toten 1967 – 1993”. In the current exhibition we enfold the major part of his books extensively.

MARTIN KIPPENBERGER: SEHR GUT | VERY GOOD
23 FEBRUARY - 18 AUGUST 2013
In 2013 Martin Kippenberger would have celebrated his 60th birthday - that is, had he not died in 1997 due to an excessive life. At several places in the building, the Hamburger Bahnhof currently exhibits an artist whose work and life cannot be separated from one another - a painter, an actor, a writer, a musician, a drunkard, a dancer, a traveller, a charmer, an enfant terrible and self-producer - in short, an “exhibitionist” as he called himself and an artist who today is considered one of the most significant of his generation. The permeation of personality and oeuvre, as well as the incredible variety of his artistic production, is now presented in its entire spectrum. “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” however does not intend to be a retrospective, but rather an approximation of both the private and public persona of the artist Martin Kippenberger. Even if Kippenberger only spent a few years in West-Berlin (1978-1981), it was here that he developed important topics of his artistic cosmos. Hence he announced that “Berlin needed a new coat of paint” and made a name for himself as a short-term co-owner of the legendary punk club SO36 and operator of the “Büro Kippenberger.” Besides performing as a musician in the band “Luxus” or respectively as an actor, he also once created for Claudia Skoda a floor collage as a catwalk for her Kreuzberg studio that he made from 1,300 photos from the fashion designer‘s environment. For the duration of the exhibition, the collage is shown in the historic passage in the East Wing. With the series “Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze” (1976-1977) he had still performed as a painter using oil and canvas, but in Berlin he traded large parts of this series for free food and drinks at the legendary Paris Bar (which he also then painted). With his series “Lieber Maler, Male mir” (1981) he shortly thereafter subverted the cliché of the genius painter by ordering large-format images from a movie poster painter. In spite of public indignations that Kippenberger repeatedly caused, with works such as “Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich” (1989) he managed to distil something positive.
 
A multiple installation - often referred to as “white paintings” (1991) and so far rarely shown - can be seen on the main building’s first floor: eleven white canvases that are embedded into the wall, virtually becoming one with it. Upon approaching the work one recognises glossy children‘s handwriting on the images, which quasi certifies Kippenberger’s work by grading it throughout with the mark “very good” - of course on request of the artist. Yet, “Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good” does not only refer to the white paintings but also to a magazine Kippenberger published in 1978 called “sehr gut. very good.”
 
In the midst of all this irony however the exhibition also reveals a human being who needed to combat his sickness through art. Kippenberger painted himself in the pose of the shipwrecked from Théodore Géricaults famous painting from 1819: bloated, aged, exhausted. Self-portrayal is in fact an essential part of his work and life, which is why there is an abundance of photographs and in particular self-portraits. A selection of photographs allows for a differentiated perspective of Kippenberger - thirty years after he left Berlin: “Art is always only looked at in retrospect anyway… I would say that the period is twenty years. […] Whatever the people will or will not continue to talk about me is what matters. Whether I spread good fun or not. And so what I'm working on is that the people will be able to say: Kippenberger was good fun!”
 
Curated by Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Co-Curator: Miriam Halwani

Greg Parma Smith
“ In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these face in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .”
(Ezra
Pound,
1913)
16.05
–
15.06.2013
Balice Hertling is pleased to announce « In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these face in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough. », an exhibition of new works by Greg Parma Smith. For his first solo show in
Paris, Parma Smith continues his investigation into art subcultures that exist outside of art history. While previous
series have explored such subcultures as academic figure painting and comic book animation, these works draw
on graffiti art, craft, and Orientalism.
The title of the show quotes the entire Ezra Pound poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) which describes a
moment that Pound experienced in a metro station in Paris. The poem recently appeared in the Manhattan
subway as part of the MTA Poetry in Motion project which aims to bring poetry to the masses.
Two oil paintings (« 1913, I » and « 1913, II ») depict spray paint caps painted from life. While graffiti artists
originally used spray paint made for industrial painting, these works show the diverse array of spray paint colors
which are now manufactured specifically for graffiti and street art. Embedded beneath the layer of oil paint, elderly
“faces in the crowd,” real plastic masks, disrupt the smooth surface of the picture plane.
Like graffiti art, the craft of origami is valued aesthetically and economically according to rules outside of
contemporary art. Stacks of patterned origami paper, the patterns designed by Parma Smith himself, appear in
two oil, acrylic, and metallic leaf paintings (« Xanadu I » and « Xanadu II ») in the show.
The Asian theme continues in two oil paintings (« On a wet, black bough I » and « On a wet, black bough II »)
depicting animals, their style influenced by the simplicity and naturalism of Song Dynasty scrolls. Both paintings
feature images of black bows relating to the “wet, black boughs” in Pound’s haiku inspired poem. These black
trees also appear in a wall painting, invigorating the game of references initiated by the artist.
Greg Parma Smith (born 1983) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University in
2007.
Solo exhibitions include: “GPS.NYC.MTA.CNC.DIY.WTC “ at Vava, Milan, (2012), “Life Drawings, Poseurs, and
‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas’“, BaliceHertling & Lewis, New York (2012), “Dick Blick meets Herr Boesner “
(with Emil Michael Klein), Everest/Fondation Gutzwiller, Zurich (2011).
Group exhibitions include “Standard Operating Procedures” (curated by Piper Marshall), Blum and Poe, Los
Angeles (2012), “The Panel Discussion, The Tennis Match, and A Bodegón “ (collaboration with Nicolás
Guagnini), Andrew Roth Gallery, New York (2011), “Greg Parma Smith & Zin Taylor“, Front Space, Contemporary
Art Musem St. Louis, St. Louis, USA (2009), “REGIFT“ (curated by John Miller), Swiss Institute, New York (2009),
““Desired Constellations“, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York (2007).