Liliane Lijn

Liliane Lijn, In The Valley of Darkness, 1973

Partly, perhaps as an act of mourning; more obviously as a reparative act, Lijn conceived of her manipulation of prisms as giving them a kind of restorative posthumous existence to remedy their mutilated identity: “A prism on its own is lost. It has no feet, no legs to stand on”. Her fantasy ran that they had lost their function in a world of technical forms by no longer being “anchored into a machine, which one way or another will be a machine for seeing… I must give it a body”.

Liliane Lijn (born 1939), is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962. She has lived in London since 1966.

Utilising highly original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and female mythology. Lijn is particularly known for her timeless, cone-shaped Koan series. In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to ‘see the world in terms of light and energy’. Lijn describes her work as ‘A constant dialogue between opposites, my sculptures use light and motion to transform themselves from solid to void, opaque to transparent, formal to organic.’

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Galleries: Giò Marconi, Milano

26 August 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Installation view: John Bock, Barlach, 2010, Giò Marconi Gallery, Milano

Gallery Giò Marconi, Milano started in 1990 under the initiative of Giò Marconi who created the Studio Marconi 17, an experimental space for young artists and art critics that he directed from 1986 to 1990. At the beginning, the new gallery was directed by Giò and his father Giorgio, who founded the Studio Marconi (1965-1992); now Giò Marconi gallery mainly focuses on contemporary positions and, at the same time, continues to include historical artists of the Studio Marconi into its programme.

Giò Marconi is interested in the works of the European and international avant-garde, showing artists such as Franz Ackermann, John Bock, Matthew Brannon, Nathalie Djurberg, Wade Guyton, Christian Jankowski, Sharon Lockhart, Michel Majerus, Jonathan Monk, Jorge Pardo, Paul Pfeiffer, Tobias Rehberger, Markus Schinwald, Dasha Shishkin, Elisa Sighicelli, Thaddeus Strode, Catherine Sullivan, Vibeke Tandberg, Grazia Toderi, Atelier Van Lieshout, Francesco Vezzoli, Christopher Wool. From 1965 until now shows by the following artists have been reaized by the Studio Marconi and Giò Marconi gallery: Valerio Adami, Enrico Baj, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Alighiero Boetti, Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Enrico Castellani, Patrick Caulfield, Mario Ceroli, Marc Chagall, Christo, James Coleman, Gianni Colombo, Willem de Kooning, Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Del Pezzo, Antonio Dias, Bruno Di Bello, Piero Dorazio Lucio Fontana, Sam Francis, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Hsiao Chin, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Franz Kline, Lee U Fan, Man Ray, Giuseppe Maraniello, Joan Mirò, Maurizio Mochetti, Aldo Mondino, Francois Morellet, Keizo Moroshita, Ugo Mulas, Louise Nevelson, Helmut Newton, Gastone Novelli, Giulio Paolini, Gianfranco Pardi, H.P.Paris, A.R.Penck, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano, Daniel Spoerri, Aldo Spoldi, Emilio Tadini, Antoni Tapies, Herve Telemaque, Joe Tilson, Giuseppe Uncini, Emilio Vedova, Tom Wesselman, William T.Wiley.

Gio Marconi via Tadino 15 I-20124 Milan Italy

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Artist: Nikolas Gambaroff

26 August 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Nikolas Gambaroff, Untitled, 2011 and exhibition view of Tools for Living, 2012

Artist Nikolas Gambaroff work questions the process of painting and its support structures by deconstructing and re-evaluating traditional methods of production and display.

As Gambaroff himself puts it, “In my work I try to dissect, deconstruct, and re-evaluate (mainly within the limits of the activity painting) the customs, expectations and myths that painting as part of our visual culture brings along.”
Works that ostensibly echo the age-old impetus of subjective self-expression are, therefore, conceived as platforms through which to question notions of authorship, distribution and exposition alongside issues such as the social and economic value of art itself.

In addition, Gambaroff’s “staging of the space that a viewer experiences painting in” is designed less to highlight interplay amongst the works themselves, than focus particularly on “the problems of support structures in art (material/architectural but also ideological).”
The introduction of elements from ‘outside’ the traditional compass of painting provides further opportunities to deconsecrate and demystify painterly production in order to debate the mechanisms that confer artistic status.

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Lynda Benglis

26 August 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Lydia Benglis, Merak, Sinc and Copper, 1990 and Ghost Dance, Bronze and gold leaf, 1992

Lynda Benglis (born October 25, 1941) is an American sculptor known for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. After earning a BFA from Newcomb College in 1964, Benglis moved to New York, where she lives and works today. Benglis’ work is noted for an unusual blend of organic imagery and confrontation with newer media incorporating influences such as Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Her early work used materials such as beeswax before moving on to large polyurethane pieces in the 1970s and later to gold-leaf, zinc, and aluminum. The validity of much of her work was questioned until the 1980s due to its use of sensuality and physicality.

Like other artists such as Yves Klein, Benglis’ mimicked Jackson Pollock’s flinging and dripping methods of painting. Works such as Fallen Painting (1968) inform the approach with a feminist perspective. For this work, Benglis smeared Day-Glo paint across the gallery floor invoking “the depravity of the ‘fallen’ woman” or, from a feminist perspective, a “prone victim of phallic male desire”. These brightly colored organic floor pieces were intended to disrupt the male-dominated minimalism movement with their suggestiveness and openness. In 1971, Benglis began to collaborate with Robert Morris, creating Benglis’ video Mumble (1972) and Morris’ Exchange (1973). Benglis produced several videos during the 1970s in which she explored themes of self-representation and female identity.

Like other female artists, she was attracted by the newness of a medium that was uncorrupted by male artists. The structure of the new medium itself played an important role in addressing questions about female identity in relation to art, pop culture, and dominant feminism movements at the time. Benglis produced several videos during the 1970s in which she explored themes of self-representation and female identity.

Benglis felt underrepresented in the male-run artistic community and so confronted the “male ethos” in a series of magazine advertisements satirizing pin-up girls and Hollywood actresses. Benglis chose the medium of magazine advertisements as it allowed her complete control of an image rather than allowing it to be run through critical commentary. This series culminated with a particularly controversial one in the November 1974 issue of Artforum featuring Benglis aggressively posed with a large latex dildo and wearing only a pair ofsunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at the Paula Cooper Gallery. One of her original ideas for the advertisement had been for her and collaborative partner Robert Morris to work together as a double pin-up, but eventually found that using a double dildo was sufficient as she found it to be “both male and female.”

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Eddie Peake, Transexual, 2011

11 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Eddie Peake, Transexual, 2011

The flesh-coloured walls of the young London-based artist’s room-within-a-room were plastered smooth. In the middle stood a lumpen beige sculpture, There is No Such Thing as an Equivalent (all works 2011): slightly phallic and bulbous – with wonky lumps and bumps, like an ill-formed Barbara Hepworth – its colour mimicked that of the plaster. The space’s corners and walls didn’t correlate with those of the buildings; nothing was quite aligned.

Peake’s room was one with multiple views: alongside the aforementioned bottom was a rainbowed placard that read ‘Eddie Peake Thing’ and a board with a smiley face on it, all part of the work Transsexual. Through one of the three windows opposite you could see a photo of the legs of a man/boy sticking out from beneath a panel painted with orange, blue and pale green squares. Beside this, a large version of the bottom spanned two windows – letting the viewer see more, but perhaps not as much as they would like – accompanied by a pale pink board that cheekily stated ‘P.S’, next to another of a painted palm tree. To the right was his face: eyes turned coyly downwards, he looked as if he was about to flutter his eyelashes, a picture of young, androgynous perfection, standing next to another sign reading ‘Eddie Peake’ (all part of Jungle). Beside this was a doorway leading nowhere, but poking my head around lead me to see the final image of him: here his face and naked upper body were fully exposed. Beside him was a board which read, ‘The Loving Clutches of My Hands’.

The blankness of the beige structure contrasted sharply with the works hung on the existing walls of the gallery outside, creating another world within what would normally be a very ordinary Victorian room, on an upper floor of a terrace in Soho. It felt like a Modernist version of a temple or theatre: tiny in size and minimal in character, but somehow ridiculously monumental as a gesture. The contrast between the interior space and the exterior works was disorientating; the views out of this ‘stage-set’ were onto a hipper, younger and more fractured world. One part without the other part would have been redundant; the exhibition’s success lay in how one world made you view the other.

http://www.eddiepeake.com/

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Oliver Laric

14 March 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Oliver Laric, Kopienkritik, 2011, Skulpturhalle Basel

Oliver Laric’s work seeks to parse the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg, and the remix, and examine their role in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures. This process is intimately tied to his intuitive, idiosyncratic brand of scholarship, which he presents through an ongoing series of fugue-like expository videos (Versions, 2009—present), and further elaborates through his appropriated object works, videos, and sculptures, all of which are densely conceptually layered and often make use of recondite, technologically sophisticated methods of fabrication. Straddling the liminal spaces between the past and the present, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and its subsequent reflections and reconfigurations, Laric’s work collapses categories and blurs boundaries in a manner that calls into question their very existence.

Laric (born 1981 in Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Laric’s first solo exhibition in Germany ‘Be Water my Friend’ took place at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin in 2012. His video work ‘Versions’ (2012) premiered at Art Statements, Art|43|Basel (14-17 June 2012). Recent solo and group exhibitions include: alienate/demonstrate/edit, Artspace, Auckland (2012); Villa du Parc Centre d’art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2012); In Other Words, NGBK, Berlin (2012), Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); Frieze New York (2012); Kopienkritik, Skulpturhalle Basel (2011); Based in Berlin (2011); You don’t love me anymore, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2011); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2011); Music for Insomniacs, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico D.F. (2011); Priority Moments, Herald Street, London (2011); Memery, Mass MoCA, (2011); Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London (2010); Artists’ Video, Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); The World is Flat (curated by Lauren Cornell), X-initiative, New York (2009); Unmonumental, New Museum, New York (2008). Forthcoming group shows include: Detours of the Imaginary (curated by Julien Fronsacq), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum (curated by Bart van der Heide), Kunstverein München (2012); Museum of the Image, Breda, The Netherlands (2012).

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