How do you celebrate the 30th anniversary of a gallery in an exhibition? One could retell its story. Stories belong in books however, whereas the exhibition is a matter of the here and now of the artworks. Carlier | gebauer’s birthday exhibition is not a retrospective, not a survey, it is an improvisation without a fixed theme with works by 8 artists from different generations and with different histories – Leonor Antunes, Rosa Barba, Michel François, Luis Gordillo, Rachel Harrison, Harriet Korman, Paul Mogensen, Thomas Schütte. There is no program that connects them; solely the gaze on the works, the visual evidence of the exhibition.
The entrance room of the gallery, a drawing room, brings together a selection of works on paper; larger groups of works follow in the main rooms. Gordillo’s painting revolves around the figure, which he takes from a wide variety of sources and breaks up and deepens...in a complex program of reflections, doublings, and displacements. Mogensen and Korman, on the other hand, work on a painting that constitutes itself from its own preconditions. Mogensen replaces pictorial composition with simple progressions, which he counteracts through the arrangement of elements and choice of colors. Korman has chosen symmetrical orders for her latest cycle of paintings, she breaks up their regularity with painterly gestures. Equally form-conscious and rigorous in her engagement with sculpture Harrison stretches its formal framework by choosing heterogeneous materials that reflect the work and their ostensibly improvisational treatment. Rigurously, Antunes takes her cue from the boundaries of classical modernist sculpture and design, from which she derives formal principles and motifs for her site specific works. Rosa Barba treats film as her sculptural material and addresses its central property, the projected light. François deliberately transcends genres in his work in order to establish connections from their edges, to link meanings, and to allow contradictions to emerge. Schütte, on the other hand, works against the background of the figurative sculptural tradition with a repertoire of heads that he constantly reinterprets and transforms through their implementation into ceramics, through his choice of dimension and glaze.
Dieter Schwarz
Entrada actualizada el el 21 ene de 2022
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