Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Fabian Marcaccio and Martin Hentschel Interview

Interview during catalog presentation, "Some USA Stories," Haus Esters, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Krefeld, Germany.
Curated by Martin Hentschel.

Part 1
Part 2



Part 3


March 18-August 18 2012
http://www.kunstmuseenkrefeld.de/e/ausstellungen/archiv/index.html

Walk through of exhibition here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNGTt06yIUU&feature=g-upl

"...It consists of a suite of 12 works that tackle themes from the dark side of recent American history. The Mexican drug war, the Waco disaster in Texas, the mass suicide commanded by Jim Jones in Guyana, the Fallujah massacre, and the Columbine High School shootings mark the social explosiveness that can be read from these monumental paintings..."

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Walk through, Some USA Stories, Krefeld Kuntmuseen


Walk through of "Some USA Stories," Haus Esters, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Krefeld, Germany.
Curated by Martin Hentschel.

Music by Claudio Baroni
March 18-August 18 2012
http://www.kunstmuseenkrefeld.de/e/ausstellungen/archiv/index.html

Images of exhibition here.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Landscape of Being - ebook



AGENCY – Art, Life and Society e-book 2 - THE LANDSCAPE OF BEING


CONTRIBUTORS

Writers: Ankur Betageri (India) Lucrezia De Domizio Durini (Italy) Robert C Koehler (USA)
Phil Rockstroh (USA) Margaret Wheatley (USA)

Artists: Ishola Akpo (Benin) Jelili Atiku (Nigeria) Conrad Atkinson (UK/USA) Lucy Azubuike
(Nigeria/USA) The Caravan Gallery (UK) U We Claus (Germany) Nicholas Galanin (Alaska)
Deborah Kass (USA) Olga Kisseleva (Russia) Simon Lewandowski & Richard Price (UK)
Mário Macilau (Mozambique) Ian MacKenzie (Canada) Fabian Marcaccio (Argentina/USA)
Graham Martin (UK) Ealy Mays (USA/Paris) Patrick McGrath Muñiz (Puerto Rico) Laura Nelson
(UK) Jackie Raybone (UK)  Anna Tretter (Germany) Angela Tyler-Rockstroh (USA)

The Landscape of Being is conceived and curated by Dr Graham Martin


‘The Landscape of Being is about our state of being in this still beautiful, globalised post-modern
crisis-ridden world. This book starts where our first e-book On the Contemporary ended, with a
call for humanitarian values, and for individuals and societies to embrace a common humanity
and the preciousness of human life. Its beating heart comes from the Occupy Movement,
Contemporary African art, Buddhism and the work of Joseph Beuys. The struggle for our
humanity, even for the capacity to be and remain human, seems ongoing and so, into an
increasingly virtual and consumerised world, I send this book out as flame, wound and reality.’


Released 12th October 2012 and available as a free pdf download.


Graham Martin
Director of Agency – Art, Life and Society, an international curatorial project based
in Yorkshire, UK, concerned with the socio-political and the how and why of living.  


Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Haute Malerei, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg

Group painting exhibition at Kunstmuseum MagdeburgOctober 14, 2012  to February 12,  2013 

Participating artists:  Jonathan Lasker, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, Neo Rauch, Fabian Marcaccio, Daniel Richter, Adrian Schiess, Alicia Paz, Sarah McGinity, Rashid Johnson 





From the Press Release:


HEUTE. MALEREI

The exhibition HEUTE. MALEREI is looking for a cross-sectional view of the genre of painting, while avoiding any kind of attachment to specific trends, schools of thought or generations. The exhibition aims to present items that pursue the creation of imagery through the use of figurative expression. It investigates the topic of the present, a topic which is established by the painting process itself and which is able to reflect the contradictory, unchanging and complex relationship between man and his world today. The open questions may lead, for example, to relationships between the use of colour tones and how they are expressed, between the surface of the image and the space depicted within, between illusion and reality, between conception and artist. The exhibition will present the items in comparison, albeit not for the purpose of comparing them, but rather to emphasize the proprietary and the unique, in which both the moment and the path taken to this point are revealed. 

The exhibition uses examples to examine the idea of what makes painting different from other artistic pursuits today, what connects it to the historical era in which painting enjoyed a privileged position, and what it contributes today in the midst of the dominance of media imagery. This gives rise to the question of how painting profits today as a necessary reaction to the media. 

Several works of each painter are shown, providing more than just a cursory glance, offering instead a sufficient perspective into the attitudes of each painter, enabling us to see clearly how they truly perceive the world. This exhibition focuses on these unique qualities of each of the items in which a complexity becomes apparent, a complexity that opens out into the painting but also creeps through the superficially visible to become meaning. The method of approaching contemporary painting, the intellectual management of handling traditional painting resources, with the cosmos of colour and the limitations of the canvas, the complex intellectual-manual process is the focus of the concept behind the exhibition. This exhibition does not seek to turn it into an academic exercise by examining labels such as ‘neo’ or ‘post’, but rather to examine individual models that have proven to be accepted over many years and models that have only joined them recently, models that have bound themselves to the unique medium of paint, shunning any other form of categorization in the process. 

Of course, an examination of painting as it is in our era gives rise to the belief that they could be representative of our times. In this regard, it is interesting to consider its connection to the definition of art, and to ask whether art could even exist without painting. To those that look, it is obvious that developments to date have given painting its place time and time again, thereby also providing the concept of art with a place in the lives of people.

Dr. Annegret Laabs, Uwe Gellner
Magdeburg , April 2012

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Paintant Report, FLUOR

Paintant Report, 2012
Commissioned for FLUOR Magazine, Issue #3

To order:
From Spain, Germany, Latin America
From everywhere else


2012 · FLUOR – One year, one magazine

FLUOR, contemporary culture magazine, appears at a time of economic crisis, amid a whirlwind that entangles and mixes art with business, luxury with necessity, ideas with forms… that make craft into art and vulgarity into elegance. Although it’s designed and created from the world of visual arts, FLUOR is not just an art magazine but a publication that will generate synergies that will set relations between the different languages and cultural forms of the present, past and future. A publication that will pay special attention to the work of artists and artists themselves. They will be the protagonists of FLUOR: with their works, their texts and their contributions. Painters, illustrators, photographers, writers, musicians… FLUOR’s pages will be filled with their work, their ideas and their words.

An essential part of FLUOR, which will define the magazine, will be the projects of invited artists who will create 16 pages of personal creativity, with specific and unique works, made especially for FLUOR. Familiar and unfamiliar artists, young and old, Spanish and other nationalities and that use any language. It doesn’t matter, every three months, in FLUOR we hope to make room for everyone: artists and ideas, forgotten and unpublished texts, narrative and beauty, horror and doubt, art and thought.

In FLUOR there will be no art criticism or any kind of critical opinion beyond the ones that our collaborators and invited artists raise with their views and attitudes. The formal and conceptual crisis of criticism has done much harm to Contemporary Art, and so with FLUOR, the objective is to introduce a different approach to culture, art and the work of artists with minimum intermediaries.

FLUOR will be, as of the first trimester of 2012, the contemporary culture magazine of these turbulent times, a place to visit on paper, a parallel exhibition space, a mixing desk for DJs of today’s culture, a magazine on who we are and what we will be in the future.

It is quarterly and bilingual (Spanish and English), to facilitate its distribution throughout the world. FLUOR will be distributed in bookstores and museum shops, and is designed for subscription (primarily for the direct contact that can be created between the reader and the publisher). It will also be present at art and book fairs around the world. We will strive to be close enough to the reader and art and literature enthusiast so that they can always count on the magazine, tailored to their tastes and interests.

FLUOR is certainly a different magazine and above all, bold and modern up to the point that it’s able to unite in its pages all kinds of languages and formats.










Sunday, September 30, 2012

Analytical Rage, 2009

Interview about Structural Canvas works, Berlin 2009.


Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Group Show "Richteriana," Postmasters

RICHTERIANA


GREG ALLEN, DAVID DIAO,
RORY DONALDSON, HASAN ELAHI,
FABIAN MARCACCIO, RAFAËL ROZENDAAL

May 12 - June 16, 2012
opening reception, saturday, may 12, 6-8
Postmasters, 459 w. 19th St

David Diao, Synecdoche, 1993, color xerox, marker and silkscreen on paper, 5 separate sheets, overall 84 x 84 inches

Postmasters' new exhibition Richteriana attempts to examine the current canonization of Gerhard Richter, presenting six artists whose works pre-date, update, expand, and subvert “the greatest living artist’s” own.

It feels interesting, even vital, to pause, to take a deep breath, and seek some perspective at this moment in Richter’s career. When the hagiographic momentum builds from full-scale, museum retrospectives in London, Berlin and Paris. When spiraling auction records are deployed by financial advisors to commodify the artist, not just as a brand, but as an “asset class” unto himself. While the reverential documentary film casts its heroicizing glow. And while eminent scholars and curators Benjamin Buchloh and Robert Storr continue to jockey for position under the master’s anointing hand.

The exhibition is not a snarky repudiation to Richter’s work, which over the decades has rarely failed to reward close looking or to inspire invigorating discourse. Nor is it an impertinent insult to the artist and his practice. Instead, Richteriana contests the critical, aesthetic, commercial, ideological, and political implications of the institutional, academic, and market forces which seem to be attempting to disengage Richter and his art from his context, in furtherance of their own imperatives--and it must be acknowledged, with a certain degree of acquiescence by or complicity of the artist himself.

While long skeptical of the so-called “victor’s narrative” and Great Man [!] Theory of art history, my motivation to organize this exhibition now was triggered by three additional, synchronous occurrences:

1. Felix Salmon, a business blogger for Reuters, who often brilliantly ventures into art, wrote an important post on commodification of Gerhard Richter and the relationship of his market value to his historical importance. Salmon's text was precipitated by a buy recommendation published by Citibank Art Advisory’s Jonathan Binstock, because “it is clear that Richter is in the process of being catapulted to a rare and illustrious realm of authority.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/04/the-commodification-of-gerhard-richter/

2. Greg Allen, a filmmaker, writer, artist and art spy par excellence wrote about a previously unknown cache of early paintings Richter had destroyed, which Der Spiegel lamented, “would probably be worth at least half a billion euros.” Appropriating Richter’s own photo-based tactics, Allen reconstituted the lost pictures by commissioning what he terms a “Chinese Paint Mill” to reproduce images taken from the Gerhard Richter Archiv.

http://greg.org/archive/2012/02/09/on_repainting_gerhard_richter.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ 0,1518,812515,00.html

3. A recent conversation with David Diao -- whose own abstract works preceded Richter's so-called "squeegee" paintings -- reminded me of Synecdoche (1993), a multi-panel work we exhibited at Postmasters in 1995. In it, Diao reprints Benjamin Buchloh's catalog essay for Richter's 1985 exhibition, replaces the images with his own paintings from 1968-73, and crosses out Richter's name, writing in his own. http://artasiamerica.org/documents/4700 (Ostrow, Saul. "David Diao: Two Acts in One: a Footnote on the Critical Problems Raised by David Diao's 'Richter's Fracture Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle' by Benjamin Buchloh." NY Arts (Dec. 2000): 19-21.)

Richteriana offers a visual feast and a conceptual springboard for considering both Richter’s context and legacy, but more importantly, re-examining larger issues of constructed history, influence, and value.



In addition to Synecdoche, we will exhibit Wealth of Nations, David Diao's painting from 1972. (It is the large, horizontal painting on the fourth panel of Synecdoche.) About this phase of his work Diao says: "Like many others, I was looking for mechanical means to circumvent the tyranny of the painter’s hand. Moving past sponges and window scrapers by early 1969, my instruments of choice were cardboard tubes readily available from the curbside of the neighborhood. My thought was to marry the size of the mark with the size of the support and by scaling up the “brush” enlarge the scale."

Greg Allen’s Destroyed Richter Paintings channel the elder artist’s own private documentary images back into the photo- based painting feedback loop he once deemed “photography by other means.” They reproduce the experience of encountering Richter’s lost originals, while becoming new objects themselves. By engaging the sprawling Chinese photo-painting industry that has grown up in Richter’s wake, Allen forefronts the market’s incredulous perception of the artist’s autonomy--and his right to declare or destroy his own work.

Fabian Marcaccio's vibrant, three-dimensional works, which the artist calls "paintants," combine an over-amplified materiality with politicized subject in what might be considered Richter on steroids. The paintant in the exhibition, titled Militia, contains an image of a Michigan paramilitary group encoded in its tangled structure of hand-woven rope, silicone, and alkyd paint. Marcaccio's disintegrating marriage of abstraction and politicized photo-representation recalls Richter's own controversial Baader Meinhof series. http://paintantscorporation.com

Rafael Rozendaal's www.colorflip.com site presents a digital monochrome abstraction which transforms with a touch into sheets of color. The virtual stack, theoretically infinite, lasts as long as the viewer keeps turning. Rozendaal’s motif echoes Gerhard Richter’s Umgeschlagenes Blatt (Turned Sheet) series of 1965-67 http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/search/?title=blatt one of the artist’s earliest forays into both monochrome and the relationship between representation and abstraction. After at least 15 paintings, Richter’s Turned Sheet series culminated in an offset print, which the artist intended to be unlimited edition, but which he terminated after signing 739 copies.

Like Richter's Atlas, Hasan Elahi's Tracking Transience is an enormous personal archive he established after being put on FBI list of suspected or potential terrorists. He countered this inclusion by publicly surveilling himself: logging his location and activity 24/7, and releasing a database of hundreds of thousands of images. In the show there is a monumental 18 feet long photograph of 672 toilets Elahi visited since the project’s inception. The site itself will be presented live in automode. http://trackingtransience.net/

In his works from Shared Roadway Ahead series Rory Donaldson explores the space in which photography and painting can overlap. Bearing a strong resemblance to Richter's paintings, each of Donaldson's works begins as a digital photograph of a landscape, cityscape, or other urban motif. The image is then manipulated through an emotive selection process until what remains takes on a look of paint that has been dragged, dripped, poured on and wiped off; a digital painterly process that results in stunning abstraction.
  


 

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

"Some USA Stories" at Krefeld Kunstmuseen

Some USA Stories, Haus Esters, Krefeld Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, Germany.
Curated by Martin Hentschel.

"...It consists of a suite of 12 works that tackle themes from the dark side of recent American history. The Mexican drug war, the Waco disaster in Texas, the mass suicide commanded by Jim Jones in Guyana, the Fallujah massacre, and the Columbine High School shootings mark the social explosiveness that can be read from these monumental paintings..."


Read more about the new works, reviewed by John Yau for Hyperallergic.













Firing Squad Wall, 2011-2012


Corpse, 2011



Eric & Dylan, 2011-2012



Fallujah, 2011-2012



Theology of Liberation Christ , 2011



Jim Jones, 2011-2012



Limo, 2011-2012



This is it, 2011



Breaking News, 2011



Podium, 2011



Ruby Ridge, 2011-2012



Waco, 2011-2012