Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Bernd and Hilla Becher at Konrad Fischer

Oscar Tuazon at Kunsthalle Bern

Ann Veronica Janssens at Alfonso Artiaco

Thomas Eggerer at Daniel Buchholz

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia at the Hispanic Society

Tony Just at Sommer & Kohl

Mark Grotjahn at Blum and Poe

Be sure to e-mail us with any tips, observations or complaints and comment on the shows you feel strongly about. Have an excellent week.

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Artist: Thomas Eggerer

Venue: Daniel Buchholz, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Fence Romance

Date: February 5 – April 17, 2010

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin

Press Release:

Thomas Eggerer’s new paintings feature figures in ambivalent spaces that are both expansive and limiting. The architectural elements in these works such as a fence in “Fence Romance” or the modernist frame in “Friday’s Child” offer shelter and definition, and are nonetheless confining. A feeling of exposure and uncertainty is enhanced by the placement of the figures on slanted angles (“Downward”) and even further by the orchestration of glances: The viewers’ glances but also a regime of glances within the paintings themselves. The ambivalence of Eggerer’s spatial constructions provides a context for a time frame – holding and releasing, breathing in and out, before and after.

One painting shows an unreasonably big yacht with crew members and hanger-outs on board holding in full summer action against the ocean waves, which are, compared to the graphically represented people, not at all defined, making the yacht somehow an image of a vessel, or a container of a group more absorbed with what happens inside of themselves, than with the space itself, the immense and deep world of the ocean. In another painting the background for some standing-around student-like looking people is slightly more defined, resembling some public space, something between a subway station or the public zoo’s big glass window. The figures seem to care very much about what is happening in the phenomenon around them – most of their gestures even point to the friendly modernist environment. A third picture has two men very near to each other, a third one far off in the distance. In comparison the background space is much bigger here, more dominant, seemingly telling the bigger part of the story and one might immediately feel that this background even points to another completely different time, to something lying in the future, looking a bit like a science-fiction illustration of a weird tunnel with no end. Since the light and texture of the space are neither as flat or abstract as in the yacht painting nor are as distinctly referential to the contemporary environment as the second image, the painting almost demands another look. It becomes quite puzzling. Suddenly there is not just one background. The light in the tunnel is from another direction than in the very abstracted space behind, behind what divides the picture elliptically, a huge bended fence. The figures are kind of leaning against the scary fence, almost like saying, here we are standing with our backs to a dark past, looking into an even scarier-looking space of an empty seeming highly organized future. But still, for that moment surprisingly, they don’t appear to be frightened.

Each of the works in this exhibition demands from the viewer somehow to return to the ones seen before in order to transport the findings between them, since they give great hints of how to better read their at first well-disguised narratives. They look at first like mostly well-constructed paintings, alone for their distinction between on one side the abstractly painted color fields and on the other the play with ambivalent meanings of gestures of the different human figures. But independent of that, it is possible that for viewers, who might have had experience with it, the space of the third painting sometimes turns from a sci-fi-like time warp into an almost religiously uncanny space of a, for instance, biblical story from long, long ago. But maybe not. Anyway, going through the exhibition the way of mutual image reading, the third, the biggest painting, becomes definitely more transparent after the study of another picture, the forth, that is painted on paper. Almost the same, or maybe even the same couple of young men as in the uncanny warp space walks down this time a declining ramp-like path, and behind we find a very textured space of dark floating colors. Maybe not one hundred percent correctly, but this work, the two downward moving figures in the space of a darkish universe, might include probably references to William Blake.

This work on paper almost seems to create sounds of deep minor largo playing strings like in a Godard movie. This imagined “sound” of the painting is comparable to Godard’s handling of classical music, both in the ambivalent gesture of cultural quotation, but as well in the quality of suspending the contemporary “worldly” narrative with some timeless seriousness of existential effect.

In “Fence Romance” time seems almost like rotating from some prehistoric glimmer to the first mundane situation within historic time. The painting within the modern public space is full of the ringing and jingling of the sweet early experience of public space and of education in youth, and the painting of the yacht seems to be an international image, but there are some particular sounds in it which make it so close to what might be called the American experience. Apotheosis of “la situation Americain”. The American-ness translates exactly half by means of content, by the poses of the represented group of people, etc., and half through the mode of painting itself. The division of the painting between pure painting pleasure and evocation of narratives becomes in the yacht painting almost humorously over-exemplified. Eggerer seems to follow his path with scientific consequence. One might not recognize it at first view, since the yacht appears so much to be simply in the middle of the frame, but the upper half of the whole image is just color field painting only, while exactly the lower half is containing the arch-mundane luxury container of some leisure society only, but even here, so obviously, it is imagined with quite some background sounds, like the (in contemporary astronomy) so called dark flow.

Josef Strau

Link: Thomas Eggerer at Daniel Buchholz

Tags: Berlin, Daniel Buchholz, Europe, Germany, Thomas Eggerer

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Artist: Oscar Tuazon

Venue: Kunsthalle Bern

Date: February 13 – April 25, 2010

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Bern. Photos by Dominique Uldry.

Press Release:

Radical interventions in the exhibition-galleries of Kunsthalle Bern were manifest in recent exhibition projects with Corey McCorkle (2005), Rita McBride/ Koenraad Dedobbeleer (2008) and Gerwald Rockenschaub (2008). For his first solo-show in Switzerland, American artist Oscar Tuazon ties in with this tradition and will create a new, site-specific installation contaminating the exhibition-spaces of Kunsthalle Bern.

According to the artist it is impossible to make architecture in an exhibition space because all of the problems that architecture needs to solve have already been solved: there’s already a roof overhead; a heating system; walls and a floor. But what if an artwork creates new problems for the building? What if the existing structure has to adapt, re-engineer itself, in order to accommodate the work? The premise of his most recent work considers architecture as a form of appropriation: buildings do not primarily represent a form of design or a thought-out concept, rather, Tuazon conceives of them as manifestations of a way of life, influencing the surroundings. At Kunsthalle Bern the artist will search the limits of the building by constructing another structure inside. Searching to describe his undertaking Tuazon talks about “one structure laid over another, one structure growing inside another, a plan for a renovation laid over an existing building, a redevelopment, two structures fucking one another.”

Being an archetypal exhibition space, Kunsthalle Bern’s big empty halls are somehow still modelled after domestic space, as a kind of home enlarged and magnified (with a grand foyer, a kitchen, a dining room, a master bedroom, a children’s bedroom, a library and a guest room downstairs). Its walls are enlarged and expanded to hold paintings. It is a structure designed to house artworks—but a structure is never designed to accommodate another structure. Tuazon’s structure will put holes in the walls—all walls that have a carrying function. The piece attacks the building—this old bourgeois idea of art at home, the idea of a space for art. The idea that there could be or can be ever any space for art. And of course even despite all the effort, it fails. It fails to do anything permanent, to disrupt the single, impossible, eternal condition of an exhibition space: that it remains empty. Somehow the grand effort emphasizes that failure. The piece depends on the building; those holes in the walls will become part of the structural system that supports the new structure. So the struggle for a kind of autonomy is futile anyway, or it’s a false aim.

It appears that Tuazon is inspired by the contradictions, which originate in different uses of space, by strategies of coping with limited means or remote places, by parasitic tactics with regard to different economic systems. He is interested in the resistance and the challenges, which an independent human survivor-instinct can mount against its environment. Tuazon envisions potential dwellings according to a DIY-aesthetics. To him, these dwellings represent maximal freedom, since they can be erected and inhabited independently of organizations and civilizations. His models of autonomy often refer to the most basic strategies and means of survival, such as shelter, food and camouflage. These explorations of alternative and individual ways of life are not meant to be a commentary on the current economic crisis, but they do evoke other currently popular models of remembrance and retrospective reflection, which strive for a simplification of the social order.

Oscar Tuazon also works as a writer, publisher and curator, and he could be called one of the most radical sculptors of his time. Tuazon’s artistic practice constitutes a kind of contemporary sculptural bricolage, which is reminiscent of Arte Povera because of its inventive use of natural and industrial materials. In today’s ‘art-system’, which is developed and institutionalized to a larger degree than ever before, such ‘underground’-activities are an impetus to reflect on artistic possibilities that retain a certain independence. This brand of autonomous occupation entails working without a fixed ‘plan’, adapting to local circumstances and being ready to react very quickly to changes.

During his exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, the first comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue on Tuazon’s work in the last few years will be published. The catalogue is the result of a cooperation of Kunsthalle Bern with Do.Pe Press, Paraguay Press, both Paris; the Centre international d’art et du paysage de Vassivière and Parc Saint Léger – Centre d’art contemporain du Pougues-les-Eaux.

Oscar Tuazon, born 1978 in Seattle, Washington, USA, lives and works in Paris, France since 2007.

Link: Oscar Tuazon at Kunsthalle Bern

Tags: Bern, Europe, Kunsthalle Bern, Museum, Oscar Tuazon, Switzerland

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