Art Writings / Catalogues

Art Writings / Catalogues

1/20/2011

Klemens Gasser “Antigone Things”

(01/20/2011)

This is a press release. Klemens told me he didn’t think he’d get press.
He said he thought this was the press. Sort of, he said that. He
showed me some canvases that are going to be in the show, and then he
showed me some canvases that aren’t going to be in the show. For
context, he showed me the ones that aren’t going to be in the show. For
context: the ones that aren’t going to be in the show are raw canvases
with drying paint pressed through to the other side of the canvas. Not
all the paint, but a big enough glob of it to run down the back. The
paintings were weirdly erotic. They’re about what we don’t see, i.e.,
what’s under the clothes under the table. The new canvases—uh, to get
all press release about it, seven of them—are raw canvas, each one with a
single page glued to the back. The glue and paper on the back of the
canvas distorts the front of the canvas. A raised impression of the
page on the back of the canvas shows on the front of the canvas. The
works will hang on the sheetrocked walls of a large cargo container
hauled by a truck. The moving gallery will be placed in front of the
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, which was recently flooded.
Klemens told me he has not had much to do with being a gallery dealer
for five years. He’s also been making movies and writing, and one of
his films and a novella of his will also be in the show. He wrote his
own press release, which to my eye looked just fine—press releases for
art exhibitions are supposed to be impenetrable. But he wanted
something else. My impression was that he wanted someone to make sense
of it all, which is typical of a press release, but that he also want
something that was not a press release...

Debora Warner: “Tomaniac”

(0108/2009)

Catalogue essay for “An Empty Space”

Essay also titled “Stranger Fruit”

Akira Ikeda Gallery

EXT. NIGHT.

Close on: tomato plant, two tomatoes hang side by side. A distinctive thread encircles the tomatoes—as if they’re skins are stitched.

Wider shot: tomato garden on plantation. South Carolina: 1840s.

In the vines. White limbs, and black. Plants rustle. The limbs: entangled in sex.

CUT TO:

EXT. DAY.

Sniffing hounds. Horses. A manhunt…

Milica Tomic

(11/17/2006)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

“Reading Capital & Container”

In a global ecosystem that is fed by the constant repetition of a select few images, Tomic reconstructs the images, the life, as seen when stripped of the lustre provided, maintained, by global corporations. Tomic shows us the unseen, not only in the sense of what is denied to us visually, but what is denied intellectually and spiritually.

Tomic’s Reading Capital (2005) is a realization of Sergej Eisenstein’s concept of a screen adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital. Tomic persuaded respected ‘Capitalists’ from San Antonio, Texas to recite passages excerpted from the work. The ‘intellectual montage’ is intended to generate a mental image arising from the filmed representation that reveals the antagonistic contradictions in society and the ‘laws’ of capitalism as the dominant logic in life.

This logic extends to the governing and flow of goods in CONTAINER (2005). The container signifies not only the transport of goods, but of people—Mexicans being shipped into the USA illegally, or the bodies of murder victims freighted for disposal, as in the Serbian war, or prisoners of war denied the rights protected under the Geneva Convention. CONTAINER (2005) reconstructs a crime, a massacre overseen by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Economy has reduced people to the status of goods and, they are treated as such. They are used-up and then disposed of.

Hanne Darboven

(11/17/2006)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

“Evolution Leibniz”

It has been said that the difference between the human and the animal is language; it has been said that the difference is shame; it has been said that the difference is the use of tools. But it is the experience of time that separates humanity from all the other living species. Language, shame, even the use of tools, all of these things evolve within the environment of our temporal experience, which allows for planning, for communication based on realities that aren’t necessarily at hand, and, of course, regret. It is this essential time, as an overarching milieu, that Hanne Darboven iterates in “Evolution Leibniz.” And it is through the basic human traits, our shame, our language, our use of tools, that she constructs a philosophy of life, of history.

Originally shown in 1986 at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (and published simultaneously) this seminal work takes as its outward inspiration the 350th anniversary of the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The 444 page volume is constituted by 222 framed double-pages. A second piece, “Dostojeweski” (1990) will accompany the work in the second viewing gallery.

With her use of abstracted language (a wavy cursive) and numerical description (“2=1,2;1+1=1,2” seals each image of “Evolution Leibniz”), Darboven fosters an epic impression of memory that is personal, collective and historical. The repeated image of “Evolution Leibniz,” a toy-like model representing a toilet and a figure working a hammer and anvil, encompass a pathos, not only of the mundanity of days and more days, but of a primary awe in our taken-for-granted technologies and mental outlook. While much has been written of Darboven and the relationship of her work to history and twentieth century philosophy, the projects themselves incorporate a plastic transience, and slide into the future with facility. The computer age, a new scientific era that incorporates chaos and a multiplicity of realities—as these theories develop into philosophies and philosophies of art, Darboven’s creations will persist in their cogency: an eternal immediacy, which for all its complexity, for all its abstraction, is the most fundamental, most animal awareness.

Petra Singh

(07/13/2006)

No two children are alike. Why should their stuffed animals be any different?

When Petra Singh accidentally shrank a fine cashmere sweater in the wash, she marveled at the precious, tight weave. And artist, Petra put herself to work, fashioning her first stuffed elephant. Since that momentous arrival, Petra has sculpted animals of all shapes and sizes, always of the finest “pre-shrunk” wools, always with creativity, fun and the individuality of the creation foremost. Like children, each of Petra’s creatures is cut from its own cloth, totally original, totally one of a kind.

Benjamin Cottam

(04/10/2006)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

Benjamin Cottam, in his first New York solo show, inverted the common art-crit assumption that all art has some essential relationship to death and/or nostalgia. In contrast to classical portraiture, rather than capture moments or images in time, Cottam’s paintings—at first glance black monoliths—sever presumed sentimentality. Cottam’s oils gain more from the future than the past; it is by studied looking that the forms of Cottam’s works take shape. Only gradually are foregrounds, on the cusp of perception, realized/invented by the viewer. While Cottam’s glazes seem significant of a scrim representing the dark end that awaits us, they are in fact barriers to the temptation of assumption, and ultimately, death itself.

In Cottam’s second New York show, a group of ten portraits span Cottam’s contemporaries: friends, supporters, other artists. The current moment is largely defined by a movement to put forth the creative person first, to ignore the work and its content; it is a ramification of a society resigned to the death of creative culture. But where many artists dwell on the apparencies of persona—the fashionista clothing, the mock urbanity—Cottam has stripped his figures of any facile cues. Cottam divests his subjects (including himself, in a self-portrait) of the expectation that persona/identity functions to cast us in life roles as tired as the characters of the latest Broadway Revival.

A series of 18 drawings, silverpoint on paper, sketch the inebriated states of Pete Doherty (The Libertines, Babyshambles) during the course of his public-eye melt down. The dime-size images shrink the person—absent media/pop grandeur—to a mere smudge of life. These postage-stamp scaled images suggest not only what it means to be reduced to symbol, but how the individual, in the present attitude of what art is, becomes reduced to commodity. Even Rock ‘N Roll, with its age-old cycles (such as Doherty’s punk revival, revival), has become a shadowy ghost of itself. Our fascination with figures such as Doherty implicates us in the larger cultural zombification, which is fundamental to Cottam’s commission: not only the horror, but the allure of spiritual death.

Peter Stauss

(02/10/2006)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

“Peter Stauss’s imagery escapes a concrete narrative, weaving social and art-historical references with depictions of disenfranchised, self-mutilating hippies. The overall feeling of these paintings is nothing short of apocalyptic.” —Andrew Marsh, Flash Art, 10/04

As much as we fear the end, it beckons us. In America, The End Times have become big business. A predominantly Christian nation, we interpret the confusion of rapidly changing lives, and an uncertain future, in biblical Armageddon. The final book of the New Testament, The Revelation, is made the stuff of popular novels, television shows, movies. Some see a prophetic nature to these works, but most of the Nation, given a more ecumenical, even Gnostic interaction with religion, are intrigued by these forays as explorations of the unknowable.

The Book of Revelation has a narrative, seemingly, but no linear telling to reveal it. In Peter Stauss works—electric with the end of knowable culture, of knowable experience, of knowable art—the narrative content is analogously discontinuous. His canvases tempt us with familiar images, some might call them archetypes—saints, soldiers, revolutionaries, heroes, villains, burnouts. But these characters, in contradiction to what is expected of characters, power no plot, no intrigue about the nature of humanity. They are whirling, disassociated from each other or anything else. The colors are vivid, slashing. His sense of paint is vibrant with technology. Our contemporary cataclysm is portrayed with the brash hues and compositional anarchy of a mall whipped into a tornado.

Of course, the end appeals not only to our fear, but to an inherent expectation of heaven, nirvana, happiness (depending on one’s outlook). The self-destruction that we manifest, that Stauss captures with startling alacrity, is driven by our own illusion of paradise. Perhaps, in this hyper-density of stories, we can find some perfection. The perfect void of a solar system smashed by a black hole. But just as likely, Stauss puts forth that our efforts towards a divine existence have created … this. That we’re as close to heaven as we’re going to get. That we have witnessed, in the words of the New Testament, tomorrow.

Will Ryman, Redux Redux

(02/07/2006)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

One often hears the “art imitates life,” formulation, and, perhaps equally often, one hears the converse, that “life imitates art.” Certainly, this contemporary moment, creatively, is fostered as much by farce as by experience. On the one hand, it has become unsatisfying to say that art is a purely reflective of experience, when it seem quite evident that art functions as far more than a mirror—whether we’re talking about a Hollywood movie or a hyper-text poem. On the other hand, the notion that we are solely the function of pop culture is equally reductive.

Like theater, the process of living, and art, is rife with expectation and easy assumptions. By directly engaging the sentiment, the ready-made emotion, Ryman addresses not only the superficiality, but the underlying identity of the human façade.

Ryman demonstrates a total control of his material and subject matter in this rigorous performance. Capitalizing on his theatrical and directorial expertise, Ryman has produced a lush and stinging moment of sculptural theater.

Will Ryman, Redux

(10/18/2005)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

In his second solo show at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, Will Ryman takes on our expectations—at first, confronting us with the ultimate in superficiality, and then contextualizing the experience with an elucidation of the underlying processes.

Upon entering the gallery, the south room is filled with a life-scale tableau of Ryman’s puppet-like sculptures (constructed of papier-mâché, PVC piping and acrylic paint). The maudlin figures consist of a man walking his dog, a “Couple in Love,” a beggar, and a homeless person (perhaps), sitting on the floor screaming. They are painted brightly, and surround a newsstand filled with candy (sweet tasting poison) and media (more sweet tasting poison). Amidst Ryman’s handcrafted Mounds bars, we see newspapers and magazines, announcing “War,” and crucial investigations such as “50 ways to be a better girlfriend,” and “50 most beautiful New Yorkers”. The scene is one of uncompromised surface—the magazine gloss of the acrylic paint lays stress to the thinness of this existence. Ryman deftly captures the horror, the comfort, of surfing through life on a wave of the banal. The supersaturation of color, candy, pop-culture, and tabloid journalism, makes it easy to meander, half-awake, through life. We borrow from the ready-made clichés of living; there are easy ways to think of love, of domesticity and of poverty. Ryman neatly demonstrates how appealing it all is.

As one moves into the north room, however, the trajectory of the show shifts. Thirty figures, all untitled, ranging in size from diminutive to enormous, are presented without color, in the gray tones of their papier-mâché insides. The anthropoids are singing, or screaming, and Ryman sets up the disturbing duality that, beneath our superficiality, we are just as likely to find another level of superficiality as to find a deeper consciousness.

Bart Domburg

(09/25/2005)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

What is it to stand inside and look at the sky through a window? What is it to look at the windows from the outside, and see the sky as merely a reflection in the panes of glass?

In his third solo show at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert , Bart Domburg re-sees the sky through the grid of the human paradigm. In eight paintings depicting Berlin’s cityscape windows, Domburg confronts the beauty and horror of the new landscape. Domburg’s literal viewpoint, that of a pedestrian standing on the street, signifies a common experience of seeing the world, the sky, reflected in the valley-like windows of the avenues. We teeter on the brink of a natural and unnatural world that is representative of an inner landscape as well as an outer one. In the street, or behind the windows of an office building—we look at Domburg’s window paintings and wonder where we find ourselves. It is this same opposition of public and private spaces that manifests in our daily, contemporary lives. Our needs, our indulgences—we find ourselves in a constant struggle to identify what is us versus what is them, what is real versus what is manufactured, what is endemic versus what is intrinsic.

Since 2003, Domburg has built upon his landscape paintings, which were focused on subjects of historical, religious and personal significance, to include horizonal paintings of a seemingly endless expanse, and window still-lifes that encompass an intellectual and emotional equivalent of a recurring series of reflections—a symbolic infinity mirror.

That Domburg’s oil-on-canvas works are ultra-real representations of East Berlin buildings serves to accentuate the abstraction of everyday life. East Berlin, exceptionally, embodies a shift to a human life that is fundamentally based on abstract thinking. The grid of the windows are not only emblematic of architecture, but of accepted societal constructs—from government and money to media and movies. The actual sky in Domburg’s windows become indistinct, unknown in their neatly spliced frames. The abstraction is an embrace of multiplicity—of painting style, of space, of history, of culture, of individual experience.

With precision, and a simplicity built on a multifaceted intelligence, Domburg imparts a quiet confidence to viewers of his work, an understanding that is perhaps articulated, perhaps wordless—but is, regardless, riveting, reverent, and revelatory.

Elizabeth Neel

(04/12/2005)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

In her first New York solo show, Elizabeth Neel brings a force, an aggression, to a series of oil-on-canvas works. The paintings, based on imagery culled from the Internet, is boldly dismissive of distinctions between abstraction and representation. Landscape and figure grow out of abstraction, and at the same time, decay into abstraction—an abstraction that represents not so much the geometry of forms as the insanity of perceiving. In this new millennia of painting, Neel has distilled a methodology as fully cognizant of digital imagery and the position of the cinematic camera, as it is of the course of art history. “Every painting I make is a reference to every painting made before,” says Neel.

In the early twentieth century, the idea that art could be something other than framed pictures of fleshy women or green panoramas or biblical tableaus, was beyond the customary understanding of what art could be. It would be insanity to find a toilet, or a coat rack, and call it art. Towards the middle of the century, the notion that art could be found on the cartoon page seemed equally preposterous, similarly, pop culture would make its surprising contribution. The next trash heap is often where we find the future—where insanity collides with creativity. Following in this trajectory, Neel forages on the Internet, which represents, to most, an artless amalgam of stuff.

“I paint from a landfill scattered and layered with the fragments of our culture,” says Neel. “Here are splintered trees and the essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, piles of clothes and the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, The Sci-Fi Channel and CNN. I search the Internet, salvaging remnants in this confounded place, finding paradigms in pieces, and strange, reincarnated creatures.”

The assumption that figuration was outmoded was widely held for many years—a notion that Neel challenges with the ambiguity of her own relationship to the categories of abstraction and representation. The work, while straddling the two camps, is also completely its own, and explosively inclusive. Her deft brushwork and acumen embody a historical perspective, as well as a historic presence.

Ena Swansea

(08/24/2004)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

The strip-malls. The torn-up forests. Where does the shadow of Empire fall? We can see it here in America, at the crosses of telephone poles and cellular towers—and we can see it all over the world, in the Asian sweatshops of Western Corporations, in the street urchins of South America. Ena Swansea, native to North Carolina, is no stranger to this shadow. America’s South has a history that lends itself to a deeper understanding of cultural and economic confrontation, and defeat. At the end of the twenty-first century, Swansea was appropriately obsessed with the shadow, investigating the subject literally and abstractly in large-scale oil paintings.

“If the leafy, stem-like forms in her paintings were a degree or two less definite, we would call Swansea an abstractionist. If these forms were a touch more referential, she would count without question as a realist…. The major precedent for composition attenuated to the point of dissolution is Claude Monet’s series of mural-sized Water Lillies. Swansea obviously knows those paintings well. Moreover, she understands what Jackson Pollock was up to when, with his dripped and poured images, he broke through the boundaries of traditional composition.” —Carter Ratcliff

Employing a unique process of a graphite ground, Swansea achieves a surface that is alternately luminous and dusky, and antagonistic to the division of abstraction and figuration which, prior to the political and global shift of the War on Terror, etc., had atavistically lingered in the art world. Within the latest socio-political paradigm, however, that distinction, especially in New York, has fallen away. New York, from the moment of the dust cloud that enveloped the city, has entered the shadow, and pretensions that New Yorkers once lived by—in art and fashion, for example—have become distinctly unpalatable. Through the ten mostly epic-sized paintings of “Situation,” Swansea has also entered the shadow of the New World Order. There is a distinct seriousness, a rent in the pop-culture fabric of fabulosity. In Dinner, one of Swansea’s figures has shed his shirt, unable to withstand even that simplest cultural definition. All of the figures in the work are somewhat indistinct, especially as juxtaposed to the objects on the table, which they surround. We are participants at a banquet—each utterly alone, and but murky phantoms to one another. Swansea takes on multiple aspects of the contemporary world: the gasoline and coal burning horsepower of Car and Train, the pedestrian nature of evil in Devil. The artist asserts a range of implications that remain true not only to her process of fabrication (equate her extraordinary graphite ground with coal, and then equate the coal with oil), but of her place in the history of painting. In an interview with Barry Schwabsky, Swansea explains:

“The old model of the abstract expressionists, Pollock in particular, ruins everything for figure painting. Once abstraction was a western frontier, wild and unexplored. It had limits that could not be seen. A century later things have frozen up and now the limits tend to block the view of the possibilities. The shadow paintings try to find one way of remembering the possibilities, of a glimpse at the unfamiliar, grafted onto a simple-minded armature—a lily shadow or something like it. The figure paintings go out into that more internally mysterious spot … people.”

Will Ryman

(05/06/2004)

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

The gallery. Exhibition space itself has largely become the contextualization of art. This is not just to say there are requisite architectural delineations of white walls without moldings, but to say that the intellectual and commercial capital of a gallery bears directly on the impact of the work it shows.

Will Ryman, in two successive acts of guerilla galleryship (2003, 2004), created an installation for his installation. His sculptural anthropoids, in the midst of their various doings (engaged in simple, but significant situations), populated a theatrical pseudo-gallery, fashioned by the artist from his Bowery loft. Ryman’s work, rather than bear the brunt of a disassociation with its exhibition space (i.e. this is the work, this is where the work is), inhabits a theatre of its own. In Ryman’s first New York solo show, which largely recreates the second of the Bowery installations, the viewer will literally walk on stage with the sculptural actors—who range in size from a towering 138 inches (“Big Guy”), to a diminutive 13 inches (“Little Guy”), and range in physical aspect from emotive and fetal, to emotive and genitalial.

The theatricality of Ryman’s sculptures (constructed of papier-mâché, PVC piping and acrylic paint, the figures take on puppet-like personas) is no accident. Ryman, who spent ten years as a playwright, brings narrative and drama to his sculptural tableaus. Very much like actors in stage sets, or characters in plays, Ryman’s figures are caught, as if forever, in sympathetic and vulnerable moments. One figure hugs another in “Embrace.” A dog-ish thing sits, as if stunned, while its master stares at the viewer in “Boy walking his Dog.” A couple contemplates their pregnancy in “The Bedroom.” Nevertheless, Ryman’s theatricality remains saccharine in its empathy, as the situations that his minions endure are as absurd as they are tragic. In “The Pit,” 91 of his creatures face the Twilight Zone conundrum of enclosure in an open box. In “The Cage,” keeping with Ryman’s participatory theater, it is the imprisoned viewer who finds him/herself the star of a sideshow spectacle. Our contemporary plight is all too silly, and all too real. Sad, those canvas sneakers. Sad, that wire hair.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

(04/13/2004)

“What would happen if spatial and temporal existence were to lose their structures by being divorced from time with space invading being?”

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

Mieke Bal poses the question in her in-depth examination of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s seminal work, The House. First exhibited as the signature work of Documenta XI (2002), The House has been included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, K21 Dusseldorf, and is currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker led his overview of Documenta XI with a discussion of Ahtila’s work:

“I kept returning to a marvelous video installation—a digital short story, essentially—by the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. ‘The House’ is about a pleasant young woman going quietly mad one nightless summer at an old seaside cottage in a forest. …”

Ultimately, Schjeldahl concludes, the protagonist of The House arrives at “a place where time and space, and cause and effect, are confounded.” The impressive cinematography and rich subject matter of The House are redolent with numerous interpretations, and Michael Kimmelman, of the New York Times, praises Ahtila’s achievement, which “defies logic and synopsis.”

In Ahtila’s fourth show at Gasser & Grunert, The House makes its first New York appearance. This significant work is recontextualized by four additional sculptures by Ahtila. The four small buildings, or houses, constructed in the style of architectural models, represent psychological potentialities, in which the viewer is invited to participate. The works are haunting advances on Ahtila’s methodology and deliberation, and signify a critical implication of Ahtila’s vision. The Plexi House is constructed of plexi, hardboard, and paint; The Shade House, mdf, plywood, and aluminum alloy; The Pool House, aluminum, acrylic sheet, insect net, water; The Tent House, mdf, canvas, ceramic tiles, sand. Ahtila’s architectural materials, in spite of an apparent architectural reserve, take on a highly individuated presence, and viewers will look on the structures as possible manifestations of human psychologies: even, perhaps, of their own. In The Tent House, the viewer is invited to raise his/her head into the structure, to become, in tandem, a mind at work, and a mind perceived. For those unfamiliar with Ahtila, the present exhibition will make an excellent introduction to a meticulous, luminous intelligence; for those who are acquainted with the artist, Ahtila’s sculptural variations will enlarge the implications of a project already fiercely broad in its interpretation.