Aleksandra Domanović

Aleksandra Domanović, Portrait, 2011, 3d model, 50 x 70 cm, inkjet-print in frame

Main

Back

From the Archive

Isa Genzken: Halleluja, Zurich

17 April 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Isa Genzken, Halleluja, 14 April-19 May 2012, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Hubertus Exhibitions, Zurich

Isa Genzken’s work is a cacophonous riot of colour, material and form. She pulls from the geometries of modernist architecture, the aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and the stark and severe ethos of minimalism and corrals these elements in to her own world, rearranging them according to her distinct set of rules. For Hauser & Wirth’s final show at the gallery’s temporary space at Hubertus Exhibitions, Genzken will present new sculptures and collages. These works reference the individuality of the real world, exploring the works’ more human qualities of fragility and haphazardness.

Genzken’s new sculptures echo the architectural dimensions of the high-rise buildings and skyscrapers abounding in New York, the artist’s favourite city. Each work consists of a fantastical melee of objects, such as stacked shipping crates, potted plants, overturned designer chairs, and paintings of Disney characters. These elements are all perched precariously upon high plinths, seemingly held together only by sprays of paint and a few dots of glue.

Like a tourist wandering wide-eyed through a sprawling metropolis, the sculptures invite the visitor to first gaze up at the fabricated skyline, and then to look closer at the ‘eye level’. At this level, Genzken takes the viewer inside the sculpture, transforming her spiralling towers of miscellany into anthropomorphic forms, a surprising humanity residing in their instability.

Photography, sculpture and painting overlap in Genzken’s new collages and with these works, Genzken activates all surfaces of the gallery, not just the walls. One new installation spans the floor of the space, like a sidewalk down the hectic streets of New York City. Each collage contains a mixture of imagery: snapshots from the artist’s personal life, self-portraits, works from her oeuvre, reproductions of Renaissance paintings, kitsch greeting cards, adverts from glossy magazines and an assortment of gaudy patterned papers sprayed with paint. Installed as if they had been forcibly flung upon the walls and on to the floor, Genzken lends these two-dimensional works the same tactility, movement and momentum seen in her sculptures.

Read Full Article

Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl

22 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Books Culture Main No Comments

Valerio Spada, From the Book, Gomorrah Girl, 2011

Valerio Spada’s self-published photo book Gomorrah Girl, the grand prize winner of 4th annual Blurb Photography Book Now Competition. The book explores the murder of Naples resident Annalisa Durante, a young woman caught in the crossfire of violence in “the land of Camorrah,” (the name for the Mafia in Naples). It is an artfully made documentary about adolescence in one of the most dangerous places in Italy to grow up.

“Gomorrah Girl shows the problems of becoming a woman in a dangerous, crime-ridden area,” says Spada, who studied in Milan and has worked as a fashion photographer. “At age 9 they make themselves up as TV personalities and dream of becoming one of them. At age 13 or 14 they often become mothers, skipping the adolescence which is lived fully everywhere else in Italy.”

The story comes together in the books innovative design—Spada’s own documentary photographs, along with a smaller book of photographs detailing the police investigation, are bound together. Captions offer details into the personal tragedies suffered by the subjects alongside stone-cold factual information provided by police evidence.
“As each page unfolds, the viewer is challenged by layers of meaning,” Says Larissa Leclair, a photography curator/writer and a judge in this year’s contest.

Spada wanted to take pictures of the original murder evidence, but the Italian police denied him permission. Handing over photographs of the crime scenes, “the police told me, ‘If you want, you can take pictures of the pictures.’ I remember I was depressed, thinking, ‘I cannot get what I want,’” says Spada, “But I shot every single page. And while I was shooting, all was clear once again. This had to be a book within a book.”

Read Full Article

Hauser & Wirth, Art Gallery

22 March 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Galleries Main 1 Comment

Hauser & Wirth is a gallery of contemporary art and modern masters, with locations in Zurich, London, New York, Somerset and Los Angeles.

Hauser & Wirth was founded in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser. In 1996, the gallery’s first permanent location, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, opened in the former Löwenbräu brewery building, along with other contemporary art galleries, the Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich.

Hauser & Wirth opened its first London gallery on Piccadilly in 2003 with an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy and, in 2010, the gallery opened a second permanent space on London’s Savile Row.

In 2006, Hauser & Wirth opened a new space at the historic premises of 15 Old Bond Street, shared with the UK’s leading old master dealer, Colnaghi. The gallery hosted two to three twentieth century and contemporary shows each year, including exhibitions of works by Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Subodh Gupta, Henry Moore and Francis Picabia, before the space closed in 2010. Hauser & Wirth also opened an enormous temporary project space in London’s East End in 2005. Hauser & Wirth Coppermill showed exhibitions by Martin Kippenberger and Dieter and Björn Roth, Christoph Büchel and Martin Creed before it closed in July 2007.

In September 2009, the gallery inaugurated its outdoor sculpture programme in Southwood Garden, St James’s Church, London, with an exhibition by Swiss artist Josephsohn. Also in September, Hauser & Wirth opened a New York gallery in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with ‘Allan Kaprow: Yard’, an Environment first made in 1961 by Allan Kaprow, the American artist known as the inventor of ‘Happenings.’

In October 2010, Hauser & Wirth London opened their new gallery, designed by Selldorf Architects, at 23 Savile Row with the exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works’. In December 2013, Hauser & Wirth closed their Piccadilly gallery permanently.

In 2013, Hauser & Wirth opened their second New York gallery at 511 West 18th Street, in what used to be the Roxy. Located on the second level of a Chelsea garage, the gallery draws visitors up a long, sweeping stairway before revealing the 10,000 square feet exhibition space. Several artists contributed to the project including Björn Roth, who designed the gallery’s Roth Bar as a tribute to his father Dieter Roth; and Martin Creed, who created a custom installation for the entrance stair hall.

In July 2014, Hauser & Wirth Somerset opened on the outskirts of Bruton in Somerset. Hauser & Wirth Somerset is a gallery and arts centre focused on a core belief in conservation, education and sustainability, and is designed around several renovated Grade II-listed historical buildings as well as two new purpose built galleries on the site of Durslade Farm. Accompanied by an extensive education programme and regular artists-in-residence, the gallery aims to share contemporary art with new audiences and to engage the public with art, the countryside and the local community. In September 2014, a landscaped garden designed for the gallery by internationally renowned landscape architect Piet Oudolf was launched, including a perennial meadow that sits behind the gallery buildings.

http://www.hauserwirth.com

Read Full Article

Dave Hullfish Bailey, Nils Norman, Surrounded by Squares

25 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Nils Norman, Exhibition view, Surrounded by Squares, 2009

For ‘Surrounded by Squares’ Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman have each constructed elaborate sculptural installations. Both relate to education and ecology, design theory and the creative industries, as well as to the site of Raven Row.

Dave Hullfish Bailey has generated polygonal sculptural forms by feeding patterns of information about Spitalfields’ history of dissidence into 3-D design software used by contemporary architects to model high-rises. Under the shadow of the encroaching financial district, Bailey suggests that alternative models may exist for the ordering of space and information.

Nils Norman is interested in the way corporate culture absorbs what is outside itself, aping innovations from the ecological movement and the playscapes of alternative education, and transforming ideas about collectivism and sustainability into those about management of people and quick profit. For his installation, Norman has designed ‘a prototype workspace for the creative classes’, a hybrid object using amongst other things, aquatic filtering systems, a rocket oven and an arid garden.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (1963, living in LA) has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna in 2006 and CASCO, Utrecht in 2007, as well as at Mesler & Hug Gallery in LA, where he also teaches at Art Center.

Nils Norman (1966, living in London) has exhibited in major museums internationally including Tate Modern and Kunsthalle Zurich. He is Professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and currently has an exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York.

Read Full Article

Sculpture: Nina Beier

20 May 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Nina Beier, Shelving for Unlocked Matter and Open Problems, Detail, 2010

Of any artist working today, 35-year-old hyper-mixed-media artist Nina Beier is creating some of the boldest examples of the contemporary artwork in crisis mode. This has a lot to do with the unstable, in flux, usually-referencing-something-absent, often-crushed-or-pieced-together, and likely-to-change nature of her sculptural explorations.

Take her seemingly straightforward work, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Wet Paint, 2010, which may look like a large blotch of test paint on a blank wall; instead, it’s a savvy institutional critique on the art of backdrops, in which Beier raids a given museum’s paint stockpile to reapply a new color on the same spot intermittently. Another example of Beier using the system against itself is her photographic piece What Follows Will Follow II: Installation shots of works from a previous show become the work framed in the next one, an idea that could breed an endless chain of recycled and re-rerecyled imagery.

The Danish-born Beier gets much of her creative impulses from philosophy and literature (Heidegger and Lewis Carroll are recent touchstones). But for all of the theoretical uplift, the end result is provocatively tactile. Her most recent productions include dipping photographic stock images in glue and hanging them to dry on mass-produced household items, thus using an image to utterly envelop an actual thing. Another series involves found secondhand fabrics stuffed together inside a frame to create an almost Arte Povera-esque surface on the verge of busting open.

Beier has been living in Berlin for the past three years after starting her career in London. “I moved mainly because I was attracted to the qualities of an underpopulated city,” she says. “I guess the pace of the city is a little slower than other cities I have lived in, but I find the contrary to be true when it comes to the productivity of artists who live here.”

Read Full Article