Gavin Brown's enterprise

Sturtevant. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the US for 7 years.

She has been living in Paris for over 20 years. In that time the world has caught up with Sturtevant. Known superficially for her replicas of the work of her contemporaries, she has been consistently opaque and mistaken for something else. This is not a copy. It is itself. The twin is only such because of the existence of the other (twin). Without, the one born first is alone. And yet together they define their difference from one other.

For nearly 50 years Sturtevant has lived a life of armed struggle in the cause of intellectual freedom. She is the annihilator of heritage, of copyright and uniqueness. In this she has been consistently insistent. Her world, her view, has now come into our field of vision. The condition of the simulacrum has come to pass. It reigns supreme. Sturtevant prefigured, in a visionary way, the impact of cybernetics and the digital revolution. We now inhabit the world with eyes as wide as hers ever were.

Elastic Tango/Rock & Rapc Simulacra is the altarpiece of our alienation. It is the Brutal Truth - that now we inhabit the hive with her and the work of art is the scrim through which we touch the physical world outside. Each image of this world out of reach - each edit and each shared simultaneous moment underlines our separation from reality. The mega-pop 'reality' of these images is a mask of truth that hides the lies.

Sturtevant (b. 1930, Lakewood, Ohio) lives and works in Paris, France. Recent exhibitions include retrospective at the Musee Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010, 'The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking' and 'Image over Image', which is currently showing at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and will move to Kunsthalle Zurich later in the year. Sturtevant was awarded The Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Clone, doppelgänger, reflection? Sturtevant is one of the great enigmas of the art scene. For half a century she has challenged the meaning of art and what it entails to be an artist. Her legendary repetitions of works by Warhol, Duchamp, Beuys and others were groundbreaking, and her work continues to be exceedingly poignant in our digital era of abundance, copies, clones and increasingly complex issues concerning commodities and copyright.

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image at Moderna Museet allows her oeuvre to display its full range. The presence of Sturtevant’s works becomes nearly site-specific in six of the 18 rooms that are usually dedicated to the permanent collection. The artists whose works she has repeated largely overlap with the history of Moderna Museet and its unique collection of Marcel Duchamp, American pop art and minimalism. Moderna Museet also has a history of confronting authenticity – from important replicas to the project Museum of the Fakes which was shown within the exhibition She – A Cathedral in 1966, and the now internationally infamous Brillo boxes. Curator of the exhibition Fredrik Liew says:
“Sturtevant is a pioneer who, at the age of 82, is at the height of her career. She was ridiculed when she made her debut in 1965, and no one at the time made the links between her work and a critical discussion of surface, product, copyright and autonomy. Nor did anyone consider what it could mean that a woman artist was repeating the works of male colleagues. But then, her repetitions came before Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Millet and Greer had published their seminal works on these subjects.”

Since 2000, Sturtevant has made several video installations in which she combines mass media images with her own filmed material in a collage-like format. These works emphasise how her oeuvre extends beyond the internal affairs of the art scene. Sturtevant’s harsh and critical gaze is aimed at a lazy society that is increasingly made up of superficiality and experience industry. As Sturtevant herself comments:
“What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go.”

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image features 30 works, including her repetitions of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Félix González-Torres, and four of her most recent major video installations. The artist has produced no less than four works specifically for this exhibition – among them a series of repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow in the Moderna Museet collection.

Sturtevant was awarded the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievement in art at the Venice Biennale in 2011.


The exhibition is produced jointly by Moderna Museet and Kunsthalle Zürich.

Curator: Fredrik Liew

La Triennale 2012 is very pleased to announce the start of Intense Proximity, a major exhibition of contemporary art opening on April 20th at the newly renovated and expanded Palais de Tokyo and seven other institutions located throughout greater Paris.
Featuring over 130 contributors, Intense Proximity draws upon the fields of visual art, ethnography, anthropology, cinema, literature, music, and performance, and explores the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The exhibition takes as one of its points of departure the critical legacy of the first half of twentieth century ethnography and the continued fascination in contemporary art with exploring ethnographic poetics.

Beginning with figures including Marc Allégret, André Gide, Marcel Griaule, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Verger, Walker Evans, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Intense Proximity emphasizes synchronic points of convergence among these names and their work. A full chronological list of all exhibition participants (organized by year of birth) can be found below.
La Triennale 2012 marks the reopening of all three floors of the Palais de Tokyo, which has been refurbished by architects Lacaton & Vassal. Significantly, Intense Proximity also reaches beyond the Palais de Tokyo through its collaborations with seven other institutions in Paris and the surrounding region, including Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, Galliera – musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Grand Palais, Instants Chavirés, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, and the Musée du Louvre.

As a prelude to the public opening of La Triennale 2012, Rirkrit Tiravanija will transform the Nave of the Grand Palais into an enormous, festive, twelve-hour banquet as he presents—for the first time in Paris—a large-scale edition of his ongoing artwork, Soup/No Soup. In a gesture of exchange and hospitality, on Saturday, April 7th from noon until midnight, the Grand Palais will give free access for all to share and sample a soup prepared by the artist and his team.

La Triennale 2012 also features a bilingual exhibition guide and a substantial publication, Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler—and co-published as two distinct volumes (French and English) by the Centre national des arts plastiques (“CNAP”), and the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais/Artlys—the anthology features eleven newly commissioned essays by leading figures from the fields of contemporary art, ethnography, and politics, and a series of twenty-six historical texts foregrounding the convergence of artistic practices and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At over seven hundred pages, the full-color anthology also includes a series of visual essays from all contributors to the exhibition.

Contributors:

Palais de Tokyo
André Gide et Marc Allégret, Marcel Griaule, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Verger, Walker Evans, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Helen Levitt, Jean Rouch, Carol Rama, Ivan Kozaric, Geta Bratescu, Öyvind Fahlström, Timothy Asch, Lorraine O’Grady, Ahmed Bouanani, Daniel Buren, Sarkis, Georges Adéagbo, Werner Herzog, Antoni Muntadas, Eugenio Dittborn, David Hammons, Annette Messager, El Anatsui, Lothar Baumgarten, Michael Buthe, Haim Steinbach, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ewa Partum, Adrian Piper, Chantal Akerman, Miklos Onucsan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Terry Adkins, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas Struth, Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, Jean-Luc Moulène, Alfredo Jaar, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jochen Lempert, Peter Friedl, Isaac Julien, Meschac Gaba, Dan Perjovschi, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ariella Azoulay, Huma Bhabha, Luc Delahaye, Rosângela Rennó, Guy Tillim, Claude Closky, Ali Essafi, Monica Bonvicini, Ellen, Gallagher, Alejandra Riera et Andreas M. Fohr, Walid Sadek, Barthélémy Toguo, Ivan Boccara, Minouk Lim, Chris Ofili, Jason Dodge, Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige, Marcia Kure, Adel Abdessemed, Yto Barrada, Jewyo Rhii, Joost Conijn, Seulgi Lee, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Wangechi Mutu, Eric Baudelaire, Emmanuelle Lainé, David Maljkovic, NaoKo TaKaHaShi, Isabelle Cornaro, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Victor Man, Batoul S’Himi, Marie Voignier, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Desire Machine Collective, Nicholas Hlobo, Hiwa K, Bouchra Khalili, Hassan Khan, Selma et Sofiane Ouissi, Younes Rahmoun, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Köken Ergun, Bojan Fajfric, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Anca Benera et Arnold Estefan, Basim Magdy, Haroon Mirza, Konrad Smolenski, Ziad Antar, Carolina Caycedo, Camille Henrot, Nina Canell, Tarek Atoui, Dominik Lang, Adam Pendleton, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Karthik Pandian, Aurélien Porte, Ekta Mittal et Yashaswini Raghunandan, Bertille Bak, Neil Beloufa, Dominique Hurth, Mihut Boscu, Centre for Visual Introspection

Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research
Hendrick Danckerts, Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, Germaine Krull, André Lassoudière, Lois Weinberger, Amos Gitaï, Claire Pentecost, Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, Dan Peterman, Maria Thereza Alves, Mark Dion, Otobong Nkanga, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Pablo Bronstein, Marie Preston

Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac
Boris Achour

Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
El Anatsui

Grand Palais
Rirkrit Tiravanija

Instants Chavirés
Skullflower, Astral Social Club, Regenorchester XIV, Api Uiz, Stephen O’Malley, MKM, Seijiro Murayama, Michel Doneda, The Contest of Pleasures, BTR, Gert-Jan Prins, Andy Moor / Yannis Kyriakides, Hubbub

Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz

Musée du Louvre
Françoise Vergès

La Triennale 2012 – Intense Proximity is a project by Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor and Associate Curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Emilie Renard, and Claire Staebler.

La Triennale is organized at the initiative of the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Direction générale de la création artistique, commissioner, with the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), associate commissioner, and produced by the Palais de Tokyo.

Press information:
presse@latriennale.notexisting@nodomain.comorg

General information:
contact@latriennale.notexisting@nodomain.comorg

Enter the world of glowing light and vibrant color of “Alex Katz Prints.” Bold portraits, idyllic landscapes, scenes of sophisticated leisure—they’re all here in the works of the renowned contemporary artist. With arresting simplicity of line, color, and form, Katz distills his subjects down to their essence, with a powerful graphic punch.

Alex Katz (b. 1927), known for his bold, hard-edged figurative paintings and prints, is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. The MFA’s exhibition "Alex Katz Prints," based on an exhibition organized by the Albertina Graphic Collection, Vienna, surveys his career from the sixties to the present with 125 works: prints, unique and editioned cutouts on aluminum, and illustrated books. Katz depicts family members, art-world friends, and Maine landscapes with a cool detachment and a seductive elegance, while walking a tightrope between traditional figuration and pure abstraction. His portraits are among the most recognizable images in contemporary art. The artist’s model and muse for half a century has been his wife, Ada. Images of her in various guises will be on view along with portraits of prominent figures from New York’s art, dance, and poetry worlds. A focal point of the exhibition will be the unique series of painted life-size cutout heads on aluminum, Rush, a 2011 gift from the artist to the MFA. This will be an inaugural showing at the Museum of this exciting piece, which will be installed frieze-like in its own space. Comprising 37 silhouetted painted portrait heads, the series depicts members of the New York cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s. The exhibition celebrates the promised gift from the artist to the MFA of an archive of his editioned prints.

MADAME FISSCHER offers a journey through Urs Fischer’s artistic career from the nineties to today. His work, characterized by humor, penchant for paradox, and virtuosity of execution, employs simultaneously an extraordinary diversity of media and materials. It calls into question the history of art and sculpture, our relationship to the body, the notion of time and the status of the object.

Urs Fischer’s art, which privileges polysemy and complexity, avoids any academic weightiness or univocal interpretation. With its combination of illusion and reality, violence and humor, his creative universe appears both logical and absurd. The artist creates unstable equilibriums, whose meaning seems to be constantly shifting. The exhibition’s title itself, “Madame Fisscher” (after the title of the work installed in the museum’s atrium), points to this rejection of a unique interpretation. Does it refer to the artist, his companion, his mother, or perhaps to Madame Tussaud and her famous wax museum? Eliciting in turn - and sometimes simultaneously - surprise, doubt, puzzlement, and concern, the exhibition unfolds precisely in this logic of indetermination and movement.

Urs Fischer’s multimedia art, which is deeply rooted in sculpture despite the artist’s training as a photographer, unfolds grand gestures with a pop attitude. Born in Switzerland in 1973 and living and working in New York, the artist grapples with scale in a sculptural balancing act. Whether playing with light and shadow, gravity, or materiality, Fischer’s subtle and striking artworks engage in radical spatial interventions that situate his work in the aesthetic tradition of artists like Francis Picabia, Dieter Roth, and Gordon Matta-Clark. His equally abstract, representational, and figurative art probes formal solutions and challenges static art representations by depicting (mechanical) processes in various installations. Searching for each work’s own internal dynamics, the artist cultivates apparent failure and makes chance an integral part of his production. As exemplified by his wax sculptures, whose candlelike forms evolve and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition, Fischer endows unconventional materials such as styrofoam, mirror glass, and glue with temporality, while the vanitas motifs in his still-lifes and skeletons memorialize the transience of the world.

Curated by Gerald Matt and Angela Stief

Jennifer Bornstein is known for her early conceptual performance-based videos, 16 mm films, and photographs. Typical of the early works is the video “Collectors’ Favorites” (1994), in which the artist appears on a famous radio show as a passionate collector of disposable fast-food containers, or the photographic series “Public Libraries and Basketball Courts” (1996-98) in which the artist posed with young pre-adolescent boys from her neighborhood and imitated their facial expressions, gestures, and posture.

Over the past few years, Jennifer Bornstein began to dedicate herself to other forms of image production (besides the photographs, videos, and 16mm films), namely, various manual printing techniques. But her interest in the tactility of old technology dates way back: she used noisy film projectors in an era when the video projectors were quietly tucked away and hidden from view. In the era of digital wonders, she created special effects by the inventive use of household objects. Through the use of manual printing techniques even her sketches are made to be tactile. Instead of using pencil on paper, she prefers etchings, a technique which blossomed over 300 years ago. A quiet sense of humor is just underneath the surface of Bornstein’s etchings and copper engravings that playback momentary scenes in direct opposition to the time and effort she puts into producing them. The etchings often serve as sketches for film projects and are then presented together with the films. In this way, Bornstein creates exhibition displays that put the relationship between the viewer and the work in the center of reflection, and the individual works become stage props in the works’ theatrical staging.

Also in the daadgalerie, Bornstein brings together various new projects in an installative staging, including video work, in which Bornstein wrote a radio play in Yiddish for a Polish radio broadcaster, as well as printmaking, partly based on techniques developed by the artist herself. Bornstein’s new works are concerned with the popular and commercial everyday language and with images of everyday surroundings – very much in the sense of Pop art – as well as her passion for collecting that finds expression in a linguistic categorization and, at times, even a fetishization of everyday impressions. Bornstein employs subtle methods in order to play with our means of perception – first and foremost with the kind of perception that has to do with preconceived ideas: she’s fascinated by the fact that 80% of what we perceive with our eyes is based on what we have already saved in our memories.

Jennifer Bornstein (born in 1970 in Seattle, Washington) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. Bornstein has had numerous exhibitions at international institutions such as the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, (2011), the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009), the CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2008), and she participated in the 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007). She has had solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005). Bornstein participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and, since 2003, has taught at Yale University, among others. In 2010/11, Jennifer Bornstein was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramms.