John Kleckner. Years Disappear. Galerie Judin. Berlin.

Vernissage July 2nd, 2017.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

John Kleckner. Years Disappear.

Press Release: Two years ago, Amer­ican artist John Kleckner, born in Iowa in 1978, took up paint­ing again. After working almost exclu­sively with ink, water­color and pencil on paper for sev­eral years, he cre­ated a dozen large-format paint­ings, which will be on view for the first time in our exhi­bi­tion. This change of technique has also prompted a change of style: the organic shapes and nat­u­ral­is­tic sub­jects of his works on paper have given way to geo­met­ric struc­tures, inject­ing an entirely new ten­sion into his com­po­si­tions. Now we find bars of carefully wrought plas­tic­ity, intricately assem­bled arrows and, in matt sil­ver shimmer, ser­pen­tine convo­lu­tions as well as many zones of color. But how do these ele­ments relate within the pic­ture? Patches of quirkily mutat­ing pig­ment and strangely falling shad­ows pose a rid­dle to the viewer: are they two-dimen­sional shapes that overlap, or are they three-dimen­sional arrange­ments of objects?

Kleckner’s works do not reveal the artist’s inten­tion imme­di­ately. And how­ever hard we try, almost none of his com­po­si­tions can be nailed down in fig­u­ra­tive terms. But our attempts to grasp and anal­yse his paint­ings yield a differ­ent insight: if at first the collaged com­po­si­tions and color var­i­a­tions sug­gest random com­pi­la­tions of het­ero­ge­neous compo­nents, closer scrutiny soon reveals that there is more to this than stand-alone arrange­ments. Again and again, sim­i­lar forms and hues emerge, some­times promi­nently placed, some­times cunn­ingly con­cealed. They belong to a surpris­ingly con­sis­tent formal repertoire that Kleckner has devel­oped over the last three years and exploited in var­i­ous ways for his se­ries of paint­ings. With this spectrum of ele­ments, Kleckner’s style is tread­ing new territory, lend­ing an unsus­pected momen­tum to his work. Many motifs seem to hark back to past visual worlds, notably from the 1960s to the 1990s—surely no coinci­dence for an artist who has declared the Ger­man term “Stilbruch” (breach of style) to be one of his favou­rite words.

Kleckner’s new repertoire of form is based on an on-going se­ries of paper collages that he started making in 2012. They con­tain frag­ments from sig­nif­icant ref­er­ences to art history, photos, graphic designs, snip­pets of global pop cul­ture and much more besides. Many of these collages have never been trans­lated into a paint­ing, while oth­ers have been pro­cessed sev­eral times over with var­i­a­tions. But Kleckner does not cling slav­ishly to his own templates. Ulti­mately, the col­ors and shapes are always var­ied. Thus every paint­ing is lib­er­ated from its pre­cursor, and by the end of the pro­cess two solitaires have been cre­ated. Kleckner refers to them as “carefully planned acci­dents”.

In the collages them­selves there are no text ele­ments to be found—at least, almost none. For although Kleckner him­self dis­penses with cut-out letters, each collage bears an enigmatic title printed at the bot­tom of the page: a number fol­lowed by a lengthy dash, fol­lowed in turn by two or three blanks, a ques­tion mark and end­ing with a year. The pages with these enigmatic titles were taken from the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue for Joseph Beuys’ The Secret Block for a Secret Per­son in Ire­land. Beuys attributed these combina­tions to the 296 works in his Block of 456 draw­ings, which had no spe­cific titles of their own. The number in front is the runn­ing inventory number and changes accord­ingly. Kleckner could not resist this blend of both the “impen­e­tra­ble and mys­te­r­i­ous” and the “pseudo-sci­entific and spe­cific”. It allowed him to appro­pri­ate and apply a sys­tem­atic framework for his own Block, which he eventu­ally called Ques­tions for a Secret Per­son in Iowa.

Kleckner’s first encounter with the work of the leg­endary Ger­man action artist and inventor of the Social Sculp­ture was a deter­min­ing moment in his artis­tic devel­op­ment. As a stu­dent he came across two small vol­umes about Beuys’ early draw­ings that shook his views of art—and what it could and should do—to the core. In the next few years, the idea that reproduc­tions, like those of Beuys’ works, might func­tion as a springboard for his own orig­inal work began to take shape. Now Kleckner’s cre­ations have been reproduced in his first mono­graphic exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue—and they in turn can serve other artists as a basis for orig­inals of their own. It is poten­tially a chain reac­tion, and Kleckner certainly sees the funny side of it.

Galerie Judin.

Dana Schutz - CFA Berlin. 2016.

DANA SCHUTZ WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

17 SEPTEMBER - 29 OCTOBER, 2016

Even in the rain the cold grey rain it is good to be back in Berlin and in time to visit CFA before the space is donated to the city and will become a museum. http://artforum.com/news/id=63997

 

 

 

 

Press release: Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the exhibition Waiting for the Barbarians with new works by Dana Schutz (*1976 in Livonia, USA), the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery.

The motifs of Dana Schutz’s earlier groups of works usually originated from her interest in absurd, imagined “what if” scenarios, where the figures follow the logic of their on invented meaning. For example, she imagined what would happen if gravity didn’t exist, and painted in Gravity Fanatic a man who glues his limbs to the floor. In the series Self-Eaters, the figures eat their own extremities and at the same time keep recreating themselves.

 The subjects of her most recent paintings, however, increasingly reflect real events, since in her view the lines between fact and fiction have become increasingly blurred in American politics and culture.

Dana Schutz’s newest paintings act as containers for events – both mundane and horrific – where time is suspended, but perhaps also reconfigured and reordered. The beholder is confronted with a series of  violent scenes: a blonde reporter is shot live on camera, elevator doors sweep open to expose an office brawl mid-flood, ultimate pictorial compression is played out in the climax of a home birth, and somewhere far away atop a mountain, a round-headed boy is about to burst a soap bubble; in “Big Wave,” a girl appears to be drowning in a massive tidal wave but wears an expression of pleasant surprise, elsewhere, a woman slices into a severed leg with the upbeat curiosity of Harriet the spy.

In contrast to the series God Paintings of 2013, the new paintings are not serial. Rather, the unease and discomfort suggested by the title Waiting for the Barbarians – taken from J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name – is atmospherically present in all the paintings of the show. They are united by the anxiety before the not yet visible, bit approaching and possibly ominous unknown.

Schutz’s figures are frequently at odds with their physical environments and personal perimeters. Traditional relationships of scale and content are upended, as ginormous surfaces are used to depict everyday intimacies and commonplace settings are favored for horrific events. Schutz scales up a weekend hangover to rival a history painting, but also slips a ghostly beheading into a quotidian elevator ride. The paintings in Waiting for the Barbarians stare back at the viewer, however disfigured or dislocated, in the way paintings can and images cannot. The multi-figured nature of these compositions seems to encourage a complex range of expressions that is reflective of both the making of the painting and the timeline unfolding within the scene. Each figure seems to dwell in their own retelling of the event, while actively participating in the task at hand. In this way, Schutz is able to create complex scenarios where different narrative and painting speeds occur simultaneously. Here everything is touched or touching, as subjects fight for space, territory, attention, and time. Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan. She has been the subject of museum exhibitions both nationally and internationally. A survey exhibition of her work will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on July 26, 2017. Her solo museum shows include the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Montreal; The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire; kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; The Neuberger Museum, Purchase; Miami Art Museum, Miami; the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, The Rose Museum, Massachusetts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. Dana Schutz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.