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3 June – 25 September 2016
Press Release: This ground-breaking exhibition is part of events to mark the 100th
anniversary of the Dada movement, which came into being in Zurich. The
retrospective explores the historical sweep of Picabia’s (1879 –1953)
provocative career – from his early successes as an Impressionist
painter and his essential contribution to Dada, via his controversial
pin-up girls and through to his abstract works created after the Second
World War. Picabia remains a hotly debated figure among the great
artists of the 20th century, owing to his distinctive eclecticism and
persistent, deliberate contradictions. Throughout his life, he reflected
on the operation of style, subverted categorizations and set his face
against systems of value judgment that distinguished high art from
kitsch and conservatism from radicalism, and this in a self-critical
manner and with acerbic humour. For all the demystification of painting
that underpinned his Dada activities, Picabia continued to paint
frenetically until his death while at the same time constantly
reinventing the technique. While the works from Picabia’s Dada years are
well known, his oeuvre as a whole and his propensity for working in a
wide variety of painting styles still await more in-depth examination.
Taken
as a whole this comprehensive exhibition, which opens the Festspiele
Zürich 2016, shows the extent to which Picabia’s work questions the
principles of the modern. It comprises some 200 works, including around
150 paintings, complemented by a meticulously compiled selection of
works on paper, avant-garde magazines for which he wrote or which he
published himself, and examples of his film and theatre production.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it will be on display from November 2016.
KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH
Vernissage 2nd. June 2016.
Press Text: KATZ CONTEMPORARY is delighted to present new works by Stéphane Zaech (*1966 Vevey, lives and works in Montreux and Villeneuve, Switzerland) in an exhibition, which is curated by the artist himself. As the title beau monde (French for “Hautevolee”/High Society”) suggests, Zaech’s work will be displayed “in good company“ alongside well-known modern artists such as Picasso, Giacometti, Hodler, Vallotton, de Chirico and others. In the context of the show Stéphane Zaech - beau monde will be published, including a narrative by the artist in form of a dialogue.
Stéphane Zaech succeeds again and again in surprising even the most experienced viewers, confusing them and making them question their common way of seeing. This mostly only happens at second glance, however, since Zaech’s manner of painting is too virtuosic, his composition too skilled and too smooth. This is surprising since the dissonances really are quite striking: women’s bodies are stretched into multiple perspectives or they seemingly melt under the gaze of the viewer. Faces are deconstructed and one can frequently find a third eye in them. One is tempted to touch the painting in order to straighten it though that would not lead to a satisfying result since multiple perspectives are often combined within one single piece. Zaech has perfected his ability to compose his whimsical pictorial worlds from single, not-quite-fitting puzzle pieces into humorous and opulent baroque images in the manner of a collage.
Besides the figurative works Zaech also frequently paints landscapes in oil, some of which
seem familiar while others have an exotic-foreign touch. The spectrum is wide and Zaech’s
universe includes Arcadian as well as seemingly impenetrable forests, Mediterranean
landscapes but also barren mountain- or winter sceneries, which allude to Japonism. Still, the artist says: „Je n’ai pas la curiosité exotique“. He claims not to travel like many of his globally oriented artist colleagues – the journeys mostly take place in his imagination, but also in museums, in which he gladly and frequently visits and studies the old and new masters. Within his paintings Zaech successfully transfers and adapts the traditional image
composition of art history’s masters into the present. The paintings in the exhibition thus take the viewer on a time travel through different eras of art history and the artist’s rich imagery. Le vernis, for instance, may remind one of Tintoretto’s Susanna e i vecchioni (ca. 1555/56), Giorgione’s La Tempesta (ca. 1506-08) or was it Cézanne’s Trois baigneuses (1875)? In fact, all of these are correct, yet false at once. The artist claims that he is not trying to animate the audience to discover any specific inspirations in his works since that would mean that he purposely disguised them, which is not his intention. What you may detect in Zaech’s work, however, are references or, phrased slightly differently, the memory of something you have seen before, which escapes the second that brush and paint touch the canvas. Then, the artist is entirely focused on the process of painting and the composition; everything else retreats to the background.
An attentive viewer will spot the Tizian catalog in the blonde woman’s arms in Stalker and
thus assume that Zaech pays homage to his famous colleague. Far from it, however, since
the piece does not have anything to do with the great painter other than that Zaech does
indeed admire him. The intention was simply to paint a book with a soft cover because of its
characteristic shape. Had it not been this Tizian catalog which happened to be within reach,
the woman might as well have held an issue of the Yellow Pages in her arms. Stéphane
Zaech thus offers us an entirely novel viewing experience, which is triggered only in
contemplation of the painting itself.
-Stefanie Bissig
KATZ CONTEMPORARY
Exhibition Text: Entitled Abräumung [Clearance], Albert Oehlen’s first major institutional solo exhibition took place in Kunsthalle Zürich in 1987. Now, almost thirty years later, Kunsthalle Zürich presents a second installment of works by this German painter, who was born in 1954 and has been living in Appenzell for over a decade. Shown in conjunction for the first time, An Old Painting in Spirit brings together important works from the 1980s, two new painting cycles and a selection of about fifty rarely shown drawings. The installation in Kunsthalle Zürich is laid out as if it were a group exhibition. The aim is to present the variety in Oehlen’s painting, making it apparant how he repeatedly subjects the medium to a stress test. Only when one steps up closer and takes a second look does the consistency of the painting process reveal itself.
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
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| Albert Oehlen (detail) |
Exhibition Text Continued:The early brown-grey pictures, offset with mirrors, originate in the era of the “rediscovery” of painting in the late 1970s. This renewed interest emanated from the Italian Transavanguardia, the so-called “Neue Wilde” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and also through American artists such as Julian Schnabel. All of it amounted to a big wave of expressive, figurative painting,
which was no less celebrated than attacked. A “hunger for pictures” and a booming art market turned some artists into stars. Many have now been forgotten. In the case of others it was only later that it become apparent that they were concerned with something more than “savage” painting, Neo-Expressionism and sentiment. On the surface Oehlen seemed to be one of many, but it gradually became clear that he was working on a different project: His purpose was to examine painting by means of painting, to experiment with its options and to make space for it (and consequently us). Already in the 1980s this is hinted at through the pictures’ titles, which are sometimes serious, sometimes ironic and sometimes cryptic. They appear to be explaining the work, but simultaneously undermine that expectation. Something similar can be said of the mirrors that are attached to the paintings. In an imaginable, simple and platitudinous way they extend the pictoral space so that everyone believes they are looking
at a different picture. In this way these works precisely and laconically hook into the at the time passionately conducted debates around the question of painting and illusion.
The second group of works are large-scale collages from 2009 and 2010 in which Oehlen uses supermarket posters in lieu of brushes and paints. Is this really painting, and if so why? Or is something analogous to the manner of Photoshop being carried out? Is this Pre-Post-Internet art? Or is it about something completely different, namely the question of how much resistance
found material has, to what extent it can be disempowered without it losing its potential. - And whether such potential (in this case, advertising) can be heaved into a different condition. The result is a series of large-format tableaus that lack any surreal effects (otherwise customary
for collages) but are unique non-figurative forks, which—unlike the paintings from the 1980s—hardly make up any image at all, as if one could no longer see the wood for the trees.
The third group is a series of recent paintings, which are shown here for the first time. Tree-
like black forms spread out on red-white or blue-white backgrounds, unromantically and harsh in style. While the early pictures and large-scale collages approach or emerge from the outer world, these latest works appear to be units enclosed within themselves and therefore independent.
They are juxtaposed with wall-covering egg cartons in the upper exhibition rooms, which were brought in to improve the space acoustics for the opening night concert by the trio Wertmüller–Pliakas–Wittwer. At the same time they insulate the room so that, like the tree pictures, it has become a unit cut off from the outside world. That has something calming, but also disturbing about it.
KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH
