New York City’s oldest surviving downtown sidewalks were made almost 200 years ago by immigrant masons who lined the streets with giant paving stones of solid granite. These monolithic slabs they then chiseled with improvised marks and designs to prevent pedestrians from slipping. These carvings have withstood the erosion of time and foot traffic, leaving a record of free thought and personal markings from the hands and minds of long-forgotten workmen.

Nares made wax frottage rubbings of selected stones and brought them back to his studio where he gilded them with 22-carat gold. Hanging vertically on the wall, they are shining monuments to whom he calls, “the unknown souls whose touch still lingers on the city’s sidewalks.”

Continuing Nares’ lifelong investigation into motion, time and gesture —the “central conceits of Nares’ artistic production” (Marcelle Polednik, Director, Milwaukee Art Museum)—these works register the topography of the city which has acted as protagonist and collaborator throughout his oeuvre, notably in films such as Ramp (1976) and STREET (2011). Tracing the materiality of lower Manhattan, where Nares has lived and worked since the 1970s, the works spotlight immigrant labor and its integral place in the fabric of the city.

297 Tenth Ave, New York, NY 10001
November 1 – December 22, 2018
Opening Thursday, November 1, 6-8pm

Kasmin is pleased to announce an exhibition of selected works from the collection of the celebrated New York poet and art critic, John Ashbery (1927 – 2017). Bringing together paintings, drawings, and collages by artists such as Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Helen Frankenthaler, Fairfield Porter, Joe Brainard, and Larry Rivers, the presentation reflects the deep-rooted artistic and personal associations amongst a group of artists and poets who, between them, defined New York’s downtown scene for almost two decades from the 1950s onwards.

Acquired by Ashbery over the course of his life, the majority of the works in the poet’s collection were gifts from his artist friends, many of whom he wrote about in his capacity as an art critic. Having relinquished an early ambition to pursue painting, Ashbery went on to cover exhibitions journalistically for over twenty-five years, reshaping art criticism with roles at ARTnews, Newsweek, Herald Tribune, and New York Magazine allowing him the freedom to write about artists that he thought were overlooked or not easily categorized. Ashbery departed for Paris on a Fulbright in 1955 and lived there for a decade—it was in the city that he came to know artists such as James Bishop and Jean Hélion, both of whom have works included in the exhibition. There his editorial stretch continued at Art and Literature, published by painters Rodrigo Moynihan and his wife painter Anne Dunn (also included in the exhibition) producing a journal that blended coverage of avant-garde art, theater, film, performance, and installation art from around the globe.

Ashbery’s collection reveals the composite of styles that were burgeoning contemporaneously during what is now perceived to be one of the century’s most radically productive artistic periods. As the spontaneous creativity of Abstract Expressionism took flight, Alex Katz’ distinctive painterly realism, the traditional portraiture and still life of Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, and the illustrative flair of fellow poet Joe Brainard’s book covers, proposed different ways of looking at the world.

John Ashbery died at the age of 90 in September 2017. It was Ashbery’s wish that upon his death his collection of art be sold with the proceeds supporting experimental artists in various fields. Many of the works have never before been exhibited. Artists represented in the exhibition include James Bishop, Joe Brainard, Rudy Burckhardt, Anne Dunn, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Jean Hélion, Alex Katz, R.B. Kitaj, Rodrigo Moynihan, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Anne Ryan, Neil Welliver, and Trevor Winkfield.

ABOUT JOHN ASHBERY
John Ashbery (1927-2017) was one of the most important poets of our time. He had more than thirty collections published in his lifetime. His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 through 1990. In 2012, Ashbery was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

ABOUT KASMIN
Founded in SoHo in 1989, Kasmin cultivates a program in which historic figures of Post-War and Modernism are in meaningful dialogue with the evolving practice of both emerging and established contemporary artists. With four spaces in Chelsea, New York, the gallery mounts ambitious concurrent exhibitions alongside participation in major art fairs worldwide.

We are deeply saddened to have learned of Robert Indiana’s death this past Saturday at his home on Vinalhaven. Speaking of the artist, Paul Kasmin says: “Robert Indiana will remain alive through the great legacy he has left behind. He was unlike any other person I have ever met. A genius.”

Born in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, Robert Indiana was a major figure of post-war American art. He drew his subject matter from the visual vernacular of highway road signs, factory die-cut stencils and commercial logos while incorporating the cultural heritage of American Modernists such as Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley.

After finishing high school, Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark) served for three years in the Air Force and then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1953, scholarships took him to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and then on to Scotland, to the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art, where his activities included studying botany and writing poetry, which he set in type and printed by hand. He returned to the United States in late 1954 and found a job in an art supplies store on West 57th Street, near the Art Students League. There he met and made friends with the young Ellsworth Kelly, who in 1956 found him an inexpensive downtown studio at Coenties Slip, a former shipping warehouse near the Brooklyn Bridge. The first major break in his career came when The Museum of Modern Art included this work in its 1961 exhibition, “Art of Assemblage.” The second break came the following year when The Museum of Modern Art purchased his 1961 painting The American Dream #1. That same year, Indiana had his first solo show at the Stable Gallery.

Robert Indiana in Vinalhaven, 2011. Photo: Paul Kasmin.

His canonical sculptures belong to many public and private collections and have been exhibited worldwide. In the fall of 2013, The Whitney Museum of American Art presented a major retrospective of Indiana’s work. The artist’s most recent solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery ran January – March 2018 and presented the monumental work LOVE WALL along with Indiana’s iconic numbers ONE through ZERO.

Robert Indiana, “LOVE WALL,” 1966 – 2006, Cor-ten steel, 144 x 144 x 48 inches, 366 x 366 x 122 cm.
Installation view at Paul Kasmin Gallery 2018 © 2018 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photo: Christopher Stach

Hauser & Wirth has built a reputation for its dedication to artists and support of visionary artistic projects worldwide. In addition to presenting a dynamic schedule of exhibitions, the gallery collaborates with renowned curators to present museum quality surveys and invests considerable resources in new scholarship and research. Since its earliest days, the gallery has mounted historically significant exhibitions. The inaugural exhibition in 1992 took place at Hauser & Wirth’s first gallery, located in the first-floor apartment of an Art Deco villa in the heart of Zurich; it united mobiles and gouaches by Alexander Calder with sculptures and paintings by Joan Miró. Since then, the gallery has continued to forge an academically rigorous, ambitious program of historic exhibitions, providing a natural home for a number of major 20th-century European and American artist estates, and encouraging a continued and engaging discourse around their oeuvres. These include Louise Bourgeois, The Estate of Philip Guston, The Eva Hesse Estate, Allan Kaprow Estate, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, The Estate of Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth Estate and The Estate of David Smith.

Hauser & Wirth is widely admired for a sympathetic approach to restoring historic buildings and giving them a new lease of life as contemporary art spaces that invigorate surrounding communities. From the conversion of its first permanent venue in the former Löwenbräu brewery building that became Hauser & Wirth Zürich in 1996, the gallery has developed and sensitively restored existing structures that respond to their environments, connecting international art with local culture through architecture. In 2003, an Edward Lutyens-designed former bank on Piccadilly became Hauser & Wirth’s first London gallery, while a decade later, in 2013, the legendary Roxy discotheque and skating rink became the gallery’s second New York space. In recent years, the gallery has renovated Durslade Farm, a collection of dilapidated farm buildings in rural Somerset, into world-class art center Hauser & Wirth Somerset, as well as redeveloping a 100,000 sq. ft. former flour mill, the Globe Mills complex, in downtown Los Angeles in 2016. In 2018, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles was awarded Los Angeles Conservancy’s highest honor, the Chair’s Award, which recognizes the importance of preserving the historic places that make Los Angeles unique. Hauser & Wirth is currently constructing its first purpose-built gallery space at 542 West 22nd Street in New York’s West Chelsea art district.

As a publisher specializing in books on modern and contemporary art, Hauser & Wirth has published over 100 titles in its quarter-century history of exhibitions, projects and research. Hauser & Wirth’s publishing activity, brought together under Hauser & Wirth Publishers, consists of monographs, artists’ books, historic exhibition catalogues, collections of artists’ writings and catalogues raisonnés. Hauser & Wirth Publishers works with academics and curators to bring current, leading research to its readers. Its first dedicated bookshop opened in November 2016 in the new home of Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Manhattan gallery.

A commitment to education underpins the Hauser & Wirth exhibition roster. Every show is accompanied by a series of lectures, interactive seminars, innovative workshops, and special events developed for a range of ages and target audiences. These programs are intended to inspire creativity and foster a passion for contemporary art, nature and architecture within all areas of the community. In Somerset, the gallery has created strong links with local schools, universities and charities, and also provides courses for adults and special interest groups. Hauser & Wirth Somerset welcomes around 100 school groups every year. Events include an annual summer school for young people in collaboration with Bristol Old Vic Theatre, seasonal workshops for adults, such as basket weaving, and Open Farm Sunday, a yearly initiative that opens Durslade Farm to visitors, as well as the annual Pumpkin Festival in celebration of the harvest. This public engagement is mirrored in Los Angeles where the learning program aims to instigate a dialogue between the works on view and the city’s diverse audiences.

Food comprises a pivotal element of the experience of Hauser & Wirth’s galleries. Bringing together Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s passion for art with their enthusiasm for hospitality, gastronomy and community, the galleries sit alongside a series of bars and restaurants conceived as social gathering spaces. The Roth Bar & Grill in Somerset and Manuela restaurant in Los Angeles provide informal and convivial atmospheres where honest, seasonal and locally-sourced food is served. The Roth Bar & Grill works closely with local farmers, gamekeepers and gardeners, to use entirely local and ethical British produce. Similarly, at Manuela, an urban kitchen garden provides the restaurant with herbs, fruits and vegetables as well as a chicken house and run for the restaurant’s 11 rare-breed chickens.

Also onsite at Hauser & Wirth Somerset is Durslade Farmhouse, a six-bedroom guesthouse within a Grade II-listed farm building, full of character and bold twists that celebrate the natural antiquity of the building. More recently, renovations have begun on The Fife Arms in Braemar, Scotland, an imposing Arts & Crafts hotel currently undergoing extensive restoration to return the building to its former glory. With their deep-rooted investment in community, history, wildlife and landscape, each of the Wirths’ ventures is embedded in the unique heritage and traditions of its local culture.

Known for his exacting watercolors depicting scenes of typically masculine coming-of-age scenarios, here Gardner trains his eye onto New York City, tracing the nature of memory and sensation as they relate to urban environments. Gardner’s relationship to New York is both as insider and outsider – he moved to the city in 1997 and has been returning regularly since moving back to his native Canada in the early 2000s. This duality allows him the latitude to observe the preciousness of everyday moments while simultaneously outlining his own archetypal version of the city’s time-honored visual identity. As much as being in New York is a collection of moments, flashes of images and emotional kindling, Gardner’s paintings freeze and elongate these instants, allowing for a dissection of the city’s resonant hum.

Tim Gardner, Lucy’s, 2018. Image courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.

In Strand, Gardner’s cityscape outside the famed downtown bookstore, bright orange construction barriers and scaffolding are present, with delivery trucks and cars maneuvering around them. These tethers to one moment in the city’s history are framed by the Empire State Building in the background, the iconic New York that always was and always will be. Lucy’s, an ironically bucolic portrait of an Alphabet City dive bar, features piles of trash and recycling piled up on the sidewalk, ready to be whisked away by the city’s sanitation department. Gardner’s aloof, descriptive rendering allows for an inquiry into how, as city-dwellers, we are conditioned to block these eyesores out of our collective experience, as if their temporary status somehow makes them invisible. Neon lights in the bar’s window romantically illuminate some wanton foliage overhead. The city’s perpetual motion is suspended, a chance to revel in the mutable details, memories, and projection that, in each moment, create lived experience.

Tim Gardner has exhibited his work internationally at such institutions as The National Gallery, London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Recent exhibitions include “Eternal Youth” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and “Shit and Die”, curated by Maurizio Cattelan at Palazzo Cavour, Turin. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among others. Gardner lives and works in Canada.

Representing That World
Galerie Mai 36 (Raemistrasse 37, Zurich) 3 Nov–23 Dec, 2017

Pictures Generation artist, Matt Mullican, renowned for his work with signs and flags and pioneering hypnosis performances, exhibited in China for the first time during West Bund Art & Design last November, with a special presentation of his flag works. He will have a major retrospective next year at HangarBicocca in Milan. Mullican has had solo shows at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2000); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2001); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005); Drawing Center, New York (2008); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011). His works have been presented at three editions of Documenta (1982, 1993, 1997); the Whitney Biennial and São Paulo Biennial (2008); Gwanju Biennale (2010); and Venice Biennale (2013).

On a chilly, grey day in Berlin, I met Matt Mullican at his studio in Schöneberg, not far from Potsdamer Strasse, in the back courtyard — the Hinterhof — of a typical old, semi-industrial building. The stairs up to the studio wrap-around a slow elevator that smells of grease and metal. Entering the studio, I see an assistant is arranging bright yellow works on canvas which cover the floor. Matt, just arrived from Los Angeles, sits behind his desk, absorbed in preparations for his upcoming show at Galerie Mai 36 in Zurich and the exhibitions of his flag works at FIAC in Paris and then West Bund in Shanghai. He apologizes for being jet-lagged but seems buoyant and energetic. He sits contentedly in a T-shirt. I shiver, nursing a nascent cold.

Matt Mullican
马特·穆里肯

in Berlin? I mean: on a day like this! You come from Santa Monica, right?

Matt Mullican: Well, Santa Monica, then New York, and now Berlin.

CM: And on days like this you wish you were in Santa Monica, right? [Ed. I do]

MM: Not at all!

My mother’s still alive and she lives in Santa Monica. She’s an artist and an amazing person. She’s 97 years old. She had her first show 2 years ago, and sold it out and now, she’s a phenomenon. I’m not kidding! “Vogue” magazine, “The New Yorker” magazine profiled her, while Hans Ulrich Obrist is publishing a book on her life. It’s been insane.

CM: So, who is she?

MM: Luchita Hurtado (1920-). She’s cool. This is my mother. It’s a portrait of her by Man Ray. She knew all those guys, back in the ‘40s. She was a beauty, an absolute beauty. She looks not so different now. Of course, she’s in her 90s but she looks pretty similar.

I grew up in Santa Monica [but] I travelled as a child quite a bit. My father was an artist [Lee Mullican, 1919-1998]. He got a Guggenheim grant — so we lived in Rome, in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. [We also] lived in Venezuela — my mother’s Venezuelan — for a year in the ‘50s. And in Chile in the late ‘60s. So, I kinda travelled a bit as a child. And then went to the California University of the Arts. Studied with John Baldessari (1931-), Pictures Generation, one of the founding, earlier practitioners of — whatever this is.

Luchita Hurtado, mother of Matt Mullican
露琪塔·乌尔塔多，马特·穆里肯

CM: I was going to ask you about this. A lot of it has to do with the essay by Douglas Crimp …

MM: Well, you know, his name is on it.

CM: That’s what I wanted to ask you about!

ARTIST SPACE

MM: Well! The man is, the woman is Helene Winer — she’s the woman; she’s the man; she’s the person.(1) If anyone did anything for Pictures it’s her, not Douglas — personally, my opinion. I was part of that, early on, with James Welling (1951-), David Salle (b.1952-), Jack Goldstein (1945-), Troy Brauntuch (1954-) — we were all at school together, under Baldessari.

I was the first one to move to New York, with Jack — Jack and Helene were connected at that point. Then Jim [Welling] moved, in the later part of the ‘70s, and then David [Salle] moved as well. Barbara Bloom [1951-] was part of that scene. And we connected up with HallwallsLINK [a contemporary art center in Buffalo, NY]. My first big exhibition was at Artists Space in ‘76, when Helene Winer was the director there.

http://www.hallwalls.org/artists/M/51-matt-mullican.html

And then in ’77 we went up to Hallwalls where we met Cindy Sherman (1954-), Robert Longo (1953-), Charlie Clough (1951-) [with Nancy Dwyer, Hallwalls founders], Michael Zwack (1949-). And they moved back [to New York] and became part of the group too. Sherrie Levine was working downtown. She became part of the group. Louise Lawler (1947-)  … you know these are all just social things that just grew up! [Louise] was working for Leo Castelli; she knew Helene, so I got to know her.

So we were all in New York! I was doing my thing, and they were doing theirs. We all worked together; we hung out.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

CM: But did you understand it as a group?

MM: We understood it as a group from the very beginning. There are photographs we took of each other, as a group. We were aware that we were the next generation. There was an awareness that “Our time will come” — just a matter of when. This was in the mid-‘70s. It happened in the ‘80s. Everything changed in 1980. I had no interest in joining a commercial gallery in ‘79 and in ‘80 I had three galleries wanting to represent me: Metro Pictures [which had just been founded by Helene [see note 1LINK], Mary Boone and Anina Nosei [Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first gallerist]. And I went with Mary because everyone was going with Metro and Helene was ‘mom’ — she was my ‘mom’ already and I didn’t want to go with her: I wanted to leave ‘home’.

We didn’t really hang out with other groups; we were our own group. Robert Longo started working at the Kitchen Center LINK http://thekitchen.org [a non-profit art space]. So, we all did shows there. I did performances there — I started working with hypnosis at that time in the ‘70s. And in ‘81 I had my first trip to Europe [as an artist]. With John being our teacher, it was very clear to me that that’s where I wanted to end up. I wanted to be an international artist, so the first chance I got was a group show that [Q. Jamana Shilan???.................................and where??? ] did, which was called “American Inexpressionism” — that’s how he called it, because “Expressionism” and “Neo-Expressionism” was all the rage, so this was an alternative to Neo-expressionism: In-expressionism! And in that show, was everybody: Richard Prince (1949-) to Cindy Sherman, to Jack Goldstein, myself, David Salle — we were all together in that show. I was the only one who actually went to the opening because he could not fly us there but he could put us up. Since I wanted to go to Europe anyway, I went. Having gone, I started getting connected up with the galleries there and within six months I started showing there and it just grew and grew and grew. Then I was in Documenta in ’82 [the first of three times] and that was when we all started showing. Barbara Kruger, whom I’ve known since forever; that whole bunch, from Barbara, to Cindy, back to the mid-‘70s we knew each other, before this all happened.

Rock & Roll was a big deal back in the ‘70s, so a lot of people were in bands — like Robert was in a band with Richard Prince called Menthol Wars. And there were parties where … at the end … there would be Battle of the Bands, everyone had been drinking, and we’d break up into bands and play music — faux music, really; it wasn’t “music” — where David Salle would be playing the vacuum cleaner and Eric Fischl (1948-) would be playing bass and then Barbara Kruger would be on cymbals, and it was like a round-robin sort of thing. So that was the moment. We all knew each other in this way. Ross Bleckner (1949-) was part of the group [too].

MM: I went to Europe on average, in the 1980s, every 2 months. Back and forth.

CM: That was a lot then.

MM: That’s a lot. Maybe even sometimes once a month. My kids were born in 1994. So that changed things a little bit but not hugely, because I would make my trips short. I would come for under a week. That was my rule.

My work within the context of all this and why my work fits in, is in a sense that I wanted to go the opposite of the conceptual artists. We had a problem, my generation: we had to follow Lawrence Weiner and the conceptual artists, the Minimalists, and a bunch of others, and this was a hard thing to do because reductivist, modernist theories had taken art to the point of “the statement” and then art was done. In fact, even someone would talk so the actual object would disappear: it would only exist in time with the viewer — that’s Ian Wilson (1940-). So, what happens after that? What are you going to do? In a sense, I was saying: it’s not the Object at all; that’s the wrong thing: it’s the Subject.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

Glen, or Stick Figures

I wanted to prove, ridiculously, that stick figures live lives. So I drew a stick figure named Glen and I gave him a life; I gave up 500 drawings of Glen in a studio and basically did experiments with his physical reality. I went through his psychology, his biology, his motives, et cetera; his blood, his nerves, his sweat, his tears, his ambitions, his fears: just all in relationship to a person who existed in this space. And I used to call it a “fictional reality” or an “imaginary reality” or “imaginary universe.” In time, it becomes clearly a “virtual” space, although there were no machines representing it.

We leafed through a book with pictures of Glen.

“Glen notices a letter that’s been slipped under his studio door.”

So I have a clock, a calendar, and a plant.

“Glen thinks about the time he hurt himself skiing.”

“Glen falls asleep near the corner of his studio.”

“The sound from next-door drives Glen crazy.”

Then this evolves into this: breathing, smelling his sweat, he is now with his friends, he is terrified, he is delighted.

So, I am going into this person, into this world. I wanted to prove that stick figures live lives. It’s not so much the physical picture that’s the issue, it’s the image in the brain, obviously. I also did a series: pricking his finger — feeling pain. So, if Glen takes a pin and pricks his finger, he feels pain. I’m interested in the pain that he feels. Basically, in today’s world it would be the empathetic response to the picture.

CM: Or lack thereof …

IMAGES AND SIGNS

MM: So, in the meantime, what happens is that there’s this whole thing called mirror neurons. When we see pictures, our body participates with [what’s going on in] the pictures, and the highest level of the neuron being mirrored is in theatre, more than in film, because they’re real people and that is too strong an impulse for us to deny. So, I am very much interested in how meaning is transferred and what we give [as viewer] to the picture, in terms of reality. See, I used the word “picture”. I used it a ton back in the day, early ‘70s, ‘73, I was very interested in breaking down the picture and also signs.

CM: Can we pause a second here? I look at that [a picture of Glen with arrows in his side], and my immediate thought is St. Sebastian. And I’m thinking: in the Renaissance and Baroque, they were using these pictures to engender a physical, an emotional response, that is tied to the psychology, and religion.

MM: Yes, this is what I’m into … [in the mid-‘70s] I made pictures that had the title above and the object symbolized. It was almost like pushing buttons to access information. People would talk about “China”, or “Egypt,” or “Japan,” or “Mayan culture,” or “Peruvian culture,” and refer [to] it not as contemporary life but as a view of what art was. In retrospect, my work is about the emergence of the “iPhone,” the internet, because pictures don’t have to have substance. Pictures exist in their own reality. They are psychological. They are pure. I noticed when you have a sign of something, it is being non-phonetical. It is faster than a word. It’s a different part of the brain. Frank Stella once said that his paintings were like super-fast cars, like you would get it in a second! You would see it; you would get it; you would understand exactly what it is. Now I thought that my flags were faster, faster than a painting. Now, I am not after speed: I am interested in the relationship. But here you have the studio demonstrations: magnets and magnetism, heat absorption, cutting [Glen’s] arm. These are two views of a fictional object. There is this sense of humor: “object under claw” — there is an object and there is not an object. There is a mirror: showing what’s over here, so there is an “over there”. It is a fictional detail, which is a Catch-22.

CM: Because “over here” is off the edge of the paper.

MM: Exactly: it doesn’t exist.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

RELIGION AND HYPNOSIS

We are looking through photos in an old book.

MM: Here for instance, that’s Jim Welling, David Salle and myself with Paul [ … .]. [*IMAGE ?] This is in ‘77. Jim took the picture [remotely] and so he’s looking away, because he’s aware of what he is doing. And here is Paul again — this is at Artists Space. This is me in hypnosis.

This is Paul and myself, where I projected myself into a picture, walked around it, and described to the audience what I was feeling in that picture and what time of day; all the specifics. And then he lit it on fire, and thus it manifested.

CM: How did you react?

MM: I talk about it in my lectures, like in relation to The Twilight Zone or some Sci-Fi movie, like I’m stuck in there forever. The portrait is gone. But it was just heat on my face and then I slid down the hill, because [the drawing] is from a book on Piranesi and it’s a picture of an arch — a very physical object I was participating in: a pictured-object.

So, if I’m talking about the psychological space of the world, immediately I was attracted to religion — because that is kind of like, what we do! — the symbolic representation of the cosmology. When I was a child, I believed I chose my parents. I remember asking my parents at one point, where was I? They said, “You were not born yet.” And I said, “Yes but where was I?” In a child’s mind, you’re always there. In our minds, in fact, we’re always there, we’ll always be. Obviously, birth and death are understood but emotionally we’re always in the present. So, then I had this idea as a child — I must have been 10 or 11 — that I was on a conveyor belt and there was a chute with my father’s name on it and I went down the chute and entered life. I also believed that fate controlled my life, as I lived my life. And Fate looked like he was watching a big TV set and he had a lever that he pulled and in pulling the lever, watching the TV set, he controlled my life. So, it’s very much like a computer. And I’m being controlled by this god figure watching me on TV. Then it gets more complicated as I became much more involved with death and the object. It was primal. I wanted to draw a dead stick figure, a real dead stick figure. I called up the city morgue and they said, “Forget it!” But a friend of mine who was going to medical school at Yale did have a cadaver, so I went and did stuff with the cadaver, which of course related to the stick figure. Death was big, an early subject in my work. It’s a primal subject. So is god. When I was at CalArts and even after, into the ‘’70s, and to today, in this group of people, I’m the only one who addresses god. I am the only one that addresses death. The only one that addresses the world, directly, the sign. And it’s made me a little bit of an outsider with the group.

In ‘73 I was cutting up details of comics and then stating what they were. So, here, collecting dead comic book characters. This really identifies with the pictures: just cutting it up and then making a found object out of the picture itself, which is right in there with all of them. But at the same time, I was doing this religious stuff. So, Fate meets Death at my death, and they decide if I go up to heaven or if I go down to hell. This is a cosmology. And one of the things about that, is that my parents were collectors of what you would call “World Art”, so I grew up with American-Indian [art], Central American Indian, Indian-Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Asmat, [Papua] New Guinea, all that stuff — our house was crammed with all these objects! Crammed! Beautiful Hopi pieces. Innuit. Northwest Coast. After I came back from doing all this [art experimentation], I was in that room [at my parent’s] and looking around and realizing not one object was considered “art” when it was made. They were not decorative. They were something else. Most of it was medicine. And I said, well this is at the core of what art is!  …

The cosmology — life and death and birth — was kind of in-your-face, just weird, and I liked that, because it was the only taboo I could come up with at CalArts where anything went, except the only thing no one would even touch, was spirituality. It just didn’t happen. You didn’t talk about angels. You didn’t talk about heaven. You didn’t talk about god. So, I said, “God! No one’s talking about this!” And it’s at the core: this is so important — in the whole history of art, this is it! And yet no one is talking about it! No one is doing anything with it!

There’s this distance. That’s what Jack Goldstein used to talk about, distance from the image. That’s something I am still very aware of. People would ask me, whether I believe in God and I said, “I believe in believing in God but that’s all I’ll tell you;” I will not say, “I believe in God.” I’m more a believer in fate than a believer in God. I don’t know what or who God is but it’s certainly an interesting idea. So, I got in trouble but that’s fine, because it gave me legs and I’m still trying to prove it.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

CM: You picked a tough city in which to do it!

MM: Berlin?

CM: Yeah, they don’t believe in many gods here. They had a bad experience!

MM:  — No, no. God is a fiction, a high-level fiction, a fiction that is shaping the world, politically. I mean — God! — it’s at the core of a lot of problems.

CM: The fiction’s not the problem though, is it?

MM: No, but it is when the fiction becomes real. I mean: it is real — fiction is real! This is something I’m interested in. Pictures are real.

SUPERCOMPUTER

In 1986, I started working with a supercomputer back in L.A. I had a big exhibition, and I had a big cityscape, because it was L.A.! And someone wrote, how would you like to go to your city and walk around in it? Cos I had already done this with my mind’s eye — 10 years earlier, in 1973. So I said, absolutely, I’ll do it! It was completed in ‘89. It was a virtual environment, and I became part of that world for a couple of years, where I was going to Iwo Jima and Ars Electronica, and various other venues to do with virtual space. Finally, the French Ministry of Culture came to an opening of mine and they said, “We would like to do a project with you; what would you like to do?” And I said, “I would like to make a virtual environment.” So, we made mine, with the VR glasses, in 1991, where you go into a house, and so forth. So, the city itself is an interface — when you’re here, you see one thing, and when you’re in another, you see something else. So, in a way, the actual architecture [became] the buttons. There’s not one city but five — a fantastic idea — because each section redefines the whole.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

HYPNOSIS

MM: At the same time as I was doing this, all along I’ve been working with hypnosis. Hypnosis separates this feeling of submersion into the media from the media itself. I cannot watch a Hitchcock film because I get too freaked out, or I don’t like watching splatter films because it makes me sick. If you take away the splatter film, you can [still] get sick, with hypnosis. It does it in another way. And you feel it, very strongly. It is a scary thing.

CM: I’ve never tried it. It’s not a case of being completely unconscious, is it?

MM: Not at all. You are totally aware, when you are doing it: you’re just unaware of the subject. It’s not far from meditation. It’s a level of concentration that you gain which allows you to really experience “The Sign”, be it the word or the image or a suggestion of any kind. And I have been doing that since the first time when I entered the picture in ‘73, which was a form of self-hypnosis. I have worked with many, many hypnotists, I think up to 20. I even did an MRI in a trance state: they wanted to look at my brain. It was an experiment we did in New Castle, in England, because there is a neuroscience center there. I was participating in a group show and they were interested in dealing with this.

CM: I am thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre trying LSD and how he reacted to that.

MM: I did LSD, once, when I was in college. It must have been fairly weak. The closest druggy experience that hypnosis approaches, for me, was mushrooms. In a sense, it’s not so far from that. The fact you could be with one object for hours and there’s this weird sense of humor that occurs. But the hypnosis, in a way, distils the response to the picture from the picture itself. So, if you were to think about representation, if you were to take the bodily response to the picture — I mean, it could be moving pictures; it could be a book; it could be a sign; it could be a cartoon — you are getting close to that participation as a separate entity. That process has had a progression. During hypnosis, I talk about “that person” — and that person, is this individual that I become in the trance state. That individual, you could say, is psychotic. People think of me in that state as being either autistic, psychotic, or schizophrenic; it is an aberrant state of mind, but one that is creative enough to participate in a given action.

Though once, in Australia, I went so deep that the body just became a physical thing, at that stage. These performances are pretty strong and they’re quite embarrassing for the audience to see. People don’t really understand what I’m doing and that’s ok but they get scared — for me. As I get older — because I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years now — I am becoming more vulnerable, so it makes it worse. When I am writhing on the floor, people are scared for me, that I’m going to hurt something. This separation from the armature of the picture is something.

The last performance I did was at Haus der Kunst in Munich. That was a killer.

My work is basically five worlds, those five worlds that exist in this chart.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio

The Subjective

Green – elemental, the materiality of things

Blue – the world, unframed, the regular outdoors, street, house, wherever we live

Yellow – the arts: the world framed, communication

Black – language

The difference between arts and language lies in their relationship to the world. For instance, what’s the information on the iPhone? It’s not physical. So, when we go into the black area we’re no longer dealing with the physical world. Whereas the Yellow and the Blue have to do with the physicality of the image, whereas in the sign, there is no physicality, it exists as information in the abstract. What conceptual art wanted to be and what Lawrence Weiner really took, he said, you may or may not build the object. So, the information can exist independent of any object. This is a debatable discussion, because the physical object may or may not always exist, we are physical and when we are conceptualizing, it is part of our physical body.

And then the top, I have the Subjective [Red?]: which is to do with the end of that chain. The Subjective is the relationship to the sign, our personal relationship: “Is it good? Is it bad? Is it happy? Is it sad?” In the subjective, I only have that person and the cosmology, but it could be in the sign. There are lots of crossovers. And you could take any object, like my iPhone, and it can apply to every world. So, it’s an interpretative architecture. Thus, things coexist but not in the same place: they coexist in time.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

BERLIN

What’s happened with me and the Pictures [Generation], is my life as an artist has become very independent of, say, David Salle and Jim Welling. We just had lunch — David had a show uptown — the first time in 35 years. The three of us, we had not sat together since, probably, 1981. Since 1985, I’m my own person and mostly my work is in Europe. When I’m in New York, after a while I get depressed. New York is terrible! And the U.S. is terrible, politically speaking — it’s just tough. So, I am happy to be back in Berlin. I like Berlin. We came here because my wife is a curator and she got a job at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and I got a job teaching as a professor at HFBK in Hamburg [Hochschule für bildende Künste]. I’ve entered my last year there. I’m 66 and next year I will retire.

Pirelli HangarBicocca

In 2018 Matt Mullican will show at the vast Pirelli HangarBicocca. Previous exhibitors there include Anselm Kiefer, Philippe Parreno, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tomás Sareceno, Joan Jonas and currently, Lucio Fontana

http://www.hangarbicocca.org/en/exhibition/matt-mullican/#

BALDESSARI

I take what I can get. I’ve been at it for 45 years now — my work … And I’m still chugging along, still trying to do the same things I tried at the very beginning. The work is growing and I’m excited about it. I learnt a lot from Baldessari, I really did. He managed to, somehow, keep himself interested.

CM: He famously burnt all of his [early] work and got rid of it.

MM: Yeah!

CM: And started afresh.

MM: He did, he did! You know, his sister, he said to her, before I burn it all, you take a few things if you want any. And she took a lot more than he thought she would! And it came out! And that work looks so much like the work he’s doing now! It looks just like the work he’s doing now! All his recent shows have the work he was doing before he burned it. It’s fantastic stuff, like billboards. Thanks to his sister! It’s thrilling, fantastic!

[photo of Matt with Baldessari under a tree??]

What do signs do? They’re about memory. They’re about recognition. Flags — what is a flag? The flag functions because it is supposed to represent something from a great distance, and very fast …  [photo of flags at Haus der Kunst and Neue Nationalgalerie]

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

INSTAGRAM FOOD. VAGINAS. PENISES.

We walked next door to look at the new work.

I wanted to bring up the images that were from the meaning of things, which were really taken off the internet, which were to do with different ways of seeing that I have been involved with for forever: I mean, for 45 years! And it really comes down to this visceral response to the picture and how people use it. And sex is the most dominant functionality. When online sex is such a big deal. When you have people getting excited at looking at people having sex, from looking at a body. I’m most interested in people looking at people having sex and then getting excited, getting an erection or getting soft or whatever you want to call it. Then also, when you see someone being violated — beat up, tortured, executed — and how you [are] feeling with that, and how terrible that is. So, you have this visceral response to these pictures. Then there are these others, one is having to do with virtual [violence] — I will have a set of “Grand Theft Auto” people that I’m going to be putting in here, and then also public executions, and then also cutting, just the cutting of the skin.

We look at the pictures arranged on the ground of naked bodies, some showing heterosexual penetration, some showing the subjective point of view glimpsed beneath bed covers.

… Here’s more cuts. There you go. And they’re all numbered and lettered, again this kind of obsession with doing many, many, many of one thing: systems! Systems are always part of what I do. I have never shown this work before. This is a show that’s going to open in Zurich at Mai 36. We’ll see how it goes, but it allows me to show all my work and I can go into my books and show signs from the ‘70s in this body of work. They’re all printed in yellow. I print a sheet of yellow [base color] and then I print the color on top of it. The earliest work I have is “Colors Under a Green Light.” So, I had a green light on color-aid cards. So, everything has been changed. And this is very similar [but] it’s the Yellow, and the Yellow in my work is the Art. It’s the psychology of how that separation is represented in the color. Everything is filtered through yellow, the whole show.

There’s a set of 8 in each section. This [set] is horizontal but it could be vertical.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

CM: What are these images here?

MM: This is a train: the speed of a train. This is velocity. It ends up looking like a Gerhard Richter and what I think he is trying to do is to get to this visceral sense of abstraction and it’s an impossibility, [because] viscerality exists within the brain. The best visceral response exists in a temporal environment, not in an atemporal environment. This is atemporal. It doesn’t exist in time. In an atemporal environment, it doesn’t exist in time; it exists as a still [image]. In an atemporal environment, the visceral element has to come in the reality of what you are looking at, so if it was a painting — how you made the painting disappear because of the super-realism or the trompe l’oeil — that is as close to viscerality, in the painting medium, as you can get. You can have giant phalluses or giant heads being cut off, or expressionism which [attempts] to engage the viewer in the process of painting, but it’s debatable [that it can].

Of course, when we see pictures, we feel something. That is the visceral response. Now I am interested in taking it apart. I am aware that when you look at a fantastic picture by, well, name the famous expressionist, you feel it. When you see a Matisse painting, you go, “Wow!” just because of the color and scale, or Pollock, where it becomes totally abstract. He took abstraction further than anybody. No one has come close to Pollock since, because he was dealing with the feeling. Frank Stella was the next chapter after Pollock, and it becomes objective. A Pollock is subjective. He is taking subjectivity down to its core, and he couldn’t survive! And then it flips, because you cannot sustain it, and it becomes objectivity-based.

When you get right to it, I am very interested in Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

THE PICTURES GENERATION SHOW

I’ve been in one show with the Pictures Generation. I’m surprised whenever I’m lumped in with that group but it’s something that’s in my history, because socially speaking I was there. When I talk about what I do, pictures are big part of what I do. There was the show called “Forrest of Signs”, which we were all in, and I was the guy making signs. I was known for doing the sign stuff. “Oh, you’re the guy who makes the signs! You’re the guy who makes the flags.” Before that, I was the guy who made the stick figures, or “You’re the guy who works with computers.” People identify you with different elements. It was nice to be in the show at The Met, the Pictures Generation show. I was the first piece, in that show. When you came in, that was my work. It was a kind of introduction to that whole thing. It was early ‘73.

I worked with Adelina von Fürstenberg [curator]. And she was showing Jack Goldstein’s work very early on and she hooked up into my work. I was in the guest bedroom and there was a work opposite the bed, by Joseph Kosuth, and it was a paragraph describing itself: the paper stock, the ink, the number of adjectives, the number of nouns, the number of sentences — blah, blah, blah — typical of the era. Now, two things: it didn’t say it was an artwork and it didn’t say that it was an artwork made by Joseph Kosuth. He couldn’t, he couldn’t say it.  But it was signed, and dated.

CM: Well it’s the same thing then.

MM: But … it’s not the same thing. That’s not the subject: that is the object. The object is signed. The subject is the paragraph. Had he put his name in it, that would have been another story.

CM: But isn’t it interpreted as part of it anyway? I mean, the moment you know it’s Joseph Kosuth, it’s part of it.

MM:  He is naming the number of periods! The paper! That [Kosuth] is the most obvious thing! The reason it is in front of you, is because he made it and it is an artwork. And that is the one thing he didn’t mention!

CM: And therefore, you don’t have to —

MM: But it’s at the core! As far as I’m concerned, that’s A-No.1. That’s at the top of the list. And Sherrie knew that as well and that’s what she dealt with. She went with the identity of the art work and the identity of the artist. This is one of the shifts — there are many — that occurred between 1968 and 1973, ‘74. And Joseph, I’m sure, thinks I’ve taken a lot of what I’ve done from him, because there is a distance to what I do. But he is an academic, or he would like to be, with the philosophy. I know nothing of philosophy in the way he does! I’m a primitive in relation to these guys who really know their stuff.

MM: There is a piece by Mel Bochner, which is a piece of wood resting on top of a number of little pieces of wood. It’s called “Levelling”. And I said, why don’t you put a pillow underneath the piece of wood, and then I called it “Sleeping Child”. So it’s taking this Minimalist piece, and by the insertion of a pillow, it becomes figurative, because we associate our heads with the pillow and it becomes us, in a way. The Minimalists were attempting to separate the object from the subject, that the object can exist independently of the subject. It cannot. They are bound. There is no way you can separate them. Although it’s a great ambition, philosophically and formally.

CM: Well, it’s an etymological separation. It’s something we’ve had to invent in order to discuss it.

MM: Yes! I mean, Carl Andre is a great, great, great sculptor. I love his work — beautiful, elegant, great! And that we can walk on it is just wonderful. But it’s an interesting problem. I did this thing where, in my imaginary studio, I took Death’s cape and I burned it and I put it in water and I shredded it up and I hung it from the ceiling. I did things to Death’s cape that Richard Serra would have done to material. They’re attempting to take all references out of the “object” and not only am I putting references back but I’m making an allegorical issue out of it, which is even worse. You know, it’s really the worse thing! But then the allegory still lies separate, on top of it. And THAT is like the hypnosis, it’s that meaning, that soul that we implant into our surroundings. We can’t help it. We just do it all the time. We have done it, to survive.

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

Matt Mullican, “The Feeling of Things”, exhibition making of, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Francesco Margaroli

NOTES

1. Helene Winer (1946-) is an American curator and gallerist. After studying Art History at University of Southern California, Winer was first an assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While travelling in Europe, she became Assistant Director of the non-profit Whitechapel Gallery in London. On returning to Los Angeles, she became Director of the Museum of Art at Pomona College, organizing exhibitions with John Baldessari, John McCracken and Chris Burden, among others. Winer then worked as a writer at the Los Angeles Times before moving to New York, at first working as a freelancer and then, in 1975 taking up the position of Director of the non-profit Artists Space. In 1977, Artists Space held the seminal “Pictures” exhibition, including Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo. Curated by Douglas Crimp, and along with Crimp’s influential titular essay in October magazine (Vol.8, Spring, 1979, pp.75-88), “Pictures” was one of the defining exhibitions of the time. After leaving Artists Space, Winer founded Metro Pictures in 1980 with former Leo Castelli director, Janelle Reiring.

Jane Freilicher, Early New York Evening, 1954, oil on linen, 51 1/2 x 31 3/4 inches, 130.8 x 80.6 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Jane Freilicher and Paul Kasmin Gallery
简·弗莱里奇，《早期纽约的傍晚》，1954，亚麻布面油画，51 1/2 x 31 3/4英寸，130.8 x 80.6厘米，鸣谢简·弗莱里奇遗产和保罗·卡斯明画廊

Over a six-decade career, Freilicher quietly painted in direct contrast to the heroic and gestured angst of Abstract Expressionism, the industrial starkness of Minimalism, and the broad sweeping cacophony of Pop.  She painted in the same spirit and dedication as Bonnard and Matisse: a subtle and unrelenting observation of domestic life. John Ashbery in a 1975 review described Freilicher with “obviously she paints what she sees, but it happens that she sees a lot.”

Featured amongst the vivid array of the artist’s cityscapes are the tough iron zig-zags of fire escapes, plumes of wispy grey emerging from ConEdison smoke stacks, the quintessential red-brown of New York City apartment blocks, and the almost-abstract configurations to which these elements amount. Essential to Freilicher’s oeuvre is the ongoing balance of what’s inside and what’s outside, oftentimes realized in the delicate shift of perspective between a simple floral arrangement and the complexity of the city behind it. In the works, these landscapes are seen as on rather than beyond the window, and as such, reside in the interior. And the flowers are, to a certain extent, anthropomorphic, taking the place of the figure, as in ‘Flowers in an Armchair’ (1956.)

These kernels of Freilicher’s paintings—interiors, delicate light, drapery, the views of the city— were crystallized during this early period of her career. Freilicher returned tirelessly, and each time with renewed vitality, to the scenes within which she was absorbed: her home and studio. Those four walls and a window offered a fertile ground from which to paint, establishing the line of sight that eventually went on to characterize her later Water Mill paintings. Two paintings ‘Interior’ (1953) and ‘Interior’ (1954,) painted one year apart,  illuminate this. Freilicher said of her work, “I’m quite willing to sacrifice fidelity to the subject to the vitality of the image, a sensation of the quick, lovely blur of reality as it is apprehended rather than analyzed. I like to work on that borderline — opulent beauty in a homespun environment.”

Freilicher, who was born in Brooklyn and lived and worked in Greenwich Village for the whole of her life, was a leading figure of the New York School scene of the 1950s and 1960s. In his poem ‘A Sonnet For Jane Freilicher,’ Frank O’Hara describes “Jane whose paintings like a stone / are massive true and silently risqué”. For Kenneth Koch, her sensibility was “a crucial part of the New York School’s influence.” The artist’s work is widely collected and is represented in major museum collections throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her paintings were selected for inclusion in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

Freilicher was a longtime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Her many honors included the National Academy of Design Saltus Gold Medal, the Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Museum, and the Gold Medal in Painting from the Academy of Arts and Letters, its highest honor.

In anticipation of the exhibition, which is organized in cooperation with Eric Brown Art Group (Advisor to the estate) a solo presentation of her nudes is being exhibited at the ADAA: The Art Show in late February. A 100 page fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany “’50s New York” and Freilicher will also be the subject of a forthcoming biography written by Karin Roffman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux).

Amalia Ulman plays with different contemporary identity roles of women on the social media platform – Instagram. She interacts with her audience. She presents the performance including the interactive behavior itself as the final art work in photographs and installations. In her series “Privilege”, an ongoing project from 2015, the artist performs as a white-collar worker and caricature of herself producing works that allude to a women’s professional life during pregnancy and how it sits within certain labor roles including the art world. The works especially emphasise a women’s experience during pregnancy as the physiological and psychological can often divide; how the women acts as a kind of modern day Avalokitesvara as she multitasks and how a freedom yet imprisonment sentiment is often felt.  Also showing are 3 video projections from the series, one starring Bob the Pigeon, a bird companion who has become her confidante after appearing in her office and interrupting her productivity.   In addition to the latest series, the exhibition also includes selected images from Amalia Ulman’s ‘Excellences and Perfections’ project, created in 2014. In this series, Ulman used popular hashtags from micro-celebrities on the popular social network, and took on the roles of ‘cute girl’, ‘sugar baby’ and ‘life goddess’. The work underlines how the internet has given people an illusion of freedom of speech, while manipulating their imagination and recording their desires at the same time. Both projects, highlighted at KWM, explore the inherent contradiction and co-existence between the physiological identity and social/professional identity in contemporary female life.   On the one hand ‘Work’ can liberate women, but it can also transform the persona into a role that is then hard to break free from. As the awareness of urban professional life and female identity have become unavoidable in the Chinese work place, Ulman’s art, directly and uniquely, provides a fantasy out of real elements, stimulating each viewer to reflect upon and feel the dramatic dilemmas of everyday life.

About the Artist
Amalia Ulman (b. 1989) is an artist with an office in downtown L.A. Born in Argentina but raised in Spain, she studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins in London. Her works, which are primarily voiced in the first person, blur the distinction between the artist and object of study, often creating humorous, gentle deceptions, while exploring class imitation and the relationship between consumerism and identity. In addition to video, sculpture and installation work, her multidisciplinary practice has involved the use of social media, magazine photoshoots, interviews, self-promotion and brand endorsements as tools for the fabrication of fictional narratives. Ulman’s performance Excellences & Perfections was archived by Rhizome and the New Museum (New York) and exhibited at the Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery (London). Her most recent works are the video essay Annals of Private History (Frieze Live, 2015), and Privilege (online performance, 2016) and its subsequent solo shows: Labour Dance at Arcadia Missa (London), Reputation at New Galerie (Paris), Dignity at James Fuentes (New York), Intolerance at BARRO (Buenos Aires), Monday Cartoons at Deborah Schamoni (Munich), Atchoum! at Galerie Sympa (Figeac) and NEW WORLD 1717 at Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai).

A number of the artists presented in this exhibition have also practiced as musicians, including Condo, Chopin, Dalwood, Gordon, Roberts and Vega. Dalwood, who performed with influential Bristol-based punk band The Cortinas left the group in 1978 to pursue a career as an artist. Focusing on the legacy of some of history’s most significant individuals, Dalwood’s paintings are the composite of factual evidence and our collective imagination. In New Pleasure he presents Second Set (2016), a painting capturing two different moments in time within one image, whose composition echoes the aesthetics of Lou Reed’s album cover for Transformer. Another musician turned artist is George Condo, who toured with a punk band in the late 70s. This led to chance introductions to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring; the latter allowed the young artist the use of his studio in 1985. As Condo would recall, it was there he completed a painting dedicated to Miles Davis, one of many musically informed works that followed. Included in this exhibition is John Lennon (2001), an energetic yellow abstract painting cut abruptly at its head with a stark blue background with blocky red letters reading the titular musician’s name. In this group of works he makes connections between his own improvisations and those of the musicians and writers that inspired him. They exist as a literal reassessment of his debt to music as the touchstone for an understanding of free expression in the visual field.

Other artists, such as Gordon, Vega, Roberts and Chopin are primarily known for their contributions to music rather than art yet each have an extensive body of artwork. Vega, the vocalist for the influential band Suicide, studied under Ad Reinhardt in the 60’s where he first made assemblage sculptures from found objects. Within the gallery he presents a makeshift crucifix, a common trope for Vega, adorned with three light bulbs of different designs. Gordon, like Vega, also came to prominence within the downtown music scene. A founding member of Sonic Youth, Gordon has since made socially-conscious paintings from layers of paint and glitter. Often addressing issues of gentrification, protest, and resistance with her practice, her work in the exhibition entitled Destroy All Monsters (2015) makes reference to the band name that artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw performed under. Roberts and Chopin both have interdisciplinary practices that mix experimental music with art. Like her music, Roberts’s work deals with the composition of history and memory. On view here is Always Say your Name (2014), a triptych collage of handwritten sheet music and found photographs interwoven with layers of charcoal and paint. One of the most accomplished avant-garde musicians of the 20th century, Chopin was a practitioner of sound poetry. Within the gallery are two examples of the deceased artist/poet’s typewriter poems that reference both music and dance.

The impact that listening to music can have on an artist’s practice is exceptional. This exchange, however, is just the surface of the ongoing discourse between music and art. Compositions both illustrative and conceptual manifest themselves through this tête-à-tête. Parmiggiani, Feldmann, Parrino and Wool all find inspiration for their work within music. Most literal are Feldmann’s photographs portraying different models of car stereos, each taken by the artist while “good music was playing”. While Feldmann presents the vessel for music, other artists show how this art form can manifest itself visually. Visceral and expressive responses to music by Parmiggiani, Parrino and Wool are presented within the gallery, each piece showcasing moments of quick action. Like a power chord or record break, these pieces are documentations of a broken space in time.

Works by Carpenter, Echakhch, Lloyd and Prince deconstruct the phenomenon that music’s influence has on our collective consciousness. Echakhch presents Sans Titre (joueur de tambour a) (2010), a sculptural work consisting of abandoned civilian clothes scattered around a marching-band drum. Here, the musical object is divorced from its traditional function and silenced further by presenting it as a static object on a plinth. The silence of Echakhch’s piece is broken by Lloyd’s installation The Band (2017) that includes a television screen placed on the ground playing footage of a musical group. With only its audio edited and playing in reverse, the camera moves throughout the venue unhinged, as if the filmmaker forgot their camera was turned on.

Prince’s photo collage Bitches and Bastards (1985-1986) is from a series of “gang” pieces where the artist would cannibalize photographs from life-style magazines and place them in a grid. For this particular ensemble, Prince has focused on twelve different hair-metal groups from the eighties. These photographs, originally taken for promotional use, are stripped of their originality. The subversive and androgynous attire of their subjects is lost within this multiplicity. Bringing these numerous photos together makes these musicians anonymous, thus stripping them of their notoriety. These are no longer fetishized rock stars but are now counter-culture conformists. Carpenter similarly critiques this failed rebellion with a portrait of Amy Winehouse from his Decades series. Mimicking the middle-brow aesthetics of a knock-off Warholesque screen print, the work is a hand-painted image of the late British singer-songwriter. The romanticization of music and art often leads to the capital appropriation of their original transgressive purpose. This occurred with Warhol (although he celebrated this sort of usurpation), as well as musical genres like jazz, rockabilly and definitively punk; all of which greatly influenced Winehouse. Winehouse – who once could have been a counter-culture icon – unintentionally became the neoliberal vision of resistance. This irony wasn’t lost on the talented musician, who likely saw this regression as a tragic metaphor for the departure of punk from its original essence, despite having an earnest passion for its message.

Murillo addresses the conditions of display in the contemporary art world by engaging with a series of dichotomies—including work and play, production and consumption, and originality and appropriation. His practice is closely tied to notions of community and migration stemming from his cross-cultural ties to London, where he currently lives, and Colombia, where he was born.

The exhibition marks a significant moment in Murillo’s career in which he consolidates his early emphasis on personal cultural experiences with a broader exploration of the different roles and possibilities of artists within an increasingly global world. It takes its point of departure in his recent travels and exhibitions, allowing for an at once introspective and radical look at his practice to date.

In a futile mercantile disposition, a maze-like room-sized installation of several hundred black paintings and steel structures inspired by morgue tables, the idea of a finished work becomes inseparable from process and materials. Each of the canvases has been covered with two coats of paint on both sides and is displayed draped across metal wires, folded, or casually scattered. Not two are alike: some have been cut into strips and sewn together in a unique pattern, while others bear evidence of previous use as oil pads in the studio, with marks left behind by other works, or of having moved around with the artist on his travels. Alternating sheer and opaque surfaces distinguish newer canvases from older ones, and the lingering smell of paint offers a sense of their ongoing production.

Ten black, torn paintings arranged in a grid in the adjacent gallery include characteristic motifs from Murillo’s oeuvre at large, yet their black on black printing makes it difficult to discern the individual layers. The artist cut into the canvases as an act of drawing, and then stitched the loose ends together to add volume to the compositions. Each of the canvases in the installation, titled Black Monday/Tuesday in a reference to the stock market crash of 1987, accompanied Murillo on a recent trip to Southeast Asia, where they were part of ritualistic performances with local spiritual guides.

The element of patchwork, along with actual motifs, are more clearly visible in another group of paintings on view, which represent a continuation of the vibrant and visually complex works for which Murillo first became known. Again including multiple layers of marks from repeated brushwork and printing, they contain recognizable, if jumbled, imagery drawn from such sources as a Jamaican two dollar bill, playing cards, coconut water packaging, and a diagram of a pig. In contrast, through patches of corn, wheat and mud, a large-scale and partially torn painting that shares its title with the exhibition, is devoid of figuration, focusing attention fully on its intricate pattern of canvas fragments that are covered with natural latex and minutely stitched together. Installed with a metal armature similar to the sculptural arrangements in a futile mercantile disposition, it offers the impression of a sturdy landscape to be traversed.

Also on view is the prototype of Them, an intimate travel journal and unique artist book that Murillo released last year. With a large selection of family photographs and drawings, it provides a practical illustration of some of the layering techniques used for his paintings, as well as the overall centrality of mark-making within his work: carbon paper between the pages means that traces of one drawing become part of several others, and continuous retouching confuses the idea of a negative and positive image.

The exhibition coincides with Murillo’s participation in Printed Matter’s 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (September 15-18). In collaboration with Mandy El-Sayegh, an artist based in London, and Yutaka Sone, who is also represented by David Zwirner, Murillo will stage Room Services, a live, multi-day drawing and printing performance, creating unique books, zines, and editions.

Oscar Murillo earned his B.F.A. in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by his M.F.A. in 2012 from the Royal College of Art, London. He joined David Zwirner in 2013 and had his inaugural exhibition, titled A Mercantile Novel, at the gallery in New York the following year. Binary function marked his first solo presentation at David Zwirner, London in 2015.

An upcoming solo show of his work is planned for the fall of 2016 at the Yarat Contemporary Art Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. Also in 2016, the artist will participate in the 2nd Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2016 in China; the 3rd Aichi Triennial. Homo Faber: A Rainbow Caravan in Japan; and the 5th Anyang Public Art Project (APAP) in Korea.

Earlier this year, Murillo participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including the 6th Marrakech Biennale: Not New Now; the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed; and Towards a Larger World at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Previous group exhibitions include those held in 2014 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp.

For Murillo’s ongoing long-term project Frequencies, created in collaboration with members of his family and political scientist Clara Dublanc, canvases are temporarily affixed to classroom desks in selected schools across the globe, encouraging students aged ten to sixteen to create any kind of mark making—drawing, writing, doodling. He recently debuted the Frequencies project with a large-scale installation of canvases as part of the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures in 2015, for which he also exhibited signalling devices in now bastard territory, twenty black canvases each hung from a single hook and extending thirty feet from the floor to the ceiling of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini.

Murillo’s works and projects have been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Most recently, presentations were held in 2015 at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá; Centro Cultural Daoíz y Velarde, Madrid (part of ArcoColombia 2015); and Artpace, San Antonio, Texas. Also in 2015, as part of Performa 15 in New York, Murillo presented Lucky dip, a series of performances and installations that took place over the course of one week at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, an important historical site in downtown Manhattan. In 2014, Murillo’s paintings, sculptures, and video works were presented at 40mcube in Rennes, France, organized as part of the 4th Les Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d’art contemporain. Also in 2014 a body of work was presented at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles on the occasion of the venue’s inaugural exhibition. In 2013, the South London Gallery hosted the artist’s first major solo show in the United Kingdom. In 2012, he created paintings on site during a five-week summer residency at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, which were shown later that year marking his first solo exhibition in the United States. Other venues that have exhibited his works and projects include the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2016), Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2012).