ANNUAL MAGAZINE

Annual at Pulse New York

AnnualArt Magazine — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:42:24 +0000

PULSE PUBLICATIONS displays national magazines, newspapers, guides and other relevant media in the main section of the fair. Publishers and editors also collaborate in the program of PULSE PLAY. No related posts. No related posts.

Hans SCHABUS

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:48:07 +0000

Austria’s Hans Schabus presented his video Wienfluss, Wien, 16. Februar 2002 at Manifesta 4, the European Biennale of Contemporary Art, in Frankfurt in 2002. This curious work shows him piloting a flimsy Optimist-type craft down the Wien, an affluent of the Danube which flows (partly underground) through Vienna. The video follows his progress beneath the vaults of murky tunnels, where the Wien flows alternately fast and slow. Schabus looks like some curious urban adventurer, descending a domesticated stream, canalized like a sewer, with long concrete tunnels evoking an intestine. Vienna being home to Dr Freud, it is hard not to see this disturbing film in psychoanalytical terms, with internal navigation symbolizing a lengthy descent into oneself.

Hans-Peter FELDMANN

Raphaël ZARKA

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:36:33 +0000

Raphaël Zarka is a collector of sculptural forms. It’s almost as if could pin them up in a display-cabinet like butterflies. He seeks out old forms and brings them back to life using a modernized formal vocabulary, recording their new status in offbeat ways. In 2001, along with the artist Vincent Lamouroux, he created the Pentacycle, a curious contraption (half-bicycle, half-pedal boat) intended for use on the concrete rail built for the Aérotrain – a futuristic rail link between Paris and Orléans abandoned in 1970s, but part of which still remains in place.

The forms Zarka uses are modernist concrete ruins – often abandoned, with vegetation gradually re-asserting itself. There is something romantic about these neglected forms, reminiscent of works by Hubert Robert. Zarka calls them Les Formes du Repos, the title of his series of photographs charting these forgotten concrete structures. One of the forms is the rhombicuboctahedron used by the American modernist sculptor Tony Smith, but dating back to Leonardo da Vinci and a Renaissance treatise by his mathematician colleague Luca Pacioli.

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Terence KOH

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:25:41 +0000

Terence Koh first appeared on the art scene in 2003 when, as asianpunkboy, he inaugurated the Peres Projects gallery in Los Angeles. He has since become known for the monochrome installations and ritual performances which accompany his exhibitions – yielding a string of successful museum shows in Zurich (Kunsthalle), New York (Whitney Museum), Frankfurt (Schirn Kunsthalle) and León (Musac).

Koh aims to connect with ‘as many people as possible,’ happily using a range of representational systems and cultural references – whether installations, sculptures or performances. His work stands on the borderline between art history and underground culture, and between decadent paganism and flights of fancy. It explores the themes of identity, power, sexuality and the sacred. He flirts with pleasure and pain, lust and death, purity and degradation, as if recreating the atmosphere of the epic performances of the ’60s and ’70s.

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DEWAR & GICQUEL

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:55:32 +0000

Daniel Dewar (born 1976) and Grégory Gicquel (born 1975) met at art school in Rennes. At the time their main interest was in performance. For their diploma project, the pair created an unusual travel agency, offering clients free, simple excursions – like going to buy bread or tour the city ring-road. Then they moved on to sculpture, first in hyper-realist fashion, with three-dimensional works consisting of reproducing ‘by hand’ (i.e. craftsman-style) industrially-created objects in identical materials: skateboard wheels, say, or BMX pinions. Then they discovered their preferred technique of direct carving – although they also practise modelling, firing pottery, weaving tapestries and working leather.

Didier GICQUEL

Dan WALSH

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:35:03 +0000

Dan Walsh could be a direct descendant of Minimalism – a period when Formalism found new possibilities for development. His vaguely geometric motifs, and liking for series, connect him to the movement started by New York artists in the 1960s. But other elements contradict this. His colours appear saturated, and his approach does not have the cold precision of the Minimalists.

Since the 1990s Dan Walsh has been painting geometric grids on neutral grounds. His works can be seen as questioning how a motif occupies a pictorial space, and how it can activate it, transcending the usual opposition between background and figures. In this he is close to Frank Stella’s Black Paintings, and certain aspects of the Geometric artists of the 1970s. […]

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Lori HERSBERGER

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:19:58 +0000

The psychological and cognitive investigations underpinning Lori Hersberger’s approach were apparent from his earliest works – series of videos based on advertising, cinema and art history, accompanied by spotlights and sound-tracks, and featuring such disparate objects as wrecked cars and electric guitars.

He earned international recognition in the late 1990s with his Archaic Modern Suite installation at the 48th Venice Biennale. Since then his works have been characterized by fluorescent colours applied to canvas, mirror, or directly to the wall using a variety of different methods such as spray, sponge, drip or stencil. Meanwhile Hersberger’s installations – involving neon, broken mirror or other unusual objects, like old rugs or empty jerry-cans – concentrate on sensorial impact and phenomenal efficiency, creating zones of hybrid, dynamic, destabilizing force: a veritable mise en espace of painting with an acidic, fragmentary aesthetic. […]

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Rudolf STINGEL

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:54:16 +0000

For twenty years, Rudolf Stingel (born Merano, Italy, 1956) has been striving to challenge the purity of the medium of painting. He describes all his works as paintings – whether they are abstract or photorealist canvases, carpets placed on the floor or hung from the wall, or even rooms lined with silvered isolating material – as he investigates some of the basic questions about a work of art’s authenticity, as posed by painting today.

He first delved into the essence of painting in his Instructions back in 1989, whose methodical approach provided a step-by-step outline for producing a ‘veritable Stingel painting.’ The manual,translated into several languages, aimed to enable anyone to create one of his paintings, thereby fighting against the cult of the individual artist. […]

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Carsten HÖLLER

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:47:38 +0000

Carsten Höller (born Brussels 1961), a trained entomologist with a doctorate in phytopathology, lives and works in Stockholm. Over the last twenty years he has been producing resolutely experimental art that seeks to cast doubt on our relationship with the world. His works question the élitist nature of scientific language; his ideas – expressed in installations, lectures or event – derive from the theories of natural evolution, and call for behavioural change. He looks to Richard Dawkins’ theory about any living organism being blindly programmed by its genes, whose dominant quality is survival and replication through time and space – along with merciless egoism. Which means that universal love and well-being are meaningless concepts when it comes to evolution.

Yet Höller refuses to let himself be boxed up in an ‘art and science’ duality which to him makes no sense; he recalls, quite simply, that he has been many other things. His work blends all his parallel experiments with a view to exchanging roles and identities – as when he installed a sports pitch at the Berlin Kunstwerke in 1999, to encourage adults to behave like children and start up their own ball games. […]

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Tom FRIEDMAN

AnnualArt Magazine — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:27:30 +0000

Tom Friedman (born St Louis 1965) is the perfect illusionist, revisiting sculptural methods by using ordinary materials to question the frontier of logic and the limits of language. His works undermine the accepted ideas that form our mental and physical realities, and our everyday relationship with the environment.

Friedman’s initial training as a book illustrator helped him treat drawing as a novel way of perceiving space. He subsequently studied sculpture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also acknowledges the influence of Gerhard Richter, especially his way of confusing and defining objects of representation; and of Ad Reinhardt, whose work helped him realize the potential
of meaning – not only in an artist’s individual works, but also in the chronological progression of individual pieces. […]

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