Andreas Gursky at White Cube

Those among you who know Andreas Gursky know what to expect from him but it's comforting to see that he can still surprise you even if you have grown accustomed to his style.

The new exhibition at White Cube Gallery Mason's Yard features new works from North Korea, Japan and a location seemingly unknown (for the F1 Boxenstopp series).

What's really stunning about his pictures is his masterful combination of both grandeur and detail, overlapped and intertwined by notions of seriality, repetition and uniformity. He's interested in the bigger picture (in a very literal way) of things yet manages to depict bigger relations which we would describe as artificial or uniform with a respect to detail that always hints towards some form of transgression of these serial structures. A civil parade in North Korea with thousands of participants might aesthetically appear almost as a military parade of the good old Cold War days (which North Korea is not really willing to get out of anyway right now) but it also reveals the transgression of this very grid-like and mostly symmetrical form. People not waving their banners at the right time, individuals sleeping or simply not paying attention. These are the details that differentiate a civil from a military parade as it allows for these things to happen.

F1 Boxenstopp is slightly different as it depicts racing cars getting checked up by the team of engineers during a race. Although they -in principle- all perform the same actions and have to act as a greater whole on the car and the pilot, given their tight time restrictions, you are still able to see the differences in movement from team to team, even if it is a similar engineer performing a similar task. This leaves us with the impression that although complying to standards and protocol is of the utmost importance here, the individual capacity to handle the form of self-organisation by the particular team as a whole is equally important. It only becomes clear by the leaflet that these pictures are in fact digitally constructed and so Gursky manages to challenge our whole perception of what his work is about once more.

White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present the work of Andreas Gursky in his first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Renowned for his large-format colour photographs charting themes of globalised society at work and play, Gursky’s new production employs the latest digital technology to capture and refine an astounding compilation of detail on an epic scale.

The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. For the Pyongyang series (2007), Gursky travelled to the Arirang Festival, held annually in North Korea in honour of the late Communist leader Kim Il Sung. The festival’s mass games include more than 50,000 participants performing tightly choreographed acrobatics, against a backdrop of 30,000 schoolchildren holding coloured flip-cards that produce an ever-changing mosaic of patterns and images. Gursky’s photographs describe, in panoramic dimensions, the incongruity of the brilliant colours and smiling faces of the performers within the controlled, totalitarian nature of the event.
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F1 Boxenstopp (2007) focuses on the frenetic activity around Formula One cars stationed in their pits during a race. Dozens of mechanics and technicians in bright team colours surround two vehicles, hurriedly refuelling and repairing, all but obscuring the cars and drivers from view. Above this scene, members of the audience look down from the darkened interior of the hospitality suite. Shot at various Grand Prix races around the world – Shanghai, Monte Carlo, Istanbul, São Paulo – the figures appear captured in a moment of authenticity, yet in reality, such simultaneous action would not be possible; these images are in fact a carefully composed digital construct.
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Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig and lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. Since the 1980s he has exhibited extensively, including major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MCA Chicago and SF MOMA, San Francisco. His most recent museum exhibition opened in February 2007 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and will tour to Istanbul and Sharjah.

Andreas Gursky at White Cube Mason’s Yard coincides with a presentation of new work at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London, 7a Grafton Street, London W1S 4EJ from 22 March to 12 May 2007.

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Victoria Miro, Parasol Unit, White Cube

Last weekend I took the time again to check on some of my favourite galleries.
Since Parasol Unit and Victoria Miro gallery are so close together, it always makes sense to visit them both in one go.

Parasol had a group show consisting of different kinds of video art. From animated short films with an actual narrative, some of them funny, some serious, to pieces without a narrative but focus on visual impact instead.

MOMENTARY MOMENTUM: an exhibition devoted to animated drawings, comprising a dozen installations and a film loop with the participation of Francis Alÿs, Robert Breer, Paul Bush / Lisa Milroy, Michael Dudok de Wit, Brent Green, Takashi Ishida, Susanne Jirkuff, William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Jochen Kuhn, Zilla Leutenegger, Arthur de Pins, Qubo Gas, Christine Rebet, Robin Rhode, Georges Schwizgebel, David Shrigley, Tabaimo, Naoyuki Tsuji & Kara Walker

Some impressions:







At Victoria Miro, there was another group show, this time, the focus was more on painting, installations and sculptures.

Absent Without Leave examines the ways in which contemporary artists might use elements of performance as a material in the production (or reception) of their work. The diverse practices on display here re-imagine performance and filter it into something 'performative' - expanding gestures, actions, characters, and roles into works which incorporate performance as process.

Conceptual and performance artist Vito Acconci has discussed how, at a certain point in his career in the early seventies, he decided to appear less in his work, so that his presence was more of an absence. Absent Without Leave borrows the spirit of Acconci's decision and uses it to platform an investigation of the idea of the 'absentee performer' - an idea in which the 'performer' (the artist ) is relocated from a visible presence, to a presence which is recorded in the conceptual fabric of the art works themselves.

The exhibition features works in which: there is potential within an art object for action to happen, which may or may not necessarily occur; there is a live event without a performer; there is a physical trace of an event which in fact never occurred; or there is a possibility to read the environment as something staged, or as a set awaiting a narrative.

My last stop for the day was White Cube gallery at Mason's Yard. I have to say that even after all this time in the city, some places are really hard to find. I spend some time circling around the area with increasing precision and with the help from local police, Transport for London staff and different versions of these handy area maps they distribute on the tube stations. Trouble was that the new editions of these maps don't contain the narrow streets and small open places anymore. Budgeting? Maybe, but surely not for the better. Anselm Kiefer currently has a few works on display at the West End outlet of White Cube. I was only able to take one picture before I was kindly asked not to take any more. In case you like what you see, I'd suggest that you check out the huge paintings of Kiefer in the basement for yourselves.

The title of the exhibition, Aperiatur terra, is a quotation from the Book of Isaiah, which translates as ‘let the earth be opened’ and continues ‘and bud forth a saviour and let justice spring up at the same time’. These contrasting themes of destruction and re-creation, violent upheaval and spiritual renewal underpin much of Kiefer’s work.

The focal point of the exhibition is Palmsonntag, an installation in the ground floor gallery comprised of eighteen paintings, hung as a single entity on one wall, with a thirteen-metre palm tree laid on the gallery floor. As its title suggests, the work evokes the beginning of Christ’s journey into Jerusalem prior to his arrest, Passion, death and resurrection. The paintings read almost as the pages of a book opened to reveal multiple layers and narratives. As is common in Kiefer’s practice, organic materials form the palette through which landscapes are created. These are then overlaid with texts which do not point to one single interpretation but rather suggest a rich, philosophically charged and resonant multiplicity of meaning and experience.

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All text in block quote is property of Parasol Unit, Victoria Miro Gallery and White Cube Gallery respectively.

Christian Marclay at White Cube

Okay, I have to confess, I've never been to the White Cube gallery before and, what's even worse, I can't really explain why. I just guess it never happened that I was at Hoxton Square when it was open. Maybe also because there wasn't anything which interested me enough to go. Well, until now that is.

Having seen Christian Marclay's exhibition at the Barbican last year, I was intrigued by his wide range of working materials and his cunning wit and humor with which he puts his concepts into practice.

During the time when he showed at Barbican, I could see his piece Video Quartet (2002) and some time later again at Tate Modern.

Crossfire (2007) is his most recent video-piece and kind of a different interpretation of Video Quartet. Rather than having four screens in one row which seem to interact with each other, you now have 4 screens facing opposite to each other and the audience is virtually caught in the crossfire itself. On the screen you can see various clip samples from action movies, some of them famous, some of them not which all entail some sort of shooting. The piece itself is well orchestrated, as is everything else by Marclay, really, and goes from silent preparation to an ever intensifying gun-battle which, after its climax, slowly comes to rest.
The first analogy that comes to mind is that of sexual intercourse, at least by the intensity curve described above. And since sex and violence intermingle with each other psychologically in various forms of desire and the cinematic silver screen is one symbolic embodiment of that desire, it all kinda made sense to me in the end.
After all, what I like best about Marclay's pieces is that you can think about them for hours or not at all, but you will understand them immediately. So I might just leave it at that for now. Enjoy.




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