Anthony Caro, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, Edmund de Waal, Rebecca Warren
Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris 2014 With a text by Jurriaan Benschop
“For those who thought that modern art was over, this show is a challenge [THEN AND NOW, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2014]. It offers a lineage that connects works by five artists in multiple ways. Their origins are British, and some of them share the landscape and the eras that surrounded and formed them as artists. They also share an interest in abstraction and modern 'essentials'. What we can see in this show is modern art still being effective. There is belief in the projects presented and in their potential to be meaningful. The show presents continuity, in methods and appearances, between 20th-century and 21st-century art pieces. Even with Warren's anachronistic little pom-pom and de Waal's reflections on the unique art object, this continuity can be felt. In fact, through questioning habits and styles, these artists only confirm the importance that 'then' has for 'now'.”
J. Benschop, 'THEN AND NOW', in THEN AND NOW, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2014, p. 24
Publisher: Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris Text: Jurriaan Benschop Publication date: 2014 Dimensions: 20 x 15 x 0,3 cm
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Bridget Riley (b. 1931) may be best known for her analysis of optical phenomena in geometrical black and white paintings that define her starting point and made her one of the central figures in the Op art movement of the 60’s. In the stunning colour work that followed, she continued her exploration of perception through the relationship between structure and colour, always causing disorientation to the viewer’s eye, as her paintings seem to flicker, to pulsate and to convey an internal life. Bridget Riley, continuously carrying out new experiments, created her first wall painting in 2007. Besides her artistic practice, her theoretical writings had a considerable influence on a younger generation of artists."To follow very closely Riley’s work is to see that sameness is courted – because repetition is crucial to an artistic practice – but sameness is also avoided, because it is in the character of a true artistic practice to create change. So, to follow her work is to see that the continuity of artistic identity is asserted, not despite change, but because of change: because change is the very means of achieving continuity. [...] The surprise of the first encounter with one of her paintings is owing to an astonishment that an inanimate object has apparently come to life and – more than that – is in communion with the viewer. The viewer’s surprise is, we recognise, is a self-created surprise. Perception is the medium just as much as is the canvas and the paint – more so, in that a painting, the artist acknowledges, ‘only comes to life when looked at from a certain distance’. In a way, it doesn’t exist factually at all; only in the viewer’s perception."John Elderfield, Creating a way of looking in Bridget Riley: Die Streifenbilder / The Stripe Paintings 1961-2012, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2013
Artist page on maxhetzler.com
Edmund de Waal's (b. 1964) work addresses, among others, the subjects of collecting - archiving and including - removing. Recognised as an exceptional ceramist, Edmund de Waal models small unique vessels that form the base of his installations. Carefully composed vitrines create a visual narration and result in a subtle dialogue between tradition and modernity, minimalism and architecture, ideas of repetition and rhythm, informed by his passions for literature as well as music and suitable for meditative contemplation.“I work with things. […] And then I arrange them, find places to put them down, on shelves or within vitrines, in houses and galleries and museums, move them around so that they are in light or in shadow. They are installations, or groupings, or a kind of poetry. They have titles, a phrase or a line that helps them on their way in the world.”— Edmund de Waal
Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) is a sculptor of more or less figurative, more or less expressive forms in clay, bronze and welded steel, and an orchestrator of fragments displayed often but not exclusively within wall-mounted vitrines. She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that she describes as existing "somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness". Hers is a restless, sometimes contradictory art, the result of sustained contemplation of the creative impulse and the mysterious potency of images and objects."This experimental, slapstick collision of Giacometti and Disney, literally cast or pressed into one physical body, leaves neither unharmed. In fact Warren's sculpture could be read as a response to culturally entrenched gender tropes - the slender modernist outline on one hand, and the Disneyish codification of cuteness and effervescence on the other hand - colliding in the real world, in real people's lives. Think of the late Amy Winehouse: big breast implants and anorexia. Warren does not merely make illustrative comments by pitting two things against each other, however. There is more at play. Sticking two things together that "don't fit" is just one possible method. Another is to duplicate (while twisting the logic of duplication); another, to alter proportion (elongate, squeeze etc.). And yet another is to use materials and conventions in unconventional ways. Think of Winehouse again: the postmodern mixture of visual styles and the clear modernism of Soul music."Jörg Heiser, Bronze Heads and Hair Bows in Rebecca Warren, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications, 2012
Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin
2014
Exhibition page on maxhetzler.com
