Assemblage

March 4-April 8, 2006
Julieta Spivak (a.k.a.Julieta Esposito, Buenos Aires), Herlinde Koelbl (Munich), Susan Lee-Chun (Miami), Andrea Nacach (Barcelona), Lucienne Pereira (Groningen, Netherlands), Ali Prosch (Miami), Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs (Zurich), and Claude Temin-Vergez (London).
Guest writer: Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, London.

Assemblage presents the works of eight women artists of different backgrounds. This gathering of artists is a brief and partial consideration of a scene of art being created now.

The term assemblage has been chosen as title for its wide meaning, which has expanded from its use to refer to a specific artistic medium, as a three-dimensional collage, to cross-pollinate the fields of architecture and post-structuralist thought. Jacques Derrida sees in a “text” an extremely numerous arrangement of contexts that may be shuffled to produce meaning, calling this an “assemblage.” (1)

This exhibition aims to propose a combination of present tense textual spaces. It is a coming together of different media and visions, rather than points of view, and an exhibition showing the act of fitting disparate pieces together under the umbrella of gender. It is also a composition from fragments of bodies of works that convene into a new gallery, and a new work in its own right made of found objects.

Bringing together these texts does not suggest that I have tried to reconcile the visions of the artists that are being presented, but in the most respectful way, it is a manhandling the works as a trial for contents and expressions to configure a dispositif. Spacially, the artworks are treated as a multiplicity of vectors with directions and intensities that may intersect and create friction. According to Newtonian mechanics, friction would result in deceleration, a response that hopefully results in increased attention, and in the opening of semantic passages into a “smooth space” (2).

The selection suggests a non-literal approach to the subject of femininity and reveals works related to idiosyncratic or individual notions of personal identity. The ideas of adaptation, transformation and symbiosis are strong connections or denominators that come out of the works. The arrangement of the artworks through the gallery attempts to suggest a sort of traveling through a vectorial rather than a metric space, a journey from the concrete to the abstract, from the optic to the haptic.

The Artists:

Julieta Spivak: Born 1978 in Buenos Aires Argentina. Studied ting with Juan Doffo and drawing with Hermenegildo Sábat. Lives in Buenos Aires.

Herlinde Koelbl: Born in Lindau Lake Constance, Germany 1939; Lives in Munich. Ms. Koelbl studied fashion design and is a self-taught photographer, in which field she works since 1976. She contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines (among them ‘New York Times’, ‘Stern’, ‘Die Zeit’). Her work was highly rewarded. Among the awards is the Golden Camera, Grimme-Prize for exeptional TV-productions, and the TV-Critics’ Prize 1999 for her feature Traces of Power (about the influence power has on personality). For Schlafzimmer: Herlinde Koelbl traveled to six major cities (London, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, New York and Paris) where some very diverse subjects agreed to pose for the camera in their bedrooms: singles and couples, celebrities and no-names, artists, aesthetes, eccentrics, the wealthy, the poor and the elderly. The result is a highly impressive photographic essay allowing an intimate, but not voyeuristic insight into the bedrooms and the lives of their occupants.

Susan Lee-Chun: Born 1976 in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Obtained her MA Art Education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago 2004; Bachelors in Art Education, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 1999. Lives in Miami.

Andrea Nacach: Born 1975 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From 1993-1998 studies graphic design and photography at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Escuela Nacional de Fotografia. Following a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship in 1998, Andrea Nacach worked in graphic design projects in Argentina, Spain and Uruguay. Since 2002 collaborates with Catalan artist Antoni Mintadas in various projects in Europe and the Americas. Lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Lucienne Pereira: Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. From 1989-1992 studied Art Education at the Universidade Estacio de Sa, Rio de Janeiro. From 1993-1997 participates in open ateliers of painting at The Art Students League in New York, then in 2000-2002 obtains a BA in art at Empire State College (SUNY). MFA at Frank Mohr Instituut, Groningen. Lives in New York City.

Ali Prosch: Born in Fairfax, CA 1979. Graduated on 2003 with a BFA degree in photography from the New World School of the Arts, Miami. Has exhibited in various private galleries in Florida, at The Moore Space in Miami, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in N. Miami. Lives in Miami.

Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs: Born in Bogota, Colombia. From 1998-2002 studied at the Ecole Cantonale d‘art de Lausanne (ECAL), Lausanne, (Suisse). Swiss Awards 2004, 2005. Lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Claude Temin-Vergez: Born in Paris, France 1964. From 1994 - 1995 attended Chelsea College of Art, from 1995 – 1998 obtained a BA Honours Painting at Central St Martins College of Art. From 1998 – 2001 post-graduate work in painting at the Royal Academy of Arts. 2005: Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Award Fellowship in Painting at the British School at Rome, Italy. Lives in London.

Notes:

1. Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 131.
2. Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Felix, “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

New Paintings by Claude Temin-Vergez

There are painters who need to dig in to their chosen territory; others, perhaps less numerous, prefer to keep moving on. Both approaches are valid, and occasionally artists suddenly convert from one sort to the other. For now, at least, Claude Temin-Vergez seems to belong to the second group. The first works of hers I saw, back in 2002, were all-over abstractions with clear reference to Jackson Pollock on the one hand and ‘70s pattern painting on the other, in which arabesque skeins of purely linear patterning cavorted atop monochromatic grounds. Within a couple of years, though, this allover linear web had been transmuted from the direct path of color itself to, in a way, something much more classical, an underlying drawing, with the painted surface itself having become a pulsating patchwork of intricately interlocking colored shapes—units of sheer sensory impulse whose value demanded to be experienced haptically as much as optically. Ornate, flamboyantly twisting and swelling forms derived both from the observation of biological forms and nature and from studies of the way such forms have historically been translated into decorative schemata, for example in art nouveau, counterpointed determinedly flat color. With no point of rest for the eye or mind, the rococo excess of these works could be exhausting.

Clearly realizing that with all these “contraction/dilatations, recto/verso, multiple/twisting, turning, invagination, and a multiplication of oppositions that give birth to multiplicities,” as the artist herself once put it, there might be little scope for pushing much further in this direction, Temin-Vergez has now wisely opted to prune back all that lavish sensory abundance. Now, protuberant tendrils of color, twining biomorphic strands, stand out against a return of the monochrome ground, and in some cases these patches of color have given way to simple colored outlines. In essence, Temin-Vergez has come to the realization that there is greater pictorial power to be derived from working neither with a classic figure/ground dichotomy in which self-contained shapes can be more or less clearly distinguished nor with the allover, in which this dichotomy is done away with, but rather with this more ambiguous situation in which a profusion of small-scale elements, somewhat elongated so that they seem at a halfway point between being shapes and lines, agglutinate into these diffuse yet not allover configurations that are, as the artist herself puts it, “forms with form, shapes without shape.” There is undoubtedly something seductive about these formless forms that remind us so strongly of things that we find decorative and beautiful but they harbor a subliminal sense of threat as well, because there is something inherently unnatural underlying their hallucination of naturalness. You want to keep your eye on them, at once for delight and from mistrust, until you finally can’t tell the two feelings apart.

Barry Schwabsky, 2006