called “tiger and turtle magic mountain,” it’s a “roller coaster” you walk  instead of ride.  good for your glutes and better for the environment.

it still looks pretty scary.

but gorgeous!

we have a show of liliana porter’s newest work at our gallery in new york.   the  centerpiece is a sculptural installation called “man with an axe” in which a man in a suit and hat smashes up what appears to be the wreckage of the past,  chopping it into bits…

the man is 3 inches tall.      the pile of debris is 12×12 feet.

the rubble is composed of furniture, a toy piano, several different representations of homes, a wedding dress, a key and hundreds of pounds of broken crockery.

the piece is the culmination of a series of works created in the last several years, in which porter positions a tiny, solitary character in front of a pile of material completely out-of-proportion to their size or ability.   faced with an impossibly overwhelming task, they seem to toil unceasingly.

relate?

the collective title for these works,“forced labor,”  implies, of course, a lack of free will…

porter is the puppet master of  an eccentric and encyclopedic collection of figurines, toys, souvenirs and knickknacks.  her talent lies in transforming junk into scenarios that speak to the most most basic of human emotions – longing, love, pride, fear, loss and death.

when she pops a statuette into an unexpected circumstance, she provokes uncanny political, philosophical and existential interpretations.

in addition to the man with the ax, the sprawling piece is populated by dozens of tiny figures.   the cast of characters includes archetypes – soldiers, travelers, farmers, geishas, kings, a mariachi, a groom — as well as specific personalities.   some of the people actively participate in clean up.  some powerlessly contemplate the wreckage.  others go about their business carelessly.

the guy with the ax isn’t the only one engaged in a monumental endeavor.   an itty-bitty man with a broom attempts to sweep up a deep-water-horizon-sized spill of blue pigment…

while a gardener with a watering can sprinkles the flowers on a shattered plate.  all gardeners are optimists.   is this an act of hope?   an attempt to coax something beautiful from the destruction?

or is it a study in impotence.   surely nurturing shards of shattered dinnerware is a fruitless effort?   as pointless, perhaps, as hand-painting fragile porcelain in the first place?  is it the strength (or folly) of human nature to persist in the face of the inevitable?

the power of liliana porter’s work lies in ambiguity.  visual puns.  the open-endedness of the narratives.

her work is as profound as it is complicated.  and this work — at its ambitious scale and epic scope — is more complex and significant than any of her sculptural works to date.    porter has worked with recurring motifs in the art she’s been making since the 1960′s.   many of those themes are incorporated into this single monumental work.

there are 13 clocks — broken, unwound or without a source of power.  archaic.  perhaps it’s not the guy wielding the ax, but time that’s the wrecker…

viewed in a mirror a clock runs backwards…  the possibility of reversing time is another of porter’s themes.

as are mirrors…

which offer us views we’d other wise find physically impossible.   they also act as metaphors for self-reflection.  or narcissism.  significantly, they are a means of forcing a viewer to see themselves within an art work.

there are several houses.

all broken.

there are the remains of cultural icons — che guevara, mao ze-dong, mickey mouse, bambi, charlie brown, a sickle, a coca cola insignia — fragments from our collective memories of the 20th century…   and the detritus of failed political or social systems?

interspersed with scattered playing cards, bingo chips, dice and mah-jong tiles, there are 11 wrecked ships in this installation.   life is a game of chance…

with serious consequences.

a tiny man sits on a mah-jong tile.    looming over him, an enormous, tumbled chair balances precariously on the edge of the platform, ready to slip and crush him.   He  gazes off, insensible to or untroubled by the constant peril…    bravery?  or denial?

one thing is certain — this is a mess.  a reminder that life constantly threatens to shatter into fragments too small to ever be repaired…   a train wreck in which forces beyond our control pile one thing on another, compounding the disaster.

this work is about the ubiquity of fear.  porter’s brilliance is in portraying cataclysm in a way that allows a viewer to look at tragedy head-on.  by projecting our horror or heartbreak or grief onto toys, we’re given the opportunity to examine our emotions without being crippled by them.

but back to our friend with the ax…     the question remains — is he causing the wreckage or is he merely set to the task of crumbling the pieces into a manageable scale?

is he the main character in his drama, or a bit player in someone else’s?

“man with axe” 2011  wooden platform and found objects, 12×12 feet is part of liliana porter’s exhibition at hosfelt gallery, new york, on view through 21 january, 2012.

a driss ouadahi painting, photographs by jay defeo…

the door of jonathan brand’s paper mustang, (one-half of) a painting by jutta haeckel, a thread work by emil lukas…

jutta haeckel and emil lukas…

a jim campbell LED and resin piece and another emil lukas piece…

photo-montages by john o’reilly, a painting on clay-coated paper by shahzia sikander, an ink and graphite work by shahzia and a pair of defeo photographs.

the fair continues through the end of the day sunday and is at 1400 north miami avenue in miami.

http://youtu.be/bxQRLFyVifk

The best paintings here are Stefan Kürten’s singular, intricate modernist interiors overgrown with plants turned savage, monstrous: the Bauhaus jungle of “Silence”, dizzying spatial patterns of brick, ironwork, greenery in “The Handsome Family”. In the 1980s, Kürten studied at Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, then the stronghold of conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their hallmarks – rigorous formality, insistence on detail yet detachment, concern for architectural subjects, nostalgia – evident in the oeuvres of star photography alumni such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth or Candida Höfer, also shape Kürten’s coolly ornamental paintings; his motifs of modernist decay, meanwhile, link him to Genzken.

here’s the entire article:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1fed1f2c-105f-11e1-8010-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1eBgQyyMH

1.  beautiful creatures

2.  primer – you’ll want to watch this one twice…

3.  das experiment (the experiment) – i wrote about this film here – http://toddhosfelt.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/das-experiment-is-the-scariest-movie-i-have-ever-seen/.       watch the 2001, german production, not the american re-make.

4.  the swimming pool

5.  conversations with other women

6.  like water for chocolate

7.  the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover

8.  the last emperor

9.  the emperor and the assassin

10.  paper moon

11.  downtown abbey  – the pbs mini-series

13.  diner

14.  the usual suspects

15.  44 inch chest

18.  amadeus

23.  moulin rouge

24.  the widow of st. pierre

26.  slingblade

27.  winter’s bone

28.  momento

29.  following

30.  burnt money

31.  love is the devil

32.  trainspotting

49.  the white ribbon

jim campbell’s large-scale piece, “exploded views,” commissioned by sfmoma, is up in their atrium.    2,800 flickering LEDs, suspended from the ceiling create low resolution imagery of dancers from alonzo king’s lines ballet.

here’s a video sfmoma made about the piece:

http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/455

jim’s work explores the line between representation and abstraction — examining the human ability to interpret information and fill in the gaps necessary to create a complete idea.   his work makes the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation as a metaphor for the human talent for poetic understanding or “knowledge” as opposed to the mathematics of “data.”

the piece will be up through the fall of 2012.   the imagery programmed into the piece will change every two months.

the space was designed by anne fougeron.    for those of you who’ve not visited the gallery, the first is an image of the front door with a view of alfredo jaar’s project “it is difficult” from 2001.  the back-lit glass entry at night…

a show of john o’reilly’s photo montages, shortly after we opened the space in february of 1998.

a cycle of paintings by julie chang we exhibited in 2008, based on the tradition of buddhist “ox-herding pictures” describing the path to enlightenment:

with an installation of her acrylic “chandelier” sculptures:

marco maggi has done 5 solo shows in our clementina space.    these images are from “Profiles:  the Ted Turner Catalog (from CNN to DNA)” in 2006.

marco is the only artist who gets free reign laying out his shows.    he uses the architecture even better than i do.

stefan kürten has also had 5 shows with us.    this is his installation “darker with the day” from 2001.

brad brown.  nothing on the walls.   the gallery is filled with simple wooden tables.

on them, nearly a thousand 6×6 inch works on paper…

the second of five exhibitions of  russell crotty’s work – this one in the spring of 2002.   his globes are ink and watercolor on paper that’s been mounted on an acrylic sphere.   they float somewhere between drawing and sculpture.

we’ve done 6 shows with michael light.   here, his “100 suns” exhibition of photographs of nuclear test explosions (2006):

100 photos!   the narrative began in black and white, then moved into full-on color.

a 2007 show of mike’s large-scaled, hand-made books of aerial photography.     the books are displayed on re-purposed, vintage movie camera tripods.

jim campbell’s “home movies” installation (now in the collection of the berkeley art museum) in 2007.

from the edge:

being installed:

200 map-based drawings by lordy rodriguez:

sometimes i’m a bit too hands-on…

a link to a clever video of the installation that david put together:  http://toddhosfelt.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/installing-201-drawings/

thematic group shows are a big part of the program.   this one about pattern used conceptually.   in this shot,  works by anoka faruqee, dorothy napangardi and julie chang:

viewed between two julie chang “scrolls” painted on paper, paintings by jeremy stenger and driss ouadahi:

and a show about abstract painting that dianne curated in 2000 (works by susie rosmarin, clay ketter and little paintings by jordan tinker.

juxtaposing greg rose’s stylized landscape paintings with ming dynasty scholars’ stones (2002).

september/october 2009, a group show of narrative works on paper:

works by shahzia sikander and henry darger.

our final show in this space — jay defeo.

i love the way this gallery design allows me to create views between rooms, revealing relationships between works.

we’ll be announcing the location and details of our next space in the next few weeks.   a new chapter…