ADRIAN VILLAR ROJAS – TODAY WE REBOOT THE PLANET

Posted on 2013-10-07

Working with a team collaborating builders, sculptors and engineers, Villar Rojas tests the limits of clay to create an apparently fossilised world of ruins and ancient monuments that play with the concept of time, history, modernity and the future. Overarching connections between his projects create a larger narrative, with themes and forms reappearing and reconfiguring themselves over time. As with My Dead Family, which saw him create a 28-metre long sculpture of a whale stranded in a forest for the Bienniale at the End of The World, each installation can seem as if is the last chapter of an unknown mythical saga.

For his first exhibition in the UK, Villar Rojas re-casts this potent mix of myth and imagination responding to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a former ammunition store (The Magazine) built in 1805. Taking inspiration from the brick-vaulted Powder Rooms that sit at the centre of the building, the artist will re-imagine the architecture and original purpose of the new Gallery at the very moment it is revealed to the world for the first time. Drawing on the artist’s self-declared fascination with topics as diverse as science fiction, comic books, popular music and quantum mechanics, his often fantastical sculptures appear as relics from an invented antiquity or an imagined future.

A key element to his installation at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is the implicit presence of another parallel site of production, a traditional brickworks in Rosario, Argentina which – alongside its daily production of bricks – functions as a laboratory of artistic experimentation for Villar Rojas. The farm produces handmade bricks, using the ancient method of mixing the raw materials in the ground using animal power before hand firing them in glowing pyramidal towers. The immediacy and rawness of this production process, which drew Villar Rojas to the brickworks as well as aspects of the work there, will appear as ‘ghosts’ in the exhibition. This return to an old and traditional practice – similar to that of returning to clay as material and sculpture as a form – is the artist’s path for inventing a symbolic world that speaks to our imagination as much as it does to the politics of a global economy.

Exhibition runs through to November 10th, 2013

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 3XA

www.serpentinegallery.org

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LIU YE

Posted on 2013-10-07

In contrast to his contemporaries, his atmospheric paintings are based mainly on his knowledge of the tradition of European painting from Romanticism through Biedermeier to Modernism. Therefore Liu Ye’s visual cosmos is filled with protagonists of European cultural history: Hans-Christian Andersen, Piet Mondrian, Balthus, and again and again Miffy, a legendary figure from children’s books, conceived by Dutchman Dick Bruna in 1955.

His paintings form a unique synthesis of Chinese culture and European painting, weaving together fairytales, erotic fantasies, and an admiration of the purity of Bauhaus and De Stijl. But at the same time his paintings and their time-consuming process of creation remain always deeply connected to the notions of contemplation typical of Chinese painting. Abstract and figurative elements no longer seem like contradictory poles. Fairytale-like and seemingly idyllic depictions encounter motifs that only appear to be naïve. In some of his most recent paintings, for example, we see crayons and colouring sheets for children. This results in an ingenious play between a naïve subject and the subtly executed painting. And the two paintings in the exhibition that are devoted to the history of the Bauhaus style – a first for Liu Ye – oscillate between a monochrome plane and a three-dimensional object.His paintings derive their power and meaning from the tension of alleged opposites, which are brought into harmony. In this way, Liu Ye points to the Asian roots of his thinking as an artist.

Opposite – Self portrait, 2013

Exhibition runs through to November 2nd, 2013

Johnen Galerie
Marienstrasse 10
10117 Berlin
Germany

www.johnengalerie.de

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BERNARDI ROIG – PRACTICES TO SMELL THE LIGHT

Posted on 2013-10-07

The tenor of the exhibition is set by a life-size figure, blocked in with his hands tied behind his back, trying, like a symbol of a singular purpose, to lick a light bulb and to energize the empty space around the spectator’s body. Another smaller figure, in a desperate attempt to smell the light, is crushed by a cascade of fluorescent light. There no longer is a place for the image to adapt to the eye, everything rushes towards an internal abyss.

Since the end of the 80’s, Bernardí Roig has been unfolding the disturbing experience of obsession. On occasion, his works have a reflective quality, trapping and deforming our image or placing us on the other side of a theatrical scene waiting for its characters. The scene is always difficult, frozen or pierced by an artificial light.

All the work developed by Bernardí Roig over these years has been produced in the shadow of two questions that are essential to him: how to deal with inherited iconographic repertoires and how to continue to create a persistent image, an image that hurls us towards a psychic precipice, in a world overflowing with images. His work, greatly influenced by literature and cinema, follows a path marked by the narrative and a theatrical approach to space.

The exhibition aims to formulate a reflection on the nature of collective perceptions in an era strongly marked by the domination of the media and the virtual world, which, with the overload of hyper-codified messages, surpasses the individual’s threshold of endurance. The endless flow of media signals has established the supremacy of language over the authenticity of experience and, with an excess of information, has hidden that which by its very nature cannot be spoken: the primary drive that inhabits the very basis of awareness. If reason is the expression of language, then pantomime is the expression of the body.

Exhibition runs through to October 12th, 2013

Galerie Stefan Röpke
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany

www.galerie-roepke.de

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