Category Archives: Galerie Ruyter 2003 – 2006

David Benjamin Sherry >< but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said >< May – July 2006

David Benjamin Sherry

“but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said”
May 11 – July 15, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of photographic works by David Benjamin Sherry from May 11 until July 15.

David Benjamin Sherry’s romantic explorations are realized primarily in photographic form, and have a strong connection to visual imagery surrounding music.

The titles of his works such as “Blue eyes and I were fire” or “A kiss on the wind and we’ll make the land” are often evolved from song lyrics, much in the same way that his images are often inspired from record covers, films and poetry. In fact, the work “My faith in love is still devout” is a re-photograph of the New Order album “Power, Corruption and Lies,” which itself is a re-presentation of a 19th century still life by Henri Fantin-Latour.

His work often employs a range of motifs and techniques that are shared by artists working in other media. Taking cues from the work of artists such as painter, Paul P. and filmaker Kenneth Anger. Inspired by writers such as Oscar Wilde and the musical lyrics of Morrissey. He uses various methods such as freezing his lens to form condensation over the image being photographed. This creates a haze to the final image thus dramatizing the emotional pull of past events and other eras. David Benjamin Sherry’s work tells of small romances with his subjects isolated into atmospheric and suggestive moments.

The dominating subjects of David Benjamin Sherry’s works are beautiful young men, often blended into a garden-like scenery and he uses a variety of iconic and erotic references viewed through soft focus. He creates a fantasy world for the viewer to float in. The surreal colors and unusual printing techniques are all done in the darkroom. Going against digital means for printing and photographing, the artist lends to his nostalgic nature for the formation of his pictures, simply using film and straight color printing techniques. In this work we are catching a glimpse of a just awakening sexuality in a tension between innocence and obvious eroticism.

David Benjamin Sherry was born in Stony Brook, New York in 1981 and lives and works in New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is receiving his MFA from the Yale School of Art.

David Benjamin Sherry >< but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said >< Photo Gallery

Katherine Bernhardt >< Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 pm >< March – April 2006

Katherine Bernhardt

“Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM”
March 23 – May 6, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM” an exhibition by American artist Katherine Bernhardt. The exhibition is on from March 23 until May 6.

The exhibition shows entirely new paintings, produced during Katherine Bernhardt’s stay at the gallery’s Project Space in Vienna last year. Most of the images show nudes, whose pale, slightly distorted bodies stand against the dark background. Through her daub and drip way of painting and the partly slipped, partly too tight image-section results an aggressive esthetics, which captivates the observer.

Katherine Bernhardt’s style is mostly described as neo-primitivism or Pop-Expressionism and compared to Kirchner, Picasso and Basquiat. Wild brushstrokes and dripping, vivid colors are used to depict images of men or women set against dark backgrounds. The subjects of her paintings one has seen perhaps too many times before: fashion models, consumer goods, and pop stars. Her approach to it is petulant and skeptical, but nevertheless with a lot of enthusiasm and playfulness.

Katherine Bernhardt was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1975 and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris (France), Kineko Ivec Gallery, Toronto (Canada), Galeria Comercial, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Canada Gallery, New York, (NY). She has been included in group shows at Modern Culture, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Hales Gallery, London, (England).

Herwig Weiser >< BlackBox Arco, Arco – Arte Contemporaneo en España, Madrid >< Photo Gallery

The Image is Gone >< January – March 2006

The Image is Gone                                             

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.03.2006

Marc Bijl, Banks Violette, Paul P., Michael Huey
January 19 –  March 18, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the group exhibition “The Image is Gone“ with Marc Bijl, Banks Violette, Paul P. and Micheal Huey. The exhibition is on from January 19 until March 18.

Marc Bijl, born 1970, Leerdam NL, takes in his work a good look at social issues and the symboles and norms involved. This results in acts or installations which undermine or emphasize our perception of the world. Thus he entitles his Lara Croft sculpture pured over with bitumen “La rivoluzione siamo noi“, or decorates spontaneous a Berlin garbage truck with the Dutch lion. Last year his works were shown at the Superstars Show at the Kunstforum Wien, in the exhibition ’Populism’ at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and others. He is represented by the young gallery ’The Breeder“ in Athens, which showed his solo exhibition ‚’Chesed/ Dien’ 2004. ’The Breeder’ gallery has supported us in every way for this project.

Banks Violette, born 1973, Ithaca, New York, USA, lives and works in New York. After a well noticed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of the American Arts he became a Superstar of the young American art scene. He creates sculptures,graphite drawings and partly huge oil paintings inspired often by bands and record sleeves. 2006 he is going to participate in the most important projects in Europe such as “Die Jugend von heute“ at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (curated by Matthias Ulrich), “DARK“ at the Museum Boljmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, (curated by Jan Grosfeld) and “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body“ at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Paul P., born 1977, Toronto, Can., is painting primarily portraits of young males and now also increasingly atmospheric landscapes by use of traditional techniques like Kreuzschraffur, pastel, oil and watercolour. While creating his paintings of unknown persons he rejects on the one hand the traditional process of producing art, on the other hand he is completely absorbed by it. His models are unknown to him and thus he is deceiving the intimacy usually linked to portraying.

Michael Huey, born Traverse City, Michigan, USA, living in Vienna since 1989. Michael Huey’s artistic method  has developed from painting, genealogical studies, art historical enquiries and collecting photographs. Since 1996 he is concentrating on historical photography and it’s realization in his work. The shining surface of the Diasec – technique reminds Michael Huey of the nineteenth century – the era of his initial specification – like for example daguerreotypes or the wet collodium – process.

Slater Bradley >< Intermission >< November – December 2005

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Slater Bradley                                   

“Intermission”
4 November – 17 December 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Slater Bradley’s “Intermission,” the artist’s most recent attempt to capture the ghost of Michael Jackson in the video medium.

“Intermission”, a perfect pastiche of the silent film form with direct references to F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” is one of Slater Bradley’s most recent and well-developed Doppleganger works. In this work Benjamin Brock, a friend who looks very much like the artist, becomes a Micheal Jackson figure walking through an empty winter landscape.

The voice-over of “Intermission,” recorded by the artist at the Museum of Natural History in New York, is a father’s conversation with his little boys — among the topics discussed is the behavior of vultures. The intertitles, which foreground the piece’s allegiance to silent film, are the lyrics of a Michael Jackson song called “My Childhood.” The barren trees and the icy landscape into which the Brock/Doppelganger/Jackson figure is placed mirror the cultural landscape that is so quick to create mythic figures and to immediately destroy them.

For the past five years, Slater Bradley has enlisted the help of Benjamin Brock to create a body of imposter works. In Slater Bradley’s work, Brock has been Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and even Slater Bradley in a complex autobiographical fiction. Slater Bradley probes the elasticity of identity and its relationship to mediated images of powerfully iconic public figures. Occupying the space between lived life and learned life, between the real and the fictive, the Doppelganger Project measures the distance from experience to its representation. What becomes of us? And how do we become us?

Slater Bradley’s first Michael Jackson reflection, “Recorded Yesterday” is concurrently being shown in the “Superstars” exhibition organized by the Kunsthalle Wien.

Slater Bradley has had one-person shows in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Geneva, San Francisco, and Basel. He was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a solo show featuring his Doppelganger project, which included “Recorded Yesterday.” He has participated in numerous museum and gallery group exhibitions in such venues as the Palais de Tokyo, the Kunsthalle Fridericianium, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, the Reina Sofia. He has recently made one-person exhibitions at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In the next year he will have solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris and London.

Slater Bradley was born in 1975 in San Francisco and currently lives and works in New York.

Herwig Weiser >< Death Before Disko >< September – October 2005

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Herwig Weiser                                            

“Death Before Disko”
8 September –  29 October 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Death Before Disko” an exhibition by Austrian artist Herwig Weiser. The show will open on 8 September and will continue through 29 October.

Herwig Weiser’s work crosses many boundaries of art-making. His art supplies are magnetic systems, low-tech electronic equipment, and chemical composites. His suppliers are innovative recyclers, university research departments, machinists, and chemical companies. His works are intense points of focus, the result of thousands of phone calls, hours of research and development, and trial and error.

The exhibition features a prototype of a machine being developed for a solo installation in a shipping container for Art Basel Miami Beach this December.

The machine is a sort of liquid disco ball, a sound-sculpture that looks like it was designed by Nikola Tesla for a high end electronics company. Similar to Weiser’s “zII” the work looks like it could fit right in with your entertainment system. The piece consists of a grey plexiglass tube, speakers, LED lights, a computer system, a motor, an array of magnets, and magnetic fluid, which is activated by the movement of the motor, the pressure of the sound system, and the programming of the lights.

A component element of most of Herwig Weiser’s work, is that of collaboration. In this case, electronics technician, Albert Bleckmann; programmer, Patrick Homolka, who has designed a program to process live feeds of sounds of outer space, sampled from sources on the internet. This program also controls the LED lights. A large number of people helped develop all of the individual parts of this compact work. The title “Death Before Disko” is in memory of Christian Morgenstern, who released a record with the same title.

Herwig Weiser (b. 1969 Innsbruck) studied architecture at TU-Innsbruck, fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Media Art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. He lives and works in Cologne and Seoul.

Irina Georgieva >< Walking on Broken Glass >< July 2005

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Irina Georgieva                                            

“Walking on Broken Glass”
29 June –  30 July 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter presents ‘Walking on Broken Glass’, the debut solo exhibition of Irina Georgieva from June 29 – July 30, 2005.

The exhibition consists of one large drawing installation and a few smaller works. Irina Georgieva’s sources for her diaristic constellations are reproductions of works by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Tracy Emin, Yoshitomo Nara, etc., as well as photos of her own personal history, family, friends.

Georgieva unifies her combinations with her technique of using sepia ink, a method she learned in her native Bulgaria. Referencing an outmoded style of photography, this technique makes the play between images found and invented more mysterious; this is where Georgieva begins to insert her own free associations.

“These are the days of our lives” and  “A day in the life”, consist of drawings the size of snapshot photographs, and take their logic from the measuring of time.

In the installation ‘Hold the Line,’ Georgieva’s associations and connections have more of a narrative character, a story of her life as an artist in Vienna, complete with interruptions of family and fantasy, jealousy and admiration.

The artist lives and works in Vienna.

Michael Huey >< Full Death >< May – June 2005

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Michael Huey                                            

“Full Death”
22 April –  25 June 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present „Full Death“, an exhibition of photographic works by Michael Huey, whose artistic practice is evolved from painting, genealogical studies, art historical research, and collecting photographs.

„ Artifacts are robust: on the one hand, they usually outlive us. On the other hand, they are fragile, and not just physically: they are open to manipulation and have no way of defending themselves (except, as I say, by outliving the manipulator and waiting around for the next, possibly fairer, interpreter). I have always been intensely passionate about justice (Gerechtigkeit), and I tend to want to apply it to the past, as well.“  -Michael Huey

Michael Huey re-photographs historical documents and, in particular, photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century. In looking at his own family, he identifies the 1860s and 70’s as the time period where the tangible and intangible become irresolvable. It is also one of many points in Huey’s work where nostalgia, fetish, and death become interchangeable stylistic flourishes. The identities of relatives and strangers become confused with the identities imposed by the decorative, scientific and stylistic processes of the image-making of different eras.

For Michael Huey, the highly reflective surface of the currently trendy Diasec technique calls to mind daguerreotypes and the wet-collodion photographic process of the era of his primary fixation, the middle and last decades of the 19th century. With diasec, a reflection is impossible to avoid, the viewer is included in the image through the same channels of distancing. Michael Huey’s other techniques include scale, meta-narrative implications, cropping and coincidence.

Michael Huey considers his appropriation to be related to the act of photography itself – related to the act of using a camera to „take“ a picture. By recovering nearly lost artifacts of moments in time, sometimes with identifiable origins in family members or 19th century photo studios, Michael Huey’s work begins to tackle the bigger subjects of personal history, authorship, ownership, inheritance, legacy, and justice.

This is Michael Huey’s first solo exhibition. He was born in 1964 in Traverse City, Michigan and has lived and worked in Vienna since 1989.

Suburbia >< March – April 2005

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SUBURBIA

Adam McEwen / Bill Owens / Steven Shearer / Banks Violette

3 March – 23 April, 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter’s Project Space
Waaggasse 5/First Floor/Top 6, A-1040 Wien

“I am more at home in Vienna generally than I am in Upper Austria, which I prescribed for myself as a survival therapy sixteen years ago, though I have never been able to regard it as my home. This is no doubt because right from the beginning I isolated myself far too much in Nathal and not only did nothing to counter this isolation but actually promoted it, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of utter despair. After all, I have always been a townsman, therefore not without reason that once I am in Vienna, I find that I can breathe freely again. On the other hand, after a few days in Vienna I have to flee to Nathal to avoid suffocating in the loathsome Viennese air. Hence, in recent years I have made a habit of switching between Vienna and Nathal at least every other week. Every other week I flee from Nathal to Vienna and then from Vienna to Nathal, with the result that I have become a restless character who is driven back and forth between Vienna and Nathal in order to survive, whose very existence depends on this strictly imposed rhythm — coming to Nathal to recover from Vienna, and going to Vienna to recuperate from Nathal.” – Thomas Bernhard (from Wittgenstein’s Nephew)

Suburbia is defined as a space between urban and rural, yet it is also a space that tends to have none of the qualities of either, no culture as in the urban and no nature as in the rural. The suburbs of America are especially quite famous, and there is not really such a thing to be found in Austria. Yet, the concept of Suburbia is a well-understood term. In a way it has become an elemental part of the culture that America exports, as well as a description of a suspended or compromised state of being.

This show here begins with Bill Owens, who has documented a very specific moment in the evolution of the term. Bill Owens presents barbecues, garage sales, daily domestic life, prayer groups, ribbon cuttings. In a Bill Owens photograph, an alternative lifestyle, dysfunctional family or XXX is first flattened by the concept of ‘suburbia’ into a mold of the generic. Stylistically the work differs from his contemporaries because of this particular message or emphasis. In the work of Owen’s contemporaries, the formal elements of suburban life are romanticized through craft to take on a Hopper-esque aestheticism. Owen’s work, when compared to his contemporaries, seems to embrace diversity, despite a technique which renders it generic or ‘suburban.’

As a counterpoint, we present three of the best young artists getting attention at the moment, who are working through many of the issues of identification alluded to in Bill Owens’ photographs.

Adam McEwen presents a series of obituaries of celebrities who are not yet dead, and sandwich board sign sculptures. Steven Shearer presents an installation of posters on the ceiling, with a mattress for the viewer. Banks Violette’s blank sign makes sculpture out of the suburban structures in Owen’s work.

Bill Owens (USA)
Adam McEwen (UK)
Steven Shearer (CAN)
Banks Violette (USA) was featured in the most recent Whitney Biennial and will open a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in May.

Tam Ochiai >< the back part of something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you >< March – April 2005

11Ochiai

Tam Ochiai                                            

“the back part of something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you”
3 March –  16 April 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Austria of artist Tam Ochiai. This drawing installation is titled “the back part of something, or something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you.” It is a continuation of what the artist calls his “Tail” series.

Much of Ochiai’s work is deliberately child-like in language, but includes abundant references that exist for a cultural intelligentsia. Most of his subjects are women, or are at least ambiguously feminine, or ambiguously human, and most of his obsessions are of French origin.

Made in no particular style, or rather made from a compendium of a variety of styles, Tam Ochiai’s work is about style, about its construction and formal functioning, in art, literature, and in fashion: in life, and in life-style. In the work of Tam Ochiai, style is moved from the periphery to the center. Style is not used to cover or reveal something inside, rather it is an integrated and necessary part of human functioning along with language and craft, with the corporeal, the sensual, the psychological and the sexual.

In this exhibition, Ochiai has confined himself to the medium of drawing. Despite the variety and complexity of the ideas in the work, Ochiai retains a consistent ephemeral quality, the clearest marker of the artist’s own personal ‘style.’

Tam Ochiai is currently in the exhibition “Flashback” at the Kunstverein Freiburg. He will be included in the upcoming “25 Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. He shows with Team Gallery in New York, Tomio Koyama in Tokyo, Arndt & Partner in Berlin, and Francesca Kaufmann in Milan. He lives and works in New York.

Cory Arcangel >< 19 January 2005

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Cory Arcangel   

January 19, 2005 at 9.30 pm

ORF

 

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present a one-night-only performance/lecture by Cory Arcangel on January 19, 2005 at 9.30 pm. The performance will take place at our new PROJECT SPACE, an empty apartment located at Waaggasse 5/1/6, just around the corner from the gallery’s main space on Wiedner Hauptstrasse.

The performance is hosted in cooperation with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, where Cory Arcangel will be featured in the gallery’s ‘Video Cube’ series, beginning on Saturday January 22, 2005 at 11 AM, continuing through March 12.

Cory Arcangel (b. 1978) is a computer artist, performer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a founding member of BEIGE, a loose knit crew of like-minded computer programmers and enthusiasts. He spends most of his time surfing the INTERNET, fooling around on his guitar, and listening to acid house music.

Cory Arcangel’s recent shows include The 2004 Whitney Biennial, ‘Seeing Double’ at the Guggenheim, the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, ‘Welcome to my Art Show’ at Team Gallery, and ‘Super Mario Movie’ at Deitch projects. Forthcoming exhibitions include the Migros Museum in Zurich, and Vilma Gold in London. He will be featured in ‘Premieres’ a series inaugurating the Museum of Modern Art’s new Film and Media theaters.

Cory Arcangel will be giving a lecture demonstration (in English) involving several new works. Topics included will be computer hacking, how Jay-Z would sound on a Nintendo, and modern day uses of Power Point.  The focus of the show will be a musical performance of the NiPOD, an IPOD emulator that runs on a Nintendo cartridge that the artist has hacked.

The PROJECT SPACE is a new initiative of Galerie Lisa Ruyter, and will regularly host events, performances, artist residencies and exhibitions. The next event is ‘SUBURBIA’ an exhibition featuring Adam Mc Ewen, Bill Owens, Steven Shearer and Banks Violette, opening on March 3, 2005.

Pulse >< January – February 2005

09PULSE

p u l s e

/ Jon Rouston / son:DA / Herwig Weiser  
19. Jänner  –  26. Februar, 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Pulse”, featuring works by Jon Routson, son:DA and Herwig Weiser.

The artists in „Pulse“share an interest in low-tech structuralism, in finding a simple way to express ideas with untraditional methods. They tend to follow logics of binary oppositions, and as a group, this, more than anything else, connects their work to the traditional forms of art making that are usually encountered in a gallery setting. Together, the works make an interactive environment – a sort of music room.

Jon Routson (b. 1969 Washington, D.C., lives and works in Baltimore) presents “Strober,” very simply, a video of a strobe light. This is a recent remake of Routson’s first video work, which led to his well-known series of bootlegs of movies, which were shown in two exhibitions at Team Gallery in New York. Routson conceptualizes his “Strober” as video vs. film, with the strobe light being a surrogate for the blinking or flicker that creates the illusion of a moving image in film.

son:DA (Metka Golec, born 1972 in Maribor, Slovenia. Miha Horvat, born 1976 in Maribor, Slovenia. They live and work in Vienna and Maribor. ) creates a ‘constellation’ of interactive television devices. The cabling of the televisions are rewired so that they become instruments where the image interrupts the sound or the sound interrupts the image, or looked at in another way, the boundaries between the viewer the image and the sound become slightly fluid and malleable.

Herwig Weiser (b. 1969 Innsbruck, lives and works in Cologne) exhibits a version of his ‘zgodlocator,’ a low-tech machine that magnetically re-animates recycled elements of computers, and gives them a sound program. It is basically a low-tech computer made out of destroyed computers, or as the artist calls it ‘dead information.’

On January 19,  at 9:30, after the opening of „Pulse“, there will be a performance lecture by Cory Arcangel at Galerie Lisa Ruyter`s Project Space.

Paul P. >< In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom >< November – December 2004

08paulpPaul P.

„In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom“
November 10 –  December 23, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Paul P.’s exhibition “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom”, from 10 November – 23 December 2004.  This will be the first European solo show by the Canadian artist.

This exhibition consists of head-and-shoulders drawings and paintings of young men and a single atmospheric landscape. These works are modeled after pornographic print sources of late 1970’s and early 80’s vintage, and are rendered in traditional techniques of cross-hatching, watercolor and glazing. Paul P. has developed a simple and sophisticated engagement with portraiture, aesthetics, the art historical, and gay representation.

“In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom” is taken from an antiquated English language naming of the 1919 volume of Marcel Proust’s great work “In Search of Lost Time”. In the text, the adolescent narrator anguishes over a brash young gang of girls in summertime coastal France. Within his writing Proust, as the narrator, appears as a heterosexual in a world teeming with same-sex desires. By using Proust’s title, Paul P. suggests a reversion.

Taken at face value, the work of Paul P. is quite romantic in nature. In the portraits, there is nostalgia for the mythical age of sexual freedom and liberation, which was abruptly cut short by AIDS. Too young to have experienced this moment in person, Paul P. projects a complicated ambivalence towards gay representation which has often relied on – almost longed for – the quixotic pursuit of impossible fantasies.

In his processing of sexual images of unnamed people, Paul P. both embraces and rejects traditional processes of art making. He does not know his models, belying the intimacy generally implied in portraiture. Through Paul P.’s inter-textual strategies, fear, desire, paranoia and intimacy are separated from issues of sexual representation, and returned to a place of lived experience.

Paul P. was born in 1977 and currently lives and works in Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions include Daniel Reich, New York, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Angstrom Gallery, Dallas.  He has been included in group shows at David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen, both in New York, The Power Plant in Toronto and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg.

Cecily Brown >< September – October 2004

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Cecily Brown                                  

23 September –  30 October 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present paintings by Cecily Brown from the 23rd of September through the 30th of October, 2004.

Cecily Brown’s subjects have ranged from figures engaged in sex to landscapes, and many places in between. In a Cecily Brown painting, form and subject collide and explode, yet remain separately identifiable. De Kooning, Bacon, Goya, and Guston are referenced through moments of specificity; through a pictoral composition, a choice of color, scale, mark-making, even copying. This work is both classical and wildly experimental.

Given a shared interest in eroticism in the accumulations of flesh, it should be no surprise that Cecily Brown has looked at the work of Rubens. “Study after Paradise 1, 2 and 3” are studies made after a famous collaboration between Rubens and Brueghel the Older. In these works it becomes clear that at each pass, the artist is focusing her attentions on a different area of the original painting.

“Crapolette” is a big, red, meaty painting, with the scale and the colors of a late Philip Guston work. This rather violent painting looks like it could be a depiction of a pile of discarded bits of flesh.

Cecily Brown has been the subject of a number of museum exhibitions internationally, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., at MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea) in Rome, and this summer at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. She was featured in this years Whitney Biennial in New York. Brown has had a number of important and well-reviewed solo shows, with Deitch Projects and with Gagosian Gallery in New York, Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, with Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, and with Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

There is currently a major exhibition of new works by Cecily Brown at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.

Cecily Brown was born in 1969 in London and currently lives and works in New York City.

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< July – August 2004

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„The Rose Garden without Thorns“
8 July –  11 September 2004

Slater Bradley, Brice Dellsperger, Dan Fischer, Irina Georgieva, Erik Hanson, Michael Huey, Justin Lieberman, Tam Ochiai, Jon Routson, Jack Smith, Jean-Luc Verna

This show is about the richly complicated relationships that artists have with each other. It is not a show about appropriation, theft or homage, but these strategies are certainly addressed. The emphasis here is on figuration rather than abstraction in art objects. The inspiration for “The Rose Garden Without Thorns” is a drawing made by Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker whose spirit runs throughout Andy Warhol’s network of ‘superstars’. 

Slater Bradley has made many series using a Doppelgänger as a stand in for himself, and also for Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Ian Curtis.

Brice Dellsperger remakes scenes from movies using the same actor for every part in the scene. Often the actors are playing their parts in drag, confusing identifications and identities.

Dan Fisher makes very tight renderings of well known photographs of artists.

Irina Georgieva is making pieces she considers diaristic, combining images of artworks with images from her childhood in Sofia. All are distilled to a commonality of technique and then subject to her train of consciousness associations.

Erik Hanson deliberately quotes the music that defined him as the subject of all of his work.

Having recently completed a massive genealogical study of his family, Michael Huey is now re-photographing odd remnants he has come across, including receipts for death certificates, or a drawing of the stars made by a grandmother.

Justin Lieberman references artists and musicians in combinations he finds interesting. He reimagines Henry Darger landscapes populated by Jock Sturges’ adolescent girls and Paul McCarthy’s monsters.

Tam Ochiai makes work that references cinema, music, artists, and even galleries, museums and museum gift shops. He once made a sculpture of Gilbert and George’s singing sculpture.

Jon Routson has made a twenty minute version of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, edited for TV, and interspersed with commercials.

Jean-Luc Verna has starred in many of Brice Dellsperger’s films. His own work is very much about his body, he makes drawings that are made the way tattoos are made and refer to something he loves.

 

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< Photo Gallery

Benjamin Butler >< Tree Alone >< May – June 2004

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Benjamin Butler                                  

“Tree Alone”
11 May –  26 June 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter presents Benjamin Butler „Tree Alone“ from 11 May to 26 June 2004. This will be the first solo exhibition in Europe of this young American artist. The show consists of modestly scaled oil paintings of trees.

Butler started making landscape paintings when he was asked by his grandmother to make one for her. The result, his first solo exhibition, consisted of about 15 paintings of mountains, each rendered in a distinctly different style. The emotional challenge of pleasing this person, while making an object which functions within the context of contemporary painting, has become the challenge which drives his practice.

Butler’s paintings are familiar, though not just as a depiction of a famous formation such as the Matterhorn. Looked at individually, a painting may seem a naive reference toward a debased lineage of abstraction, or a painfully sincere attachment to nature, but Butler’s affection towards his subject could not be more complex or contemporary.

In some ways his practice is a campaign against the impersonal and distanced nature of the current state of painting, and a comment on the difficulty of finding a place for emotional expression and connection in contemporary art.

His sources and methods are similar to those of a Pop artist, appropriating found images and styles, mixing high and low. A Butler painting may seem to reference what one might find in a hotel room painting, or that creepy painting which will haunt forever from childhood. Butler invites a sophisticated audience to accept the pleasure that others take in visual images that we think are worthless or worse: in deeply bad taste. He helps us remember a pre-formed stage of visual awareness.

Recent solo shows include „Little Mountain“ at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Japan last year and the exhibition „Trees“ at Team Gallery, New York City in January 2004.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and most recently at Grimm/Rosenfeld in Munich and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg. Benjamin Butler was born 1975 in Kansas and lives and works in New York City.

Miles Coolidge >< Drawbridges >< March – April 2004

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Miles Coolidge

Drawbridges
March 5 – April 24, 2004

Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Miles Coolidge’s series of drawbridge photographs from March 5 to April 24, 2004. The artist will be present for an opening reception on March 25th from 19-21 hr.

Coolidge has photographed raised drawbridges throughout Southern Florida. The result is a roadway grid, raised to square with the picture plane of the photograph itself. The depth and perspective the lowered roadway would have indicated, is destroyed and replaced by the formal, self-referencing picture of the roadway surface. Coolidge has found these temporary, (existing only for a moment as recreational boats pass underneath) industrial monoliths in the heart of some of the most kitschy American suburbs. The images in this series are impenetrable with all the weight of modernist picture-making behind it, yet the viewer is aware that this is only a momentary statement, as the bridge will again lower to let those in the perspective of the viewer pass through.

Coolidge consistently maintains a conceptual methodology in all of his series. Previous work has included photographs of empty elevators, suburban garages, a town built to 1/3 actual scale (‘Safetyville’), and temporary housing for farming workers.

These are all spaces that are defined by human use. Coolidge deliberately makes quasi-photographs, from quasi-architectural spaces. The meaning of Coolidge’s pictures is shaped in between what is visible, and what is left out, between form and content.

Miles Coolidge was born in Montreal, Canada and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts and at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with Berndt and Hilla Becher.

Coolidge has shown with Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, Galerie Capitain in Cologne, ACME in Los Angeles, and at the Orange County Museum in Newport Beach, California. He has participated in many group shows internationally, including the MCA in Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; and Nikolai Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen.

 

Katherine Bernhardt >< Pleasure and Paint >< January – February 2004

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Katherine Bernhardt

“Pleasure and Paint”
January 15 – February 21, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present new paintings by Katherine Bernhardt. This is the 28-year-old painter’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Bernhardt’s paintings suggest that something new is possible in the pleasure of painterly excess. Like Polke or Kippenberger, they are bold, arrogant, risky and disruptive. Her practice is stridently irreverent. Bernhardt takes advantage of the material hybridity of contemporary painting; she is a master of economy and aggression.

Her most recent work – in which she has narrowed down her choice of materials to acrylic, spray paint, and canvas cutouts – playfully and consciously references the artists she has been looking at most recently: Donald Baechler most obviously, in the canvas cutouts and formal arrangements, but also painters such as Laura Owens and Chris Ofili.

To get an idea of Bernhardt’s position, simply look at her personal iconography, which includes references to the flashy fashion of American rap, pop and sports stars – Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana – all pulled from promotional materials, ads and even magazine articles on the stars themselves.

Bernhardt places herself in a similar dynamic in relation to the fashions of painting. Though a background may, at a glance, seem like a badly executed reference to Pollock, the masterful depth she ultimately achieves is all show business: an unrestrained, performative and completely natural expression.

Justine Kurland >< Welcome Home >< November – December 2003

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Justine Kurland

“Welcome Home”
November 6, 2003 – January 3, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Justine Kurland’s first solo exhibition in Vienna.

The exhibition features black and white, and color photographs Kurland took in isolated rural communities across America, including communes located in Arizona, Montana, Utah, California, Oregon, New Mexico and Florida. Members of these alternative societies often greet each other by saying “Welcome Home.”

Justine Kurland is attracted to the idealism of individuals who build small, independent communities away from larger urban centers, and live according to an ethic of stoicism and economy. In her photographic study, Kurland explores fundamental dichotomies–man vs. nature, the individual vs. community, private vs. public. She focuses on individuals as well as large groups, combining a subjective view with one that addresses a larger social whole. “Communion,” a color self-portrait achieves this aim. Works such as “Katy’s Farm” or “Black Bear Ranch study social positioning.

According to Kurland:

“The naked figures in the color photographs have willingly undressed. They represent perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens. In some cases the frame is stripped, an unembellished document. In other cases the subjects perform quasi-biblical narratives or ritual acts as they elaborate fantasies of communal living and communion with nature. And sometimes it is the natural landscape that dominates, swelling to engulf the figures who inhabit it. The photographs are shared acts of faith, romantic gestures impelling us towards a transcendental experience of being human in the world.”

Justine Kurland was born in New York State in 1969 and lives and works in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts and an Masters of Fine Art from Yale University, where she studied with Gregory Crewsden and Philip Lorca di Corcia. Kurland has shown internationally, with Gorney, Bravin and Lee in New York, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels and Emily Tsingou Gallery in London. She recently participated in “The first ICP triennial of Photography and Video” at New York’s International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured in major art and photography magazines as well as such publications as Vogue, Elle and The New York Times.

Brice Dellsperger >< Body Double 16 and 17 >< September-October 2003

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Brice Dellsperger

September 11- October 25, 2003
Opens September 11, 19.00 – 21.00

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“Body Double 16” 2003, starring Jean-Luc Verna. Duration: 6.24 minutes
“Body Double 17” 2001, starring Gwen Roch and Morgane Rousseau. Duration: 16.27 minutes

Galerie Lisa Ruyter will open its doors to the public for the first time by presenting a show of video works by Brice Dellsperger from the 11th of September through the 25th of October, 2003.

Two pieces will be screened one after the other for the duration of the exhibition. “Body Double 17” from 2001, is a remake of the roadhouse scene from David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” In “Body Double 17” all of the roles are played by sisters, who are not twins but who do in fact look very much alike. “Body Double 16” from this year, puts a lesser known scene of Stanley Kubrick’s very famous 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange” with the very famous naked wrestling scene from Ken Russell’s not-as-famous 1969 film “Women in Love” (Both films, by the way, were banned in England for their content.)

Two of Dellsperger’s primary themes are that of the Body and that of the Double.

To understand Brice Dellsperger’s project a little better, begin by looking at the artist’s use of the name “Body Double” to title all of his films. The name, borrowed from the 1984 feature by Brian De Palma, is also a film production term. A ‘body double’ is a person who stands in for an actor to perform certain types of scenes or to facilitate special effects. Dellsperger points out that it is an individual who takes the place of a famous person, in fact, he even describes himself as a body double for a director.

Dellsperger thinks of his project as an attempt to break down the hierarchical structures of mainstream filmmaking and its attendant star machinery. His productions are shot on digital video, and edited on his home computer. These remakes usually star only one or two people who play every character on screen, lip-synching with the original soundtrack. The collaging of separate pieces of footage of the same person creates slippages that are not unlike Andy Warhol’s mis-registrations. These are often ghost-like and expressive. Brice is at heart a pop artist and his project is intrinsically linked to confusions and appropriations of popular style, consumable culture and celebrity.

The star of “Body Double 16” is artist Jean-Luc Verna, who has a very large, very tattooed and pierced body. He is also the star of Dellsperger’s full-length masterwork “Body Double X,” a remake of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1975 melodrama “The Important Thing Is To Love.” When he stars in Dellsperger’s work, he plays every character on screen, styled and dressed as a transvestite. This creates a replacement for a body, outlined by gender. The viewer is forced to use alternative skills in the act of identification, of naming, just to hold onto the narrative structure of the piece.

Dellsperger’s pieces are numbered upon conception of the piece rather than on completion. The pieces often have a personal agenda at their conception, but the many acts of doubling in their execution often results in negating this along with the agendas of the original film. What are left are the slippages, the reversals and the outlined ideas, through which connections are made – physical, emotional and cultural. These become more important than any notion of an “original,” and therefore superior– text, body, work or idea.

The gallery is owned and operated by painter Lisa Ruyter. We are happy to introduce the director of the gallery, Andreas Fischbacher, who has been an invaluable help from the very beginning of the project. Galerie Lisa Ruyter will open at the same time as a solo show of new works by Ms. Ruyter at Georg Kargl, just around the corner on Schleifmühlgasse.

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