« … Souvent, il séjournait dans cet espace pour trouver le calme et l’inspiration. Dans un carnet, il prenait des notes accompagnées de croquis et de plans pour de futurs projets. Les murs blancs de la maison, la vue sur le jardin et les arbres étaient propices à la méditation et parfois à la lecture. Il pensait qu’un moine jardinier aurait pu se retrouver dans la même situation que lui, à l’écart du monde, du vacarme et des brutales réalités de la vie. Ces murs laiteux ressemblaient à ceux d’une chapelle. Par un jour de printemps, il décida de peindre de petites saynètes et des paysages directement sur ces parois immaculées. … »
Constellations
By Dean Kissick
During the Nineties, when Elise was at school in the English countryside, there was a constant flow of UFO sightings and crop circles, in which complicated but harmonious patterns of spiralling orbs would appear cut into wheat fields overnight, and reports of ethereal abductions on lonely country roads. These abductions were usually in the United States, and again happened overnight. Aliens would come down and snatch American men and sodomize them, for their experiments. The Nineties were fantastic, she thought. Now that old sense of excitement about and openness to the cosmos was gone. There were no more lights in the sky, no more encounters of any kind. No more geometry appeared on the farms. Steel monoliths sometimes arrived on Romanian hillsides and deserts. But no one thought about space anymore. What was space good for now?
Fabian Marti sees his artistic work as a chance to explore ideas about the place of the artist and the individual in society and in the field of production. This type of questioning, which brings him closer to conceptual art, allows Marti to view his practice as a way of challenging the divides between traditional techniques, conventional modes of creation, customary terms of exchange right through to the artist’s status. He goes back to more archaic technical choices, and the handmade in particular, reappropriating craft skills such as ceramics. As for the shift in the artist’s function, Marti is involved and participates in the creation of exhibition spaces, artists’ studios and publishing houses. The Zurich space Hacienda, TwoHotel, Marti Collection, Marti Ceramics and FM Studio Chairs are simultaneously both art objects and small “companies”, places or structures that facilitate production projects, both for Fabian Marti himself and for invited artists. (more…)
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s primary medium might be painting, but it often goes beyond two-dimensional space to extend to its surroundings, becoming decor or pieces of furniture. This expansion of the pictorial space is seen both in the choice of subjects and in the enlarged and repeated stylized motifs. His large format paintings, often installed like decorative tapestries, wall panels or suspended ceilings, stages the exhibition space in which viewers are physically immersed. This highly spatial and physical approach to painting expresses Lutz-Kinoy’s special relationship with the body and gesture, and explains the extension of his work into dance and performance. For his recent exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, a vast system of murals, inspired by François Boucher’s painted panels that once decorated a boudoir and are now displayed at the Frick Collection in New York, entirely covered the walls of this white cube. This fascination with the refined, sophisticated and carnal painting of the 18th century brought out its erotic and transgressive nature against a backdrop of sensual and sexual liberation.
For his exhibition at the CEC, Victor Man invites Navid Nuur not so much to create a common work but rather to establish a dialog and to underline a certain kinship between their artistic practices: their use of traditional and handcrafted techniques – watercolour for the one and ceramics for the other -, their common references to materials that bear strong symbolic and poetic meaning – minerals, water, fire -, their personal and artistic background, but also their ties to childhood, to memory and perhaps to nostalgia. A shared way of revisiting the significant initiatory stages that rendered this duo possible and natural, offering an installation alternating the watercolours of Victor Man and the ceramics of Navid Nuur. (more…)
Presentation of the edition offered to the 2017 members of the Centre d’édition contemporaine association
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The CEC at week-end
Genève Art Contemporain
Itinerant presentation of the facsimile of the publication Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques
Signing session in the presence of Thomas Hirschhorn
From 6 PM Presentation of Jean-Michel Wicker’s edition, #picturebook1, artist’s book, offset, 27 × 28.5 cm, 396 pages, including 360 pages in colour and 36 pages in black on LuxoArt Silk 150 g/m2 paper, glossy colour cover, LuxoArt Silk 350 g/m2, 10 inserts, colours, 26.5 × 28 cm, LuxoArt Silk 130 g/m2, publication of an arbre de vie produced by Jean-Michel Wicker in collaboration with Marlie Mul, a text by Harry Burke, and a recipe for Alsatian plum pie by Charlotte Wicker (French), English, an edition of 500. Graphic design: Maximage Société Suisse, London. Printing: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg, Altenburg. Edition of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, June 2017.
For this exhibition, Jakob Kolding will be proposing a scenography reminiscent of 19th century dioramas or the photomontages of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, a small theatre that will fill all our exhibition spaces and be visible from outside, both as an installation and a public artwork. Several scaled up or down “standing” silhouettes will be grouped on this stage set, creating an interplay of juxtapositions and gaps. Each figure suggests a historical or anonymous person, illustrative of Jakob Kolding’s extended vocabulary of literary, philosophical, artistic or personal references, and encouraging a sociological, cultural and aesthetic interrogation of the use of space. While in his earlier works this critical research was more closely linked to the phenomena of the transformation of urban space and gentrification, Kolding has more recently approached different concepts of space in a broader, more open and ambivalent way, as areas where questions of identity are simultaneously complex, shifting and multiple. (more…)
Jean-Michel Wicker’s exhibition BBiblioteca ffanafffantastica brings together several works involving the medium of print for which the artist has worked out a number of iterations, including fanzines, scrapbooks, antibooks, book-objects, and flyers. The display will also feature supports, both literal and figurative, that have something to do with books, and other elements that extend the gesture of consultation, reading and writing, even the function of storage. This includes bookcases, display stands, showcases, tables and chairs. Other objects or useful ordinary materials like electric wires, clothing, key rings, neon lights, lamps and tarps will be transformed, cobbled together, and combined with a wide range of supports in their usual and unsurprising form or reappropriated and put to other uses. Those supports include paper, cardboard, plastic, papier-mâché, and shells. (more…)
Valentin Carron explores the principle of reality through acts of appropriation, replicating almost identically elements from popular culture, the practice of monument-making, daily life and his immediate environment. The shift in meaning is probably due more to the choice of referents than to their mere displacement in the field of art. Carron conceals the function, blunts the decorative aspect and revisits the craftsmanship-like manufacturing of these objects that oscillate between irony, affection and fascination and seem to densify as entering in contact with art, endorsing themselves with a common acknowledgement and with the nostalgia of a forgotten story. (more…)
Mathis Gasser draws upon and combines thousands of images that he patiently gathered and arranged in a personal archive. Their references come from the arts, architecture, cinema, comics, science fiction, magazines or from current events. In a very elaborated practice of collage, thousands of signs collide and are multiplied in an explosive combination, in a mirror or imbricating effect, diffracted by the immateriality of the digital world and by the invasion of information. The impact that Gasser seeks for through this body of reappropriated, reassociated images that are frequently reworked through drawing and painting, and caught in a sustained and invasive turnover. They oscillate between a nihilistic vision and an interrogation of the limits of a world undermined by temptations of archaism and the resurgence of primal fears, sectarian deliriums, theories of conspiracy and hyper technological and futuristic extravaganzas and other prophecies. (more…)
Conference I want to talk again about the birds That are deaf from fireworks. In collaboration with the HEAD-Genève Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 18pm.
For his exhibition at the CEC, David Maljkovic will create, in collaboration with the German designer Konstantin Grcic, a series of works called Negatives. The “negatives” began with Maljkovic’s Temporary Projections in 2011. For this project, the artist created a fictional studio as a projection and one of the elements in the studio was a ‘fake’ working table. In collaboration with Grcic, the table is now an actual object, and what was once a secondary element becomes a model and the focus of the work. The “negatives”, then, are tables designed by Grcic that Maljkovic transforms by using as a work surface. As the artist cuts into paper with a blade, he leaves slashes and marks on the soft surface of the table top. The result is a group of intersecting lines and marks that combine to make a geometric abstraction. Red ink is then applied to this surface, and paper applied, in a process that resembles printmaking, leaving the table top marks filled with a vibrant red. The ‘negative’ is this structure that provided a space for the edition-making process. (more…)
Exhibition of an installation of large pencil drawings on paper scroll and mobile wire sculptures, and the edition of an artist’s book entitled RREPTILES produced and edited by the CEC.
Raphaël Julliard is a polygraphic artist. Whether it be drawing, painting, installation work, video or performance, his work, rather than departing from a predefined idea or concept, stems from an initial impulsion that is as free and autonomous as possible, in order to arrive at the configuration induced by that same idea and its process of realisation. His work sometimes also questions the works of other artists, may them be central figures or lesser known. However, he seems to be inspired by everyday banal little things, whose existence is, in theory, considered to be insignificant. Like so, he had proceeded to the making of a classical ham-butter sandwich, from the planting of the seeds to the devouring of the sandwich, including the slaughtering of the pig and the churning of the butter (Mon Sandwich, HD video, 2010). (more…)
The artist as collector, Oriol Vilanova is a collector of postcards, this touristy and obsolete medium of communication that contains within itself traces of individual and collective memory. Images d’Epinal, pictures of monuments, of iconic and historical places, printed on a simple card, thus offering an idealised vision of the world, filled with nostalgia, and unchanging subjects, yet they testify of a time hopelessly lost. Oriol Vilanova often works with notions of individual and collective memory, of lost time, of the immortality of the iconic and heroic figure, of monuments and stereotypes re-enacting through writing, performance or installation an extensive visual documentation—films, publications, printed matter, postcards—and thus creating a collision and a temporal coming and going between past, present and future. (more…)
An installation of four silkscreen prints and a sound piece, as well as a new publication, Through the Windows.
David Hominal manipulates images that often come from his personal archive, from the press or more largely images with historical or political references. He proceeds by free associations that mix flashbacks that are as much linked to current events as to intense personal experiences or to his literary and cinematographic keenness. He makes freely figurative or abstract painting. The subjects are treated in a graphical manner, in a rapid and immediate style that borrows more from photography, advertisement and the press than from painting itself. (more…)
JM: « For a little book that I just made with Galerie Yvon Lambert, The Making of Ten Posters, Ten Languages, Ten Colours, Ten Words, Ten Euros, we asked the printers if they would photograph their process. Actually, it started with a poster project that we had printed in Riga. Without us asking anything, the printers sent us photographs of the posters coming out of the press and of the printers holding them up. Upon seeing these pictures, we thought it would be perfect to make a book out of them. It’s really simple, basically to just show how the printers made the posters. But then we decided to ask the printers of the book, in Montreuil, to take pictures. We sent them a Polaroid camera and they agreed to document their whole process of making the book.» (more…)
Oscar Tuazon or the liberating potential of construction
The work of Oscar Tuazon seems to be a natural extension of childhood, as obvious as building a wooden hut or exploring the forest. Tuazon never goes into architecture, he always stays below construction rules, safeguarding the freedom of building, by instinct, for the pleasure of taking possession of a place that would become for a while his living space, his home. Building as an extension of one’s self, of one’s body and movements. The gesture and the process of assembling are part of his pieces that must be understood as forms of appropriation, of experimentation, of « real-life » experiences. In an interview published in his catalogue I can’t see, Tuazon explains: « I want to make something with its own life, its own needs, a living thing. » (more…)
Coming from the counterculture, Jeffrey Vallance (born in 1955, lives and works in Reseda/Los Angeles)is a Californian artist who revisits religious rituals, folklore and fetishist practices. While he slips in turn into the clothes of an ambassador, an anthropologist, an explorer, a writer, a professor or an investigator in paranormal phenomena, Vallance remains a compulsive collector whose stock-in-trade is nourished by personal and collective mythologies. Influenced by his forebear Emil Knudsen (1872–1956), famous Norwegian medium, he strongly believes in the part inspiration plays in his work, often perceived as a conversation with the hereafter. He thus turns his everyday life into an enchanted world, open to acts of faith, mysteries and revelations.
Aaron Flint Jamison is an artist particularly engaged in the field of edition. His artistic work comes as a wide range of reflections on the book and the object. He can be printer, typographer, editor and of course artist at the same time.
He often works by assemblage and combinations: a piece of furniture, a poster or a publication which all push the link between representation, production, functionality, presentation and distribution to the edges of its simplicity, its obviousness and its impact. Each object merges technical and aesthetic potential and conceptual accuracy. Aaron Flint Jamison is between the artist and the technician, between the craftsman and the inventor. (more…)
Like the spectator of a 3D cinema, Philippe Decrauzat’s work slides with mastery from one dimension to another. With wallpaintings and floorpaintings, shaped canvases, installations and light displays, we sway between scientific rigour and the vibrant effect of the red-blue spectacles. Whilst encompassing the legacy of abstraction as in Contructivism and Suprematism, in Op Art and its games of illusion as well as in Minimalism, his work shows a much wider interest for the origins of abstraction. (more…)
Gerard Byrne’s work is structured around documents – advertisements, daily papers, specialized magazines – dating from after the Second World War, generally from the 1960s and 1970s. After researching archives, Byrne uses these often fragmented and forgotten documents, transforms them and gives them a second life. The new images and settings that emerge from the joined processes of critical deconstruction and reconstruction, often dramatized, examine the codes of artistic or media images and those of representation. (more…)
Céramiques et porcelaines Made in West Germany, 1960-1980
With a sound piece by Seth Price
For the beginning of the month of November 2010 with the exhibition of a collection of historical ceramics from the 1960s – 1980s, we will be crossing from the field of art into the field of the object, nevertheless not fully abandoning the first one to the second. Almost a hundred pieces covering different styles and production processes will let us discover through a utilitarian and decorative object the different aesthetic variations of a prolific and stylistically free period, when common taste allowed itself to be kitsch and delirious. An era before the supremacy of design that is going to format most of our daily objects.
The exhibition, entitled « Sgrafo vs Fat Lava, Ceramics and Porcelains Made in West Germany, 1960-1980 », is accompanied by a little book published for the occasion by JRP/Ringier (Zurich) in its « Hapax » series : Sgrafo vs Fat Lava. (more…)
Susanne M. Winterling likes revisiting different figures of Art History, architects or intellectuals of the 20th century, mostly from its beginning. She admires and is inspired by the work of artists such as Berenice Abbott, Eileen Gray, Edward Krasinski, Le Corbusier or Annemarie Schwarzenbach, artistic fiction-figures from another world, a world that witnessed the birth of modernity.
As Mark Prince states in his Frieze article [n° 126, October 2009, …of Mice and Blood, (for E.K.), review of the Berlin exhibition at the gallery Lüttgenmeijer, where Susanne M. Winterling pays tribute to the Polish artist Edward Krasinski (1925-2004) with a display of objects and an environment inspired by a series of photographies taken in his atelier, preserved in its last state by the Warsaw Foksal Gallery (that Edward Krasinski cofounded in 1966)] : « Where the installation is more than the sum of its allusions, it manages to translate the irreducible particularities of another artist’s life and work into Winterling’s own language, like a dreamy adolescent who absorbs the image of a pop star into the private universe of her bedroom. » (more…)
Sans titre
15 lithographs, black, on BFK Rives 300gm2 paper, 80 x 65 cm, edition of 4 plus 1 A.P. and 1 H.C., numbered, dated and signed.
Heimo Zobernig, born in 1958 in Mauthen (Austria), lives and works in Vienna.
Erik van Lieshout is one of Holland’s most prominent artists and is best known for his installations and videos. Nevertheless, he regularly paints and above all draws. He finds his inspiration in urban culture, its sociocultural melting-pot and its violence and has no qualms about immersing himself for long explorations into non-place zones – like the outer suburbs and frontiers with no real identity – and losing himself, setting himself adrift in unrestrained, openly depressed self-scrutiny verging at times on the morbid and a state of crisis. These overplayed, uninhibited and often provocative autobiographical events are put across with humour and intensity in a continuous, inextinguishable production, punctuated by drawings and collages, which represents the free, direct expression of repressed feelings and holds up an emancipating mirror for all our introspection and past experience. (more…)
While Trisha Donnelly produces drawings, photographs, videos as well as sound pieces and performances, she doesn’t just decline techniques. Instead, the different mediums she uses are reservoirs of reflections. Even the space and time of the exhibition are seen by the artist as receptacles of references – historical, geographical, symbolical and spiritual -, of associations of ideas and reminiscences.
Rather than thinking of Trisha Donnelly’s works as mysterious and impenetrable, one should see them as attempts to escape the constraints of the production and materialisation of any object and to go beyond the spatial and temporal limitations of the exhibition. Maybe Trisha Donnelly is just not where we think she is? (more…)
Olivier Bardin’s exhibitions challenge the image of the person. Visitors are invited into an empty exhibition space, and the show really commences as the artist asks them to become the only pictures to be seen. Thus, the self-image is the real object of the exhibition. The apparatus reveals the way this image is built up from the other people’s perception; spectators, at the same time, are watching and being watched. Eventually, they constitute a community based on mutual confidence, where perception acts as a self-balancing device. (more…)
A digital clock, recently installed on the fronton of the Tokyo Palace entrance chimes the 5 billion year countdown, which separates us from the explosion of the sun and therefore the end of all life on earth. Big Crunch Clock (1999) reminds us of the inexorable end of all things.
A cake of soap made from extra fat recovered after Silvio Berlusconi’s liposuction in a Swiss plastic surgery clinic: Mani pulite (2005). The first cake of Berlusconi’s soap brand which washes whiter than white? What about the replica of the American flag which was erected on the moon (Tranquility Base, 1999) once transposed in the space of White Cube? Should we see the poetic nevertheless absurd conquest of emptiness or of contemporary art? We might as well be shooting for the moon! Yet the commemorative tablet of the 759 Guantanamo victims (The Victims of Guantanamo Bay (Memorial), 2006), prisoners, or rather hostages, parked in a space without rights, literally removed from society’s awareness. (more…)
It is a well-known fact that Finns are not afraid of anything. They often love unusual sport events: mobile throwing Olympics, wife carrying contests, mosquito killing competitions, sauna world championships. In the same spirit, every year, not far from the Polar circle, is held the Air Guitar World Championships to which Anne-Julie Raccoursier has dedicated a video work. Entitled Noodling (2006, 7’20’’), it reveals, in close-up, stylish contestants, unlikely clones of Frank Zappa or Billy Idol. They ape the gestures of these musicians at the climax of their shows. The state of exaltation of the candidates is tempered by the absence of soundtrack. An additional distance is created between them and us: in slow motion, their gestures, sometimes hidden out of shot, seem loaded with affect and could equally suggest (solitary) pleasure or pain, ecstasy or hysteria. (more…)
Markus Schinwald (born in Salzburg in 1973 ; lives and works in Vienna) is an artist whose work is protean and has no hierarchy of genres. Inspired by the worlds of fashion, dance or opera, and more broadly by that of entertainment, he moves easily from performance to film, from photography to clothes making. His heelless pumps (Low Heels, 1998) or his snakeskin sneakers (Snakers, 1998) – fetishistic objects par excellence – suggest a subtler conditioning of the body. Markus Schinwald’s universe wavers between that of Lynch, Cronenberg and Chalayan, and the clothes he designs can become instruments of constraint, transform themselves into prosthesis, and even replace the body. This dividing, or dual body, expresses hidden fantasies and brings to the surface the intricacy of our subconscious depth. (more…)
The approach of Andreas Dobler (b. 1963, Zurich) is characterized by frequent incursions into varied domains such as fanzine illustration, tie-dye, China ink on paper, hard rock or ambient music, as well as screenwriting for films and the stage. Even though painting remains his favored activity, he is still very much interested in drawing. His universe oscillates between oppressive representations, often borrowed from sci-fi imagery, psychedelic culture, the esthetics of comics, petit bourgeois kitsch or exoticism for tourists.
Launching the French and English editions – Future Perfect, 21st Century – recounting the history of the 21st century from anticipatory texts and scenarios.
40 x 500 cm
French and English versions
With the collaboration of Pedro Jiménez Morrás for the translation and Gidon Mead, Frédéric Favre, Céline Mangeat, Francesca Whitman for the rereading.
This edition is presented in the form of a 5-meter-long scroll with a timeline running through it relating the history of the 21st century. (more…)
Christophe Rey is an artist who is particularly interested in photography and its history as well as in the cinema, architecture and literature. His long journeys – preferably across Canada or the United States – have enabled him to build up an extensive photographic archive which provides him with a major source of inspiration for his writing. His texts, often concise, express deep introspection. Yet, without restricting himself to a purely autobiographical approach, the artist’s keen eye goes far beyond mere ‘impressions of a journey’ and is infused with a social, moral or political awareness drawn mostly from the very heart of cities. (more…)
In one of the last Florian Pumhösl’s movie, Untitled (Mixed Exhibits), images of a deserted city slowly unfold in a strangely timeless mood of expectation, threat and ending. The viewer is taken, by a slide show succession of dissolving images, from the outside walls of a huge fortress to a wild courtyard; in the back a motionless isolated Cyclops sits in semi-obscurity. Led back out to the open, the viewer then finds himself at ground level, in the mist of stone and concrete blocks. He gets transported abruptly from the artificially stone paved winter garden to the outside barren stone yard. Shown in a long barely moving frame, authentic outside stone blocks seem to acquire a sort of mineral density. Their radically motionless material aspect alludes back to the Cyclops, and encloses the viewer into a timeless, frozen like surreal space. (more…)
pour hoM/Me, Printemps Été 2004, Serie of 6 posters, silkscreen four colors, 120 x 176 cm, 25 issues of each, coedition Cneai (Chatou/Paris) and Centre d’édition contemporaine Center of contemporary edition (Geneva).
M/M presents a “new” collection of clothes, integral and technoid uniforms. Six models dressed up with integrated tools offering to their owners greater possibilities of communication and autonomy.
Since 1999, Mai-Thu Perret invents the story of an utopian and autonomous community, situated in New Mexico, which is strictly made up of women. New Ponderosa Year Zero already exists in different forms, those of a text-manifest, diaries, objects produced by this community : furniture, decorative elements, sculptures, clothes and party’s decor as well as events’ residues which testify the existence and the organization of the everyday life of this microsociety. This imaginary world gives the artist the possibility to invent a society, its story and its organization and to project her fantasies, her comments whether they are of a social or political nature, putting together reality and fiction just as her pleases her. This work’s structure allows Mai-Thu Perret to play different roles : artist, director, novelist. More seriously, this is also maybe a way of thinking about the reconstruction of a ethic, a search for lost idealism or a new form of commitment.
Harutyun Simonian (lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia) will present at the cec, video testimony of a performance achieved in camera and previously transformed into a private theater, a sort of black box whose interior coated with vaseline is made impassable. This action between body art and dance, put the artist in a constant imbalance, always at the limit of the fall.
Hanging 13 copies of the edition of Monica Bonvicini, Eternmale, 2002
Editions
Posters, artist’s publication,briefcase with 18 folded prints, streetview photos of the posters, several texts in french/english : an artist’ text, a selection of past projects’ texts, a text of Doreen Massey, geographer, french translations of posters’ texts, 21 x 29,7 cm, offset, black/white, on paper couché demi-mat blanc 115 gm2, briefcase couché semi mat white 300 gr, 22 x 30,5 cm, 700 copies, edition of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, 2003.
Poster, offset, black/white, on paper affiche couché blanc brillant, 135 gm2, 60 x 84 cm, 700 copies, unnumbered, undated and unfirmed, edition of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, 2003. (more…)
Presentation of Amy O’Neill’s (US/GE) and Emmanuel Piguet’s (GE) edition: dm-melkenburg (death match-melkenburg) realized within the 2001 Prize of the CEC. This edition is in reality a virtual one, consisting of a computer card with a fighting game to be played in networks or on the internet. The environment of the game reconstitutes the death row of an American prison.
Karl Holmqvist, view of the exhibition Soirée tropicale, Centre d’édition contemporaine, Genève, 2002
Karl Homlqvist’s Tropical Evening
for the presentation of his edition, CECI N’EST QU’UNE ILLUSION, offered to the members of the association of the cec and to anybody else.
Videos
WORLDSAVER (Chiang Mai 2002, 15’30’’),
GREEN PARTY (Chiang Mai 2002, 60’),
De Kongelige Elefanter (Copenhague 2002, 23’20)
Posters and publications
Aesthetic movement, REAL Art & Poetry etc.
Music
CHA-BASHIRA L?K?O MusicsystemM,
Greatest Hits ACE OF BASE,
Tigerman TEDDYBEARS STHLM,
Djurens Parad PLUXUS Villa Lecitin
and others
Poetry
SPOKEN WORD: Les Fleurs du Mal (more…)
Exhibition of the editions of Rosemarie Trockel, etchings, 1996.
Monica Bonvicini (born in 1965 in Venice, lives and works in Berlin)
First presentation of Monica Bonvicini’s new publication, on the occasion of her two shows in Switzerland : bad bed bud pad bet pub at the Kunsthaus Glarus (Summer 2000) and Bonded Eternmale at the Centre d’édition contemporaine.
Eternmale, publication with 13 reproductions of collages from the series Drawings for Eternmale (2000) and an interview of Monica Bonvicini by Beatrix Ruf, offset print on white opaque Patinata paper, 200gm2, colour, 14 pages bound together by a metal spiral, 50 x 60 cm (same size as Pirelli calendars), edition of 1000, co-edited by Kunsthaus Glarus and Centre d’édition contemporaine, 2002.
Monica Bonvicini transforms our venue into a living room with brutal design, characterized by virile aesthetics but not lacking critical humour.
Fabrice Gygi is an artist from Geneva who has become increasingly important on the contemporary art scene over the past few years in Switzerland, and more recently, abroad. His work has been shown in various group–Nonchalance, Centre PasquArt, Bienne, Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer, Kunsthaus Zurich, Dogdays are Over, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, Xn00, Espace des Arts, Chalon-sur-Saône–and solo exhibitions–at the Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel, and at the Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble. He has also produced works for public spaces on the occasion of Over the Edges in Ghent, in Fribourg at the invitation of the Kunsthalle and in Bienne during Transfer. His pieces are also regularly on view at galleries Bob von Orsouw in Zurich and Chantal Crousel in Paris. (more…)
Vidya Gastaldon (born in 1974 in Besançon, lives and works in Geneva)
Jean-Michel Wicker (born in 1970 in Mulhouse, lives and works in London)
Exhibition of a new piece and presentation of the edition Chromolux Landscape, 2000, silkscreen prints
Concert-installation for the presentation of the edition Evil Talk with organ concerto played by Julien Cupelin and bar where Jägermeister was served .
Videos of Integrated Presentation at the 8th Biennial of Moving Images, Centre pour l’image contemporaine, Saint-Gervais Geneva.
Integrated Videos, 1995-1999
Compilation of all the videos embedded by Thomas Hirschhorn at its installations between 1995 and 1999, video, VHS PAL, 15 ‘, color, sound, achieved by raising and Coraly Suard-Hirschhorn, produced by the Centre pour l’image contemporaine, Saint-Gervais Geneva in collaboration with the Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, published by bdv, Paris, 1999.
The exhibition presents an installation composed of recent works : paintings, mannequins, photographs, videos and music.
Presentation of the editions, Love It by Elena Montesinos and FUJI 4 Alexandre Bianchini ( publication edited by Véronique Bacchetta ), subtitle of the event: ” MXP Live electronics, non-stop drinks + noise “. Friday, November 28, 1997, in the evening and during the exhibition Été 97.
[ … ] Most often, Stan Douglas’s films are shown as installation in which music, text and images cross each other. Each screening mobilizes the entire space, involving the viewer in a subjective scene that immerses it in a historical and cultural universe, where are combined new computer technologies and aesthetic charged with references, often nostalgic. (Véronique Bacchetta , extract from the press release)
With objects that one hesitates to describe as artistic or utilities, Heimo Zobernig questions both the places of art (the exhibition, the catalog) and the everyday environment (a bar, a facade). (Véronique Bacchetta , extract from the press release)
Her artistic practice situates it-self in an infra-thin area where each act, minimized – sounds, line, light – is repeated endlessly. Repetition insinuates a reseach for a breaking point where the mastery yields to the humanity of the gesture and the voice. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of various editions (1992-1994) and etchings published by the Centre.
For the edition of the Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, Rosemarie Trockel incorporates elements that have traveled through his work. If, in her “paintings”, electric hob stove or knitted patterns replace in a trivial and playful way the forms of minimalism, for this serie of engravings long woolen thread blocked in the varnish organize the networks of clumsy and trembling lines – line networks that transform a grid or decorative designs repeated several times in a stylized writing. This distance towards abstract painting codes is recovered in a very pragmatic and immediate approach of the engraving where an object is reproduced literally in its texture. Again, artisanal qualities of the technique are used not for their material effects, but with objectivity and amused detachment that often characterize the works of Rosemarie Trockel. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
One of the rooms will be occupied by a huge “stand” (Les Plaintifs, les Bêtes, les Politiques). […] The other rooms will be crossed by a cardboard box wall where Thomas Hirschhorn will intervene by collages of photographs, newspaper clippings and pages from his previous catalogs. The comments he will add will enable him to act again and document his exhibitions again. This kind of presentation gives the opportunity not only to re-expose his work but to subject it to self-criticism, justifying itself again and again, breaking the classification of genres – exhibitions, videos, catalogs, texts, editions – to defer the closure of his work. The works are reused and re-discussed, like the cardboard box constituent material, revealing an artistic practice that also announces itself on the mode of recovery and recycling. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
[…] Karen Kilimnik appropriates love affairs and escapades of media personalities: stars, supermodels and princesses, from Elizabeth Taylor to Michael Jackson via Caroline of Monaco or Kate Moss. […] She transposes her fascinations and schizophrenic fantasies that range between freshness, innocence and violence, the horror of thriller, the famous tragic event, whether the Manson family crimes, the murder of John Kennedy, the occupation of Paris … Some of its “decorations” overloaded with a multitude of objects and images seem to emerge from a disaster, close to the results of an action or a happening, remembering the hazard game of Fluxus or of art in progress. But this research for identity and the fascination for dated and glamor can switch very quickly into drama when Karen Kilimnik goes to spray with bullets her hanging just finished with a machine gun. The seven black and white lithographs are collected in a luxury and flashy box, covered with fake tiger fur and lined with shiny satin. This box contains seven subjects partially copied or inspired of celebrity pages of magazines. […] These lithographs, will find their readability thanks to a mirror slipped into a pocket crafted in the same fake fur than the box. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Luc Tuymans asks throught the representation, the question of the status of painting in the current field of art. Inspired as much by the cinema and photography, he reflects the world of resurgences and fantasies, intimate and disenchanted, related to the collective memory and personal recollections. These images are often mangled by some specific treatment that gives an impression of both blur and immediat. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of the edition of twenty-five unique prints, monochrome in five colors and five shapes.
L’exposition n’aura pas lieu du 27 janvier au 26 mars 1994. Le vernissage ne sera pas le 26 janvier avant 18h. Il n’y aura pas d’édition de huit séries de 20 livres d’artiste intitulés « 1440 nombres qui servent à donner l’heure ». Fermé le dimanche, fermé le samedi avant 14h et après 17h, du lundi au vendredi avant 14h et après 18h. Édition de deux séries de 80 livres d’artiste intitulés « 8560 nombres qui ne servent pas à donner l’heure ». Du lundi au vendredi de 14h à 18h, le samedi de 14h à 17h et sur rendez-vous. (Invitation double-sided written by Claude Closky)
Each of the 80 books reproduced on 216 pages, a non-existent minute figures copied to a digital clock. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of the edition offered to the members of 1994 of the Centre, Version #1 (performance, music, decor and bar)
Exhibition and edition of a book object, 235.604-1789.
The texts or fragments of texts used by Alex Hanimann are often indifferently extracted from manuals, philosophical maxims or political slogans.
The edition Images de pierres produced by the Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine and co-published with the School of Fine Arts of Annecy, is made up of five prints drawn on the basis of lithography from five marble slabs, chosen and reworked by Giuseppe Penone. This particular experimental technique, very empirical, allows to find and print the natural veins of the marble that constitute the matrix and the pattern of this series. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Joint presentation of paintings, drawings and edition of the Centre (book and portfolio).
Sigurdur Arni Sigurdsson, Icelandic young painter, tackles figurative painting without previous speeches, nor on the “painting–painting” nor on a so-called return to representation. His subjects are extremely simplified archetypes (lakes, clouds, animals) or abstract forms (balls, circles, ovals). […] These simplified objects float on a monochrome surface, often cold and bright, suggesting a boreal atmosphere, that they penetrate, creating a confrontation between flat space and the illusionist space. The schizophrenic space and shapes in suspension arising from these pure and transparent surfaces transport us to imaginary tales and legends. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of films shot by Gerry Schum under its Fernseh und Videogalerie. In collaboration with Simon Lamunière, artist and curator, Geneva.
Gerry Schum has made several series of films as part of its project Fernseh Gallery / Television Gallery, which aimed to create links between the confined space of the art gallery and television. From 1969, Gerry Schum shot several short films with major artists affiliated to Land Art, to Arte Povera or to conceptual art. These films are not documentaries on the work of these artists, but autonomous works. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Exhibition of twenty-one unique engravings edited by the Centre Genevois de Gravure Contemporaine in 1992, Villa Arson, National Centre of Visual Arts, Nice.
Presentation of the series of silkscreen prints edited by the Centre as well as drawings and editions.
For Ian Anüll, art is an integral part of society, it is not an alternative to reality or to the banality of the world nor a subject of mystification. His work always oscillates between right and wrong, the message and the irony, art and non-art. […] Ian Anüll rather cultivates independence and impertinence that enable him to collect and update them with quick thinking and foresight the nonsense and pitfalls of the artistic conformism and also of the society. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Installations, drawings, sculptures, objects and editions.
Since 1985, Claude Gaçon constitutes a collection of balls. He produces and recovers an infinity of spherical objects, composed of such diverse and strange as unexpected materials: paper, marble, lava, wire, plastic, crystal, fur, etc. This accumulation built a non exhaustif catalog of all possible and imaginable formal combinations between full and empty, the heavy and the light, the precious and commonplace. The pure shape is also the starting point for conceptual games and investigation, between inside and outside, content and container, order and disorder, purity and impurity, dispersion and concentration … […] In an aesthetics close of scientific and biological performances – viruses, atoms, anatomical plates, maps and world maps – Claude Gaçon seeks endlessly to imagine, to simplify, to understand and master the elusive three-dimensional shape. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of a series of twenty-one unique engravings.
The work of John Armleder has long been as close to the neo-Fluxus as the geometric painting. His pictorial references are numerous: Picabia and El Lissitzky to Blinky Palermo, Helmut Federle and Olivier Mosset through Sigmar Polke. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of the edition. Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, 1992.
Drawings, wall interventions and artist book.
Lithographs printed at the Centre by Laurent Mathelin, typography of the first cover, title page and colophon conducted by the Imprimerie des Arts, Geneva, bound by Craftsman Bookbinder, Jean-Pierre Netz, Geneva. Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, 1991.
Embroideries, drawings, paintings and presentation of the edition and the artist’s book.
Lithographs and paintings. 1991
Lithographs printed by the Centre Laurent Mathelin. Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, 1991.
[…] An almost cinematic continuity is woven between these portraits. Her work is based on an opposition between the snapshot and the pose. The model laying six to seven seconds, while the image remainsthat of a fragment of a glance, a fleeting nod, barely sketched. Suzanne Lafont moves the meaning of her images between “taken from life” and set design, between the sole and the series between the pictorial and cinematic. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Presentation of all editions of Marcel Broodthaers (except Le Corbeau et le Renard, 1967). In collaboration with Philippe Cuenat, Geneva.
Presentation of the five framed prints and a molded object with sulfur bull eyes, Histoire d’yeux.
[…] Without wishing to return to archaic or some nostalgia too often attached to traditional printmaking techniques (as it happens the technical copper occurrence in flowers of sulfur dating from the eighteenth century), the features offered by the direct attack of the copper by the sulfur (without acid interference) fit perfectly to the work of Jean-Michel Othoniel and his research for this edition. The artist seeks to reproduce trademarks, ghosts of objects: clothing, fabrics.
[…] Roman Signer works on natural elements – water, fire, air, earth – and sometimes industrialized or manufactured objects such as boxes, cans, balloons or furniture, making them fly, fall, explode, filling, emptying, etc., like Richard Serra when he proposed, in 1967-1968, his famous list of action verbs “roll, fold, bend, twist, split, cut …” Roman Signer prefers the progress, the process and the idea of moving sculpture.(Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
Jean-Marc Meunier is foremost landscape photographer: in 1984, his first important series is devoted to the transformation of neighborhoods in south-east London, offering whole landscapes under construction, half savage, half industrial. He then focuses on vegetation, particularly vegetation accreditation suburban areas and residential areas, and its intermingling with architecture and public facilities. His series on Christmas trees, carried out between November 1988 and January 1989 in the Geneva area, continues that theme. (Olivier Lugon, extract from the press release)
Anne Pesce tries to find a definition of painting in the nihilistic context of the recent years. Avoiding to get confused with the movements “neo” and other post-modernism that never end to kill painting, Anne Pesce tries to take it up through a more poetic and philosophical. It creates metaphorical links between painting, words, critical thinking and the world: “I like to paint to stop thinking, think to paint is only an aping of the big tide of the spirit. “
Presentation of the edition and installation in the Parc de Malagnou in front of the Centre, of the six double-sided panels (remained in place from 1989 to 2000)
In the park in front of the Centre, will be installed a series of panels similar to those used for road signs, except that the discs do not present the conventional acronyms, but abstract signs, perforated or enamelled. Planted following each other, these six panels will turn into a succession of targets, bringing confusion on the actual function of the set and an ironic dash to omnipresence in our cities of the signs and its procession of prohibited. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)
During the exhibition: presentation at the Centre of the film Images du monde visionnaire of Henri Michaux, directed by Eric Duvivier (1963).
The June 14, 1989 in the evening: Concert of New Quartet of Geneva, 5th quartet of Giacinto Scelsi dedicated to Henri Michaux and the works of H. Villa Lobos and Anton Webern
Today, it seems important to report by texts of the will of producing and experimenting of Michaux, always with the same honesty facing the sign in movement and the abstract sign, as well as its points of cinematographic view, given to see, in their profusion, like a picture book.
Presentation of the edition and silkscreen-prints.
Photographs from 1984 to 1989.
The landscapes of Andreas Gursky are soccer fields, swimming pools, mountains, artificial lakes, play areas, intermediate areas between town and country, the Sunday walks. Man is at the center of these photographs, although the landscape is omnipresent.
Presentation of the complete series of 35 large format prints published by the Centre and exposed in 1988 (Stéphane Brunner, Gravures, March 17 to April 23, 1988) and paintings, Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds.
The Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine, in 1985, had exposed several works of young Genevan artists from the School of Visual Arts in Geneva. Without being in the hunt for young talents, the Centre would like to show that etching is still a field of investigation for new formal and conceptual preoccupation. Shigeru Mori, was born in Japan in 1952, student of the engraving workshop of the School of Visual Arts in Geneva since 1985, he works with a traditional technique, particularly spectacular – black aquatint – he uses in a “modern” perspective with reports of abstract and minimal forms. (Véronique Bacchetta, extract from the press release)