ZURICH.- Galerie Eva Presenhuber is presenting the group show Wall Works & Sculptures, showcasing works by Walead Beshty, Angela Bulloch, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, John Giorno, Adam Pendleton, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Ugo Rondinone, and Steven Shearer.
Walead Beshty (b. 1976 in London, UK) is concerned with how the art system influences the production of art and how the works that emerge from it can in turn influence it. His work is based on an awareness of the interactions between social context and social conditions: Materials, production conditions, studio and exhibition spaces, transport systems, educational institutions and environments, critics, audiences, collectors, the art market, etc. They help to determine how a work of art is created, presented and ultimately perceived. Beshty understands the art system as a microsystem of globalised capitalist society, characterised by the exchange of information and the necessary mechanisms of circulation and distribution. Reflecting this, the work Steel Surrogates (2019) is designed as a modular piece, where each surrogate can flexibly stand alone or be configured with others. This adaptability invites curators and viewers alike to interpret and arrange the work in various ways.
Angela Bulloch’s (b. 1966 in Rainy River, CA) work manifests a fascination with systems, patterns and rules, as well as a preoccupation with the history of form and human interaction. Bulloch consistently blurs the boundaries between the perceived digital and the analogue, between virtuality and reality. Her sculptures and installations combine her interest in the logic of geometry and seriality with a graphic quality. The Heavy Metal Stack Pink West on display seems almost like an animated illusion in a digital space. The irregular angles in the repeated rhomboid form confuse the eye and the brain’s expectation of regular geometric forms. The appearance of the sculpture changes depending on the point of view: from one side the irregular aspect dominates, from another the impression of a certain totemic regularity prevails.
Sylvie Fleury’s (b. 1961 in Geneva, CH) artistic practice has been exploring the intersections between art, fashion, beauty, pop culture, motorsports and science fiction since the early 1990s. She utilizes the unmistakable visual language of these arenas and draws on their aesthetics and phenomena to examine desire in all its forms, while also radically questioning the paradigms of art history and its male-dominated canon of modernism. With the large-scale wall painting Égoïste (1993), she references the lettering of Chanel’s Égoïste Pour Homme fragrance. She examines the brand’s portrayal of egoism as a seductive masculine trait. By isolating the logo from its original context, Fleury highlights its ambiguity—turning it into either an insult or a self-obsession. Fleury explores the creation of identity and a question that resurfaces throughout her work: how do we define ourselves? As is so often the case, she chooses a trenchant motif that allows viewers to find their own answers.
Liam Gillick (b. 1964 in Aylesbury, UK) is known for work that deploys multiple forms to expose the new political control systems that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. Gillick’s work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus. His work extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form. Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art. Throughout this time Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Lawler, and the band New Order. The plastic curtains of Scorpion when Felix (2012) are an elegant, powder-coated aluminum structure. Their rigidity harmonizes with the surrounding space rather than opposing it. The work evokes the layered associations of transitory spaces, theatricality, and tactile interpretation—hallmarks of Gillick’s artistic practice.
Douglas Gordon (b. 1966 in Glasgow, UK) is renowned for his exploration of cinema and images drawn from collective memory and everyday culture. His multidisciplinary work spans film, photography, performance, sculptural installation, and conceptual text. Gordon examines and reconfigures images from contemporary culture to reveal fundamental patterns of perception. By incorporating literature, folklore, iconic Hollywood films, as well as his own footage, drawings, and writings, he manipulates time and language to disorient and provoke. Through this approach, he delves into moral and ethical questions, mental and physical states, and the concepts of collective memory and selfhood.
John Giorno (1936–2019, New York, NY, US) work targets a broad audience, redefining the capabilities of linguistic forms at the crossroads of poetry, visual art, music, and performance. He is recognized as a pioneer in the field of performance poetry and spoken word, as well as a major activist for AIDS awareness, LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-war struggles. Giorno’s relationships with artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg profoundly influenced his work and encouraged him to bring poetry off the printed page and into visual, musical, and political realms. No other artist has woven poetry, visual art, sound performance, and dance as succinctly as Giorno did, while radically questioning their boundaries and interdependencies.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 in Richmond, VA, US) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These compositions are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing, and photography. An encounter with any single work brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry.
Gerwald Rockenschaub (b. 1952 in Linz, AT) works within a formal repertoire that he began developing in the 1980s when he was a central figure in the emerging “neo-geo” (neo-geometric conceptualism) movement. Uniquely influenced by his work as a techno DJ and composer of electronic music, Rockenschaub absorbs the everyday imagery and forms of logos, traffic signs, and pictograms to produce sculptures, wall installations, and animations that render an aura of hyperrealist perfection.
Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964 in Brunnen, CH) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. The breadth and generosity of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. His hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time, where modernist achievement and archaic expression intersect.
Steven Shearer (b. 1968 in New Westminster, CA) has worked with a wide range of materials including, print, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collaged found photography. Shearer has become increasingly well known for his adept portraits of figures painted within interior spaces. These portraits recall figures from past music subcultures and art historical paintings and are rendered employing stylistic references from Fauvism and Symbolism to German Romantic Art. Reconfiguring Renaissance systems of perspective, he creates complex perspectival elements within the compositions that animate the viewer’s engagement with his paintings. The exhibited Poems XXIV (2008) are conté drawings of white, sans-serif capital letters on a black background. They are produced in much the same way as his other works, stemming from an active use of the Internet and a system of classification and sifting as the first stage of the process. Each selected phrase is often an edit from a series of websites specializing in cataloging the various subdivisions of metal music from around the world. Shearer sets rules typical of modernist practice in his use of repetition, as each line is used only twice as the series unfolds, in an ever-increasing number of poems.
