NEW YORK, NY.- Tilton Gallery is presenting Egan Frantz: Multiples, from May 10 - June 22, 2013.
For this exhibition Egan Frantz has focused his attention on artist multiples. He is interested in multiples, in part, because they are united by their lack of uniqueness, a characteristic usually regarded as a prerequisite in a work of art. However we know, at least since Duchamp's readymade, that a work of art as multiple does not preclude a unique historical event from taking place.
As a student Frantz was mentored by the late poet, Robert Seydel, with whom he developed a love for artists, poets, writers, and philosophers sharing a tendency towards seeing communication as a construction in and of language itself. These formative interests in the affective power of words would lead Frantz towards the appreciation of psychoanalysis, of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and the groups that continue to maintain and develop psychoanalytic work today. Specifically convinced by Lacan’s belief that “mathemetization” is the key to the Real, an idea that has influenced such contemporary philosophers as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Quentin Meillassoux, Frantz believes there is a comparable key for the artwork; that its formalization alone can reach a Real.
The influence of culture on our interests in art is distilled explicitly with the artist’s own distinctive humor and acute sense of the absurd. Part ready-made, part appropriation, yet entirely produced by hand, Frantz transforms objects themselves literally back into themselves: indoor/outdoor bucket sculptures respectively titled “Monochromes,” appear to be distilling something with sparkling water bottles bubbling in their water filled buckets; real baguettes have been dried out, crushed and mixed with an epoxy, then put into molds made from the original baguettes to become “Baguette Sculptures.” Metal wall bound-works Frantz has titled “Baguette & Crab” sculptures are composed of stainless steel baking pans donned with the image of a crab, hand-stamped into aqua colored seals, before being framed by the artist himself.
The artist points out that if we have at any point associated food, drink, love, and even culture itself with France; here we are also associating food, drink, love, and culture with the work of “Frantz,” some even “framed by Frantz.” Produced by seemingly circular means, food sculptures are made with food, drink sculptures are made of drink, wall sculptures concerning the production of French culture, e.g. French bread, are composed of pans on which it is baked, and in other works “Erotic Sculptures” are walls of arrows. These multiples are unique; these unique sculptures are multiples.
Also included in this exhibition is a leather-wrapped baguette sculpture produced in collaboration with the artist Ben Schumacher.
Egan Frantz was born in 1986 in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA. Recent exhibitions include “Room Temperature” at Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; “The Serial Poem 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6” at Tomorrow, Toronto; and “Sequence 3” at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Forthcoming exhibitions include “Tails” at Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy and Art Statements, Art 44 Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Frantz graduated from Hampshire College in 2009.
