Hauser & Wirth Zürich
Larry Bell Venice Fog: Recent Investigations
Opening: Thursday 18 January 2018 | 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 19 Jan – 3 Mar 2018
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3402/larry-bell-venice-fog-recent-investigations/view/

 

Installation view, Larry Bell ‘Venice Fog I’, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 2017
© Larry Bell Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Mario de Lopez

 

Hauser & Wirth Zürich is proud to present a major solo exhibition by sculptor Larry Bell. This marks the gallery’s first exhibition of Bell’s work since representing the artist across America and Europe. Bell is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, alongside contemporaries Frank Stella and Donald Judd, and had garnered international repute by the age of 30. Known foremost for his refined surface treatment of glass and explorations of light, reflection and shadow through the material, Bell’s significant oeuvre extends from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design.

‘Venice Fog: Recent Investigations’ is an exhibition of new laminated glass works with colour combinations inspired by the marine fog which rolls into Venice CA, the location of Bell’s studio since the early 1960s. Large cubic glass works will showcase Bell’s interpretation of the luminosity created by the dispersion of water in the fog intermingling with the lights of Los Angeles’ desert plain. The structure presented is based on one Bell originally introduced in 1992 in an outdoor commission for the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and features a four-paneled structure within a larger version of itself.

This sculpture allows two colours to be fused together through reflection and refraction. This technique has been a focal element of Bell’s work since he was in art school and cut scrap glass to fit into the wooden shadowboxes he found at his part-time picture framing job: ‘The one break in the glass created three lines – One a reflection from the break, one the shadow of the break, and the break itself. Reflection, transmission and edge, these elements still are dynamic forces in my work.’ The constant presence of the misty Sea Salt color of the exterior glass structures plays with and against the various hues of the interior glass structures, evoking the mercurial light of the Los Angeles sun, a glow that has preoccupied Bell throughout his career.

Bell’s use of commercial industrial processes in his studio demonstrates his unparalleled skill and dedication in each step of his sculptures’ fabrication. Since 1969 his studio has managed its own high-vacuum coating system that allows him to deposit thin metal films onto his glass surfaces, harnessing a little known technique developed for aeronautics to create an unprecedented body of work.

While these monumental works occupy and transform Hauser & Wirth’s 2nd floor space in the Löwenbräu, they will be accompanied by a series of 1:6 small-scale maquettes of the same structure. In turn, the sculptures will animate and be animated by the natural light coming in through the gallery’s wall of windows; the varying conditions at different times of day repeatedly altering visitors’ experience of the works.

Bell’s understanding of the potential of glass and light allows him to expand visual and physical fields of perception, and his sculptures to surpass traditional bounds of the medium. He has said: ‘Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.’ The exhibition presents true examples of Bell’s glass work mastery, as the sculptures appear material yet immaterial, hard yet ethereal, transparent yet saturated with a myriad of fleeting hues.

 

Hauser & Wirth Zürich
Dieter Roth Paper
Opening: Thursday 18 January 2018 | 6 – 8 pm
19 Jan – 3 Mar 2018
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3384/dieter-roth-paper/view/

 

 

Hauser & Wirth Zürich is delighted to stage a presentation of works focused on the medium paper by legendary German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998). Curated by Björn Roth, ‘Dieter Roth. Paper’ offers a unique window into the artist’s explorations and expansions of the medium. Enduring curiosity and artistic restlessness led Roth to make strides in virtually all visual art forms including drawing, book-making, film, sculpture and immersive installations, but his pervasive manipulations of paper – whether in cardboard, waste material, photographic paper, prints or books – can be considered the crux of his oeuvre.
Roth’s knowledge and appreciation of graphic design developed from his studies in the late 1940s and was most vividly realised in the over 200 artist books he created. Roth, alongside Ed Ruscha, is considered the inventor of the artist book and is credited with giving the medium significance throughout his career. The exhibition features more than 100 examples of Roth’s Copy Books, produced from the late 1970s using a simple photocopier. By using the rapid and most readily available form of printing and copying, unhampered by constraints or the need to liaise with professional printers, Roth was able to quickly and easily express himself as his poetry and drawings took the form of these books.
The Copy Books showcased are accompanied by various series of unique drawings including ‘13 Lollies mit Rückseiten (13 Lollies with reverse sides)’ (1981) and ‘11 Heterogenii’ (1981 – 1982). These biomorphic and experimental drawings are presented on the wall in their original state but also incorporated within the editioned books. This dual viewing opportunity offers an exceptional appreciation of Roth’s interchangeable use of media and his constant furthering of source material.
Roth’s preoccupation with documentation and diaries is compellingly shown in his opus ‘Flacher Abfall (Flat Waste)’. The project originated when the artist began collecting for periods in the 1970s and is an archive of all flat objects that went through Roth’s hands, under 1 cm of thickness, in a period of one year. In hundreds of binders, plastic sleeves house objects of utter banality: cigarette packets, fruit cartons, jam jar lids, and pieces of paper featuring the artist’s scrawl. Roth’s conservation of these items stems from his appreciation of the work and design each object was subject to in its fabrication. Roth found beauty in the banality of these everyday objects and in 1972 while travelling realised he was carrying various scraps of paper from place to place. When asked about this preoccupation answered simply ‘I do not seem to be able to throw them away’. The painstaking preservation of detritus both advances the diary format, which Roth explored till the very end of his life and, through the physical trove of garbage, confronts the viewer with the transient nature of our existence.
A number of collections exist from the 1970s and 1980s but the version shown is an archive of the ‘flat scrap’ that passed through Roth’s assistant’s hands in the year 1987. At the time Roth was collaborating with this assistant on a museum that would house Roth’s manuscripts, prints and books. The museum did not come to fruition but this iteration of ‘Flacher Abfall (Flat Waste)’ exists as a mark of their partnership.
Waste material is also the medium of ‘Kartonabfälle (Cardboard Waste)’ (1986), a 33-part collage of cardboard. On his ‘Fundbilder’ or ‘found pictures’, Roth wrote ‘I often felt, to paint or draw or collage on those pieces of cardboard was too nice, too timid, too clever. I saw, I could not keep – looking for something ‘better’ – the simple (and tough to take) beginnings. So I took aside certain pieces – of cardboard, wood or anything – and had them on the wall (at exhibitions – not at home), without doing myself anything to them.’ The simplicity of this concept again preserves, this time in frames, what the viewer might discard. Roth’s fascination with recording his life and leaving a physical and weighty imprint of it bequeaths us the understanding of a life philosophy in which his daily life and art were wholly entwined.
The documentary ‘Dieter Roth’ by Edith Jud will be screened on 2 February 2018 as part of film programme CinemArt, a collaboration between Hauser & Wirth and Arthouse Zürich.

 

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind
Opening: Friday 19 January 2018 | 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 20 Jan – 7 May 2018
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane, Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3392/the-land-we-live-in-y-the-land-we-left-behind/list-of-works/2/

 

 

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to announce ‘The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind’, curated by Adam Sutherland. This ambitious survey exhibition explores the contradictory nature of society’s relationship to the rural. The presentation features over 50 international artists and creatives, as well as works on loan, by artists working from the 1500s to the present day, including Paul McCarthy, Beatrix Potter, Carsten Höller, Laure Prouvost, William Holman Hunt, Samuel Palmer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcus Coates, Fernando García-Dory, Mark Dion, Roni Horn, Aaron Angell and Mark Wallinger.

 

Hauser & Wirth New York
Zhang Enli The Garden
Opening: Thursday 25 January 2018 | 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 25 Jan – 7 Apr 2018
York, 22nd Street
548 West 22nd Street New York 10011
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3395/zhang-enli-the-garden/view/

 

 

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘The Garden,’ an exhibition of new paintings by Zhang Enli. A champion of overlooked spaces and objects, Zhang Enli works from sketches, photographs, and memories to render his experience of the world in variegated brushstrokes and intimations of figures. His works, grounded in his immediate surroundings, involve a ceaseless scrutiny of ways of seeing. For the paintings on view in ‘The Garden,’ Zhang Enli has drawn inspiration from the gardens that populate the industrialized cityscape of Shanghai, articulating his impressions of their organic forms through expansive, immersive paintings that envelop viewers in an uncanny sense of recognition.

 

Hauser & Wirth New York
Fabio Mauri With Out
Opening: Thursday 25 January 2018, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 25 Jan – 7 Apr 2018
22nd Street
548 West 22nd Street New York 10011
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3397/fabio-mauri-with-out/view/

 

 

I act as if [Fascism] had not undergone its final condemnation, but was still in force today. Elsewhere, one might rightly suspect, it appears to me that it is still operating in different ways.’
– Fabio Mauri, ‘Ebrea’ (Jewess) (1971)

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Fabio Mauri. With Out,’ a solo exhibition of works by the late Italian artist, organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément. In a career spanning five decades, Mauri conducted an unyielding critical exploration of the mechanics of ideology, specifically as they materialized in the visual languages associated with World War II, the rise of Fascism and the Holocaust, and their lingering echoes in the modern world. His command of a diversity of disciplines and mediums – from drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and installation, to theatre and theoretical writings – produced an oeuvre that effectively connects the enduring traumas of the twentieth century to today. Sobering, direct, and poetic, Mauri’s work recovers individual and collective historical memory; it addresses themes of mass communication and manipulation, and brings to light the political dimension of images that proliferate throughout contemporary society by means of our most prized tools.

 

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
Mark Bradford You Remind Me of a Friend of Mine
Opening: Saturday 17 February 2018 | 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 17 Feb – 1 Apr 2018
901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles CA 90013
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3403/mark-bradford-you-remind-me-of-a-friend-of-mine/view/

 

Following recent major solo presentations at the US Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, LA-based artist Mark Bradford will present new works in ‘You Remind Me of a Friend of Mine,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles.

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
Geta Brătescu The Leaps of Aesop
Opening: Saturday 17 February 2018 | 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition: 17 Feb – 1 Apr 2018
901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles CA 90013
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3401/geta-brytescu-the-leaps-of-aesop/view/

Geta Brătescu in her studio, 2015 Photo: Ștefan Sava
© Geta Brătescu Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

‘Geta Brătescu. The Leaps of Aesop’ is the first Los Angeles solo presentation devoted to the 91 year-old forerunner in the field of Romanian Conceptualism. Her diverse oeuvre – comprising drawing, collage, engraving, textiles, and photography, as well as experimental film, video, and performance – mines themes of identity, gender, and dematerialization, often drawing from the stories of literary figures and addressing the symbiotic relationship between art making and working environments. Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, serves as a point of departure for this exhibition, which features more than fifty works that span Brătescu’s career. In many ways a fitting avatar for Brătescu, Aesop manifests in the works on view as a symbol of antic irreverence, mocking authority and status. A spirited believer in the role of the artist as that of a disruptor, Brătescu has championed ideas of play and disorder throughout her vibrant practice, remarking, ‘there is much economy and at the same time rebellion in the creation of expression.’

 

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
Louise Bourgeois The Red Sky
Opening: Saturday 17 February 2018 | 6 – 9 pm
17 Feb – 1 Apr 2018
901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles CA 90013
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3405/louise-bourgeois-the-red-sky/view/

 

On the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth is proud to present a selection of previously unseen works on paper by Louise Bourgeois. Though Bourgeois created a heterogeneous body of sculpture extending over seven decades, writing, drawing and printmaking were an essential part of her artistic practice. Created between 2007 and 2009, this presentation depicts both words and images that confirm the artist’s interest in central themes of memory, trauma, nature, and the body.

 

Hauser & Wirth London
Lorna Simpson Unanswerable
Opening: Wednesday 28 February 2018, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 1 Mar – 28 Apr 2018
23 Savile Row London W1S 2ET
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3399/lorna-simpson-unanswerable/view/

Ice 4, 2017 Ink and acrylic on gessoed wood panel
259.1 x 365.8 x 3.5 cm / 102 x 144 x 1 3/8 in
© Lorna Simpson Photo: James Wang

 

Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Simpson’s striking juxtapositions of text and staged images raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history; concerns that are reflected in the artist’s expanding and multi-disciplinary practice today.

Simpson’s inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London features her new and recent work across three different media: painting, photographic collage and sculpture. Throughout the exhibition, Simpson continues to develop the language of the found image as a source and incorporates vintage photographs from Ebony and Jet magazines dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. Photo collages and paintings are presented alongside a series of sculptures that feature glistening ‘ice’ and ‘snow’ made of various materials. Through layering and collage, Simpson’s recent works reconfigure imagery of the female form and reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of, and response to, contemporary culture and American life today.

 

Hauser & Wirth London
Matthew Day Jackson Still Life and the Reclining Nude
Opening: Wednesday 28 February 2018 | 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 1 Mar – 28 Apr 2018
23 Savile Row London W1S 2ET
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3400/matthew-day-jackson-still-life-and-the-reclining-nude/view/

Hauser & Wirth London is delighted to present Matthew Day Jackson’s upcoming exhibition ‘Still Life and the Reclining Nude’. The artist’s interdisciplinary practice explores a myriad of aspects of human experience and draws from sources that reveal both our intrinsic inventiveness and its counter-point, our ongoing capacity for destruction.

The exhibition will feature an entirely new series of still life paintings and bronze sculpture. Utilising the conventions of the still life and the reclining nude figure in combination with a precise use of material and form, Jackson critiques these traditions, their cultural placement and his own authorship in relationship to these ways of working. The ‘paintings’ are made with artificial and human-made materials such as formica, plywood and epoxy, and are direct representations of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s and Younger’s genre defining series of flower paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, made during a time of colonial expansion and exploitation. If Breughel’s paintings are a celebration of nature as a divine gift to humanity, Jackson presents an alternative to this view since for the artist, ‘each work is a meditation on exploration, the past found in the present, and is a critical discourse of technology and our persistent tendencies to open Pandora’s Box.’

 

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong
Mark Bradford
Opening: Monday 26 March 2018, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition: 27 Mar – 12 May 2018
Levels 15 & 16 H Queen’s
80 Queen’s Road Central
Hong Kong 999077
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3404/mark-bradford/view/