Press Release

Bortolami is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Aaron Young, an installation in which he invites the viewer into a participatory space constructed within the gallery. Creating a tension by the unexplained need for participation, the artist passively teases the viewer to take the required action. The action, if taken, results in a surprising optical assault.

Young plays with contemporary social issues such as the economy, globalism, and socio- economic disparities by using popular iconography and interactive performance. He has created site – specific bronze sculpture in the forms of rocks with graffiti tags sprayed across them, broken police lines and skateboard-grinded street curbs. He has staged participatory performances in different urban neighborhoods where he chains various bike parts to street posts which eventually, as the parts get stolen, begin to disappear. Following his interest in urban culture and Fluxus intervention in everyday space, Young made a series of sculptures of battered steel chainlink fence, dipped in 24 karat gold before being installed in a manner where the viewer has to squeeze through the work in order to view the full exhibition. Also, he orchestrated a series of three performances, one at the 7th Regiment Armory here in New York City, one in Moscow’s Red October factory, and the last one, just a month ago, on the active volcano Solfatara in Naples. During the performance, the audience witnesses motorcyclists riding over painted black panels, burning off the surface layer with their tires, revealing the color underneath, and thus creating true ‘action paintings’.

Aaron Young was born in San Francisco, California and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 before continuing on to receive his Masters of Fine Art from Yale University in 2004. In 2005 he participated in Greater New York, at P.S.1, New York. In 2006, he was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. He participated in the group show Uncertain States of America in 2005, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar B. Kvaran. The exhibition travelled to Norway, New York, London, Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing. And he had a solo show at Kunst-Werke in Berlin, Germany. He will be included in Political Minimalism at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, opening November 2008. And he will have a solo show at PAN, Naples in June 2009.

For more information please contact Nicole Will at 212 727 2050 or nicole@bortolamigallery.com.

Press Release

Bortolami is proud to announce the first exhibition of Thilo Heinzmann’s work in the United States. His abstract paintings are the result of Heinzmann’s continuous research and discovery of new materials. Glued, pinned, perched or dispersed on a white background, his materials are chosen because of their uncommon textures. Since his days as a student, Heinzmann has been concentrating on the endless possibilities of white background paintings. Whether it is canvas, aluminum or polystyrene, white has been the stage where his crystalline, translucent, refractive materials could be transported into their next life.

Marbled pigments, vellum, crystals and minerals, furs, melted tin, all had a life before becoming part of a formal composition. They carry the symbolism of their previous life with them in the paintings, and their varied textures are in tension with each other, creating a hedonistic and subliminal surface. Heinzmann resembles an alchemist, mixing and matching and looking for the ultimately perfect, abstract, window on the world.

Thilo Heinzmann was born in 1969, he lives and works in Berlin. The artist has been included in exhibitions at both the Kunstverein Oldenburg and Kunstverein Frankfurt in Germany. He shows widely in galleries in Europe.

For more information please contact Nicole Will at 212 727 2050 or Nicole@bortolamigallery.com.

Press Release

Scott King’s work is blunt, in a subtle way. He takes the visual economy of postmodernist consumerism to a tipping point of aggressive clarity, where it starts cannibalizing itself as a paradoxical form of affirmative self-reflection. Proclaiming the Death to the New, King puts an end to the Fordist phantasma of eternal progress and ushers in the confused and confusing Age of the Bastard.

It is, however, not only Jeff causing an op-art disaster by accidently spilling his over-sugared coffee into the server of an open-plan office, but rather the general field of political oppositions structuring the realm of the social that is thrown into turmoil. George W. Bush might have only figured as a temporary catalyst delineating the force fields for a brief historical moment until the boundaries of political conviction fade away again in the opaque fogs of contemporary reality. When the culture of protest turns into a mere wish for clarity its forms are emptied out as free floating signifiers. Singing louder might be of help. Or rather the coffee in the server?

We could also try to look back and exhume Karl Marx in the guise of Roy Wood, the lead-singer of the completely forgotten and totally unimportant Glam-Rock formation Wizzard. While Roy today heads the Roy Wood Big Band, others draw into doubt that Marx is to be personally held responsible for the historical incarnations of state socialism. In the meantime, the totem of Karl Wood or Roy Marx might not only serve as confused archive of popular subject positions 40 years ago, but also as a historical analogy highlighting the fact that political opposition not only grants clarity, but also holds the promise of a fair share of glamour rubbing off on one’s life as a renegade. Just like Che on a T-Shirt, whose likeness remains the most often reproduced image until today. When the revolutionary gestures of the former left become hollow, it might be about time to start thinking about the royalties to be gained. Or, from a slightly different angle, when politics turn into a pose, the pose becomes political.

Scott King’s work is governed by the idea of a viral aesthetics of the parasitic. He works from inside the system, making use of the organs of the host in order to bring it down with its own means. Following in the footsteps of situationist image politics and the graphic heritage of punk, King amalgamates the signifiers of our contemporary mediascapes in bastardized icons that celebrate the disease of their own origin. The question to be asked is less who or what we vote for, but rather how to cause an affray of words and images that raises the stakes of our contemporary confusion.

Scott King was born in Goole, Yorkshire, England,1969. He currently lives and works in London. Recently Kunstverein Munich held a solo show of King’s work entitled “Marxist Disco (cancelled)” in February, 2008. King’s work has been included in various group exhibitions “Defamation of Character”, PS1, New York; “CRASH!”, ICA, London; White Columns, New York; and “Regarding Terror” Kunst-Werke, Berlin.

Scott King text written by Daniel Pies, curator of Kunstverein Munich

RYAN FOERSTER
Presentation of photographs
June 24th – August 22nd, 2008

Ryan Foerster was born in 1983 in Newmarket Canada. He has had solo exhibitions at White Columns in 2007 and Swiss Institute Project Room in 2008. Foerster displays recent photographs of Julie.

For more information please contact Nicole Will at 212-727-2050 or Nicole@bortolamigallery.com

Press Release

Bortolami Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new drawings, paintings and sculptures by German artist Jonathan Meese. In the four years since his last solo New York Show, Meese has discovered that his entire career has been spent in service of the Dictatorship of Art. Meese now provides us with the only option to the failed destructive religion of democracy, the Dictatorship of Art. In this Dictatorship, human power and its limitations have been replaced by the unlimited benevolence and indifference of Art. To Meese “Art is not a religion, but every Religion is Art.”

As a Public Relations officer for the Dictatorship, Meese has been able to act as a neutral and hermetic explicator of our new heroes and villains. In the anti-reality of the Dictatorship, Mary Poppins (Dictatorbaby) can frolic with Meese’s hero from Clockwork Orange, Alex DeLarge (Revolutionbaby) and Wagner and Hitler can play with Scarlett Johansson (Scarlettierbaby) and Charles Bronson. Every painting in his new series is painted on black canvas. By painting on black, Meese’s palette is limited and he must paint in order to increase and expand Light rather than Dark. Each sculpture in the show demonstrates the unlimited relationships possible within the legal vacuum created by the Dictatorship. In its purest form Art is the total revolution of the future.

Jonathan Meese was born in 1970 in Tokyo and lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg. He began his career as a painter and then extended his practice and mainly dedicated himself to installation and performance. The trancelike state which he obtains during his performances has allowed him to explore new realms and realities. In the last two years Meese has had solo shows at La Caixa, Barcelona, Kunstraum Innsbruck, The Essl Museum in Vienna, De Appel Centre for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam and Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. In addition, he has shown at the Louisiana Museum, MAGASIN Center in Grenoble and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. He performed in Wagner’s Parsifal in Berlin.

For more information please contact Nicole Will at 212-727-2050 or Nicole@bortolamigallery.com .

Press Release

Bortolami is pleased to present the second solo show by Michel François at the gallery. For this exhibition, François proposes a formal sculpture show. Set up like a series of architectonic elements that appear to be relics, the sculptures show grandness in form, but at the same time seem almost at the point of collapsing. The austerity of the group of works is threatened by the fragile stability of the materials. François questions the internal or external forces that push the objects into a possible dissolution.

Dipping ordinary things, such as nets, into plaster to make them rigid, François juxtaposes the crumpled form with a skeletal one to produce tensions in the sculptures. He then finishes them with mediums such as gold leaf, polystyrene balls, fluorescent or metallic paint. Other works use glass, a material often employed by François in the past. Adding emphasis to the rigid versus collapsed form, François incorporates a new video of juggling glasses and posters with images of tumbling objects.

Michel François was born in 1956 in Saint-Trond, Belgium. Upcoming Solo exhibitions include MC Project, Los Angeles and Thomas Dane, London. Past Solo exhibitions include Frac Haute-Normandie, Rouen; Frac Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France; CCStrombeek, Belgium; Maison de la culture d’Amiens, France; Art Pace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Space Vox, Montreal; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Center for Photography, Geneva, Switzerland and Fondatión Miró, Barcelona, Kunsthalle Bern, and Haus der Kunst, Munich. François’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as, “Recent Video from Belgium,“ Philadelphia Museum of Art, The 49th Venice Biennale – where he represented Belgium together with Ann Veronica Janssen, the São Paolo Biennal XXII, and Documenta IX. The artist currently lives and works in Brussels.

For more information please contact Nicole Will at Nicole@bortolamigallery.com.

Press Release

Bortolami is pleased to present new works by Piotr Janas. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Piotr Janas makes large scale representational paintings of unrecognizable scenarios. Amoebic forms referencing organs, fluids and various body parts are contrasted with hard edged machine-like mechanisms and parts that puncture the surface. The pinks and reds associated with living organisms are juxtaposed with dark, often violent stained strokes and drips that suggest death or something sinister. However, at the same time, there is a sense of irony and comic humor that pervade the works. Sharp, tapered objects and splatters perforate large, dense spaces on the canvas. Janas succeeds in creating a sense of depth within the paintings as one aspect often encapsulates or penetrates another. The paintings appear to be able to invert inside out or slowly morph into something different than what they are.

For this latest group of works, the artist addresses the actions of scratching, pulling and prodding– as techniques that reveal something that lies beneath the surface and as actions that when done repeatedly and furiously leave wounds and gashes. Organic looking forms referencing tree branches and clouds taper into single talons that scrape the walls of the environments they inhabit and leave what appears to be blood stains or simply the shuddering sense one feels with nails on a blackboard. The reaction is a visceral one. Janas gives a glimpse into his surreal landscapes where some sort of force seems to be provoking the canvas from within.

Piotr Janas was born in 1970 and currently lives and works in Warsaw. He has had solo gallery exhibitions in Berlin, Warsaw and San Francisco. In 2006 he was included in the group show Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism, curated by Franceco Bonami at the Villa Manin Centro d’Arte Contemporanea as well as Polish Painting of the 21st Century at the National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the 50th International Venice Bienniale in 2003.

For more information, please contact Nicole Will at Nicole@bortolamigallery.com