Xavier Veilhan inaugurates
Andréhn-Schiptjenko’s new space,
September 15 – October 20, 2007
Andréhn-Schiptjenko proudly announces the inauguration of their new space with a solo exhibition by Xavier Veilhan. Veilhan, born in 1963 and living and working in Paris, is arguably one of France’s most internationally renowned artists. Having received attention for his public projects Le Monstre in Tours, Le Lion in Bordeaux and Les Habitants in Lyon he has also done several institutional solo-exhibitions in recent years, at the Centre Pompidou Paris, at MASS MOCA, Massachusetts, at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain and at Musée d’art contemporain de Strasbourg.
Encompassing sculpture, installation, painting, photography as well as hybrids of all of these, Xavier Veilhan is also engaged in performance work and filmmaking. He plays with the notions of the generic, of the industrially produced object and of universal representation, creating objects at once ambivalent and stark. The work references art history as well as current society of mass consumption of goods, services and media. At a time when many artists work to shift the spatio-temporal context of art Veilhan gives priority to the exhibition as form, integrating its discourse into his artistic practice.
In the current exhibition, the artist’s fifth with the gallery, he will be presenting large sculptures of the human form, as well as a series of aluminium works on the walls. Veilhan has used high-tech industrial techniques to mimic what was originally the epitome of human craftsmanship — the statue. A three-dimensional scanning technology to represent the form and volume of human beings has been followed by milling in industrial polyurethane and aluminium. The pieces are intentionally called “statues”, a term that has fallen out of use within contemporary art production insofar as the monumentalisation of human beings has become almost obsolete. The statues are renderings of people in the artist’s proximity — friends, family and colleagues.
Xavier Veilhan can currently also be seen in De leur temps 2 at Musée de Grenoble and The incomplete at Chelsea Art Museum and later this fall in Intrusions au Petit Palais, Paris. Three monographs are upcoming, Light Machines and Monography by Les Presses du Réel and X.Veilhan, Comment ça marche? by Onestar Press. He is also currently involved in Aérolite a concert-performance in collaboration with AIR and in the shooting of the film Stealth.
Andréhn-Schiptjenko is relocating to a classified industrial building from the 1930′s, designed by awardwinning architect Ragnar Östberg. Housing a number of galleries the area will becoming the centre for contemporary art in Stockholm.
For more information and visuals please contact the gallery. The gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 11-18, Saturdays 12-17.
Gallery information:
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Hudiksvallsgatan 8, 2tr
113 30 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46 8 612 00 75
Fax: +46 8 612 00 76
E-mail: info@andrehn-schiptjenko.com
http://www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com/
