The Endless Renaissance – Six Solo Artist Projects
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Barry X Ball, Walead Beshty, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ged Quinn and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
December 6, 2012–March 17, 2013
VIP reception (by invitation only):
Wednesday, December 5, 9pm–midnight
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Bass Museum of Art presents six international contemporary artists: Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland), Barry X Ball (USA), Walead Beshty (UK), Hans-Peter Feldmann (Germany), Ged Quinn (UK) and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand). These six solo artist projects pay homage to the Bass Museum of Art’s mission statement, “we inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collection and contemporary art.”
Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a video artist and photographer. She will present a three-screen video projection, The Annunciation. Though the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38) provides the narrative and Renaissance painting the iconography, Ahtila interprets the Annunciation with moving images that are at once spiritedly reverential, contemporary and humane. Through her choice of actors—some of whom are professional and most (a group women from a center for social services) of whom are not—Ahtila questions the nature of performance and the notion of linearity, and presents the “story” of The Annunciation in strikingly original ways in two versions: one image in a single frame (38 minutes), followed by three images (split screen) in a single frame (33 minutes). Courtesy Crystal Eye, Finland. In Finnish; English subtitles. 71 minutes. Ahtila lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
Barry X Ball, through the use of unconventional materials and innovative methods, has reinvigorated the age-old tradition of figurative stone sculpture. Ball employs an elaborate array of equipment and procedures to realize his works, ranging from the cutting-edge to the traditional, from 3-D digital scanning, virtual modeling, and computer-controlled milling to hyper-detailed hand-carving and polishing. The sculptures’ complexity is echoed in their clinically poetic titles. With their simultaneous fever-pitch intensity and surreal stillness, Barry X Ball’s bravura works make an expansive case for the reconsideration of contemporary sculptural practice. Ball lives and works in New York City.
Walead Beshty will feature a selection of glass and copper works that demonstrate an awareness of their own histories. Fitting perfectly inside proprietary sizes of FedEx boxes, these glass sculptures travel through the company’s massive infrastructure from venue to venue, becoming severely chipped and cracked. Likewise, Beshty’s large copper panels are handled directly by manufacturers, shippers and art handlers, resulting in smudges, hand-prints and tarnishes. Beshty’s work exposes the marks of time and physical signs of usage that take place in the process of production, shipping and installation of works of art. Just as an Old Master painting holds a provenance, a history of ownership and display, Beshty’s use of fragile materials like copper and glass aid in the disclosure of each object’s “provenance”, and the evidence of their handling. Beshty lives and works in Los Angeles.
Hans-Peter Feldmann‘s approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art. Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters and multiples. Feldmann lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany.
Ged Quinn specializes in allegorical paintings that include contemporary images in idyllic scenes based on classical paintings such as the pastoral works of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich. In The Endless Renaissance, Quinn will present densely layered paintings that transform art-historical genre painting into contemporary experience. Quinn lives and works in Cornwall, United Kingdom.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is universally recognized as one of the leading video artists from Southeast Asia, recently featured in dOCUMENTA (13). She will present works from her Two Planets series, in which members of Thai villages discuss several classic works of modern European painting while Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook fixes her camera on them. Contemplated outside of a museum in this atypical context, the work explores the conventions of viewing and interpretation that have come to be central features of the Western experience of art. Rasdjarmrearnsook lives and works in Thailand.
*Image above:
Walead Beshty, Copper Surrogates (September 20-23/November 21-23, 2011, Beijing, China, June 13-18/November 21, 2012, Los Angeles, California, November 29-December 3, 2012, Miami Beach, Florida), 2011. Polished copper panels. 74 3/4 X 35 1/2 X 1 1/2 inches each. Courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.
