Jardins de Bagatelle II

Galerie Tanit - MunichSeptember - October 2014

Jardins de Bagatelle IICurtis AndersonMartin AssigRicardo BreyWim Delvoyevan Eetvelde SautourLionel EstèveMichel FrançoisLaurent GrassoMona HatoumUrs LüthiMarcel OdenbachTony OurslerCharles SandisonRosemarie TrockelHossein ValamaneshGhassan Zard

Bagatelle : something frivolous, something of little value or importance.

Bagatelle is a word that has been used ironically to speak about luxurious items, and gallant forms of amusement. In 1775, as a result of a legendary bet between the hedonistic and lavish MarieAntoinette and her 19-year-old brother, the Count of Artois and youngest brother of Louis XVI, the park of Bagatelle was conceived in the Bois de Boulogne – Paris. In the space of two months the Count of Artois realized a playful and romantic park with lush roses, caves and ponds, in contrast to the geometrical classic French landscape style. Inspired by this fantastic work, Galerie Tanit – Munich presented “Jardins de Bagatelle I” in 1990, an exhibition showcasing worksfrom different established and emerging artists of that time.24 years later, it is time to present the second edition of this highly successful exhibition. “Jardins de Bagatelle II” invites you to take a stroll into a maze of sculptures, videos and collages from a selection of international artists.

Curtis Anderson is an American artist born in 1956. He founded the Curzon Studio in New York in 1980, a studio that produced architectural models, frames, furniture as well as sculptures. Curtis Anderson has been living and working in Cologne since 1985.The techniques and materials Anderson uses in his work play a very important role. His production requires patience and imagination to discover different levels of meaning and interpretation. Through multiples ways Curtis explores questions around tantrism, combining magical or mystical elements to interrogate continuity and time concepts. The untitled piece on display is subtle and enigmatic: three wooden items contrast with the slate chalkboard on which they are installed. Conscientiously sculpted these forms remind us of hourglasses. As a metaphor for the passage of time these wood sculptures depict the present as being between the past and the future. This piece can also be read as a symbol of human existence, a reflection on mortality.

Untitled1988

Wood, slate, chalkboard coating120 x 45 x 45 cm

Curtis Anderson

Martin Assig is a German artist born in 1959 in Schwelm. He lives and works in Berlin. His artistic approach interrogates creation itself through different concepts of Religion and the Cosmos. As a passionate demiurge the artist rebuilds cult sites in order to question their place in our society. Churches like reliquaries, enclosed edifices, become silent sculptures interrogating the shape, the sheath of belief.In this exhibition two churches are on display: “Dom and MS Jenseits” (Cathedral and MS Afterlife), one white and one black. Like two antagonistic poles, the positive and the negative, these two sculptures give rhythm to a promenade weaving between good and evil.Martin Assig works with encaustic, an antique painting process using wax. The use of this traditional technique, simultaneously a protective coating and a substance to burn oil, is also a way to broach subjects pertaining to religion. This technique, which is at the centre of his artistic process, is also used on his paintings and drawings and gives his work transparency and lightness, opacity and darkness.

MS Jenseits2008

Encaustic, mixed media60 x 42 x 25 cm

Dom2008

Encaustic, mixed media60 x 60 x 38,5 cm

Martin Assig

Ricardo Brey was born in Cuba in 1955; he lives and works in Belgium. Considered one of the best representatives of contemporary Cuban art, Brey participated in the Documenta IX, Kassel in 1992, Venice Biennale in 1999, and recently had an important solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, la Havana, Cuba.Heir of Afro-Cuban beliefs tinted by animism, the artist confers a spiritual dimension to all his pieces, transforming the common into the sacred. Trivial found objects, varied materials from the everyday context are at the heart of his paintings, sculptures and installations.Through subversive irony, his work plays with tensions created by juxtapositions, unexpected meetings between materials, forms and textures. By synthetizing, and transforming, the artist creates a personal mythology both poetic and political. Since he left Cuba, Brey provides a point of view from the intersection between two cultures, where the tension between individual and collective consciousness is a source of creation.Borrowing from multiple universes, “The Difficulty of Producing an Egg”, resumes this desire to confront different contexts by combinations, to create a new sense. A small bird put on an oversized egg formed by chaotic lead material is presented on an old-fashioned wooden stand. Incongruity and deep metaphor of human vanity emanate from the scene: the egg as a symbol, the egg with its elegant lines is also a tribute to Brancusi’s “The Sleeping Muse”.

The difficulty of producing an egg2013

Lead, silver, wood126 x 30 x 20 cm

Ricardo Brey

Born in Belgium in 1965, Wim Delvoye currently lives and works in Gand, Belgium. Using the art of diversion the artist takes over and deforms patterns, which inspire him. Renowned as a bad boy of contemporary art, he gained international recognition through multiple participations in major exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1990), Documenta XI (1992), “Cloaca” at the New Museum in New York (2002) and more recently at the Musée du Louvre in 2012.Representing two persons, a couple interlaced, “The Secret” is a part of his bronze production. Through his re-reading, Delvoye plays with the kitschy aspect of mannerist sculpture bringing us back to traditional Flemish art. Indeed, he conceptually and physically distorts the image of lovers, questioning this rigorous idea. The couple is formed and deformed by what seems like a whirlwind, like a Rorschach test where everyone who takes a stroll through the exhibition, can project himself or herself.

Le Secret2011

Bronze, polishedUnique

46,6 x 22,9 x 16,2 cm

Wim Delvoye

Catharina van Eetvelde and Stéphane Sautour worked together for over two years. The Fukushima disaster initiated the creation of the collective “Call it anything” which hosts their collaboration.Catharina Van Eetvelde is a Belgian artist born in 1967, she lives and works in Paris. Mainly employing the medium of drawing, she explores circuits and streams inside the body, using the expressive and the stylising power of the line. She composes particular universes of forms with minimal use of colour. Stéphane Sautour is a French artist born in 1968. He lives and works in Paris. Using science and new technologies, Sautour’s work emerges as complex and evolutionary. Based on social behaviour and urban development it explores reality and fiction to criticize how society promises a safe and controlled future that is paradoxically very unpredictable and mysterious. This assemblage explores delicate balance and gravity. The title, an enumeration of the components describing what is happening without mentioning the content, puts the viewer just below the level of narrative.

(left:) STEEL, ZINC, POLYMER, RUBBER, COTTON(STRAP) to STEEL(STRING) to SILK(YARN) to GLASS to VACUUM to GLASS to METHYL ETHYL KETONE to ETHYL ACETATE, BUTYL ACETATE, ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL, BUTYL ALCOHOL,

CYCLOHEXANONE, PLASTIFIER, CHROMIUM OXIDE(COATED)

(middle:) STEEL, ZINC, POLYMER, RUBBER, COTTON(STRAP) to WAX(WAXED) to WOOL(FELTED) to LINEN(THREAD) to ROCK(STONE)

(right:) STEEL, ZINC, POLYMER, RUBBER, COTTON(STRAP) to WAX(WAXED) to LINEN(THREAD) to CLAY(RAW) to WAX(HEATED)

2014

van Eetvelde - Sautour

Lionel Estève is a French artist born in 1967. He lives and works in Brussels. His work has been included in several shows such as: “A chaos”, DCOTA Florida; “I can talk to my cat: thinking what other are thinking”, Palais des Beaux Arts Brussels; “Migrateur” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.With a variety of tiny and small elements, the artist creates sculptures, collages and drawings. Those are the results of intense colors combinations, between abstraction and representation. The untitled collage on display can be defined as a spatial drawing as powerful as it is fragile, stimulating perception of an infinite dreamed reality.

Untitled2004

Collage, mixed media85 x 99 cm

Lionel Estève

Born in Belgium in 1956, Michel François lives and works in Brussels. His work has been included in several shows, among others: Documenta IX Kassel in 1992, Salon Intermédiaire Centre Georges Pompidou in 2002, “Pieces of Evidence” Bortolami Gallery, New York in 2014.Michel François’ artistic path explores a variety of media including sculpture, photography, installation and video. François often plays with the event of instabilities, where objects are placing themselves between two states. His work can be seen as an exploration of cause and effect. A gesture cutback rhymes with the precision of the form and the proliferation of meaning. As an echo to the connection between his drawings that are transformed into sculptures known as Scribbles, the ethereal sculpture presented reveals a struggle between black and white, geometric strictness and gesture happenstance, stability and instability. Offering an optical and spatial game, the artist gives his piece the obviousness of a drawing, where lines depict a sensible itinerary to cross.

Untitled2008

Plastic, cement, metal lacquered

Michel François

INSTALLATION VIEWGALERIE TANIT, MUNICH 2014

Born in France in 1972, Laurent Grasso lives and works in Paris. He was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008, and was included in Manifesta 8 and in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. Recent solo shows include: “The Horn Perspective” at the Centre Georges Pompidou, “Gakona” at the Palais de Tokyo and Uraniborg, co-produced by the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.The artist has developed a multifaceted body of work that explores the fictional potential of great iconographic discoveries. He builds parallel realities to test our system of knowledge and critical capacities. A perpetual shift of the viewpoint is at the heart of Grasso’s aesthetic sensibility, for him the point is not to test the truth but to exploit its fractures and tensions. With a deep sense of mystery, Grasso explores space and temporality, standing on the boundaries between reality, belief and science. Reminding us of a fairytale world, the neon light installation “1610” on display is inspired by the constellation discovered by Galileo in 1610, it evokes the problematic of the rehabilitation of Galileo a few years ago by the Vatican.

16102011Neon

Variable sizeEdition 3/5

Laurent Grasso

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Lebanon in 1952. She lives and works in London and Berlin. She has participated in numerous important exhibitions including the Turner Prize in 1995, Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2005, Documenta IX in 2002. Her solo exhibitions include Centre Georges Pompidou in 1995, Tate Britain, London in 2000, in 2013, Kunstmuseum St Gallen and Mathaf in Doha in 2014.In her artistic approach, Hatoum explores problematic issues such as exile and conflict zones through the intimate and the domestic. Her work, as politically involved as it is poetic, includes installations, sculptures, photography, videos and works on paper.The sculpture “No Way III” presented here is particular in that she transforms every-day domestic objects and manipulates them to be foreign things, repulsive and dangerous. This hybrid colander joining frivolity and strength creates a gap probing our relationship to the world.

No Way III1996

Stainless steelHeight 10 cm, diameter 25 cm

Edition 4/6

Mona Hatoum

Urs Lüthi is a Swiss artist born in Luzern in 1947. He lives and works in Munich, Germany. He has contributed to the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and was awarded the Arnold-Bode-Preis by the City of Kassel in 2002.He is one of the most important European conceptual artists. His work engages in a complex, ambivalent and playful way with photography, performance, and sculpture.Lüthi’s art is provocative. Famous for his self-centered research, his ideas are based on the ambiguities of both the individual and the object. Full of irony and derision, it explores questions about the human substance and its transformation through different modes of representation.From the series “Art is a Better Life”, these two works reflect the advertising universe, referencing the art poster tradition. Like small skits, each “computer-painting” creates a dialogue between the human body and the artificial forms and spaces. Like all his work these two pieces are punctuated with his self-portrait - his profile on a pedestal - as referential pattern.

Direction East VIFrom the series “Art is the Better Life”

2011/2012Colour-Print, plexiglass

153 x 116 cm

Direction East XVIIFrom the series “Art is the Better Life”

2011/2012Colour-Print, plexiglass

153 x 116 cm

Urs Lüthi

Marcel Odenbach was born in 1953 in Cologne, Germany. He has produced an extensive body of tapes, performances, drawings and installations and has gained international recognition as one of the most important German video artist. Throughout his artistic career, Odenbach analyzed the advertising tools and mechanisms of persuasion of the masses in post-industrial society. His aim is to find the convergence points and dialectics between an introspective view and social influence. Using the same techniques of exploiting montage and collage, in his predilection for videos and drawings, he asks the viewer to not only see the general overview but to also pay attention to details.The large drawing on display titled “Nach einer stürmischen Nacht“ (after a stormy night) is a perfect example of how his approach induces multi-layered messages. Enhanced with ink, a forest landscape is formed by combining texts and images. A certain collective memory is shaped with press clippings and images of different visual histories such as Lucian Freud’s famous painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.

Nach einer stürmischen Nacht2014

Collage, photocopy, ink on paper110 x 150 cm

Marcel Odenbach

Charles Sandison is a Scottish artist who lives and works in Tampere, Finland. He has participated in important international group exhibitions, at the Museum of Art Lucerne Switzerland (2005) and the Kunstmuseum Bonn Germany (2006) among others. His work was presented at the Shanghai Biennial in 2006. His solo shows “Correspondance: Sandison – Monet“ at the Musée du Quai D’Orsay in 2008 and “The River” at the Musée du Quai Branly in 2010 were very well received.His videos employ a language created using computer software and algorithm and are projected in dark spaces. Physics, medicine, biology, and informatics are the subjects of his interest. The artist takes the viewer into a fascinating world, a kaleidoscopic universe of symbols and language. It seems as if the words have acquired a life of their own, performing an individual choreography. Fully immersed, wandering between words and signs, the spectator feels the movement of a binary structure through a poetic scheme.

Forever2014

C++ Computer CodeEdition of 5

Charles Sandison

Tony Oursler is an American artist born in 1957. He lives and works in New York. Exhibitions of note include: “Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some),” Musée D’Orsay, 2004; “Dispositifs”, Jeu de Paume, 2005; “The Influence Machine”, Tate Modern, London, 2013.Oursler stages videos within installations that he calls “devices”. These “devices” involve sculpture, design, installation, performance and soundtrack. They transport us into a world with no rational boundaries, which explores relationship between the individual and mass media systems with humour and irony.Considered as a major figure in the recent history of video art, Tony Oursler revolutionised the medium, introducing his “sculpture-screen” concept. Since 1990 he has produced an extensive body of work with a video projection technique that rejects the rigorous frame. Through this process he questions, on different surfaces, the infinite visual possibilities to create new perceptions. Inscribed in a very elaborate dramatization, favourite themes broached are death, desire, money, obsession and media.The piece “Feedback”, presented here, can be seen as a memento mori. He addresses human vanities of our time. Working with space and time he gets us back to our basic instincts.

Feedback1998

Mixed media, Sony CPJ 200, projector, VCR, videotape, fiberglass skull68,6 x 55,9 x 91,4 cm

Tony Oursler

Rosemarie Trockel was born in 1952; she lives and works in Cologne. In 1999 she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta in 1997 and 2012. More recently she had important solo shows in Wiels, Belgium and at The Artist Institute, New York.In the middle of the 1970’s she introduced questions about the female role in society and questioned the system hierarchy within the German art scene then dominated by male artists. Her approach stands out among contemporary artists through the unconventional use and diversity of materials and processes she combines. Ceramics, paintings, drawings, collage, digital prints, films and videos are elements to distort and combine, to produce the myriad of forms that comprise her practice. Trockel’s cosmology explores the multiple facets of things, the ambivalence, the ambiguity and the inversions to always renew her approach, extend it and complete it.On view is an organic shape, a ceramic piece titled “Sand Dollar”. It revives techniques of artisanal handicraft and vernacular technology; the material seems to open first to later withdraw into itself. On the other hand the piece “Mottenbild” (Moth Picture), referencing a painting by Lucio Fontana, uses the potential of silkscreen printing which the artist simultaneously distorts to create an opaque surface, scattered with random openings that seem like holes in a fabric created by moths. Sand Dollar

2014Ceramics, glazed52 x 45 x 14 cm

Mottenbild1992

UniqueSilkscreen under Plexiglass

80 x 100 cm

Rosemarie Trockel

Born in Iran in 1949, Hossein Valamanesh has been living and working in Australia since 1973.Valamanesh has received numerous awards including the Austria Council Residency in Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 1991 and the Australian Council Fellowship in 1998.His work is often made with elementary substances, natural materials, found or every day objects affected by cultural history and personal memory. It is always based on the relationship between the human and the natural world in concert with spirituality, Iranian poetry and Sufi poetic tradition. About the “Kettle” in the show he notes: “Fire is like a living element and a flame is such a poetic symbol of life and its vulnerability. I used that kettle in my kitchen for many years. But now, the fire is not underneath the kettle, but inside it, filling this mundane object with light and life”. Indeed, the kettle converted into an oil burner is a perfect example reflecting the artist’s way to give an object a poetic and symbolic feeling. The second installation titled “Face to Face” presents a mat on which the artist disposed prayer caps found in a mosque in Lahore. Mirrors placed inside the caps refer to the concept of prayer being a process of self-reflection. This piece started with locally found materials and evolved with the mirror, the pile and the dust added later on. This opens up playful imagination, metaphysical questioning and quiet reflection.

Untitled (Kettle)1994

Copper kettle, oil lamp18 x 25 x 21,5 cm

Face to Face2002

Strawmat, mirrow, loam90 x 198 x 18 cm

Hossein Valamanesh

Ghassan Zard is a Lebanese painter and sculptor born in 1954. He lives and works in Beirut. He has participated in multiple group shows such as “Vous avez dit abstrait?” Galerie Tanit, Beirut, 2013. Initially his paintings were influenced by lyrical abstraction. His large-scale canvases depict a coloured rhythmic universe reminiscent of music partitions. Compared to his pictorial work, his sculptures are more restrained but always tinted with irony. Combining polished wood, aluminum and raw steel, Zard creates a bestiary of forms, interpreting the anatomy of reality to recreate a personal mythology. Playful by all appearances, his sculptures hide something that is deeply settled in the artist’s approach. Beyond the shape, something tries to come to the surface, the naked wood, full of life, is stapled with a rigorous but intermittent violence. It seems to contain a body in the making, a tacit entity, however, extremely present, waiting in the heart of every piece. Dreamlike animals become a metaphor for human beings and represent an artist’s desire to give a protective and ludic shape to an old “souvenir”. Buried in the subconscious digression, this sculpture can be read as the return of the repressed, skillfully formed, skillfully mastered.

Untitled2013

Wood, metalUnique

22 x 19 x 19 cm

Untitled2013

Wood, metalUnique

100 x 40 x 40 cm

Ghassan Zard

INSTALLATION VIEWGALERIE TANIT, MUNICH 2014

We would like to thank the following lenders: Martin AssigWim DelvoyeLionel EstèveUrs LüthiMarcel Odenbach

Bernier / Eliades Gallery Athens for Charles SandisonMargret Biedermann Gallery Munich for Tony OurslerSprüth Magers Gallery for Rosemarie Trockel “Sand Dollar”

Photos credits Christoph Knoch© The artists and the galleries