Maureen Paley is pleased to present the 2nd solo exhibition at the gallery by New York-based artist Thomas Eggerer. 

Thomas Eggerer was born in 1963 and studied at the Art Academy in Munich, Germany before moving to the US in the mid 90s where he eventually became a member of the artist collective Group Material. By the late 1990s his focus returned to painting and he has been exhibiting this work extensively over the last fifteen years. 

Using a pictorial language between abstraction and figuration, Thomas Eggerer’s paintings are inhabited by anonymous figures that are absorbed in degrees of action or exchange. They are observed from an elevated perspective and choreographed into arenas of colour. Forms of currency such as money, cigarettes or cans of beer are held and gestured towards, suggesting modes of social transaction with intent.

The work 'evokes a contemporary condition of internal splitting or dis-location' as discussed by David Joselit in his essay Time Zones published in Artforum in January 2014. He identifies Eggerer's application of paint using processes of sketching, stuttering, dripping and staining that make his subjects appear at once dismantled and stitched together. 

Thomas Eggerer’s work has been selected by Ralph Rugoff to be included in the 13th Biennale de Lyon, 'La Vie Moderne', that opens this September 10.
He will participate at 'Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age', Museum Brandhorst, Munich, November 11, 2015 - April 2016. 

Thomas Eggerer -

Since 1992, Shi Yong (*1963 Shanghai) works and practice - experimental, rational and pioneering - largely influenced the art scene.
Let All Potential Be Internally Resolved Using Beautiful Form will present for the first time a site-specific installation, developed around the notions of space, material and language. Through 'erasure' and 'language' he will bring narrative vocabulary into 'reality': The kind of reality that can only be presented as a form of Abstract art. According to the words of the artist: 'I like to decompose narration by embedding a certain vocabulary, within a narrative context, until it becomes another language.' Using this concept of 'erasure' he reveals a covered or deliberately artificial reality.

In his new show, Shi Yong wants to tell us something but doesn’t want us to know what it is. There is a line of text cutting through all the highly formalized forms in the exhibition space, but the artist has made it into a secret by striking it through with a thick metal line, rendering the words indecipherable. All that remains are the abstract and disjointed arms and legs of Chinese characters whose bodies have been obliterated. So, maybe Shi Yong doesn’t want to tell us something and only wants us to know that he has something to say – but not to us. But if not to us, the only witnesses to this artwork, then to whom? (Text by Colin Chinnery)

Yong SHI -

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery will be hosting an exciting exhibition of ground-breaking work by American artist, Jeff Koons (* 1955), widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of our time. ARTIST ROOMS: Jeff Koons will be the first time Koons' work has been shown in East Anglia and is the only chance to see Koons' work in the UK in 2015.
This landmark exhibition will showcase Koons' remarkable career from 1981 – 2003 and will include significant examples from each of the series created during this period.

Throughout his career Koons has pioneered new and imaginative ways of using everyday objects in his work. By combining popular culture with art historical references, and deploying hand crafted techniques with industrial manufacturing, he has tested what an artist can be within a time of ubiquitous celebrity culture. Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp are obvious antecedents to Koons' artistic practice, but his frank and unashamedly iconic works are distinctively his own, tackling head on the vital questions of art.

The works on display are taken from ARTIST ROOMS, an inspirational collection of modern and contemporary art acquired for the nation by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland through the generosity of Anthony d'Offay with additional support from funders, including the Art Fund.

Jeff Koons -
Curator Harriet Loffler -

Keita Miyazaki, a young Japanese artist, works on creating sculpture series and installations which evoke a sense of the post-apocalyptic. He is an artist exploring the supposedly polar notions of orderliness and fantasy. His installations select materials for their capacity to suggest ambiguity: traditional like metal, light and fragile like paper, invisible like sound. These juxtaposing techniques avoid concrete description, instead suspending forms in a state of uncertainty.

For Miyazaki, the car is a symbol of global capitalism that represents the tenets of modernity such as industrial progress and mass production. Meanwhile, the scrap metals used in his works evoke a sense of destruction in the mind of the audience. To contrast with machinery, colourful flowers made of paper and felt bloom from the car parts. The botanical elements represent rebirth and the continuation of life. The auditory element also plays a crucial role in his works, as the collected sounds of city life come out from speakers concealed in the flowers and expand the territory of the post-apocalyptic world. Installing a variety of sculptures in the two galleries, Miyazaki explores the relationship between the audience and the sculptures by depicting a complexity of visual and audio illusions in a space where reality and fantasy converge and stimulate the audience’s imagination into envisaging a future world.

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Keita Miyazaki -

Der Pionier der digitalen Kunst zeigt Arbeiten aus den Jahren 2013 bis 2015.

Seit 1968 arbeitet er mit Computer und Programmiersprache und entwickelt Algorithmen, um seine Ideen zum Thema „Kubus“ visuell umzusetzen. Vom 3-dimensionalen Würfel bis zum vieldimensionalen Hyperwürfel erscheint dieser geometrische Körper bei Mohr in neu generierten Zeichensystemen.
Zu sehen in leuchtender Farbigkeit oder in Schwarz-Weiß, als Bildschirm-Arbeit, als Zeichnung oder als Malerei. Dabei bleiben Bezüge zur Musik dem Künstler (in jungen Jahren auch Jazz-Saxophonist) stets wichtig und ihre Strukturen erkennbar inspirierend.

Zur Eröffnung um 18 Uhr spricht Dr. Lida von Mengden (Kuratorin).

Manfred Mohr -

For over three decades Marilyn Minter has produced lush paintings, photographs, and videos that vividly manifest our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and beauty. Her unique works—from the oversized paintings of makeup-laden lips and eyes to soiled designer shoes—bring into sharp, critical focus the power of desire. As an artist Minter has always made seductive visual statements that demand our attention while never shirking her equally crucial roles as provocateur, critic, and humorist.

Minter’s work is not merely a mirror of our culture, and this exhibition provides, for the first time, a critical evaluation of her practice as an astute interpretation of our deepest impulses, compulsions, and fantasies.

25 paintings made between 1976 and 2013, three video works, and several photographs that show Minter’s work in depth.

Co-produced with Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

Marilyn Minter -
Curator Elissa Auther - Bill Arning -

This series is titled after the Italian term Pentimento. This phrase, which is used to describe layerings, additions or changes to a work of art, allows multitudinous readings, different layers as one descends through White’s palimpsest of forms and colours. However pentimento can also be translated as repentance, which suggests atonement or remorse. In 2009, White immigrated to France after being awarded a studio at La Cite Internationale Des Arts. Is Pentimento, then, a form of atonement for having left his native country, a gift from afar to compensate for his departure from Australia?

Rather than Australian indigenous art, White is more accustomed to comparisons with the abstractionists of the New York School of the 1950s, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauchenberg’s Combines. The artist himself suggests the French affichistes artist Jacques Villegle who created magical collages via torn metro and street posters, creating poetical compositions that embraced elements of the alphabet, photography and design. It is not difficult to see Villegle’s influence on White.

Although distinctly painterly, one can see the suggestions of torn edges, of strange depths as though other narratives reside beneath the immediate surface. Like the hidden Egyptian hieroglyphs obscured by palimpsests of ‘new’ information, White creates a world of textures, his own secret histories which allow hours of contemplation, translation and interpretation.

Words by Ashley Crawford, Melbourne 2015

Anthony White -

With this piece, Beutler continues his acclaimed work in which he assembles mundane materials in individual processes to create spatial installations relating directly to each particular site.
The cross-genre works are intended to be understood as reactions to architectural and social structures, as well as to specific situations at respective sites within the exhibition. Central elements in Michael Beutler's works are also underscored by his analysis of industrial production processes and the economies associated with them, as well as the thematic development of a conscious and autonomous attitude to the materials and methods he uses. The artist incorporates industrially manufactured or processed materials, such as paper, metal, wood or plastic, shaping them into large-scale building elements with specially developed tools and apparatuses, as well as through the involvement of third parties. Resembling an experimental setup, a condition of provisional uncertainty is created in the process-like development of his installations, which Beutler seizes as a necessary, productive component of his work.
In this exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Beutler goes beyond simply elevating the historical hall into the show's protagonist; instead he transforms it into a place of continuous production, into a 'museum workshop'.

Support for this exhibition project is part of a multiyear partnership between Volkswagen and the Nationalgalerie - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Michael Beutler -
Curator Melanie Roumiguière - Greta Hoheisel -

The exhibition seeks to distinguish the contemporary expressions of the Black Dandy phenomenon in popular culture. The first comprehensive exhibition of its kind, this project highlights young men in city landscapes who defy stereotypical and monolithic understandings of Black masculinity by remixing Victorian-era fashion with traditional African sartorial sensibilities. Dandy Lion: (Re) Articulating Black Masculine Identity features images of both emerging and world- renowned photographers and filmmakers from various regions of the African Diaspora, including the U.S., South Africa, the Congo and Western Europe. Juxtaposed against an urban backdrop, the “hip hop” generation’s Black Dandy is noticeably different from the historical minstrel or Harlem Renaissance queer prototype. The 21st century Black Dandy’s sartorial choices are an expression of the African aesthetic rather than an imitation of European high-brow society. Using their self- fashioned bodies as sites of resistance, contemporary Black dandies are complicating modern narratives of what it means to be Black, masculine and fashionable today.

Hanif Abur-Rahim - Jody Ake - Kia Chenelle - Laylah Amatullah Barrayn - Bouba Dola - Delphine Adama Fawundu - Rose Callahan - Russell K. Frederick - Cassi Amanda Gibson - Allison Janae Hamilton - Akintola Hanif - Harness Hamese - Caroline Kaminju - Charl Landvreugd - Jati Lindsay - Devin Mays - Baudouin Mouanda - Terence Nance - Arteh Odjidja - Numa Perrier - Alexis Peskine - Radcliffe Roye - Sara Shamsavari - Nyugen Smith - Daniele Tamagni - Richard Terborg - Rog Walker -
Curator Shantrelle P. Lewis -

Photographer Steffi Klenz is preoccupied with the built environment, exploring the notion of place and space in her work. Although her work presents environments and buildings it is not architectural photography.
Klenz' work has been described as 'post photographic' because she considers whether meaning is influenced by what lies outside the picture frame. She also considers whether repetition underpins or obscures meaning and the context, and if the location in which an image is stored or experienced changes what it communicates.

In Plotting Spaces. Steffi Klenz works with the theatrical fly-tower and the focal plane shutter of the camera as places and devices, which produce an uncertain distinction between fact and fiction.

Plotting Spaces strips back the space of the theatre and the workings of the camera to their architectural and theatrical essence. the images reveal the tension between narrative tendency (describing what we see) and abstract possibility (creating illusion and make believe).

Plotting Spaces brings into sharp relief spaces that are curtained (or screened) off, a space in which a charged absence emphasises presence. Klenz’s images aim to encourage the debate about how photographs are produced, how they communicate and how they might be rethought.

Steffi Klenz -