Month: January 2009

The obvious question with the work of James Jessop is how does a notorious graffiti artist (whose distinctive trident tag and ‘Tek 33’ signature that swathe the streets of North and East London where the artist lives and works) translate this side of himself into his painting? But if we ask this question we have already taken a wrong turn in understanding how Jessop operates. If you ask Jessop what motivates his prolific graffiti excursions he’ll tell you that he does it for the buzz, that he has a passion for spraying up walls and trying not to get caught, and that he has a deep love of graffiti art circa 1980’s New York. And if you ask him the same question about his painting you’ll receive a similar answer, except this time he’ll mention artists as diverse as Peter Paul Rubens, Vincent Van Gogh, and Tal R.

Jessop’s practice as a painter and his relationship to graffiti can be understood in terms of ‘approach’ and not ‘translation’ from one practice to another. This approach or tactic, this line of attack when approaching the canvas, is one that embodies the energy of the act of graffiti; it’s frenetic, free form, improvisational bombilation, or as the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri would call it: lines of flight. Graffiti’s power is its sense of resistance and rupture in the ever increasing corporate sterilization of urban landscapes. The aesthetic that graffiti takes from; that of mass culture, whether that be comics, film, television, magazines and advertising, is likewise Jessop’s index for what kind of subject matter is allowed into his work. Jessop’s use of the equipment and technique; the spray can as a brush, the modified paint pen, the calligraphic rhythms that you find in tagging, open up and inform his approach to painting.

Tom Christoffersen

‘We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence’

Simon Hoegsberg

Michel Auder – Heads of the Town

Michel Auder has seldom neglected to record an event in his life and, over the course of these
40 years of filmmaking, he has slipped into a variety of roles: silent participant, obsessive
voyeur, discreet accomplice, or simple observer. Auder’s singular approach has earned him
worldwide recognition. His films are found in the Anthology Film Archives in New York and have
been exhibited in major international museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2008 his
works were shown at the European Kunsthalle in Cologne, at the Statens Museum for Kunst in
Copenhagen and at the Berlin Biennale.
In November 2008 he won the New Vision Award at the CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen
for The Feature, an artistic collaboration with director Andrew Neel. In his role as the fictional
protagonist, Auder reflects on the stations of his real life as a filmmaker, junkie, and partner of
Warhol’s muse Viva and, later, the artist Cindy Sherman. The French experimental filmmaker,
who lives in New York, was present for The Feature’s world premiere at the 58th Berlinale and is
now returning to Berlin one year later in time for this year’s film festival.
Heads of the Town, Auder’s first solo show in Berlin, employs installation to realize a unified
vision of sound and video. Although these recent works have little in common with the
seemingly “authentic” documentary style of his video diaries, Auder’s current approach – at
times reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion – remains self-referential in its treatment of
the work of art and the medium of film. All the same, Michel Auder has never viewed himself as
a documentarist. The artist Jonas Mekas wrote about Auder: “And yes, Auder is a poet; he isn’t
a realist. A poet of moods, faces, situations, brief encounters, tragic moments of our miserable
civilization, the suffering. And yes, also human vanity, ridiculousness.”

Aurel Scheibler

Ulrik Heltoft

PRESS RELEASE
Ulrik Heltoft: Elements from a Nightmare
Opening: January 23rd, from 5-8 pm.

It is a great pleasure to announce Ulrik Heltoft’s third solo exhibition at the gallery: Elements from a Nightmare. The exhibition consists of a new video work, photography, and an object, and continues Ulrik Heltoft’s familiar, original yet subtle universe.
Apparently fatally injured and trapped in a mysterious room, a man, played by Ulrik Heltoft himself, investigates his surroundings with a paradoxical, trance-like attention. He staggers around the room, looks out the tower window, observes the furniture and the objects in the room, and finally collapses on the sofa. The actual room dissolves itself and converge with a hallucinating internal experience of the room, which extends into a kaleidoscopic sense of an abyss. The video Voyage autour de ma chambre (Voyage around my Room) is Ulrik Heltoft’s interpretation of the French author Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 novel of the same title. de Maistre wrote the novel during 42 days of house arrest, to which he was sentenced after participation in a duel. In the novel de Maistre describes his stay in the cramped keep as an adventurous, imaginary journey to an exotic and foreign world. Furthermore de Maistre praised this inner journey: it didn’t cost anything and could therefore strongly be recommended to the poor, the infirm, not to forget the lazy.

A mental extension of a physical space may take on unreal, unrecognizable or even nightmarish dimensions. Such places: at once concrete and imaginary, are the subject matter for also the remaining works in the exhibition.

The photo series White-Out, shot in the Arctic ice landscape captures the weather phenomenon
“white-out” – the polar landscape and the sky converge into an almost monochrome
white surface. The result is a strange, vague, and disturbing dream-like space. In this hyper-arctic landscape mental conceptions of dizziness and vertigo replace the normal physical points of reference.

The large photography Old Mine shows the entrance to an abandoned gold mine in California. While pebbles and the mountains’ rock structure appear in almost palpable clarity, the gaze is lost in the impenetrable darkness of the deep, dark shaft, where both light and the recognizable world disappears. The mine is a one-man work, and a picture of the paradoxical relationship between a very concrete and physical project (as digging a hole in the ground) and all the hopes, fantasies and dreams associated with this activity.

The sculpture Deception Island is a large architectural object made from super-light and ultra-reflecting planes. By a very simple design principle Ulrik Heltoft achieves a highly refined effect: at once logical and yet completely incomprehensible, the mirror image reflects the room – and oneself – upside down!

Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) is educated from the school of visual arts at the Royal Danish Art Academy 1995-1999 and from Yale University 1999-2001. He has recently had solo shows at Raucci e Santamaria in Naples and at Wilfried Lenz in Rotterdam, and moreover
he recently had a screening at the New Museum in New York.

Kirkhoff