Category: Conceptual art

Rest Days

Luca Sironi is a Milan based photographer and filmmaker who recently completed his conceptual photography project titled Rest Days. The project comprises 24 colour photographs depicting a series of closed shop shutters.

Sironi explains:

The shutters hide what’s inside, becoming apparently identical to each other, and in their repetition, looking more and more like a minimalist series of ordered anonymous headstones.

The photos, taken in the towns of Bussero, Caponago, Carugate, Cernusco soul Naviglio, Gorgonzola and Pessano con Bornago, represent the change over the last 25 years in people’s social habits on Sundays (our typical rest day) in the areas these shops reside. In recent years the result is as if shops have changed their function, becoming symbols of the inhibition that consumerism exercises on spontaneous social aggregation, rather than useful daily facilities.

I love the impact these photos make as a collective.

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Spaces, Etc.

These sculptural objects by New York based designer Ron Gilad, together called Spaces, Etc., are minimal three-dimensional outlines of various familiar shapes. Gilad is known for his experiments with architectural forms, which were triggered by an infamous New York moment. In 2008 his entire building was evicted due to a fire code violation. Living without a permanent place for three months, the designer started exploring the idea of spaces and homes, trying to define what a home really is.

The process of translating ideas into three dimensional functional objects is something that has always intrigued me. I am not inventing anything new. I’m basing my thinking, research, and creative process on what I see, know, and what already exists. Almost naively I ask the question, why is it like this?

The visual tension between the lines is so strong, the objects show the signs of optical illusions, stretching the frontier between transparent and tangible, functional and abstract.

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Your House

Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson, a Minimalissimo favourite, conceptualised Your House. The book, designed in 2006 by Michael Heimann and Claudia Baulesch, is a limited-edition artist’s book with a laser-cut negative impression of Eliasson’s house in Copenhagen. Each of the 454 pages are individually cut and corresponds to 2.2 cm of the actual house.

Commissioned by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Your House is a remarkable arrangement of cutouts and imagery presented in a minimalist yet technical format. Readers gradually build a physical and mental narrative, whilst also examining the perceptual and spatial experience of domestic architecture of the house.

Although I haven’t had the pleasure of reading one of the 225 printed copies (perhaps one day), I love of the combination of sculpture and architecture and the illusion of being inside the house.

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Milkstones

German artist Wolfgang Laib is well known for his sculptures known as Milkstones. These works consist of a block of marble containing very shallow depressions that are filled with milk. The combination and contrast of materials and textures make the tactility of the work quite vivid, even if you haven’t (myself included), seen these in person.

As this article by Mark Stevens points out:

Pouring milk on stone took on the sacramental air of ritual; the milk itself evoked intimacy, nurture, purity, and the beauty of first things. It was, as he said, at once “chaste and sensual,” joining milk to marble, soft to hard- the two became inseparable in these works- reflected the Eastern aspiration of harmonizing opposites.

Laib is also well known for his beautiful, and painstaking installations of yellow pollen.

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Claude Rutault

Claude Rutault (1941) has had a highly important role in art in France since the 1970s. He is a conceptual artist although Rutault doesn’t see himself as a conceptual artist but as a painter.

Since 1973, Claude Rutault uses a simple method to create new artworks. Definition/Method is a text, describing a procedure that makes it possible to realize a painting by Claude Rutault. Basically, with Rutault, the wall is becoming an integral part of the artwork.

For example, the definition/method 1 of 1973 reads: canvas per unit. a canvas braced on a stretcher, painted the same colour as the wall on which it is hung. can be used standard formats available in the trade, be they rectangular, square, round or oval. hanging arrangement is traditional.

The identity of the canvas colour with the wall has led to development of a corpus of over 300 definitions/methods. Artworks from Claude Rutault are visible at Galerie Perrotin in Paris.

I really love the simplicity of his work, visually, but also his formulation and critical analysis of the art world, founded on the social operation between the work and the artist, their gallery, the collector, the museum and the auction house.

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nothingtoodoo

nothingtoodoo is the latest work by Beijing-born, Canadian-based artist Terrence Koh. The work is part installation and part performance. It consists of a large mound of white salt, around which Koh circles in a white suit on his knees. Koh has continued this ritual since the opening of the work at Mary Boone Gallery in New York City on the 12th of February, and intends to continue it until its closing on the 19th of March. This kind of duration performance reminds me instantly of Marina Abromovic’s The Artist is Present, which was performed at the Museum of Modern Art midway through last year.

Roberta Smith, writing for the New York times, says:

This is performance art reduced to a bare and relentless rite in a space that has been stripped down to a kind of temple.

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Carl Andre

American minimalist artist, Carl Andre (1935) is known for his geometrical arrangement of commercial and natural materials such as bricks, blocks and plates.

His most significant contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting and placing.

Andre has sought to renegociate conventions of display, forcing a dialogue between the object and its surrouding.

Carl Andre has received this year the Switzerland’s 2011 Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize.

I love it because the artist does not want his sculptures to have a fixed view point, but to be experienced as more than areas or paths.

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Cloud Gate

Minimalism is the official language of public sculpture and public memorials.

The Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor (1954) lets art and architecture show off.

His sculpture is in many ways one long ode to the minimalist monochrome and its emphasis on simplicity and purity, but he has also explored different materials such as fibreglass and reflective metal surface to create organic forms that mirror the viewer.

I love his wildly popular Cloud Gate, an enormous, shiny, pillowlike archway at Millennium Park in Chicago. So if you are in the city, check it out yourself!

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Sol LeWitt at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery recently presented an exhibition of large-scale installations by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), an American artist primarily linked to the Conceptual Art movement on the 1960s and ’70s, but his influence on minimalism is undeniable.

Of Wall Drawing #792 (conceived in 1995), Gladstone Gallery says:

It underscores LeWitt’s early interest in the intersections between art and architecture, which he distinguished and admired as a practice structured by predetermination, empirical logic, and collaboration.

What an absolutely gorgeous work.

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Nothing

Voids, an entire exhibition devoted to the art of nothing.

A retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein (1928-1962) in 1958, who invited thousands to view an empty, white-washed room.

This exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris was in 2009 one of the most radical show ever seen inside a museum. Stretched through nine rooms, completely empty, each one was the work of an artist from the past fifty years.

The best explaination of the show came from the curators themselves:

Bringing together propositions by Yves Klein, Robert Irwin, Laourie Parsons, Roman Ondak, Bethan Huws, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Berry and Art & Language, this very special retrospective includes only exhibitions that presented a completely space, gallery or museum.

It casts light on an element in art history that has long been neglected because it represents a challenge not only to the museums but also to the art market. At the same time it raises a number of questions, such as what is an exhibition? or the possibility to revive ephemeral works, known only through documentation and the memories of those who witnessed it?

An extreme minimalist experience, a refreshing reprieve to have so much room for contemplation, free for a moment to think about what we are going to do…

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