Isa Genzken | Hauser & Wirth | Peace & Plastic Figures

 Hi all! If you have liked me on Facebook you will be aware of mine and Eerika's (http://eerikasblog.blogspot.co.uk/) adventure today, we had to meet this morning at 10:15 for a talk at the WGSN Headquarters near Piccadilly Circus. The talk was incredibly interesting and we were shown through the working of the WGSN website and how we as students cant make the most out of the information that is available to us. To be honest, due simply to its availability to us, (thanks to our amaze-balls uni) I had underestimated the importance of WGSN and to be honest didn't expect some of the brands that were mentioned would want anything to do with something that could alter their creative direction. 

But hey, that's why I am here. Learning!

So, returning to the main purpose of this post. We had a walk and took visits to several galleries (the rest will be covered in different posts, today or not depends on how hormonal my computer is feeling.) including Hauser & Wirth; which is always home to some incredibly interesting exhibitions, and is located on the super fantastic Savile Row. The exhibition was showcasing the works of Isa Genzken, I had no idea what was being exhibited and was very happy to find something (from an artist I admittedly had never heard of before) that was incredibly relevant to the idea's that I am trying to develop within my current project. I understand that I keep mentioning this 'project' and the only inkling I have given you about it is a post about triangles,,, ( http://aestheticsousveillance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/triangles-are-my-favourite-shape.html  ) back in october... But I will have another post soon.

My head has been slightly overwhelmed and confused by it all, and that would have made for nothing more than a blog post that would have had me sent straight to a mental asylum.

Anyway,,,,,, here's some stuff about the exhibition from the Hauser & Worth Gallery Webpage. 

Yes, I like to leave the hard bits to somebody else. I'm a textile artist not an art critic. 

If you have the chance I would definately go and check this one out,,, I have released that I think I have said that in every single exhibition post I have done so far. I am sure after a while a bad one will come. And I can have a good rant and tell you all to stay away! :-) But for this one, don't.

"Isa Genzken

15 November 2012 – 12 January 2013,

‘I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a ready-made, it could be one. That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality’
– Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans 

Inspired by the stark severity of modernist architecture and the chaotic energy of the city, just as much as by art history, the aesthetics of the great American artists of the Sixties and pop culture, Isa Genzken’s work is continuously looking around itself, translating into three-dimensional form the way that art, architecture, design and media affects the experience of urban life. From 15 November, Genzken will present an exhibition of new and recent works at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row gallery. Genzken’s totemic columns, pedestal works and collages combine disparate aspects from her many sources in seemingly nonsensical, yet harmonious sculptural compilations.

The bust of Nefertiti, an ancient icon of feminine beauty, is one of the most well-known and historically significant sculptures. In Genzken’s new series of sculptures, she appropriates plaster reproductions of this bust, which the artist first saw at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, gives them sunglasses and places them upon tall, white pedestals. She pairs Nefertiti with a reproduction of the Renaissance icon of feminine beauty, the Mona Lisa, whose famous portrait leans against the foot of each pedestal. Genzken then overlays her own self-portrait on to the reproduction of Mona Lisa, playfully inserting herself and her own practice into this multimedia exploration of the lineage of feminine beauty and the place of women in art history.

Genzken’s sculptures are precariously stacked assemblages of potted plants, designer furniture, empty shipping crates and photographs, among other things, arranged with the traditions of modernist sculpture in mind – traditions which are then manipulated by the artist. With this cacophonous array of objects, Genzken undermines the classical notions of sculpture and, in the North Gallery of Savile Row, re-creates the architectural dimensions of the artist’s beloved skyscrapers and the riotous colours of the city streets. Devoid of the weightiness and overpowering scale seen in the sculptures of her Minimalist predecessors, these works abandon notions of order and power, allowing the viewer to relate to the works’ inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability.

Both sculpture and photography combine and overlap in Genzken’s collages, whose dense surfaces are formed from the materials of the artist’s world: magazines, flyers, snapshots of friends, self-portraits and reproduced artworks. Genzken makes use of all surfaces of the gallery, including an on-going series of collages that span the floor of the space, like a pavement down a busy city street."

Text taken from  http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1432/isa-genzken/view/

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Peace and Plastic Figures.