Tim Maul — Looks Matter — Florence Loewy — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 20 → May 31, 2012

’Looks Matter’ is both an exhibition and a personal reminesence that evolved from conversations between Tim Maul and Florence Loewy.

Tim Maul is an artist and critic living and working in New York City. In his essay, which is the starting point of this show, he explains his fascination with the artists’ books he discovered in the streets, galleries, bookshops and through exhibitions in 70’s New York.

There is a mix of theory (Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972), magazines (Avalanche, Aspen…), group publications (Art & Language) and artists’s books of the moment: John Baldessari, Richard Hamilton, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, among others.

The exhibition offers a broad vision both geographically and chronologically by presenting European publications by such artists as Richard Long, Sophie Calle, Jean Le Gac, Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski and Richard Prince.

In addition to this initial corpus, Tim Maul’s own photographic work is presented with the series Gus V.S./Kodak Paper/81’ a romantic narration where a man (Gus Van Sant) carries a Kodak paper box in a landscape.

“ In the spring of 1981 I concerned myself with a series of black and white photographs depicting an individual in a landscape. I wanted the person to carry a box of Kodak paper, also black and white, suggesting a vaguely romantic narrative about the production of images. I traveled out to my home town of Darien Connecticut, and asked my friend Gus Van Sant if he would ‘star’ in my modest project. I had known Gus since we were kids, and he was living in town working on his own short films, writing, and recording music. In retrospect, I see these pictures as a ‘goodbye’ to youth, suburbia, and to “70’s Art’. I also see the influence of both the younger and elder Brueghels, whose paintings always intrigued me. ” Tim Maul NYC, 4/05

Tim Maul is the author of a portfolio The Cultured Tourist. (Curtains) (1996) and a book Traces & Presence (1999), both published by Florence Loewy.