Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Niele Toroni, Lawrence Weiner — Marian Goodman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 24 → March 31, 2012

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition including works on paper by Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Niele Toroni and Lawrence Weiner as well as two films by Tacita Dean and William Kentridge made from drawings.

On the ground floor of the gallery will be presented Snowflakes [Lac Du Bourdon Été] and Mapa Corporal, 2008-10 by Gabriel Orozco of the series Corplegados (2010), a title created by the artist combining the words « cuerpos plegados » (folded bodies). So as to carry them with him as he travelled, Gabriel Orozco folded large sheets of paper on which he has worked on in gouache, ink and collage. The back of the work, which represents the imprint and unconscious image of the piece according to the artist, is visible through a very unique display. “These drawings immediately call to mind the artist’s earlier diaries and notebooks, which collected all kinds of visual source materials, sudden insights, written inspirations, material and textual references, and photographic memorabilia in the manner of an artist’s atlas.” Gabriel Orozco was born Mexico in 1962. In 2010 and 2011, the MoMa in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris organized a retrospective exhibition of his works.

The compositions on paper by Lawrence Weiner, made in 2006 and 2010, combine ink, watercolor, pencil and collage. These drawings all bring together the artist’s classic combination of line, color and language. “One of the reasons I choose to work with language or other materials is that each time a piece can be built anew. Language is less impositional“. We are also showing a text work At the Same Time/ Au même moment on a glass door of the gallery. Born in 1942 in New York, Lawrence Weiner lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. He has been the subject of a one-artist retrospective exhibition called AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE hold at the Whitney Museum of New York, the Moca of Los Angeles between 2007 and 2009. He also took part in the most important art events, such as the Venice biennial (2005) or Documenta (1972, 1977 and 1982).

Two pieces entitled Miroir d’Eau (1973) and one Vert Wagon (1977) by Niele Toroni perfectly illustrate the specific and radical creative process that he designed from the start of his career at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in January 1967. The imprints made with a n°50 paintbrush are repeated at regular intervals of 30 cm. Niele Toroni was born in Locarno-Muralto in 1937 in Switzerland and lives in Paris since 1959. His work has been exhibited in many biennials and international museums such as the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2001), Stedelijk Museum (1994), Gwangju Biennial (1997) etc. Niele Toroni is the recipient of the 2003 Wolfgang-Hahn Prize.

Tacita Dean is presenting overpainted postcards and photographs. Along with her cinematic practice, the artist often draws on vintage postcards that she finds in flea markets. Especially keen on strange or contorted trees, she paints with white gouache, with a very thin brush, the outlines of the branches as well as the background. Tacita Dean was born in England in 1965 and currently lives in Berlin. She took part in two editions of the Venice biennial (2003, 2005). One of her last works, FILM, is still projected in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London.

One ink and pencil drawing on mounted paper by Giuseppe Penone completes this set of works. A major figure of Arte Povera, the italian artist has, since his debut, included drawing within his practice, for which he favours the use and evocation of organic materials. Propagazione-indice destro, 1994, shows a propagation of lines, aesthetically close to tree rings, around a print of the artist’s right index finger.

Giuseppe Penone, born in 1947 in Garessio in Italy, lives and works in Turin and Paris where he teaches at the Fine Arts School. He has been the subject of recent one-artist exhibitions at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Japan (2009) and at Modern Art Museum of Bologna (MAMbo) Italy (2008). In 2013, he has been invited to present his work as part as the 2013 contemporary art programme at the Château of Versailles.

In the downstairs gallery is presented for the first time in Paris a new film by William Kentridge, Other Faces (2011), together with a selection of drawings used for the film’s animation. In this new film of the series Drawings for Projections started in 1989, we find ourselves again in the midst of the city of Johannesburg, with the character Soho Eckstein beset by many difficulties (car accident, recollection of unhappy memories). As in every film of William Kentridge, the charcoal drawings come alive following a succession of erasures and overdrawings which show in a dreamlike and narrative way some aspects of the South African reality. William Kentridge was born and lives in Johannesburg. A retrospective exhibition of his work, Five Themes, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art, recently travelled abroad; Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Israel Museum (Jerusalem) in 2011; MoMa (New York), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Albertina Museum (Vienna) in 2010.

The second projection is a silent film by Tacita Dean, The Friar’s Doodle (2010) shot in 16 mm and shown for the first time at the Abbey of Santo Domingo in Silos (Spain). The subject of the film is a drawing that a friar had offered to the artist when she was a teenager and that, since then, fascinated her. This drawing, which she kept with meticulous care inside a book as a talisman, became in her eyes a symbol of religious vocation and cloistered life.

“The doodle has no exit. Its continuing and cyclical journey reminds me of the Benedictine monk in the Abbey at Silos who walked round and round the cloisters above our heads, as they all must have done in earlier life when they could never set a foot outside- defining a life by walking it as defining a life by drawing it.”