OPENING RECEPTION:
Saturday, September 6, 6-8 pm
LECTURE-PERFORMANCE AND CURATORIAL TALK
The Glassell School of Art
Saturday, September 6, 1 pm
With Lenora de Barros, Lorenzo Bueno, and Gabriela Rangel
Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition curated by Gabriela Rangel, in commemoration of the centennial anniversary of collage. We mark this venerable moment in the history of contemporary art with an exhibition of ground-breaking new works by Kader Attia (Algeria-France), Lorenzo Bueno (Argentina-U.S), Lenora de Barros (Brazil), Ramiro Cháves (Argentina-Mexico), Arturo Herrera (Venezuela-U.S), and Cristóbal Lehyt (Chile-U.S).
At the present, collage reverberates in the Global South and in the peripheral North as an incisive yet reparative practice that has the potential of revealing colonial agency, deploring monolinguism, and disavowing hetero-normative attitudes embedded in more and more depoliticized technologically fragmented realities. To cut something is followed by a restorative process, a repair of the object or thing that has been ripped apart and therefore separated from its substance.
Each of these artist-bricoleurs propose singular forms of collaging that remain legible, tangible, and still cannot be grasped unless we admit with Serge Gruzinski that: “In theory reparation stops where substitution and replacement begin (…) To repair is therefore also to connect - times, people, things ... - and that's why any global history of humanity must pay a profound attention to this gesture seemingly simple and commonplace which often consists in inventing a way to insert one world into another, not in a gratuitous manner, but to yield meaning and social manners."
About the Artists & Curator:
Kader Attia, born in Algeria in 1970, lives and works between Paris and Berlin. He departs from the post-colonial perspective of living between distant cultures as a point of tension to produce a critical practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of diversity. Typically, Attia examines historical misunderstandings, exploring what he calls “re-appropriation” and more recently the notion of “repair,” which he elaborated through the French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who declared “Property is theft!” during the mid-1800s. Attia’s work is also influenced by the Anthropophagic Manifesto, written by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade that formulates that Brazil could overcome the burden of its European cultural legacy only by “cannibalizing” it.
Attia’s recent solo shows include Contre Nature at the Beirut Art Center (2014), Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2013), Repair. 5 Acts at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2013), Construire, Déconstruire, Reconstruire: Le Corps Utopique at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012). He also participated in the Biennale of Dakar (2014), DOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel (2012), Performing Histories (1) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2012), and in Contested Terrains at the Tate Modern in London (2011). He is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.
Lenora de Barros, born in São Paulo in 1953, lives and works between São Paulo and New York City. She is considered one of the most important artists of her generation working with the legacies of constructivism and concrete poetry. Having studied Linguistics at the Universidade de São Paulo, de Barros’ interdisciplinary works are located in the field of visual poetry due to the juncture of words and images. In 1983, she published the book Onde Se Vê [Where You See], which includes twelve poems using words and photographic sequences of self-portraits. Since then, she has used different media in her practice, such as video, graphic design, performance, photography, objects, and installation.
Her solo exhibitions include PIVO in São Paulo (2014), Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim in Rio de Janeiro (2013), Centro Universitário Maria Antonia in São Paulo (2007), Fundação do Centro de Estudos Brasileiros in Buenos Aires (2003), Centro Cultural Sérgio Porto, Rio de Janeiro and Centro Universitário Maria Antonia, São Paulo (2002). She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo (2014), and Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (2014), the Thessaloniki Biennial (2013), the 11th Biennale de Lyon (2011), Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan: Latinoamérica y el Caribe, in San Juan (2012), the 7th Bienal do Mercosul (2009), and the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1998), among others in New York, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Milan, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Zurich, Berlin, and Lisbon. She is represented by Galeria Millan, São Paulo.
Lorenzo Bueno, born in Buenos Aires in 1991, was raised and lives in New York City. He is a multidisciplinary artist concerned with the redevelopment of New York, post 9/11. In 2013, he had his first solo exhibition at the Steinhardt School of Art and Art Professions in New York University, where he presented the lecture-performance A Tour of the Monuments of the 4th Avenue F and G Platform. In 2014, he undertook a reinvestigation into silence, compiling different renditions of 4'33'' (John Cage's "silent" piece), and presenting The 4’33’’ Mixtape, in Amo Studios in New York. He has also participated in group exhibitions including CITY: Surface and Texture at Dickinson Roundell, Inc., New York (2013), and in other group exhibitions at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2010), the Museum of the Moving Image in New York (2011), Casa Argentina in Paris (2011), Consulado Argentino in New York (2012), and the Brucennial in New York (2012), among other alternative venues in Buenos Aires, Paris, Rome, and New York.
He recently organized an artist residency program that took place at a McDonald's fast food restaurant in downtown Manhattan. His work is in the collection of The School of Architecture Library in Princeton University.
Ramiro Chaves, born in Córdoba, Argentina in 1979, lives and works in Mexico City. Using photography as a starting point, he creates videos, sculptures, architectural drafting, writing, and archival recovery with a strong influence of punk sensibility. He explores diverse aspects of Latin American modernist architecture, from the ideological positioning to the contradictory transformations within those marginal places or interstitial spaces in which the modernist project was never accomplished. His most recent works are in collaboration with fashion designer Carla Fernández and related with didactic displays.
His solo exhibitions include Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City (2011), Centro Cultural Border in Mexico City (2010), and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City (2006). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2014), Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (2013), Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (2010), Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (2009), and numerous others in galleries in México, France, the United States, Spain, Holland, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Argentina, and Japan.
He participated in the Miradas Cruzadas residency exchange program between México and France in 2010, and received Bancomer’s 2012-2014 Contemporary Artist grant in partnership with the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. In 2006, his first book DOMINGOS was published by Editorial Diamantina and in 2009, his second book, Los Últimos Héroes de la Península (in collaboration with Victor Mendiola), was published by Editorial RM. His newest publication, XXXXXXXXXX, will be published this year. He is represented by YAUTEPEC, Mexico City.
Arturo Herrera, born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, lives and works in Berlin. Herrera is considered one the most important contemporary bricoleurs. His work appropriates substrata of printing industry voyeurism and borrows fragments from popular and mass culture imagery to create collages, works on paper, sculptures, reliefs, wall paintings, photography, and felt wall hangings. Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, he produces provocative and open-ended works with an authoritative knowledge of modernism and striking elegance and beauty.
Herrera has exhibited widely in galleries, kunsthalles and museums throughout the United States and Europe. He had solo shows at the Americas Society in New York (2011), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela in Spain (2005), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001), UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2001), Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (2000), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City (2000), Dia Center for the Arts in New York (1998), Renaissance Society in Chicago (1998), among numerous others. He has also participated in group shows at the Linda Pace Foundation (2014), the Lyon Biennial (2011), the Whitney Biennial (2002), and he received the prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Cristobal Lehyt, born in Santiago, Chile in 1973, lives and works in New York City. Lehyt’s performative use of drawing unfolds into photography, installation, sculpture, painting, and video. He examines mistranslations that occur when mystifications of history become universal and stereotypes about place collide with the local. Most of his institutional presentations are site-specific.
Lehyt’s solo exhibitions include the Americas Society in New York (2013), Carpenter Center in Cambridge, MA (2010), Fundación Telefónica in Chile (2009), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2008), University of California Irvine (2007), and in galleries in London, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, and Mexico City. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Mercosur Biennial (2009), El Museo del Barrio in New York (2007), Kunsthaus Dresden (2006), the Shanghai Biennale (2004), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2003), MoCA in Los Angeles (2002), as well as exhibitions in Santiago, Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, Berlin, Vienna, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro. He has received the Art Forum Fellowship at Harvard University and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He is represented by Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York.
Gabriela Rangel is a Venezuelan writer and curator based in New York. Since 2004, she is the Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at Americas Society, New York. She holds a B.A. in film studies from the International Film School at San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba; an M.A. in media and communications studies from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas; and an M.A. in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. She has curated and co-curated a number of modern and contemporary Latin American art exhibitions, including Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship (Americas Society, 2013); Gego: Origin and Encounter-Mastering the Space (Americas Society, 2012); Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent! (Americas Society, 2011); Arturo Herrera: Les Noces (The Wedding) (Americas Society, 2011); and Gordon Matta-Clark: Undoing Spaces (Museo de Bellas Artes de Chile/ Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo/Paço Imperial de Rio de Janeiro/MALI, 2009–10).
