Erik van Lieshout
27 Oct 2007 - 18 Jan 2008
Erik van Lieshout
gaza surfers
“Gaza Surfers” by Erik van Lieshout (1968) represents the second solo exhibition in our gallery. It follows the show that took place in the spring this year at Kunsthaus Zurich, which resulted from a collaboration between the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam and the Städtische Galerie at Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Like only few artists of his generation, Erik van Lieshout fuses life and work to an entity, far from any formalisms or aesthetic concerns. Running through the drawings, paintings and video works there is a thematic strand that ranges from a parody of hip hop and pornography, capitalism and machismo, all the way to morals and religion. The artist is a protagonist in any and every media, who puts his impulsive and fragile self on unadorned display. In his often clip-like videos he interacts, unsparingly direct, with social outsiders, with neo-Nazis and rappers, with the mentally handicapped or members of his own family.
Thus in the video “Respect” (2003), Erik van Lieshout, with his homesexual brother, strolls through the immigrant quarter of Rotterdam where, against a background of violence and marginality, the clash of cultures is described. The artist does so without any aesthetic distancing, but instead formulates his own bisexual tensions as well as his slant on the immigrants that is one “between fear and fetishizing”. In the video shown in our last exhibition, “Up!” (2005), he tried to master his existential crisis and unsuccessful search for a self by means of therapeutic measures. Whereby rage and desperation and the contradiction between one’s own fantasies and factual reality reflect the fragility of the conditio humana. In the video “Rock” (2006), a nouveau-riche businessman is at the crux of the plot. The status symbols of wealth can, however, not obscure the fact that, despite all the pomp and circumstance, an existential hopelessness looms ahead that ties in with earlier works.
The video installation “Guantánamo Baywatch” (Part 3, 2007), continues the films presented in Kunsthaus Zurich “Guantánamo Baywatch” (Part 1 and 2), which Erik van Lieshout filmed in Los Angeles. The artist shot part 3 during a stay in Israel, which brings the trilogy to an end. In contrast to earlier video works, we can see a change in the film’s aesthetic. It is no longer only rapid, staccato-like rhythms that determine the individual scenes, but longer shots allow the artist’s interest in a more strict cinematic composition to be foregrounded. While part 1 and 2 is dedicated to the fuzzy borderline between the real and the unreal in Hollywood and the suppressed reactions of U.S. citizens to the intervention in Iraq, the artist’s stay in Israel confronted him directly with the political and socio-economic conflicts of another trouble spot. The undaunted way Erik van Lieshout exposes himself to the menace of an everyday life branded by fear and violence shows once again that political themes run through his works “like a leitmotif”, insofar as the political is also the personal. “Guantánamo Baywatch” is neither documentary investigation nor critique, but the immediate expression of personal dismay that, via its artistic reworking, is given universal significance: “I have quite exact ideas about art, namely the fact that art should, in the end, always be stronger than I am myself.”
Birgid Uccia
Opening: Friday, 26 October from 6 to 8 pm.
The artist will be present.
gaza surfers
“Gaza Surfers” by Erik van Lieshout (1968) represents the second solo exhibition in our gallery. It follows the show that took place in the spring this year at Kunsthaus Zurich, which resulted from a collaboration between the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam and the Städtische Galerie at Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Like only few artists of his generation, Erik van Lieshout fuses life and work to an entity, far from any formalisms or aesthetic concerns. Running through the drawings, paintings and video works there is a thematic strand that ranges from a parody of hip hop and pornography, capitalism and machismo, all the way to morals and religion. The artist is a protagonist in any and every media, who puts his impulsive and fragile self on unadorned display. In his often clip-like videos he interacts, unsparingly direct, with social outsiders, with neo-Nazis and rappers, with the mentally handicapped or members of his own family.
Thus in the video “Respect” (2003), Erik van Lieshout, with his homesexual brother, strolls through the immigrant quarter of Rotterdam where, against a background of violence and marginality, the clash of cultures is described. The artist does so without any aesthetic distancing, but instead formulates his own bisexual tensions as well as his slant on the immigrants that is one “between fear and fetishizing”. In the video shown in our last exhibition, “Up!” (2005), he tried to master his existential crisis and unsuccessful search for a self by means of therapeutic measures. Whereby rage and desperation and the contradiction between one’s own fantasies and factual reality reflect the fragility of the conditio humana. In the video “Rock” (2006), a nouveau-riche businessman is at the crux of the plot. The status symbols of wealth can, however, not obscure the fact that, despite all the pomp and circumstance, an existential hopelessness looms ahead that ties in with earlier works.
The video installation “Guantánamo Baywatch” (Part 3, 2007), continues the films presented in Kunsthaus Zurich “Guantánamo Baywatch” (Part 1 and 2), which Erik van Lieshout filmed in Los Angeles. The artist shot part 3 during a stay in Israel, which brings the trilogy to an end. In contrast to earlier video works, we can see a change in the film’s aesthetic. It is no longer only rapid, staccato-like rhythms that determine the individual scenes, but longer shots allow the artist’s interest in a more strict cinematic composition to be foregrounded. While part 1 and 2 is dedicated to the fuzzy borderline between the real and the unreal in Hollywood and the suppressed reactions of U.S. citizens to the intervention in Iraq, the artist’s stay in Israel confronted him directly with the political and socio-economic conflicts of another trouble spot. The undaunted way Erik van Lieshout exposes himself to the menace of an everyday life branded by fear and violence shows once again that political themes run through his works “like a leitmotif”, insofar as the political is also the personal. “Guantánamo Baywatch” is neither documentary investigation nor critique, but the immediate expression of personal dismay that, via its artistic reworking, is given universal significance: “I have quite exact ideas about art, namely the fact that art should, in the end, always be stronger than I am myself.”
Birgid Uccia
Opening: Friday, 26 October from 6 to 8 pm.
The artist will be present.