Frances Stark
lonely and abandoned on the market place
28 Jun - 17 Aug 2019
Frances Stark
“Reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantamo Diary on the laptop by the fire not long before he was finally released after 17 years”, 2019
Flashe, acrylic, Sumi ink and gesso on canvas
145 x 112 cm
&
“In a book commemorating Ed Ruscha’s 2005 American Pavilion I contributed an essay (alongside Joan Didion no less!) entitled Always the Same, Always Different ”, 2019
Flashe, acrylic, gesso on canvas
112 x 145 cm
installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2019
“Reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantamo Diary on the laptop by the fire not long before he was finally released after 17 years”, 2019
Flashe, acrylic, Sumi ink and gesso on canvas
145 x 112 cm
&
“In a book commemorating Ed Ruscha’s 2005 American Pavilion I contributed an essay (alongside Joan Didion no less!) entitled Always the Same, Always Different ”, 2019
Flashe, acrylic, gesso on canvas
112 x 145 cm
installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2019
FRANCES STARK
lonely and abandoned on the market place
28 June – 17 August 2019
The titles of these paintings point to various leads that a close reader can follow:
Clever/Stupid promotional prize poster with parrot pair, or “Art offers the possibility of love with strangers”, 2019
“An invitation to escape from the relentless tyranny of Now that keeps us hooked to the irresistible fruit of American Empire,” is one of the sentences I got paid to write for Raymond Pettibon’s New Museum catalogue in 2017, 2018
A book object made for Parkett in 2013 called Dishonest But Appealing, 2019
Bobby Jesus’s unwritten picaresque memoir in the form of a book object with a hidden chamber between the pages to stash away secret things, 2019
Reading Ian Svenonius’s Psychic Soviet from 2006, 2019
Reading the Gore Vidal book of interviews Julian Assange was carrying as he was carted off to prison in
April 2019, 2019
Reading about the Americas before and after Columbus in the 15th century, 2019
Chain Brain (pink), 2018
Chain Brain (black), 2018
Reading Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare from the mid-1940’s, 2019
Reading Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death written in 1985, 2019
Reading James Baldwin’s last interview from 1987, 2019
Reading Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual from 1994, 2019
The index of Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion from 2009, or War comma Warhol, 2019
In a book commemorating Ed Ruscha’s 2005 American Pavilion I contributed an essay (alongside Joan
Didion no less!) entitled Always the Same, Always Different, 2019
Reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantamo Diary on the laptop by the fire not long before he was finally released after 17 years, 2019
Study for “Censorship Now!”, 2016
I’m not making a syllabus but rather capturing these haptic engagements with (mostly) American voices critical of empire. And then there’s the choice to paint, the re-orientation/transposition of long-form thought, my own battle with an inability to write and utter failure to feel stabilized by any sense of value or agency — an unmoored mind, trapped in the market, confused about what constitutes community and the social... The title of the show is snatched from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”:
“It is a frequent occurrence that someone gets stuck with a high purchase price because he kept raising his bid – more to assert himself than to acquire the book. On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place, and bought it to give it is freedom – the way the price bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”
— Frances Stark, 2019
Galerie Buchholz announces the fifth solo exhibition by Frances Stark since 2000, and her second in our Berlin gallery. Frances Stark (*Newport Beach, California, 1967, lives and works in Los Angeles) has had recent survey exhibitions including “Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991-2015” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015-2016) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016-2017, and “Intimism” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her works have been presented in major international exhibitions, including “Censorship Now!” in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), “Bobby Jesus’s Alma Matter...” at the Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2013), “Put a Song in your Thing” at Performa, New York (2011), and her digital video “My Best Thing”, first shown at the 54th Venice Biennial (2011). Additional solo exhibitions by Frances Stark include the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2013); MoMA P.S. 1, New York (2011); the M.I.T. List Center, Cambridge (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2007), and the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2007), among others. She was a 2018 nominee for the Hugo Boss Prize, and the 2015 recipient of the Absolut Art Award. Her work is included in the collections of the MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and others.
lonely and abandoned on the market place
28 June – 17 August 2019
The titles of these paintings point to various leads that a close reader can follow:
Clever/Stupid promotional prize poster with parrot pair, or “Art offers the possibility of love with strangers”, 2019
“An invitation to escape from the relentless tyranny of Now that keeps us hooked to the irresistible fruit of American Empire,” is one of the sentences I got paid to write for Raymond Pettibon’s New Museum catalogue in 2017, 2018
A book object made for Parkett in 2013 called Dishonest But Appealing, 2019
Bobby Jesus’s unwritten picaresque memoir in the form of a book object with a hidden chamber between the pages to stash away secret things, 2019
Reading Ian Svenonius’s Psychic Soviet from 2006, 2019
Reading the Gore Vidal book of interviews Julian Assange was carrying as he was carted off to prison in
April 2019, 2019
Reading about the Americas before and after Columbus in the 15th century, 2019
Chain Brain (pink), 2018
Chain Brain (black), 2018
Reading Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare from the mid-1940’s, 2019
Reading Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death written in 1985, 2019
Reading James Baldwin’s last interview from 1987, 2019
Reading Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual from 1994, 2019
The index of Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion from 2009, or War comma Warhol, 2019
In a book commemorating Ed Ruscha’s 2005 American Pavilion I contributed an essay (alongside Joan
Didion no less!) entitled Always the Same, Always Different, 2019
Reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantamo Diary on the laptop by the fire not long before he was finally released after 17 years, 2019
Study for “Censorship Now!”, 2016
I’m not making a syllabus but rather capturing these haptic engagements with (mostly) American voices critical of empire. And then there’s the choice to paint, the re-orientation/transposition of long-form thought, my own battle with an inability to write and utter failure to feel stabilized by any sense of value or agency — an unmoored mind, trapped in the market, confused about what constitutes community and the social... The title of the show is snatched from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”:
“It is a frequent occurrence that someone gets stuck with a high purchase price because he kept raising his bid – more to assert himself than to acquire the book. On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place, and bought it to give it is freedom – the way the price bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”
— Frances Stark, 2019
Galerie Buchholz announces the fifth solo exhibition by Frances Stark since 2000, and her second in our Berlin gallery. Frances Stark (*Newport Beach, California, 1967, lives and works in Los Angeles) has had recent survey exhibitions including “Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991-2015” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015-2016) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016-2017, and “Intimism” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her works have been presented in major international exhibitions, including “Censorship Now!” in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), “Bobby Jesus’s Alma Matter...” at the Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2013), “Put a Song in your Thing” at Performa, New York (2011), and her digital video “My Best Thing”, first shown at the 54th Venice Biennial (2011). Additional solo exhibitions by Frances Stark include the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2013); MoMA P.S. 1, New York (2011); the M.I.T. List Center, Cambridge (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2007), and the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2007), among others. She was a 2018 nominee for the Hugo Boss Prize, and the 2015 recipient of the Absolut Art Award. Her work is included in the collections of the MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and others.