Sam Pulitzer
Shadow of the Problem as Such
25 Nov 2017 - 19 Jan 2018
Installation view, Sam Pulitzer, Shadow of the Problem as Such, Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, 2017. Photo: Annik Wetter
SAM PULITZER
Shadow of the Problem as Such
25 November 2017 – 19 January 2018
Galerie Francesca Pia is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Sam Pulitzer. For his first exhibition at the gallery, and first in Switzerland, Pulitzer has developed an installation that questions and redistributes received notions of the politics, history and day-to-day events of a connected, yet structurally asymmetric, world.
Consisting of 20 new intricately framed graphic works and seven wall texts in the form of entryways, Pulitzer’s newest works show a radical perspective on the chronicled precedents of the contemporary condition. Through a revealing of his personal research and a particular talent for aggregating information we are presented with work that becomes both diary and dictionary of a personal and worldly existence. Within all the works he levels references, quotations and snippets of struggles, critical stances, cultural thought and events across wide-reaching global boundaries and historical continuities.
His meticulously rendered graphic works merge a fetish for handmade craft against the multiple verbal visual references that are imbedded within. Reflecting an initial appearance of vintage advertising, children’s book illustrations, magazine pictorials and motivational posters; Pulitzer works within a common and ubiquitous language of images subconsciously known and felt. Underlying these images are textual captions in a broad range of languages that refer to current events, philosophy, poetry, punk, radical political projects, urban planning and economic analysis from the historian Perry Anderson to the poet Louis Zukofsky. Combined with titles from a similarly expansive reach of human action and interaction the pieces become fragments that exist as singular images and conceptual documents for further introspection. In each we are apprised of the possible interconnectedness of expansive and encyclopedic parts of an oft-interrupted historical process.
This is further enhanced with the installation of doorways or portals constructed of text. The gallery spaces are transformed into lobbies of gateways to further comparative thought. These textual interventions appear as some kind of paused LED scrolls, similar to the bottom of cable news programs and Times Square billboards, and suggest the continual movement of possible headlines stuck in a permanent moment. This abstraction of the present through an overlaying of the past and possible future is posed as a commentary frozen at this particular juncture. The exhibition, then, knowingly situates itself within the gallery as a symbolic and concrete point of exchange within the contemporary world-system as such.
Sam Pulitzer (b. 1984, New Hampshire, USA) has exhibited widely in the USA and internationally. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include at éstablissement d’en face, Brussels (2016), Artists Space, New York (2014) and Fondazione Pastifico Cerere, Rome (2012). He has been included in wide ranging group exhibitions including LUMA Westbau, Zurich (2016), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), Künstlerhaus Graz (2015), White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013), White Columns, New York (2013) and Sculpture Center, New York (2012).
Shadow of the Problem as Such
25 November 2017 – 19 January 2018
Galerie Francesca Pia is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Sam Pulitzer. For his first exhibition at the gallery, and first in Switzerland, Pulitzer has developed an installation that questions and redistributes received notions of the politics, history and day-to-day events of a connected, yet structurally asymmetric, world.
Consisting of 20 new intricately framed graphic works and seven wall texts in the form of entryways, Pulitzer’s newest works show a radical perspective on the chronicled precedents of the contemporary condition. Through a revealing of his personal research and a particular talent for aggregating information we are presented with work that becomes both diary and dictionary of a personal and worldly existence. Within all the works he levels references, quotations and snippets of struggles, critical stances, cultural thought and events across wide-reaching global boundaries and historical continuities.
His meticulously rendered graphic works merge a fetish for handmade craft against the multiple verbal visual references that are imbedded within. Reflecting an initial appearance of vintage advertising, children’s book illustrations, magazine pictorials and motivational posters; Pulitzer works within a common and ubiquitous language of images subconsciously known and felt. Underlying these images are textual captions in a broad range of languages that refer to current events, philosophy, poetry, punk, radical political projects, urban planning and economic analysis from the historian Perry Anderson to the poet Louis Zukofsky. Combined with titles from a similarly expansive reach of human action and interaction the pieces become fragments that exist as singular images and conceptual documents for further introspection. In each we are apprised of the possible interconnectedness of expansive and encyclopedic parts of an oft-interrupted historical process.
This is further enhanced with the installation of doorways or portals constructed of text. The gallery spaces are transformed into lobbies of gateways to further comparative thought. These textual interventions appear as some kind of paused LED scrolls, similar to the bottom of cable news programs and Times Square billboards, and suggest the continual movement of possible headlines stuck in a permanent moment. This abstraction of the present through an overlaying of the past and possible future is posed as a commentary frozen at this particular juncture. The exhibition, then, knowingly situates itself within the gallery as a symbolic and concrete point of exchange within the contemporary world-system as such.
Sam Pulitzer (b. 1984, New Hampshire, USA) has exhibited widely in the USA and internationally. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include at éstablissement d’en face, Brussels (2016), Artists Space, New York (2014) and Fondazione Pastifico Cerere, Rome (2012). He has been included in wide ranging group exhibitions including LUMA Westbau, Zurich (2016), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), Künstlerhaus Graz (2015), White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013), White Columns, New York (2013) and Sculpture Center, New York (2012).