Mark Wallinger | William Mackrell | Radhika Khimji
02 May - 15 Jun 2019
MARK WALLINGER | WILLIAM MACKRELL | RADHIKA KHIMJI
2 May – 15 June 2019
MARK WALLINGER
Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front
Mark Wallinger, born 1959 in Chigwell, Essex, is one of the most important artists of his generation. Widely known for his sculpture Ecce Homo, the first sculpture presented at the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in 1999, also exhibited in the British Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 as well as in a solo exhibition at the Secession in 2000 in Vienna. In 2007 he won the Turner Prize for his installation State Britain.
The exhibition, entirely devoted to his paintings, is the artist’s third solo show at Galerie Krinzinger. Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front brings together paintings made since 2015, incorporating three distinct, but related bodies of work, entirely hand-made and related to the proportions of the artist.
The id Paintings (2015/2016) are black-and-white monochromes that grew out of the extensive Self Portrait series (exhibited at Krinzinger in 2013). Each canvas is the width of the artist’s span or height (180cm), by double height (360cm). They mark a significant shift from the painted ‘I’ to ‘I paint’. These performative works follow the traces of the artist - both hands working simultaneously to achieve symmetry on the upright canvas. The painting is flipped halfway through the process and thenceforth there is a dialogue for the other half to take part in. These pieces bear some resemblance to the psychological Rorschach test: the standard set of symmetrical ink blots of different shapes and colours presented one by one to a subject who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble. Recognition of figures is a reflection of our own desires and predilections, a mapping of the territory. We invite your introspection. You are implicated. Perhaps any mark when met with its mirror image, twin or double, has authority or meaning. One senses the process of making in more than purely visual terms because everything is pointing to active participation, something felt, experienced as empathy, is encouraged by the process itself. Painting is not usually experienced as a time-based medium. The various trajectories of a painting’s making are subsumed in a rush to apprehension of its finality. The painting is ready for the viewer when the work is completed. Here the activity has ceased as a point of arrest, so one’s scrutiny tends towards forensic examination: apprehension at the scene of the crime – evidence.
The Action Paintings (2017) are painted silver into black, wet on wet. The paintings capture four actions, (the canvas revolved by 90 degrees for each action) in the quickly drying paint. These works represent part of a larger concern with self-reflection, and how the trace of the hand’s gestures are indicative of the artist’s presence within the work: relaying movement and creating an unexpected illusory space that give the paintings a curious photographic quality. And, indeed, silver salts in gelatin are the light-sensitive material that is the basis of black-and-white photographs. ‘Silver’ has value and meaning beyond the paint and its reflective qualities here make for a shifting surface that is hard to define. The artist might be said to be painting with light.
The title Action Painting is obviously the term Harold Rosenberg coined in 1952 to describe how the canvas became ‘an arena in which to act,’ the painting being the residue of the act or process of painting itself. However, Wallinger dispenses with brushes and the ‘brush mark’ as some kind of authentic trace of the artist’s psyche, and makes literal ‘the hand of the artist.’ What could be more authentic than the direct handling of paint?
The Mirror Paintings (2018) have developed from the Self Portraits and id Paintings. The artist comments ‘Again working directly with my hands I began using silver paint on black grounds and working wet into wet. There is a hard-to-define embodying of gestures achieved by dint of the reflective nature of the paint and I was interested in paintings that shift and change according to the position of the viewer and the existent light. Pushing further I began to cover the entire expanse of the canvas with silver. These are worked in layers until the finished works are a palimpsest of their making, simultaneously registering the material of paint with depth and reflection. The surface sheen picks up the final gestures like the nap on cloth.’
Through the use of silver paint applied with the artist’s hands in free-form gestures these new works represent a further fetishized encounter with the canvas. The memory of his touch is suspended in the substance of the paintings. Their surfaces are insistently sculptural, tracing his hand and fingerprints, asserting direct and immediate engagement. They also take on an unpredictable illusory quality as the material sets. This transformation infuses the paintings with ‘a quality of otherness,’ a sense of elusiveness that Wallinger likens to gazing through the surface of water. „I was bearing in mind Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies‘ and the ineffable space – the reflection on the surface of water of endless space. There is a photograph, a self portrait that Monet took of his shadow on the lily pond at Giverny that became emblematic to the sequence.“
Mark Wallinger is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his protest-installation against the Iraq War State Britain. His work Ecce Homo (1999–2000) was the first piece to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Labyrinth (2013), a major and permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work Writ in Water was realized for the National Trust to celebrate Magna Carta at Runnymede, and The World Turned Upside Down was unveiled in 2019 for the London School of Economics. Selected solo exhibitions at: Serpentine Gallery, London (1995); Portikus, Hamburg (1999); Museum for Gegenwartskunst, Basel (1999); Palais Des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1999); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2000); Vienna Secession, Vienna (2000); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2001); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2004); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2005); Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City (2006); Tate Brita London in, (2007); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2007); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2008); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2010); Museum de Pont, Tilburg (2011); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2012); Serlachius Museum, Mänttä (2016); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2017); Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2018) and Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2018). Collections including: Tate, London; MoMA, New York; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. After sum (2013) and W-E (2005), Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front fully devoted to his paintings, is the artist’s third solo exibition at the Main Space of Galerie Krinzinger.
WILLIAM MACKRELL
Here is where we meet
William Mackrell, born 1983 in London, works out from the body, ingesting his experiences of sensation into the fragile assemblage of language. The dialogues in his installations ignite a constant push-pull of control and release, which run through his work, setting up unsettling scenarios that blur beauty with a sinister unraveling of his thoughts. Working out of performance and an intense activation of materials and surface, Mackrell unravels a sense of animality in his approach to absence, sexuality, waiting and rebirth.
Resulting from his second residency stay in 2017 (the first one in 2013), he showed his first solo exhibition Door for a day at the Krinzinger Projekte (catalogue available). With Here is where we meet he is showing his works for the first time in the Showroom of Galerie Krinzinger.
In addition to another series of works, Mackrell is showing Root-of-trust. He mouths an entire CIA document leaked from a cache of files released by former CIA Agent, Edward Snowden in 2013. The extent of contemporary global surveillance by U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies and their operational techniques to extort private information from foreign governments is broken down word by word in white lipstick on black archival cataloguing cards. He is transcoding the text into a kind of hieroglyphics of Mackrell’s own language. By unrevealing the revealed, we are offered a heightened sense of scepticism towards political transparency across the world at this moment.
William Mackrell lives and works in London. He graduated from the MFA Fine Art Goldmiths College, University of London (2016), the BA Painting Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London (2016) the the Foundation Diploma Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2002).
His work has been included in international solo - and group exhibitions including Let there be light, JAHM Collection, Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne (2019), Drawing: The Beginning of Everything, Albright-Knox
Museum, Buffalo (2017), Cover Up – Why Paintinge Now?, Krinzinger Projekte, Wien (2013), Infinite Jest, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK (2012). William Mackrell was awarded the Manchester Contemporary Art Fund in 2017 with acquisition of his work to the Manchester Art Gallery collection and received the Purchase Prize from Goldsmiths College in 2016. His works are held in public and private collections including the Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, the Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo Goldsmiths College, London and the Justin House Art Museum, Melbourne. Since 2013 the Galerie Krinzinger is showing his work at Art Fairs such as Frieze, London, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Dubai, Armory Show, New York, Art Bruessels, Art Basel and viennacontemporary.
RADHIKA KHIMJI
Shift
Radhika Khimji, born 1979 in Oman playfully employs methods of construction on the surface of an image, intentionally destabilising the relationship between figure and ground to reassemble a fragmented body and make it abstract. Terms are set in flux placing painting, drawing, photography and sculpture up against each other to allow for a place between many polarities to emerge. Khimji has developed a collaged way of working informed by the physicality and materiality of the making process to deconstruct, evade and erase constructions of formulated identities.
She borrows from a surrealistic language to shift cultural stereotypes and make visible a body screened by certain censorships.
In 2017 Radhika Khimji participated in the artist-in-residence program of Galerie Krinzinger and presented her artistic results in the solo exhibition Becoming Landscape at the Krinzinger Projekte. With her solo exhibition Shift, her latest works will be presented in the Galerie Krinzinger for the first time.
Radhika Khimji (b. 1979, Oman) lives and works in Muscat and London. Graduated from University College London, London (2007); the Royal Academy of Art, London (2005); and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2002). Radhika Khimji was the recipient of the Sir Frank and Lady Short Award (2004). Residencies include Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (2017) and Qbox Gallery, Tzia (2010). Selected solo exhibitions include Shift, Galerie Krinzinger (2019); On the Cusp, Stal Gallery, Muscat (2018); Becoming Landscape, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (2017); Of Place and Places, Gallery Sarah, Muscat (2016); Part Deux, Relics and artefacts, Gallery 88, Kolkata (2015); Artefacts from Below, Project 88, Mumbai (2014); Found Gesture, Katara Art Center, Doha (2012); and Safe Landings, Barka Castle, Barka (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Drawing Biennal 2019, Drawing Room, London (2019); Adventitious encounters, The Whiteleys, London (2018); Drawing Biennial 2017, Drawing Room, London (2017); Of Things Long Forgotten, Siegfried Contemporary, London (2017); Marrakech Biennale 6, Not New Now, Marrakech (2016); Somewhere In-Between, Karavil Contemporary, London (2015–2016); The 4th Ghetto Biennale, Port-Au-Prince (2015); Progress Reports, INIVA, London (2010); and The Franks-Suss Collection, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010). Her works are held in public and private collections including the Devi Art Collection, Delhi; Modern Forms, London; the Huma Kabakci Collection, Istanbul; and the Franks-Suss Collection, London.
2 May – 15 June 2019
MARK WALLINGER
Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front
Mark Wallinger, born 1959 in Chigwell, Essex, is one of the most important artists of his generation. Widely known for his sculpture Ecce Homo, the first sculpture presented at the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in 1999, also exhibited in the British Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 as well as in a solo exhibition at the Secession in 2000 in Vienna. In 2007 he won the Turner Prize for his installation State Britain.
The exhibition, entirely devoted to his paintings, is the artist’s third solo show at Galerie Krinzinger. Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front brings together paintings made since 2015, incorporating three distinct, but related bodies of work, entirely hand-made and related to the proportions of the artist.
The id Paintings (2015/2016) are black-and-white monochromes that grew out of the extensive Self Portrait series (exhibited at Krinzinger in 2013). Each canvas is the width of the artist’s span or height (180cm), by double height (360cm). They mark a significant shift from the painted ‘I’ to ‘I paint’. These performative works follow the traces of the artist - both hands working simultaneously to achieve symmetry on the upright canvas. The painting is flipped halfway through the process and thenceforth there is a dialogue for the other half to take part in. These pieces bear some resemblance to the psychological Rorschach test: the standard set of symmetrical ink blots of different shapes and colours presented one by one to a subject who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble. Recognition of figures is a reflection of our own desires and predilections, a mapping of the territory. We invite your introspection. You are implicated. Perhaps any mark when met with its mirror image, twin or double, has authority or meaning. One senses the process of making in more than purely visual terms because everything is pointing to active participation, something felt, experienced as empathy, is encouraged by the process itself. Painting is not usually experienced as a time-based medium. The various trajectories of a painting’s making are subsumed in a rush to apprehension of its finality. The painting is ready for the viewer when the work is completed. Here the activity has ceased as a point of arrest, so one’s scrutiny tends towards forensic examination: apprehension at the scene of the crime – evidence.
The Action Paintings (2017) are painted silver into black, wet on wet. The paintings capture four actions, (the canvas revolved by 90 degrees for each action) in the quickly drying paint. These works represent part of a larger concern with self-reflection, and how the trace of the hand’s gestures are indicative of the artist’s presence within the work: relaying movement and creating an unexpected illusory space that give the paintings a curious photographic quality. And, indeed, silver salts in gelatin are the light-sensitive material that is the basis of black-and-white photographs. ‘Silver’ has value and meaning beyond the paint and its reflective qualities here make for a shifting surface that is hard to define. The artist might be said to be painting with light.
The title Action Painting is obviously the term Harold Rosenberg coined in 1952 to describe how the canvas became ‘an arena in which to act,’ the painting being the residue of the act or process of painting itself. However, Wallinger dispenses with brushes and the ‘brush mark’ as some kind of authentic trace of the artist’s psyche, and makes literal ‘the hand of the artist.’ What could be more authentic than the direct handling of paint?
The Mirror Paintings (2018) have developed from the Self Portraits and id Paintings. The artist comments ‘Again working directly with my hands I began using silver paint on black grounds and working wet into wet. There is a hard-to-define embodying of gestures achieved by dint of the reflective nature of the paint and I was interested in paintings that shift and change according to the position of the viewer and the existent light. Pushing further I began to cover the entire expanse of the canvas with silver. These are worked in layers until the finished works are a palimpsest of their making, simultaneously registering the material of paint with depth and reflection. The surface sheen picks up the final gestures like the nap on cloth.’
Through the use of silver paint applied with the artist’s hands in free-form gestures these new works represent a further fetishized encounter with the canvas. The memory of his touch is suspended in the substance of the paintings. Their surfaces are insistently sculptural, tracing his hand and fingerprints, asserting direct and immediate engagement. They also take on an unpredictable illusory quality as the material sets. This transformation infuses the paintings with ‘a quality of otherness,’ a sense of elusiveness that Wallinger likens to gazing through the surface of water. „I was bearing in mind Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies‘ and the ineffable space – the reflection on the surface of water of endless space. There is a photograph, a self portrait that Monet took of his shadow on the lily pond at Giverny that became emblematic to the sequence.“
Mark Wallinger is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his protest-installation against the Iraq War State Britain. His work Ecce Homo (1999–2000) was the first piece to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Labyrinth (2013), a major and permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work Writ in Water was realized for the National Trust to celebrate Magna Carta at Runnymede, and The World Turned Upside Down was unveiled in 2019 for the London School of Economics. Selected solo exhibitions at: Serpentine Gallery, London (1995); Portikus, Hamburg (1999); Museum for Gegenwartskunst, Basel (1999); Palais Des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1999); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2000); Vienna Secession, Vienna (2000); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2001); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2004); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2005); Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City (2006); Tate Brita London in, (2007); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2007); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2008); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2010); Museum de Pont, Tilburg (2011); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2012); Serlachius Museum, Mänttä (2016); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2017); Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2018) and Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2018). Collections including: Tate, London; MoMA, New York; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. After sum (2013) and W-E (2005), Upside Down Inside Out Back to Front fully devoted to his paintings, is the artist’s third solo exibition at the Main Space of Galerie Krinzinger.
WILLIAM MACKRELL
Here is where we meet
William Mackrell, born 1983 in London, works out from the body, ingesting his experiences of sensation into the fragile assemblage of language. The dialogues in his installations ignite a constant push-pull of control and release, which run through his work, setting up unsettling scenarios that blur beauty with a sinister unraveling of his thoughts. Working out of performance and an intense activation of materials and surface, Mackrell unravels a sense of animality in his approach to absence, sexuality, waiting and rebirth.
Resulting from his second residency stay in 2017 (the first one in 2013), he showed his first solo exhibition Door for a day at the Krinzinger Projekte (catalogue available). With Here is where we meet he is showing his works for the first time in the Showroom of Galerie Krinzinger.
In addition to another series of works, Mackrell is showing Root-of-trust. He mouths an entire CIA document leaked from a cache of files released by former CIA Agent, Edward Snowden in 2013. The extent of contemporary global surveillance by U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies and their operational techniques to extort private information from foreign governments is broken down word by word in white lipstick on black archival cataloguing cards. He is transcoding the text into a kind of hieroglyphics of Mackrell’s own language. By unrevealing the revealed, we are offered a heightened sense of scepticism towards political transparency across the world at this moment.
William Mackrell lives and works in London. He graduated from the MFA Fine Art Goldmiths College, University of London (2016), the BA Painting Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London (2016) the the Foundation Diploma Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2002).
His work has been included in international solo - and group exhibitions including Let there be light, JAHM Collection, Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne (2019), Drawing: The Beginning of Everything, Albright-Knox
Museum, Buffalo (2017), Cover Up – Why Paintinge Now?, Krinzinger Projekte, Wien (2013), Infinite Jest, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK (2012). William Mackrell was awarded the Manchester Contemporary Art Fund in 2017 with acquisition of his work to the Manchester Art Gallery collection and received the Purchase Prize from Goldsmiths College in 2016. His works are held in public and private collections including the Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, the Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo Goldsmiths College, London and the Justin House Art Museum, Melbourne. Since 2013 the Galerie Krinzinger is showing his work at Art Fairs such as Frieze, London, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Dubai, Armory Show, New York, Art Bruessels, Art Basel and viennacontemporary.
RADHIKA KHIMJI
Shift
Radhika Khimji, born 1979 in Oman playfully employs methods of construction on the surface of an image, intentionally destabilising the relationship between figure and ground to reassemble a fragmented body and make it abstract. Terms are set in flux placing painting, drawing, photography and sculpture up against each other to allow for a place between many polarities to emerge. Khimji has developed a collaged way of working informed by the physicality and materiality of the making process to deconstruct, evade and erase constructions of formulated identities.
She borrows from a surrealistic language to shift cultural stereotypes and make visible a body screened by certain censorships.
In 2017 Radhika Khimji participated in the artist-in-residence program of Galerie Krinzinger and presented her artistic results in the solo exhibition Becoming Landscape at the Krinzinger Projekte. With her solo exhibition Shift, her latest works will be presented in the Galerie Krinzinger for the first time.
Radhika Khimji (b. 1979, Oman) lives and works in Muscat and London. Graduated from University College London, London (2007); the Royal Academy of Art, London (2005); and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2002). Radhika Khimji was the recipient of the Sir Frank and Lady Short Award (2004). Residencies include Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (2017) and Qbox Gallery, Tzia (2010). Selected solo exhibitions include Shift, Galerie Krinzinger (2019); On the Cusp, Stal Gallery, Muscat (2018); Becoming Landscape, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna (2017); Of Place and Places, Gallery Sarah, Muscat (2016); Part Deux, Relics and artefacts, Gallery 88, Kolkata (2015); Artefacts from Below, Project 88, Mumbai (2014); Found Gesture, Katara Art Center, Doha (2012); and Safe Landings, Barka Castle, Barka (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Drawing Biennal 2019, Drawing Room, London (2019); Adventitious encounters, The Whiteleys, London (2018); Drawing Biennial 2017, Drawing Room, London (2017); Of Things Long Forgotten, Siegfried Contemporary, London (2017); Marrakech Biennale 6, Not New Now, Marrakech (2016); Somewhere In-Between, Karavil Contemporary, London (2015–2016); The 4th Ghetto Biennale, Port-Au-Prince (2015); Progress Reports, INIVA, London (2010); and The Franks-Suss Collection, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010). Her works are held in public and private collections including the Devi Art Collection, Delhi; Modern Forms, London; the Huma Kabakci Collection, Istanbul; and the Franks-Suss Collection, London.