Artur Zmijewski / Bruno Jakob
21 Jan - 04 Mar 2006
ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI
20th January - 4th March 2006
Opening: Friday, 20th January 2006, 6 - 8pm
The Peter Kilchmann Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski (born 1966 in Warsaw, lives and works there). The exhibition presents a new three-part video work.
For his new film project Artur Zmijewski was looking for three different employed persons whom he found via an advertisement in a local newspaper. He received their agreement for filming each of them for 24 hours. The leading characters are a laun-dress, a woman who works on the assembly line in a factory and a mechanic from Warsaw. Zmijewski interviewed each pro-tagonist in advance, in order to briefly get to know the personal and vocational surroundings. The artist then shortened each 24-hour film into a 5-minute sequence. The result is the subjective attempt of a cinematic essence about the organization of every-day life. By means of the apparently objective camera eye the artist has caught banal and repeated activities like getting up, working, family work, eating and sleeping. The onlooker is to question the analogies and deviations between the various pro-gressions of everyday life. Strictly speaking, the regularity of our everyday life can be disturbed by unforeseen events and sud-denly change.
"Everyday life ? Holiday [...], everyday life = routine [...] everyday life = working day [...] everyday life = life of the mass of the peoples [...] everyday life = event range of the daily life [...] everyday life = private life (family, love, children) [...] everyday life = sphere of the natural, spontaneous, unreflected and true experiencing and thinking [...] everyday life (everyday life conscious-ness) = epitome of ideological, naive, not well thought through and wrong experiencing and thinking [... ] the list is everything not but complete." (Elias 1978, S. 26) . Which meaning do 24 hours have in the life of a human being? Usually, everyday life is shaped by repetitive samples such as work, consumption (purchase and food), family, leisure and sleep, the progressions of which can be easily foreseen. In this context, the artist examines individual rituals, repetitions, orders, and automatisms. Beyond other things the artist’s video work focuses on the uncovering/indicating of the unconsciously steered everyday life action, which can be understood as a social interaction moment, because the human being is always located into a social and cultural con-text.
Thematically, the artist concerns himself with the mode of presentation of deviating physicality (physical/psychological), shows an interest in the narration of subjective life reality, the visualization of human emotions such as shame and vulnerability and tests the excess of the individual privacy again and again. With its cinematic and photographic work, Zmijewksi locates himself between documentary film and narration, between report and fiction. He is a reserved observer, who describes human behav-iour under psychological and sociological aspects. Advertisements in newspapers frequently serve the artist as an aid to find his protagonists. He observes them for his films, confronts them with an arranged situation, and thus provokes them. On the one hand, the artist functions, as a sociological catalyst of social snap shots and on the other hand the documentary film appears likes an apparently objective authority.
In the beginning of the early Nineties Artur Zmijewski visited (with Pawel Althamer and Katazyna Kozyra) the master studio of the artist and professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the sculptor faculty of the Warsaw academy of arts. He began to work as a sculp-tor, but after his diploma, he changed the medium to photography and film. Zmijewski was also active as a free curator and critic in Poland until the late 1990s. He was recently included in the 2005 Venice Biennial as the representative of the Polish Pavilion (Repetition, 2005). Since the late Nineties Zmijewski has had several solo and group exhibitions, e.g. Artur Zmijewski, Kunsthal-le Basel, Switzerland (2005); Das unmögliche Theater, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2005); Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video 1995–2005, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA (2005); Artur Zmijewski. Selected Works, 1998 – 2003, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2004), Under the red and white flag. New art from Poland, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, (2004); Manifesta 4, Frankfurt on the Main, Germany (2002); in freiheit / endlich – Polnische Kunst nach 1989, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2000).
OVERVIEW (ÜBERBLICK) – a new event in the evening, in which we respectively present a selection of works from the com-plete work of the artist, in relation to the exhibition, which will be commentated and discussed.
Dates: Wednesday, 8th February 2006 and 22nd February 2006, 7pm
Place: Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich
The artist will be present at the opening. For more information, please contact Cynthia Krell +41 44 440 39 31 or c.krell@kilchmanngalerie.com
BRUNO JAKOB
MY PAINTINGS
20th January - 4th March 2006
Opening: Friday, 20th January 2006, 6 - 8pm, kilchmann plus
The Peter Kilchmann Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition titled My Paintings by the Swiss artist Bruno Jakob (born 1954 in Switzerland, has been living and working in New York since 1983). During the opening, the artist will present a live performance in kilchmann plus.
Bruno Jakob paints invisible pictures with water on paper and canvases. For the production of his pictures, he uses differ-ently marked containers/cups with water, brushes in different sizes and strengths and his imagination. Jakob himself calls his pictures Invisible Paintings/Drawings. The artist is strictly spoken a painter without colours, because he uses pure water without pigments. During the procedure the brush is put into different containers/cups several times, it moves skilfully over the paper or canvas, draws circles, lines, points, surfaces, stops and dives into another container again. You can see figura-tive and abstract forms, which leave traces in the shape of waves and which change the surface of the material. The pictures partially carry absurd titles (6 Legs Confused, 1991), which open a wide association area to the viewer or they receive a more descriptive title (Evening Landscape with to Two Men, 1991), which demonstrate a concrete situation to the recipient.
The artist has also developed so-called energy pictures (Energie-Bilder). The physicist Albert Einstein once formulated the following thoughts: "Each energy corresponds to a mass, and each mass can be attributed to an energy." In the beginning of the Nineties, the artist produced a set of energy pictures entitled Green Prison nearby Bad Scuol, Switzerland. For this the artist had painted a canvas with locally well-known welfare water (Emerita -, Bonifacius and Luciuswater). With these can-vases, Bruno Jakob went to wander through the forest nearby. There, the canvas was hold in the direction of a deer for one hour. According to the artist, the canvas took up the energy. Characteristic for the work of Jakob remains the equation image = blank space, which can be dissolved only with the help of the viewer’s imagination.
The painting process is the focus of the artist who at the same time leads this focus ad absurdum. His pictures are the result of the intensive examination of the process of painting and the thinking about painting with pictorial means (Meta-Malerei). His artistic development shows the turn to an art of fleetingness and immateriality. It questions the borders of visibility, the materiality and it examines the colour white in the fine arts.
After the artist had visited the painting class in the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel (1976-1978) and after his study at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf (1978-1981), he has participated in several solo- and group exhibitions, e.g. A Brief History of Invisible Art, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2005); Highlights, Synagogue, Samorin (2004); 8006 Les Bains, Swisstag Haus, Zurich (2003); Invisible Paintings, Ateliers Höherweg, Düsseldorf (2003); Philosophy Energized (Invisble Paintings) – Das Kunstwerk und sein Ort, Amden (2002); das weiss dahinter, Kunsthalle Palazzo Liestal (2002); Vapor, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2002); Waving Animals Cathedral Saint John of the Divine, Harlem/New York (2000).
The artist will be present at the opening. For more information, please contact Claudia Friedli +41 44 440 39 31 or c.friedli@kilchmanngalerie.com
© Artur Zmijewski / Bruno Jakob
20th January - 4th March 2006
Opening: Friday, 20th January 2006, 6 - 8pm
The Peter Kilchmann Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski (born 1966 in Warsaw, lives and works there). The exhibition presents a new three-part video work.
For his new film project Artur Zmijewski was looking for three different employed persons whom he found via an advertisement in a local newspaper. He received their agreement for filming each of them for 24 hours. The leading characters are a laun-dress, a woman who works on the assembly line in a factory and a mechanic from Warsaw. Zmijewski interviewed each pro-tagonist in advance, in order to briefly get to know the personal and vocational surroundings. The artist then shortened each 24-hour film into a 5-minute sequence. The result is the subjective attempt of a cinematic essence about the organization of every-day life. By means of the apparently objective camera eye the artist has caught banal and repeated activities like getting up, working, family work, eating and sleeping. The onlooker is to question the analogies and deviations between the various pro-gressions of everyday life. Strictly speaking, the regularity of our everyday life can be disturbed by unforeseen events and sud-denly change.
"Everyday life ? Holiday [...], everyday life = routine [...] everyday life = working day [...] everyday life = life of the mass of the peoples [...] everyday life = event range of the daily life [...] everyday life = private life (family, love, children) [...] everyday life = sphere of the natural, spontaneous, unreflected and true experiencing and thinking [...] everyday life (everyday life conscious-ness) = epitome of ideological, naive, not well thought through and wrong experiencing and thinking [... ] the list is everything not but complete." (Elias 1978, S. 26) . Which meaning do 24 hours have in the life of a human being? Usually, everyday life is shaped by repetitive samples such as work, consumption (purchase and food), family, leisure and sleep, the progressions of which can be easily foreseen. In this context, the artist examines individual rituals, repetitions, orders, and automatisms. Beyond other things the artist’s video work focuses on the uncovering/indicating of the unconsciously steered everyday life action, which can be understood as a social interaction moment, because the human being is always located into a social and cultural con-text.
Thematically, the artist concerns himself with the mode of presentation of deviating physicality (physical/psychological), shows an interest in the narration of subjective life reality, the visualization of human emotions such as shame and vulnerability and tests the excess of the individual privacy again and again. With its cinematic and photographic work, Zmijewksi locates himself between documentary film and narration, between report and fiction. He is a reserved observer, who describes human behav-iour under psychological and sociological aspects. Advertisements in newspapers frequently serve the artist as an aid to find his protagonists. He observes them for his films, confronts them with an arranged situation, and thus provokes them. On the one hand, the artist functions, as a sociological catalyst of social snap shots and on the other hand the documentary film appears likes an apparently objective authority.
In the beginning of the early Nineties Artur Zmijewski visited (with Pawel Althamer and Katazyna Kozyra) the master studio of the artist and professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the sculptor faculty of the Warsaw academy of arts. He began to work as a sculp-tor, but after his diploma, he changed the medium to photography and film. Zmijewski was also active as a free curator and critic in Poland until the late 1990s. He was recently included in the 2005 Venice Biennial as the representative of the Polish Pavilion (Repetition, 2005). Since the late Nineties Zmijewski has had several solo and group exhibitions, e.g. Artur Zmijewski, Kunsthal-le Basel, Switzerland (2005); Das unmögliche Theater, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2005); Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video 1995–2005, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA (2005); Artur Zmijewski. Selected Works, 1998 – 2003, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2004), Under the red and white flag. New art from Poland, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, (2004); Manifesta 4, Frankfurt on the Main, Germany (2002); in freiheit / endlich – Polnische Kunst nach 1989, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2000).
OVERVIEW (ÜBERBLICK) – a new event in the evening, in which we respectively present a selection of works from the com-plete work of the artist, in relation to the exhibition, which will be commentated and discussed.
Dates: Wednesday, 8th February 2006 and 22nd February 2006, 7pm
Place: Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich
The artist will be present at the opening. For more information, please contact Cynthia Krell +41 44 440 39 31 or c.krell@kilchmanngalerie.com
BRUNO JAKOB
MY PAINTINGS
20th January - 4th March 2006
Opening: Friday, 20th January 2006, 6 - 8pm, kilchmann plus
The Peter Kilchmann Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition titled My Paintings by the Swiss artist Bruno Jakob (born 1954 in Switzerland, has been living and working in New York since 1983). During the opening, the artist will present a live performance in kilchmann plus.
Bruno Jakob paints invisible pictures with water on paper and canvases. For the production of his pictures, he uses differ-ently marked containers/cups with water, brushes in different sizes and strengths and his imagination. Jakob himself calls his pictures Invisible Paintings/Drawings. The artist is strictly spoken a painter without colours, because he uses pure water without pigments. During the procedure the brush is put into different containers/cups several times, it moves skilfully over the paper or canvas, draws circles, lines, points, surfaces, stops and dives into another container again. You can see figura-tive and abstract forms, which leave traces in the shape of waves and which change the surface of the material. The pictures partially carry absurd titles (6 Legs Confused, 1991), which open a wide association area to the viewer or they receive a more descriptive title (Evening Landscape with to Two Men, 1991), which demonstrate a concrete situation to the recipient.
The artist has also developed so-called energy pictures (Energie-Bilder). The physicist Albert Einstein once formulated the following thoughts: "Each energy corresponds to a mass, and each mass can be attributed to an energy." In the beginning of the Nineties, the artist produced a set of energy pictures entitled Green Prison nearby Bad Scuol, Switzerland. For this the artist had painted a canvas with locally well-known welfare water (Emerita -, Bonifacius and Luciuswater). With these can-vases, Bruno Jakob went to wander through the forest nearby. There, the canvas was hold in the direction of a deer for one hour. According to the artist, the canvas took up the energy. Characteristic for the work of Jakob remains the equation image = blank space, which can be dissolved only with the help of the viewer’s imagination.
The painting process is the focus of the artist who at the same time leads this focus ad absurdum. His pictures are the result of the intensive examination of the process of painting and the thinking about painting with pictorial means (Meta-Malerei). His artistic development shows the turn to an art of fleetingness and immateriality. It questions the borders of visibility, the materiality and it examines the colour white in the fine arts.
After the artist had visited the painting class in the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel (1976-1978) and after his study at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf (1978-1981), he has participated in several solo- and group exhibitions, e.g. A Brief History of Invisible Art, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2005); Highlights, Synagogue, Samorin (2004); 8006 Les Bains, Swisstag Haus, Zurich (2003); Invisible Paintings, Ateliers Höherweg, Düsseldorf (2003); Philosophy Energized (Invisble Paintings) – Das Kunstwerk und sein Ort, Amden (2002); das weiss dahinter, Kunsthalle Palazzo Liestal (2002); Vapor, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2002); Waving Animals Cathedral Saint John of the Divine, Harlem/New York (2000).
The artist will be present at the opening. For more information, please contact Claudia Friedli +41 44 440 39 31 or c.friedli@kilchmanngalerie.com
© Artur Zmijewski / Bruno Jakob