Pavel Büchler
18 Oct - 15 Nov 2014
© Pavel Büchler
'Engagements (Film diary 1991)', 1991
Spiral bound engagements diary with 43 collages/drawings
20 x 22 cm
Unique
'Engagements (Film diary 1991)', 1991
Spiral bound engagements diary with 43 collages/drawings
20 x 22 cm
Unique
PAVEL BÜCHLER
Back to Work
18 October - 15 November 2014
Curated by Philippe Pirotte
Tanya Leighton is proud to present 'Back to Work', an exhibition of early collages by Pavel Büchler, which have never been shown before. This exhibition is curated by Philippe Pirotte, Rector, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt.
In the 1970s and 80s Pavel Büchler ventured to collage. The principles of the medium remained a working strategy, the traces of which can be seen in his subsequent artistic itinerary. Though initially working in the vein of fellow Czech artist Jiří Kolář, Büchler seemed to be aware that he was developing a body of work that did not really add "new" material to the visual production of the world, but that this form of conceptualism would instead engage with a variety of his predilections like photography, writing, misunderstanding, the Kafkaesque, and technology.
When surveying the stock of his early collages, at first one suspects that Büchler is constructing a typical artistic dualism: a nice but nasty tactic in which a scene is contaminated with something discordant. Rather than creating surprising and visually striking new combinations, Büchler furthers the self-evident rhetoric and compositions of the images he pairs. His approach to collage exposes the visual structure of his source material, flirting with their subliminal meaning, and perversely refiguring them towards a certain normalcy. Forgoing self-reflexive art historical ironies, Büchler makes his images reverberate, lending the resulting works a distinct humor.
Büchler works with his images as if they were texts - in his subsequent development he would work with texts as if they were images. Collage becomes a form of writing, wherein the text, in Barthesian spirit, begins to live its own life, taking lead over the author. As experimental sketches, Büchler's early collages represent his first forays in developing a discipline that continues something preexisting - re-stating, albeit in a different way, what is already there. As abstractly disquieting artistic objects, the rediscovery and exhibition of Büchler's collages reveals the slightly taboo fascination for the anachronistic tradition in which they take part.
- Philippe Pirotte
Awarded the Northern Art Prize 2009 and The Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists 2012, Büchler has recently exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2014); Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2014); Power Plant, Toronto (2013); The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneve (2011); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel (2011); Museion, Bolzano (2011); DOX, Prague (2010), Tinguely Museum, Basel (2010); and MuHKA, Antwerp (2010), among others.
Back to Work
18 October - 15 November 2014
Curated by Philippe Pirotte
Tanya Leighton is proud to present 'Back to Work', an exhibition of early collages by Pavel Büchler, which have never been shown before. This exhibition is curated by Philippe Pirotte, Rector, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt.
In the 1970s and 80s Pavel Büchler ventured to collage. The principles of the medium remained a working strategy, the traces of which can be seen in his subsequent artistic itinerary. Though initially working in the vein of fellow Czech artist Jiří Kolář, Büchler seemed to be aware that he was developing a body of work that did not really add "new" material to the visual production of the world, but that this form of conceptualism would instead engage with a variety of his predilections like photography, writing, misunderstanding, the Kafkaesque, and technology.
When surveying the stock of his early collages, at first one suspects that Büchler is constructing a typical artistic dualism: a nice but nasty tactic in which a scene is contaminated with something discordant. Rather than creating surprising and visually striking new combinations, Büchler furthers the self-evident rhetoric and compositions of the images he pairs. His approach to collage exposes the visual structure of his source material, flirting with their subliminal meaning, and perversely refiguring them towards a certain normalcy. Forgoing self-reflexive art historical ironies, Büchler makes his images reverberate, lending the resulting works a distinct humor.
Büchler works with his images as if they were texts - in his subsequent development he would work with texts as if they were images. Collage becomes a form of writing, wherein the text, in Barthesian spirit, begins to live its own life, taking lead over the author. As experimental sketches, Büchler's early collages represent his first forays in developing a discipline that continues something preexisting - re-stating, albeit in a different way, what is already there. As abstractly disquieting artistic objects, the rediscovery and exhibition of Büchler's collages reveals the slightly taboo fascination for the anachronistic tradition in which they take part.
- Philippe Pirotte
Awarded the Northern Art Prize 2009 and The Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists 2012, Büchler has recently exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2014); Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2014); Power Plant, Toronto (2013); The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2012); Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneve (2011); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel (2011); Museion, Bolzano (2011); DOX, Prague (2010), Tinguely Museum, Basel (2010); and MuHKA, Antwerp (2010), among others.