Walead Beshty
19 Apr - 26 May 2012
WALEAD BESHTY
Travel Pictures
19 April - 26 May 2012
Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to announce a second solo exhibition of Walead Beshty (b. 1976 in London. Lives and works in Los Angeles).
This two-part exhibition is presented in both gallery spaces, at No11 and No3 Duke Street, St. James’s. It combines Beshty’s definitive series ‘Travel Pictures’, 2006 with its recent pendent series,Travel Pictures, 2012.
The nine ‘Travel Pictures’ are exhibited for the first time in London, after having been presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006 and at the Whitney Biennial, New York in 2008. The series of large-format photographs documents an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic office located in former East Berlin, itself vacated to the West by the German Democratic Republic in 1990.
On his return journey from Berlin, as he moved across international borders, Beshty's photographic film was damaged by airport security checkpoint X-ray machines. This transpired to be fortuitous accident that generated discoloured - or ‘re-coloured’ - images of a site stripped of its sovereignty and exposed to the elements.
The presence of chance, of random external factors, and the transformation of security or corporate apparatuses into art production units, have since integrated Beshty’s work in both photography and sculpture.
By punching a hole through the original negatives of the ‘Travel Pictures’ - a normal practice for preventing their re-use, but also a technique often exploited for creative purposes - Beshty has created a new series, the Travel Pictures. With their striking, pitch-black circles blocking significant parts of the picture, these photographs perpetuate the cycle of manipulation and recycling characteristic of his work and constitute both a ‘cancellation’ of the initial project and also its open-endedness.
The exhibition also includes a new iteration of Beshty's ‘After the Ends’ film screening programme – which has been shown at the Hammer; ZKM, Karlsruhe; The Institut Im Glas, Berlin; the Kadist Foundation, Paris and the Whitney Biennial. For the first time, the whole programme of fourteen ‘cold-war, apocalypse’ films will be shown forward as well as backwards.
Walead Beshty completed his MFA at Yale University School of Art in 2002. He has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia; recent solo-exhibitions include the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Malmo Konsthall; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan and Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
Travel Pictures
19 April - 26 May 2012
Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to announce a second solo exhibition of Walead Beshty (b. 1976 in London. Lives and works in Los Angeles).
This two-part exhibition is presented in both gallery spaces, at No11 and No3 Duke Street, St. James’s. It combines Beshty’s definitive series ‘Travel Pictures’, 2006 with its recent pendent series,Travel Pictures, 2012.
The nine ‘Travel Pictures’ are exhibited for the first time in London, after having been presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006 and at the Whitney Biennial, New York in 2008. The series of large-format photographs documents an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic office located in former East Berlin, itself vacated to the West by the German Democratic Republic in 1990.
On his return journey from Berlin, as he moved across international borders, Beshty's photographic film was damaged by airport security checkpoint X-ray machines. This transpired to be fortuitous accident that generated discoloured - or ‘re-coloured’ - images of a site stripped of its sovereignty and exposed to the elements.
The presence of chance, of random external factors, and the transformation of security or corporate apparatuses into art production units, have since integrated Beshty’s work in both photography and sculpture.
By punching a hole through the original negatives of the ‘Travel Pictures’ - a normal practice for preventing their re-use, but also a technique often exploited for creative purposes - Beshty has created a new series, the Travel Pictures. With their striking, pitch-black circles blocking significant parts of the picture, these photographs perpetuate the cycle of manipulation and recycling characteristic of his work and constitute both a ‘cancellation’ of the initial project and also its open-endedness.
The exhibition also includes a new iteration of Beshty's ‘After the Ends’ film screening programme – which has been shown at the Hammer; ZKM, Karlsruhe; The Institut Im Glas, Berlin; the Kadist Foundation, Paris and the Whitney Biennial. For the first time, the whole programme of fourteen ‘cold-war, apocalypse’ films will be shown forward as well as backwards.
Walead Beshty completed his MFA at Yale University School of Art in 2002. He has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia; recent solo-exhibitions include the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Malmo Konsthall; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan and Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.