TONY OURSLER
"Phobos"

January 25 – February 24, 2007

Tony Oursler was born in New York in 1957. He attended the California institute for the Arts in 1979, B.F.A. He lives and works in New York.

Tony Oursler stands as a major figure within the evolution of video art. He was one of the first artists to understand the limitations of the television monitor as the primary framing device for video images, taking them out of the box and making them function in three-dimensions.

Tony Oursler’s work since the beginning of his career, was dominated by themes such as violence, media, drugs, mental illness, pop culture, pollution and how these are reflected on the physicality of the human body. From the early single-channel videos of the 70’s and the 80’s to the dummies of the 90’s that took the place of the screen as a projection surface, the artist concentrated on examining larger questions related to the body in space, sexuality, the communicative power of images and the deconstruction of social and interpersonal relationships.

At the end of the 90’s he begins to concentrate on groups of smaller works such as the Eyes Series and the Talking Heads, where he reduces his ideas to a bare minimum.

This reductivism was evident in his previous works shown in Bernier/Eliades Gallery in 2004 and still is in his new works.

In this show Tony Oursler is inspired by the highly technical and abstract history of space exploration as a vast field of inspiration. Using hi-resolution computer manipulations, he blends human features with elemental forms such as stars, fire, and liquid, and projects these images onto fiberglass sculptures, thus adding new levels of visual complexity to the works.

In this exhibition the gallery space is transformed into a galaxy. The floor is a symbolic earth and the room is the outer or free space. While parts of the installation are fallen on earth due to gravity, others take the form of celestial bodies, space dust, black holes, or smoldering stars.

www.tonyoursler.com.

The gallery remains open Tue-Fri 10:30-20:30, Sat 12:00-16:00.