GROUP SHOW

JMAES CASEBERE, MOSHEKWA LANGA, YAN PEI-MING, JUAN MUÑOZ, CORDY RYMAN,

THOMAS SCHÜTTE, THOMAS STRUTH, BOYD WEBB

October 14 - November 20, 1999

Sculptor Thomas Schütte (born 1954) deploys a vivid spectrum of colors and a range of materials to revision the basic constituents - natural, cultural and political - of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental questions about the artist and society. Reconstructing the human figure within a post-conceptual context and defining the relationship between the significant and the fictitious predominates in George Lappas’ (1950) work. Juan Muñoz (1953) moves within a wide spectrum of artistic activity (sculpture, prose, radio, theater). Theatricality, a bitter sense of humor and an infinite dialogue with the past remain basic constituents of his sculptures.

James Casebere (1953) has merged the disciplines of sculpture, installation and conceptual art to create photographs which are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional sets and models that the artist painstakingly constructs in the studio. Thomas Struth’s (1954) photographs of urban landscapes and gallery scenes, his portraits, family portraits and portraits of flowers, disclose the direct and unhierarchical relation with which the artist engages his subjects. Boyd Webb (1947), a pioneer in the investigation of photography as a medium, draws on the techniques of scenography and model-making, the strategies of staging and display, to create a compressed universe in which human and animal, object and image, set and scenario are made, positioned, captured and dissected.

Yan Pei-Ming’s (1960) outsized faces and anonymous landscapes (in bichrome black and white or red and white) extend expressionist portraiture to participate in the contemporary debate between Chinese tradition and modernity. South- African conceptual artist Moshekwa Langa (1975) is considered a “pioneer and flag-hoister of a new generation of black post-apartheid individualists promulgating an art not of ideology but ideas, whose struggle site lies not in didactic political turf but in more ineluctable existential realms. Cordy Ryman’s (1971) interest in painting developed out of an interest in sculpture. Limiting the scale of his works in order to comfortably handle them with one or two hands, and painting primarily on solid surfaces, using a bench or a table as opposed to an easel, enables the artist to treat his paintings more like an object. His decision making is usually stimulated by the process itself.