Hans Breder "New Paintings, Telephone Sculpture, Video"
Algus Greenspon
This event has ended.
Algus Greenspon presents an exhibition of new paintings, conceptual sculpture and video by Hans Breder.
The current exhibition draws on three aspects of Breder’s work: new paintings grounded in an exploration of the neuro-opthalmology of image perception, conceptual sculptures made by telephone in 1969, and a recent video installation, continuing Breder’s 40 year interest in the medium.
Breder’s recent Opsis series paintings arechromatic computer gradient images on canvas investigating the physiology of color vision. Working with a neuro-opthalmologist and a scientific imaging specialist, Breder utilizes the interactions of the retina’s color sensitive photoreceptor cone cells (S, M, and L) by converting the cells’ differing spectral sensitivities into RGB print values. The result is paintings whose vibrating color space, where image and afterimage interact, recall the utopian optical constructivism of painters like Wojciech Fangor, as well as the meticulously Photoshopped, if blithely neutered, color field photography of younger artists like Cory Arcangel.
The sculptures being exhibited, Ordered By Telephone, are conceptual works made using PlexiglasTM sheets in early 1969. To produce these sculptures, Breder phoned in dimensions and specifications for incised cuts to an industrial fabricator who delivered the sculptures, unseen by the artist, to the Richard Feigen Gallery in Chicago. Having had no direct role in the work’s production, Breder picks up on an idea of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who while teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922 ordered geometric enamel on steel compositions over the telephone from a commercial sign maker (one of these is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art courtesy of Philip Johnson).
Hans Breder is the founding director of the Intermedia Arts program at the University of Iowa. Counting among its early alumni Charles Ray and Anna Mendieta, the program built upon Breder’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests, emphasizing the liminal interstices that were evolving as art, performance, technology, electronic media, cognitive science, and philosophy began to intersect in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Hans Breder was born in Herford, Germany in 1935 and moved to New York in 1964 as an assistant to the sculptor George Rickey. Breder showed in New York and Chicago with the Richard Feigen Gallery. The artist’s series of conceptual performance photographs using reflective steel plates and models, Body/Sculptures (1969–1973) are particularly well known. This use of reflective forms emerged in his sculptural objects in the mid-1960s. Included in the current exhibition is the first of Breder’s documentary photographs using reflective planes made in 1964.
Media
Schedule
from March 16, 2012 to April 14, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-03-16 from 18:00 to 20:00