Pamela Rosenkranz "Because They Try to Bore Holes"
Miguel Abreu Gallery
This event has ended.
Miguel Abreu Gallery announces "Because They Try to Bore Holes", Pamela Rosenkranz’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will feature new works that “take the form of paintings and sculptures, but do not themselves begin with these terms.”1 Framed works made of repurposed materials, such as adhesive photomount hand-applied to blank Ilford photo paper, and various soft drinks mixed with Ralph Lauren latex paint covering inkjet printed paper, will be installed alongside sculptures made of hand-warped acrylic glass sheets and Ikea furniture parts boxed in their original cardboard packaging, itself painted in shades of decorative whites. If Rosenkranz engages the age-old categories of human-scale painting and sculpture, she renders them unfamiliar through her irreverent treatment of the materials at hand.
The works in the exhibition might seem to simulate, on their respective surfaces at least, a certain meaning of art as the direct expression of the artist's experience and subjectivity. As the title indicates, the show refers to Yves Klein’s statement in his ‘Chelsea Manifesto,’ that the birds passing across the bright Mediterranean sky above him "tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work” – that is, the blue sky itself. For Rosenkranz, Klein functions as the model for a brand of modern and contemporary art that firmly positions at its core the artist and his or her subjectivity. By openly reducing the artwork to its evolutionary and capitalist conditions of production, Rosenkranz undermines an idea of art that purports to transcend its immediate materiality. She does not hesitate to integrate in her pieces mass-market consumer brands such as Samsung, IKEA, or Coca-Cola, rendering explicit the complicity between the artwork and its material components. In her use of soft drinks, for instance, she points to the metabolic currency that underlies the conception, production, and perception of the artwork. The brain requires energy, she affirms, and therefore needs sugar to burn. In other words, glucose must be burned in order to generate thought, to develop and view the work. In this sense, Rosenkranz collapses the potential meaning of an artwork to its meaningless material elements. And here it lies; and from here it goes.
Media
Schedule
from February 26, 2012 to April 15, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-02-26 from 18:00 to 20:00