Julius von Bismarck “Landscape Painting”
Marlborough Chelsea
This event has ended.
Marlborough Chelsea presents Landscape Painting the first U.S. exhibition
of German artist Julius von Bismarck. Featuring a two-channel video, a pair of large scale
photographs and a stone sculpture, the show is a concise distillation of the artist’s
multivalent and globalized practice.
Primarily concerned with the intersection between nature and culture, von Bismarck
engages the wilderness as a site for direct intervention. The artist is increasingly well
known in Europe for works that involve the artist lashing the ocean with a bullwhip, or
firing hobby rockets into a Venezuelan lightning storm in an attempt to straighten the
path of the bolts to the ground. Quixotic actions, often with quite strange and beautiful
results, that investigate science, phenomenology, art history and mythology are von
Bismarck’s fertile terrain.
For this exhibition, von Bismarck engages the tradition of landscape painting by, quite
literally, painting the landscape. In the remote Mexican desert, the artist and a crew
of local workers first covered a vista of rocks, earth and cacti in white paint, and then
proceeded to realistically repaint it in its actual colors. The process becomes fodder
for a poetic documentary-style video and the resulting “painting” the subject of a
large-scale digital photograph. This action was repeated in the jungle, in collaboration
with Maya painters, and makes up the other half of the video projection.
Additionally, the artist has used a sophisticated digital milling machine to hollow out
a boulder, rendering it wafer-thin and impossibly light, with only its surface remaining.
This sculpture is reinforced and made permanent by way of an elaborately engineered
fiberglass and steel girding system. This allows the stone to be easily moved and
even suspended in air, lending the work a brand of matter-of-fact magic that nicely
encapsulates von Bismarck’s artistic agenda.
Julius von Bismarck (b. 1983 in Breisach am Rhein, Germany) received his MFA from
Hunter College in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include History Apparatus at Kunstverein
Arnsberg, Germany (2014); Unfall am Mittelpunkt Deutschlands at Alexander Levy,
Berlin (2013); Les bêtes sont bêtes et les plantes le sont encore plus at Galerie Ilka Bree,
Bordeaux (2013); . Recent group exhibitions include Shit and Die at Palazzo Cavour,
Torino, Italy (2014); Un homme juste est quand meme un homme mort at Palais de
Tokyo, Paris (2013); TEA at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Taichung, Taiwan (2013); Life Clock at Den Frie center of contemporary art, Copenhagen (2012); These
Peanuts are Bullets at Family Business, New York (2012). The artist lives and works in
Berlin.
Media
Schedule
from May 16, 2015 to June 20, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-05-16 from 18:00 to 20:00