Andréhn-Schiptjenko at Art Dubai, March 11-13, 2022
We are delighted to announce our first participation at Art Dubai, the Middle East’s leading international art fair, taking place every March in Dubai, UAE. We will be presenting extraordinary recent works by Martín Soto Climént as well as a new large-scale Mobile by Xavier Veilhan.
We look forward to welcoming you to our booth C4 in Arena hall.
Martín Soto Climént (b. 1977, Mexico, lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico), is well known for his surrealist manipulation of images and objects. By re-contextualising ever so slightly and executing delicate re-arrangements by ways of appropriation and juxtaposition his works often have the humble quality of the ready-made or appear to be fragile assemblages exploring issues of temporality, desire, decay and marginality.
At Art Dubai we will be exhibiting works from his series of Phantograms, works that are developed from his tights on canvas, and the closest the artist has ever come to painting. This group of works was inspired by the photogram, a camera-less technique popularized by the avant-garde artists in the 1920s – an object is placed directly on photosensitive paper and the arrangement is exposed to light. Where the object blocks the light, its shadow is recorded as a light area on the developed paper, and the uncovered areas register as dark.
To make his Phantograms, Soto Climént uses tights as stencils and a self-made mixture of charcoal powder and egg tempera as paint. He stretches the tights over the canvas, then applies the black pigment over the surface. As in a photogram, the canvas records a white, phantasmagorical shadow wherever the tights covered it(hence the title of the series), with the rest of the pictorial plane turning black. The white marks are at times clearlyattributable to the patterning of the tights, but in other instances they are more abstract, or reminiscent ofrivulets tricking down the canvas.
The Phantograms range from an intimate scale of one canvas to large formats involving up to thirty-six different canvases that Soto Climént individually stencils, then combines in a meticulous grid whose constituent parts complement and strengthen one another.They are a major recent development in the artist’s œuvre: while objects and three-dimensional materials have always been central to his practice, with these works, for the first time, the object or material is present only as a memory.
For a video presentation of Soto Climént’s new Phantogram series, please paste the below link into your web browser. https://vimeo.com/429547278
With a long list of international institutional and gallery exhibitions behind him, such as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hessel Museum of Art, Hudson USA, and Kunsthalle Wintherthur, Switzerland, his work is today included in several noteworthy private and public collections. A monograph on Soto Climént has recently been published by Mousse Publishing.
Xavier Veilhan (b 1963 France, lives and works in Paris, France), is arguably one of France’s most internationally renowned artists, His practice encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, photography, performance work and filmmaking as well as hybrids of all of these. He plays with the notions of the generic, of the industrially produced object and of universal representation, creating objects at once ambivalent and stark. Veilhan’s interest for architecture and installation is long-standing. In 2009 he invested the entire Chateau de Versailles castle and gardens and in 2017 he represented France at the 57th Venice Biennale where he transformed the entire pavilion into the critically acclaimed Studio Venezia, an immersive and collaborative installation with a continuously changing programme for the whole duration of the Biennale. Veilhan has also made numerous permanent public works around the world.
Mobiles form a part of Veilhan’s œuvre since 2004 when he first created Le Grand Mobile for his eponymous exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. All of Xavier Veilhan’s mobiles have a forever-changing form floating within a general architecture, almost as if programmed We are aware that the elements of Le Mobile n°1 will never exit its volume, but we could never predict how they will organize within. It is both a calming and reassuring object as well as a microcosm of unexpectedness. It recalls a certain principle of uncertainty, but also hangs in the space as the crust of a tree, a permanent form, constantly changing.
“I have always considered Calder’s invention as being a whole new field in art history rather than simply the apparition of new objects. I try to explore the possibilities of these intangible forms. Their rigorous aspect counters the uncertainty of their form
and balance.” (XV)
The mobiles evoke the continuity of a present, intangible. They materialize the moving air, the consistent cycles of time.
For more information and visuals please contact Joséphine Bursacchi at josephine@andrehn-schiptjenko.com.
For more information on Art Dubai please visit www.artdubai.ae
