September 10, 2014, 5–9pm
With artist Chris Burden
Music by The Antlers and the Lydian String Quartet
The Rose Art Museum
Brandeis University
415 South Street
Waltham, MA 02453
The Rose Art Museum announces the opening of its fall exhibitions and the dedication of a major new sculpture by the artist Chris Burden (b. 1946). A reception will be held on the evening of Wednesday, September 10, beginning at 5pm. At 6:30pm, Chris Burdenwill take part in the dedication of his permanent installation Light of Reason. The evening’s program includes music by Brandeis University’s Lydian String Quartet and a concert beneath the lampposts by The Antlers. All events are free and open to the public.
Chris Burden’s Light of Reason was commissioned specifically for Brandeis and for the Rose. The design of the sculpture was inspired by the three torches, three hills and three Hebrew letters in the Brandeis University seal, while the work’s title borrows from a well-known quote by the university’s namesake, Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis: “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.” Antique Victorian lampposts and concrete benches form three branches that fan out from the museum’s entrance. Planned as an integral part of the image of the Rose and the university, the sculpture will serve as an inviting gateway to the museum and a dynamic outdoor space for the Brandeis community.
Fall 2014 exhibitions
Mark Bradford: Sea Monsters
Rose Projects 1B: 1914: Magnus Plessen
Collection in Focus
September 11–December 21
Rose Video 04: Alex Hubbard
September 11–November 2
John Altoon
Co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
October 8–December 21
Rose Video 05: Gillian Wearing
November 11, 2014–March 8, 2015
About the Rose Art Museum’s fall exhibitions:
Mark Bradford: Sea Monsters presents new paintings and sculptures by Mark Bradford (b. 1961). This just-completed body of work draws upon the example of Medieval and Renaissance maps: specifically, the tendency of cartographic illustrators to use fantastical creatures to mark unchartered waters, tempting explorers to reach further into the unknown. Bradford’s abstractions do not strive for cartographic precision, but rather evoke the socioeconomic conditions of communities under siege and in a near constant state of emergency and reinvention. The seascape of paintings, inflated and failed buoys, and the monumental text-based mural that together comprise Sea Monsters were all executed in the last six months. All are made of worldly matter, yet exert an otherworldly effect, pointing at once to that which we know and everything about our world that remains a mystery. By moving back and forth between mapping social conditions in flux and refining his formal approach to painting, Bradford has derived a new language of abstraction that is as much a hermetic studio discipline as it is of and about the world we share, a language best described as social abstraction.
Rose Projects 1B: 1914: Magnus Plessen presents recent work by Berlin-based painter Magnus Plessen (b. 1967) alongside the historical materials and documents of World War I that inspired this body of work. For years, Plessen has returned repeatedly to look at Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924), the seminal anti-war polemic that used censored photographs to reveal the grim realities of the war, including graphic images of the facial wounds suffered by soldiers in the trenches. Plessen’s figurative paintings convey the shatter and shock of the men’s identity through passages of black—not abstraction per se, but a kind of blind representation. 1914 is the second in a series of three exhibitions organized by curator-at-large Katy Siegel. The series, Rose Projects 1, focuses on artists who refuse the categorical divides between representation and materialist abstraction.
Alex Hubbard’s (b. 1975) work reflects the diversity of his practice: his paintings are sculptural, his videos painterly, and in all media his artwork is evidence of the performance of its creation. Hubbard elects to work with difficult, unpredictable materials that take directions and shapes of their own, and his paintings and videos capture his gestural process in a collage of messy marks and vibrant, visceral forms. Rose Video 04 presents Hubbard’s Annotated Plans for an Evacuation (2009) alongside a recently completed painting.
John Altoon opens at the Rose Art Museum on October 8. The exhibition was co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is Altoon’s first major retrospective. A post-modernist before his time, John Altoon (1925–1969) had a facility with line, color and subject matter that influenced his peers and continues to resonate with artists today. The exhibition includes approximately 70 paintings and drawings created by this legendary figure of the 1960s Los Angeles art scene.
For more information on the Rose’s fall exhibitions, its Collection in Focus presentation, and the upcoming exhibition Rose Video 05: Gillian Wearing, please visit the museum’s website: www.brandeis.edu/rose.
Press inquiries:
Nina Berger: [email protected] / T +1 617 543 1595
These exhibitions are made possible through funding from the Rose Art Museum Endowed Fund, Lois Foster Endowed Exhibition Fund, Lois Foster Fund, and the Office of the Provost, Brandeis University.
