Heimo Zobernig: chess painting
October 27–December 31, 2017
Since the 1980s, Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958, Mauthen, Austria) has been working in sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, and print design. His practice continually pushes back against the tropes of Modernism and seeks to reorient the role of the artist, the institution, the audience, and the artwork itself. For his exhibition at the List Center, Zobernig uses the museum and its architecture as a stage; he allows a viewer to confront the constructed, at times theatrical, experience of visiting an art exhibition. He playfully acknowledges and amplifies methods of display and design—balancing form and function—in questioning the hierarchies and mechanisms at work in the presentation and understanding of an artwork. chess painting is an extension of a project initiated at the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, in 2016 and is Zobernig’s first solo institutional exhibition in the US since 1996.
In addition to a recent series of sculptures and a new room-scale installation, the exhibition will also include Books & Posters, a comprehensive overview of the monographs, exhibition catalogues, printed-matter editions, and exhibition posters and postcards designed by Zobernig from 1980 to 2015.
Heimo Zobernig: chess painting is curated by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center; and Diana Baldon, independent curator.
List Projects: Adam Pendleton
January 2–February 13, 2018
Appropriating found images and text, Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, VA) brings together often divergent ideas to destabilize the present and envision new aesthetic, cultural, and political futures. His multi-disciplinary practice across painting, sculpture, video, and performance searches for “radical juxtapositions.” Since 2008, Pendleton’s process has been driven by a conceptual paradigm the artist termed “Black Dada,” which takes inspiration from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus.” List Projects: Adam Pendleton features Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer (2016–17), his most recent video portrait of the dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer.
List Projects: Adam Pendleton is curated by Paul C. Ha, Director, with Jamin An, Curatorial Fellow, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995
February 8–April 15, 2018
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995 shines a spotlight on a historical moment and a body of work in the history of media art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. The exhibition explores the connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space. This exhibition will present a re-evaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the 1980’s and serve as a tightly focused survey of works that have been rarely seen in the last twenty years. Artists in the exhibition include Dara Birnbaum, Takahiko Iimura, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Antoni Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Diana Thater, Maria Vedder, and others.
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995 is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
List Projects: Gordon Hall
April 17–May 20, 2018
Gordon Hall (b. 1983, Boston, MA) is a New York-based artist and writer that layers sculpture, language, and movement in performances and exhibitions. Hall’s work centers around an interest in our bodies’ physical and social relationship to objects and space. Abstract, handmade sculptures act as instigators of open-ended questions around functionality, attraction, intimacy, and accessibility. Hall will present a new series of sculptures and accompanying performance. This is Gordon Hall’s first solo institutional exhibition.
List Projects: Gordon Hall is curated by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Allison Katz: Diary w/o Dates
Spring 2018
Allison Katz’s work is driven by a curiosity for the everyday, language, oral and written history, and her own experience. Primarily a painter, Katz (b. 1980, Montreal, Canada) refuses formal or thematic coherence across her work opting instead for a non-hierarchical approach generated by humor and observation. While consistently figurative, her work spans a wide spectrum of subject, scale, technique, and style. A constellation of ideas and associations—functioning like a notebook, at times unpredictable or contradictory—her paintings always consider larger existential concerns. Her List Center exhibition Diary w/o Dates centers around a new series of 12 paintings that take their point of departure from the French Revolutionary Calendar, a 12-year experiment in restructuring time. Diary w/o Dates is Katz’s first solo institutional exhibition in the United States.
Diary w/o Dates is organized in collaboration with the Oakville Galleries and is curated by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Frances Loeffler, Curator, Oakville Galleries, Ontario.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Jane & Neil Pappalardo, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. Additional funding for Heimo Zobernig: chess painting was generously provided by Modica Carr Art Advisory.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
