July 27–September 14, 2013
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based Romanian artist Daniel Knorr and an exhibition by the Argentine-British-Angelino conceptual artist, David Lamelas.
In the main gallery, Depression Elevations is Knorr’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and includes a series of resin sculptures accompanied by a limited-edition artist book. Knorr explores the surface of Los Angeles in Depression Elevations, a series of resin sculptures cast from impressions of city streets. Knorr’s topographical concern is biopolitical; while infrastructure is produced by the state to facilitate connectivity, it also proscribes social movement and imposes parameters upon a population. The city’s vast and complex network of roads leaves an indelible mark upon the wide, flat plane of Los Angeles, begetting a cultural landscape dominated by car culture and urban sprawl.
The hollows of the street, however, worn by the ravages of time and human use, provide a small footprint of the city’s past. In casting from these puddles and potholes, Knorr catches history in his mold, engendering form and substance from a literal void. The resultant sculptures derive an evocative power not from their undeniably beautiful façade, but from the intimate aura of a swiftly fading past.
To mark his inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles, Knorr has produced the ninth edition of Carte de Artiste, his series of global encyclopedias. Titled On Los Angeles, the book takes as its subject the castoffs of our daily lives; Knorr traverses the city streets, seeking out discarded objects and pressing them between the pages of a book. In cataloguing the transitory elements of an urban landscape, Knorr addresses the transformative and destructive complexities of representation.
Since his representation of Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Knorr has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Kunsthalle Wien. Over the next several years, Knorr will mount a series of exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the first of which debuted in December of 2008. He has participated in group shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Liverpool Bienniale, and the Berlin Bienniale, and his work is held in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Migros Museum in Zurich, the Stasi Museum in Leipzig, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Knorr was born in Bucharest, Romania and lives and works in Berlin.
Also on view in the south gallery and courtyard are works by the Argentine-British-Angelino conceptual artist David Lamelas. First produced in 1968 at St Martins College of Art in London, the work Signaling of Three Objects determines three spaces inside metal circles. In this particular installation, a tree, a chair, and a person encircled by steel plates signal their transformation into the focus of attention. Photo documentation of the original Hyde Park installation is also on display. Additionally, his site-specific Corner Piece from 1968 inverts the angle created by two walls and turns the empty space into volume. Finally, the traveling wall made of paper titled Paredes doblade or Doubled Wall, first made in 1994 while Lamelas was living in Manhattan, was folded and carried in a suitcase and shown in Buenos Aires. In this reinstallation of the idea, a paper cut was made of the 15 x 14 foot West wall, folded box-size and it is now shown on the opposite wall.
David Lamelas won a top prize at the 9th Sao Paulo Biennial in 1967 and exhibited his Newsroom of Information at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1968. Moving to London in 1968, he has participated in the first conceptual art exhibitions throughout Europe and has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Institute of Contemporary Art and Tate Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Wiener Secession in Vienna, and Reconsidering the Object of Art at MOCA and Lost Line LACMA in Los Angeles, among others. Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires and lives and works in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and London.