Doug Ashford
Six Paintings and One Photo from Saturday, June 25, 2005
15 March–26 April 2014
Opening: 14 March, 5–7pm
Conversation between Doug Ashford & art historian Mathias Danbolt, 4pm
bureau publik
Vesterbrogade 111
DK–1620 København V
Denmark
Six Paintings and One Photo from Saturday, June 25, 2005 is the first presentation of Doug Ashford’s work in Denmark. The exhibition presents a new series of works, which considers the idea that today the making of a person is always already a disaster. In working with this series Ashford has been interested in how we experience the world through affects and how human life is imprisoned by debt and financialization.
Ashford was part of the New York-based collective Group Material and his own artistic practice is based on the conviction prevalent in the group’s projects that the presentation of art is a political event. In recent years he has been working with an abstract language in the medium of painting in order to explore abstraction as an agent for social change. Abstraction can be seen as a withdrawal, retreat and rejection of the given rules, which can open up for new worlds to be imagined and this is where the transformative potential of abstraction is located. In this sense, abstraction contains a promise of reconfiguring the possible.
This promise is not only about large-scale change; it also has to do with the experience we have of our own lives. As Ashford has put it: “After all the thinking and writing I have realized that in truth I began to make abstract paintings simply because I like the way they look. They look like the failures of my life lit up by possibility.”
The exhibition has been realized with the support of the Danish Art Agency. Courtesy Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam.
Upcoming events:
9 April: Ulla Hvejsel, presentation
1 May: Drop Outs, Sleep and Other Acts of Rejection, group exhibition opening
7 May: Stefano Harney, lecture
27 May: Mark Fisher, lecture
