Seb Patane’s 400 Sonnets in Reverse, Together

SEB PATANE
400 Sonnets in Reverse, Together
18 June–28 August 2011

Curator: Bettina Steinbrügge

Opening: Friday, 17 June from 7.00 to 10.00 pm

La Kunsthalle Mulhouse / La Fonderie
Centre d’Art Contemporain (contemporary art center)
16 rue de la Fonderie
68093 Mulhouse Cedex
France
T +33 (0)3 69 77 66 47
kunsthalle [​at​] mulhouse.fr
www.kunsthallemulhouse.com

La Kunsthalle Mulhouse is delighted to present—400 Sonnets in Reverse, Together, the first solo exhibition of Seb Patane in a public institution in France. Seb Patane was born in Italy in 1970. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 2002 and soon earned critical acclaim for his work across a diverse range of media including video, sculpture, performance and collage. The exhibition at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse presents a selection of Patane’s recent works, some of which have been conceived especially for the occasion and in relation to the gallery’s context, site and past history.

400 Sonnets In Reverse, Together, the piece of music that gives the title to Patane’s Mulhouse exhibition and that will be on show in the entrance area of the exhibition, takes its title from a line in the lyric of “The Be Colony” (2009) by the English group Broadcast. Besides the sound piece, the exhibition will contain the artists’s latest video installation, Year of the Corn (2011), as well as a large new sculptural piece, some new wall-based works, and the considered addition of a few works from recent years.

Patane’s work shifts back and forth between abstraction and figuration, between the suggestion of narrative and its un-doing as fragmented form, but there is a consistent and driving charge to his output throughout the past ten years that seems to be to do with a repeated and compulsive return – whether in two or three dimensional work – to certain archetypal images, like the figures in the Patrons Paper series, four large screenprints on found clothes patterns that have been produced especially for the exhibition in Mulhouse. Patane is playing an intricate game of references, symbols and signs, which touch different buttons depending on the private context of each viewer.

On the occasion of the exhibition in Mulhouse, his first monograph will be published by DISTANZ including texts by Rob Young, Catherine Wood and Heike Munder.

Seb Patane’s recent solo exhibitions include “So this song kills fascists”, Art Now, Tate Britain, 2007, Art Statements, Art 40 Basel and Constellations, Artissima, Turin, both in 2009. Patane has had previous solo shows at China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles and Galleria Fonti Naples, as well as Maureen Paley, London. His work has been included in numerous group shows, such as Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body, migros museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich and in 2006 he was nominated for Beck’s Futures. Patane lives and works in London.

Enquiries/Press office: Schwarb Clarisse +33 (0)3 69 77 66 47
Clarisse.schwarb@mulhouse.fr