Fresh Hell /
Carte Blanche à Adam McEwen
20 October 2010 – 16 January 2011
October 19, 2010
11 a.m. to 2 p.m.: press opening
8 p.m. to midnight: public opening
Palais de Tokyo
13 avenue du Président Wilson
F – 75116 Paris, France
Tél: +33 1 4723 5401 & +33 1 4723 3886
“The rooms at the Palais might stand in for the artist’s studio, which might stand in for the artist’s mind—which is a landscape, and the landscape demands some kind of gesture. ‘Progress’ in this context is temporary. It needs to be reinvented afresh, endlessly. The phrase Fresh Hell is often misattributed to Shakespeare, presumably from Macbeth, but in fact it comes from Dorothy Parker. This quiet piece of historical slippage seems appropriate. History uncoils in a tangled, organic mess across the studio floor, and the artist picks through it, looking for what to do next.”
—Adam McEwen
By mapping the artist’s brain, desires, and influences, the carte blanche gives a fresh slant on the creative process and aesthetic correlations. In the wake of Ugo Rondinone in 2008 and Jeremy Deller in 2009, Adam McEwen (British artist living in New York) hatches an extraordinary scheme and creates a dialogue between medieval sculpture and conceptual art, vaults and attempts to levitate, forgotten artists and those already blessed by history. When faced with this history, what stance can an artist take today? Everything has been done already? Great, now we can finally get to work!
The exhibition FRESH HELL dives into history, recent or distant, but doesn’t bore through the strata. Instead, it skims horizontally and nonlinearly, generating multiple paradoxes and stirring up a breath of fresh air that is constantly sucked away by ghostly shadows.
Artists:
Bas Jan Ader
Barbara Bloom
Jonathan Borofsky
Angela Bulloch
Maurizio Cattelan
Anne Collier
Martin Creed
Gino De Dominicis
Walter De Maria
Jessica Diamond
Matias Faldbakken
Isa Genzken
Geert Goiris
Dan Graham
Philip Guston
Raymond Hains
David Hammons
Georg Herold
Martin Kippenberger
Michael Landy
Hanna & Klara Liden
Nate Lowman
Sarah Lucas
Ana Mendieta
Henri Michaux
Reinhard Mucha
Bruce Nauman & Frank Owen
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Rob Pruitt
Steven Shearer
Roman Signer
Agathe Snow
Rudolf Stingel
Rosemarie Trockel
Valie Export
H. C. Westermann
& Œuvres du musée de Cluny – mnma, paris
