Sarah Morris
China 9, Liberty 37
Seth Price
2009
26 May – 26 July 2009
curated by Gianfranco Maraniello
and Andrea Viliani
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologna
Italia
Sarah Morris
China 9, Liberty 37
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna is presenting the first solo exhibition of Sarah Morris in an Italian museum and has the pleasure of welcoming the international première of her new film, Beijing.
Morris’s paintings and films are characterised by an abstract and complex structural approach. The urban environments, the architectural motifs, the symbols and the representations of the power are the subject of the artist’s close investigation. Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades, urban structures, cities and nations might conceal on their surfaces. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in conspiratorial studies of power, of the structures of control, of global socio-political networks.
Beijing, an 86-minute 35mm film, focuses on one of the most intricate and ambiguous international broadcasted events of past years: the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing. Morris’s film observes the overwhelmingly perplexing and contradictory economy and authority of China, made all the more resonant in current climate of global crisis. Beijing is a surreal portrait of a state of turbo-capitalism, during a period when the International Olympic Committee effectively took over sovereignty of the capital.
China 9, Liberty 37, a reference to the English title of 1978 Italian/Spanish western film Amore, piombo e furore, comprises the film, a series of paintings from the series Origami and Rings and a new site specific large scale wall painting (Taurus).
The Origami and Rings series, a coupling, signify possible impending events and the multiple cities and years of their correspondence. The Rings paintings are titled by date of the various years of Olympic games and their corresponding cities from the past into the future. The large scale intervention, Taurus, will occupy a 30-metre-long exhibition hall.
In concomitance with the exhibition in Bologna, Beijing, a new publication edited by MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna, MMK – the Museum für Moderne Kunst of Frankfurt and Witte de With – Center for Contemporary Art of Rotterdam, will be available. The catalogue is published by König Books.
Sarah Morris was born in the United Kingdom in 1967. She lives and works between London and New York.
Seth Price
2009
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna has the pleasure of presenting the first solo exhibition of Seth Price in an Italian museum.
Prices’s artistic research is characterised by a multidisciplinary approach, which includes painting, sculpture, photography, sounds, video, and writing. Investigating the role played by the distribution/dissemination in redefining the creative and intellectual practices, Price adopts and reconfigures strategies ranging from Conceptual Art to Appropriationism to explore the multiple connections and the potential interpretations arising from the work itself, its references or the materials used to produce it.
For the first time the show at MAMbo joins together the complete series of Calendar Paintings (2003-2004), displayed in parts at both Kölnischer Kunstverein of Cologne in 2008 and at Reena Spaulings Gallery of New York in 2009, as well as in earlier incarnations in group shows in 2004. The inkjet-on canvas works contain advertisement images, computer graphics, and reproductions of paintings made between the two World Wars by American painters less known by the general public. Each painting bears its original date of production. In Bologna a selection of vacuum-formed sculptures, in which rope knots are captured in painted and printed plastic through the vacuum-forming packaging process, will be also on view, as well as two videos: Redistribution (2007 – ongoing) and Köln Waves/Blues (2006/2008). Redistribution, begun in 2007 and conceived as a never-finished, constantly updated work, takes up a Guggenheim “artist’s talk” delivered by Price only to pull it apart, reassemble it and graft new material to it, resulting in an open-form hybrid. For Köln Waves/Blues, Price purchased a 6-second video loop from a company that makes “empty” background images for corporate use, then added color effects and looped it, yielding a hypnotic, emptied-out work that looks back to structuralist and early film experiments even as it presents an image of degraded and détourned digital junk, threatening at each instant to collapse.
In concomitance with the exhibition of Seth Price at MAMbo a new artist’s book published by MAMbo will be available.
Seth Price was born in East Jerusalem in 1973. He lives and works in New York.
