Exhibition Dates: 15th January - 6th March 2010
„......Locked in his room for three days, he folded and tore away at the paper. () The paper heart went in first, followed by the main veins and then the smaller capillaries. Antonio connected liver and lungs, the stomach and newsprint digestive tract, patching the belly with college-ruled sheets, and before the last layer of crumpled paper could be flattened Figgaro was playing with his tail. It was through this experience with the marvels of paper and his pet cat that Antonio discovered his calling. After five years of medical school and lab experiments with series of radial pleats and reversed folds, Antonio became the first origami surgeon......“
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2008)
Hamish Morrison Galerie is pleased to present the 2nd version of the exhibition Media in Transition. Beside new works by the artists Tom Gallant (GB), Chris Jones (GB), Stefan Kübler (DE) and Jon Laxdal (IS), artists who featured in the first exhibition, works will also be presented by Roland Fuhrmann (DE), Peter Madden (NZ), Daniel Medina (VE), Carmen Perrin (BO), Javier Piñon (USA), Jörg Scheibe (DE) and Fabian Seiz (AT).
The common denominator of this exhibition is the raw material: printed paper. The paper is collaged, cut, modelled, installed, punched out, photographed. It mainly concerns leftovers, waste products of our everyday culture: coupons, forms, operating instructions, labels, food tickets, entrance cards, announcements, packaging materials, newspaper cuttings, illustrations from pornographic magazines, posters, calendars, magazines and maps.
Preceding the transformation of the printed material is the process of collection. Many artists of the 20th Century have shared this primarily aimless pleasure in the found object, in the collecting of inspiring “raw material”. The artists reactivate an elementary experience, one we know from the human stage of development of the hunter-gatherer and which probably every child today still experiences at some point.
In the artworks lie literal ruins of empiricism, integrated fragments of reality, in whose creation the artists have had no influence and which they have often used without making any changes. Strictly speaking we can talk of a special form of the division of labour. The picture plane is broken asunder; parts of the outer world, islands of another reality are contrasted with the subjectivity of the artist. At the same time the artist questions his or her own function as well as the function of art in general.
Javier Piñon - Courtesy Zieher Smith, New York
Chris Jones - Courtesy Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam
Carmen Perrin - Courtesy Gisèle Linder, Basel
Peter Madden - Courtesy Michael Lett, Auckland
