#relacoespublicas #rp #rpmoda #pr #publicrelations » 2013 Agosto 13 » Richard Prince Curates Walter Dahn
19:57 Richard Prince Curates Walter Dahn | |
The Artists
Walter Dahn and Richard Prince first met in 1990 during Dahn’s
exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Prince detected a kindred
spirit in the German-born Dahn. Here was another artist exploring the
underside of American culture, albeit from a European perspective. A
shared interest in "outsider art” and fascination with New Wave and Punk
music culture solidified their friendship and ongoing rapport. It is
from this perspective and through the lens of personal history that
Richard Prince has curated the exhibition 4th Time Around/ (My Back Pages),
the first New York exhibition in two decades devoted to the work of
Walter Dahn. The show will open at Venus Over Manhattan gallery on
September 12, 2013.
4th Time Around/ (My Back Pages) will
present paintings, "anti-silkscreens,” and rare bronze sculptures,
evidencing the full sweep of Walter Dahn’s practice since 1981. The
exhibition takes its name from two songs by Bob Dylan, a favorite of
both Prince and Dahn. "4th Time Around” is a song about a
couple having an argument and later reconciling, while "My Back Pages”
is Dylan's poignant look back upon his own early, idealistic
protest-song years. Together these titles suggest not only a dialogue
between two artists but an unending internal conversation within Dahn,
an artist constantly cycling and recycling through phases – his own and
those of the popular culture at large -- in a practice that forever
defies stasis.
4th Time Around/ (My Back Pages) will remain on view through October 26th.
In 1971, Walter Dahn became a student of Joseph Beuys at the
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he also encountered such fellow students
as Blinky Palermo, Jorg Immendorf, Imi Knoebel, and Sigmar Polke.
During this time Beuys’ "extended definition of art” -- his interest in
locating creativity outside of formal art practice, his belief that
anyone could be an artist, and his notion that art should eschew
ideology – ignited Dahn’s artistic development. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, Dahn was associated with the Cologne-based Jungen Wilde
(Wild Youth) painters of the Mülheimer Freiheit. This collective avidly
challenged the prevailing Minimalist and Conceptual art, and its
collaborative practice, intensive engagement with music, and raucous
group exhibitions are widely recalled as improvisational, experimental,
and highly charged: everything seemed to be made quickly and without
premeditated plans or structures. "We were this group of painters, it
was like a band. We went to every concert we could see,” Dahn has said.
"It was a kind of mixture of an insane asylum, kindergarten, and art
school.”
The impact of this period is revealed vividly in Dahn’s large paintings
of the early 1980s, including such works on view at Venus as "The
Momento m." (1983) and "Untitled"(1981). For the first half of the
decade, the artist was engaged in "sampling,” paralleling a phenomenon
that was emerging in the contemporary music scene. Richard Prince has
observed that Dahn’s work "went through an incredible number of styles
of painting very quickly,” tearing through techniques, moods, and
approaches to material and application in his work, even while adhering
to figuration and a consistent engagement with popular music, as well as
a consistent interest in mixing imagery drawn from disparate sources.
In 4th Time Around/ (My Back Pages), the
energy of such avid experimentation is on view in an array of paintings,
from the gently poetic "3 Sonnen” to the large-scale canvas "Ausfegen.”
(1986).
During the late 1980s, Dahn began applying his experimental approach to
printmaking. Rejecting the prevailing model for silkscreens. Whereas
the majority of artists produced multiples in which differences between
strikes were subtle and uniformity was a value, Dahn began making
"anti-silkscreens.” Creating and manipulating his image, he would create
a single unique edition and then discard the screen. With such works as
"Walter," (1985), the layered, rough, and beautiful results of his
innovative printing are revealed in the exhibition at Venus.
Eschewing formalism, Dahn’s work favored experimentation and unexpected
combinations of seemingly random imagery such as graffiti from Oceania;
album cover art recycled with appropriated images drawn from popular
culture; snapshots of friends juxtaposed with landscapes and
architecture. Through such tactics Dahn suggests there is no distinction
between high and low culture: "You can transform the low, the most
shitty and obvious things, into high quality art, recycle them into an
art context where they take on different meanings…That's my strategy,
working with these kinds of mass or working class icons. I show
similarities and differences at the same time. After a while I really
get absorbed in this kind of psychology, everything becomes meaningful
and meaningless at the same time.”
Since the 1990s, Dahn has circled back continuously through his
different areas of interest, revisiting themes and techniques. After
having been involved in various bands from the early 80s, for example,
in 1994 he painted the titles of his favorite songs onto canvases, and
in 1997 made drawings that referenced an album cover by the band Palace.
Such approaches continue now in Dahn’s practice: "Now it seems like a
way to move forward is to look back, sometimes to my teens and twenties.
I work with memory,” he once commented in an interview by Richard
Prince. Recent works on view at Venus – the unique edition piece "Anne
Frank wehrt sich” (2005) and the painting "Bill Callahan” (2004) – find
the artist revisiting and masterfully reinventing, calling to mind
Dylan’s famous lyric, "Ahh, but I was so much older then/I’m younger
than that now.”
VENUS OVER MANHATTAN gallery is located at 980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets, on the third floor and is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10AM – 6PM.
 by Andrea Schwan Inc. | |
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