ART CITIES:Zurich-Works on Paper

The group show ‘’Works on Paper’’, is a comprehensive presentation of 31 artists of various generations and nationalities. This exhibition is a diverse collection of drawings, prints, and collages. The medium of paper is the one constant in the show, which deliberately avoids any emphasis on the heterogeneity of positions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Eva Presenhuber Gallery Archive

Doug Aitken, is showing selected works from a group of watercolors from 2008 titled to give it all away. In this series Aitken constructs seemingly urban landscapes in an almost psychedelic manner. Peter Fischli and David Weiss paid greatest attention to everyday things and their astonishing diversity. The exhibition includes their edition Ordnung und Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness 1981/2009), seventeen photocopies of drawings originally accompanying the 1981 film The Least Resistance, which shows the artists on a circuit through Hollywood dressed as a rat and a bear. Douglas Gordon is one of the most influential video artists of our time. Performances, sculptural installations, and conceptual texts are also among his forms of expression. With his analyses and reconstructions of images from our collective memory and everyday culture. His work is dominated by the polarities life and death, good and evil, guilt and innocence, temptation and fear. With her oeuvre, Karen Kilimnik has been evoking a world saturated by seemingly trivial desires since her early years. The glamour of fashion serves just as much as a means of projection as do TV series, the rainbow press, or the world of ballet: hovering students, swans, or dead squirrels are suitable protagonists for her art, which is filled with girls’ dreams. In her drawings, Karen Kilimnik combines beauties as you might find them in common fashion magazines with lifted quotations, and her own, sometimes quite caustic comments. Andrew Lord has produced an extensive and continuously evolving oeuvre. Living and working in New York since the early 1980s, he has helped to bring about a paradigm shift in American art together with such artist colleagues as Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Tony Cragg, and Sandro Chia. This generation of artists turned away from aestheticism and the rigorous features of Conceptualism and Minimalism toward more sensuous, narrative, and less austere expressiveness. Andrew Lord’s drawings reflect the artist’s emotional states, complex equations between atavistic form and momentary mood. His artworks are personal and autobiographical and reflecting his experiences. At an early stage Franz West turned away from painting and chose collage as a fundamental technique in his further artistic work. Since the middle 1980s Sue Williams, become known to a broader public for her painting, initially still distinctly narrative. In diary-like scenes of domestic violence and sexual obscenities reminiscent of simple illustrated stories like comics and caricatures, the artist conveys her rage at society’s continuing sexism. Other artists participating in this group exhibition: Kathryn Andrews, Walead Besthy, Martin Boyce, Joe Bradley, Verne Dawson, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Carroll Dunham, Latifa Echakhch, Maria Eichhorn, Matias Faldbakken, Sam Falls, Liam Gillick, Wyatt Kahn, Tobias Pils, Adam Putnam, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Ugo Rondinone, Dieter Roth, Eva Rothschild, Steven Shearer, Oscar Tuazon, Michael Williams.

Info: ‘’Work on Paper’’, Eva Presenhuber Gallery, Löwenbräu Areal, Limmatstr. 270, Zürich, Duration: 21/2- 25/4/15, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri: 11:00-18:00, Sat: 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com