ART-PRESENTATION: States of Being

The Lehmann Maupin gallery represents a diverse range of American artists, as well as artists and estates from across Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. It has been instrumental in introducing numerous artists from around the world in their first New York exhibitions. Known for championing artists who create groundbreaking and challenging forms of visual expression, the gallery prioritizes personal investigations and individual narratives.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

The group exhibition “States of Being” marks Lehmann Maupin’s first physical location in Taipei and offers a bridge between the gallery’s global programming and the vibrant local cultural scene. The exhibition showcases an exploration of performance, theatre, and contemporary storytelling from within the gallery’s roster, including Billy Childish, Tony Oursler, Alex Prager, Robin Rhode, David Salle, and Erwin Wurm, as well as Tom Friedman. The exhibition features David Salle’s complex narrative paintings, which draw inspiration from art history, advertising, design, and American culture, in conversation with Tony Oursler’s exploration of the moving image through an intimately-scaled video installation. Also, on view is be an iconic participatory sculpture by Erwin Wurm, where audiences are invited to activate the work by standing underneath it, alongside a human-scale stainless steel sculpture of two figures dressed in hazmat suits by Tom Friedman. Billy Childish initially denied an interview to the local art school, he produced hundreds of drawings that gained him entry to London’s Saint Martin’s School of Art. Childish’s defiance of authority led to his eventual expulsion from art school in 1981. Since then, Childish has gained something of a cult status worldwide, writing and publishing five novels and more than 40 volumes of confessional poetry, recording more than 150 LPs, and painting several hundred works. Through all of these disciplines, Childish addresses social, political, and personal issues such as war, protest, his turbulent childhood, and his struggles with addiction. While his confessional poetry and music explore these issues with startling honesty, Childish’s paintings are more subtle. His subjects are often drawn from his environment or are people he knows or admires: birch forests, self-portraits, a lone figure in a pastoral English landscape, and his wife as a reclining female nude. Childish works quickly and intuitively, making spare marks on raw canvas that leave much of it visible. Labeling himself a “radical traditionalist” Childish has a reverence for traditional oil painting yet has resolutely resisted any connection with a particular group or artistic movement.

Tony Oursler is best known for his innovative integration of video, sculpture, and performance. While studying at the California Institute of Arts, Oursler was influenced by John Baldessari, who taught him, Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Jim Shaw the importance of the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language. A pioneering figure in new media since the 1970s, Oursler has since explored diverse methods of incorporating video into his practice, breaking video art out of the two-dimensional screen to create moving three-dimensional environments with the use of projections. At the center of Oursler’s practice is a persisting preoccupation with technology and its effect on humanity, and in his immersive installations he presents a dissonance of moving image and sound that seeks to disorient and disarm viewers. His videos often take as their subject the human face, fragmenting and distorting its physiognomy, and thus the legibility of expression, by projecting it onto inanimate objects or embedding it into his sculptures. With these video-sculptures Oursler explores the role that the rapid growth of technology plays in altering, and often inhibiting, human social behavior.

Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker who creates elaborately staged scenes that draw inspiration from a wide range of influences and references, including Hollywood cinema, experimental films, popular culture, and street photography. She deliberately casts and stages all of her works, merging past and contemporary sources to create a sense of ambiguity. Her familiar yet uncanny images depict worlds that synthesize fiction and reality and evoke a sense of nostalgia. Prager cultivates the surreal in her photographs and films, creating moments that feel like a fabricated memory or dream. Each photograph captures a moment frozen in time, inviting the viewer to “complete the story” and speculate about its narrative context. Prager’s work often makes the viewer aware of the voyeuristic nature of photography and film, establishing the uneasy feeling of intruding upon a potentially private moment. The highly choreographed nature of her photographs and films exposes the way images are constructed and consumed in our media-saturated society.

Robin Rhode engages photography, performance, drawing, and sculpture in creating visual narratives that are brought to life using quotidian materials such as soap, charcoal, chalk, and paint. Rhode came of age in the newly post-apartheid South Africa and was exposed to new forms of creative expression motivated by the spirit of the individual rather than dictated by a political or social agenda. The growing influence of hip-hop, film, and popular sports on youth culture as well as the community’s reliance on storytelling in the form of colorful murals encouraged the development of Rhode’s hybrid street-based aesthetic. Rhode is best known for his photographic series that document a protagonist interacting with murals the artist painted on public walls in Johannesburg and Berlin. In the succession of photographs, the movements of the actor or group appear to alter the two-dimensional renderings, compressing space and time and transforming the urban landscape into a fictional storyboard. Melding individual expression with broader socio-economic concerns, Rhode’s work reveals a mastery of illusion, a rich range of historical and contemporary references, and an innate skill for blending high and low art forms.

Erwin Wurm came to prominence with his “One Minute Sculptures”, a project that he began in 1996/1997. In these works, Wurm gives written or drawn instructions to participants that indicate actions or poses to perform with everyday objects such as chairs, buckets, fruit, or knit sweaters. These sculptures are by nature ephemeral, and by incorporating photography and performance into the process Wurm challenges the formal qualities of the medium as well as the boundaries between performance and daily life and spectator and participant. While in this series he explores the idea of the human body as sculpture, in some of his more recent work he anthropomorphizes everyday objects in unsettling ways, like contorting sausage-like forms into bronze sculptures or distorting and bloating the volume and shape of a car in. Wurm considers the physical act of gaining and losing weight a sculptural gesture, and often creates the illusion of bodily growth or shrinkage in his work. While Wurm considers humor an important tool in his work, there is always an underlying social critique of contemporary culture, particularly in response to the capitalist influences and resulting societal pressures that the artist sees as contrary to our internal ideals. Wurm emphasizes this dichotomy by working within the liminal space between high and low and merging genres to explore what he views as a farcical and invented reality.

Photo: David Salle, Ice Flow II, 2001, Oil and acrylic on canvas and linen, 72 x 108 inches / 182.9 x 274.3 cm, © David Salle, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin

Info: Lehmann Maupin Taipei, Kimpton Hotel Da An, 1F No. 25, Alley 27, Section 4, Ren Ai Road Da’an District, Taipei, Taiwan, Duration: 3/8-18/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com