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Germany / Berlin : Exhibition
Cyprien Gaillard
Nov 20, 2009 - Jan 16, 2010
Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present an exhibition by French-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard evolving around his work ‘Cities of Gold and Mirrors’ (2009). This 16mm film develops the artist’s interest in contemporary landscapes...
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Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present an exhibition by French-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard evolving around his work ‘Cities of Gold and Mirrors’ (2009). This 16mm film develops the artist’s interest in contemporary landscapes as complex sites of loss and potential, manifested through architecture, monuments and history.
‘Cities of Gold and Mirrors’ takes place principally in and around the Mexican city of Cancún, and consists of a sequence of five parts accompanied by a particular looped recording of ‘Le Feu de St. Elme’, by Haïm Saban and Shuki Levy (1982). The city of Cancún, founded in 1970, offers Gaillard a landscape perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin. As hedonistic young American tourists, the ‘spring breakers’ returning to the US with little but addled recollections, invoke a contemporary discourse of decadence and decay, so the modern hotels built of steel and glass upon the physical ruins of the mighty Mayan Empire articulate an historicized vision. Within the film's non-narrative structure, a spirit of displacement presides; the city is a palimpsest, and time and space are displaced in the moment of the spectacle and the delirium of the carnival. Cyprien Gaillard works across a range of media, including film, video, photography, sculpture and live performance. Between vandalism and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art his practice oscillates between a resistance to the notion of archaeology as fixed or passive, and a suspension or relocation of time and place. His recent works has been concerned with deconstruction of post-War modernist architecture, and the demise of Utopian ideals on which such structures were founded. The artist’s archeological approach towards found imagery, nature and architecture, can be observed in his series of works ‘Geographical Analogies’ and ‘Fields of Rest’: both juxtapose a sequences of polaroids taken in various locations to each other. They draw analogies based on collective memory, for instance between natural sites in Mexico or Egypt, or Second World War bunker architecture on the coastline of Normandie and housing projects in the Bronx – whether it be for their visual correspondences or their geological placement, highlighting in each photo the same sense of fragility and liberating it from its original connotations. Cyprien Gaillard (born 1980 in Paris) has recently had solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2009), Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2008), Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, île de Vassivière, L’Atelier du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include the Berlin Biennial (2008) and Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio and a two person exhibition at The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA (2010). |
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