Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft mbH – förlag

Fausto Melotti’s uniquely lyrical sculptures

This co-publication with Hauser & Wirth will be released on the occasion of their inaugural exhibition of Fausto Melotti, curated by Douglas Fogle at Hauser & Wirth New York. With never before published historical material from the archive of the Fausto Melotti Foundation, this extensively illustrated publication will provide insight into the work of an artist yet to be discovered by the American public. The late Italian sculptor, installation artist, and poet Fausto Melotti (1901–1986) is admired for his unique contribution to the development of mid-century European Modernism. The artist, who was active for six decades, moved freely between mediums, incorporating brass, stainless steel, ceramics and fabric into uniquely lyrical sculptures. Creating drawings and mixed media works, the artist drew from his rich background in music, mathematics and engineering. The book will feature a text by Douglas Fogle, an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles, who has previously served as curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Exhibition: Hauser & Wirth, New York, 20/4–18/6/2016

Anselm Reyle is one of the internationally most renowned German artists of his generation. Born in Tü bingen, he grew up in Heilbronn where he exhibited his work at Kunsthalle Vogelmann. The list of places where he has exhibited reads like a who’ s who of the art world: from Kunsthalle Zurich to Palazzo Grassi in Venice, from Deichtorhallen Hamburg to museums in the United States. His collaborations, such as with Dior for an exclusive series of handbags, are legendary. Anselm Reyle mixes styles, colors, and materials in a rather intriguing way, working with car paint, PVC and mirror film, spray paint, LED lights, concrete, and clay. Found objects as source material tend to play a prominent role in his work; these may be elements from works by other artists, as well as everyday objects, architecture, or design objects. This approach to his own work as reflection, appropriation, rephrasing and reformulation is thus made visible and addressed time and again. The viewers get caught up in the surprising beat of opposing formal as well as material samplings, in which the entire pictorial repertoire of modern abstract image development finds itself.

When asked about the role of the paradise in his work, Erik Schmidt answers his interviewer Adriano Sack: “ Trying to stage life as a paradise is an important motivator for me. Whenever I go somewhere, I feel this total fascination, even if it’ s only a palm beach.” Erik Schmidt creates works that explore symbolic processes within various social systems. The immersion into foreign contexts plays an important role in his paintings, videos, photographs and drawings. Be it in the crowded cityscape of Tokyo, in the camps of the American Occupy movement, with wine and olive farmers in the West Bank, in aristocratic hunting circles of his North Rhine-Westphalian homeland, or under the umbrella of mighty palm trees – Schmidt is an observer and tends to deliberately assume the role of the outsider. This detached attitude provides him with insight into group dynamic processes, but also allows him to unravel a wide variety of cliché s, stereotypes, codes, rituals, norms, patterns, and conventions. And at the end of a long series of works there are now palm trees: “ They are square and in the middle is the nut.”

After World War II, the white cube acquired the status of an aesthetic convention. Dagmar Varady’ s studio, impressively presented in the book, though seems to be a place where art is produced and also an “ exhibition space” . Rather than being viewed as completed works or paintings, her works are “ permanently in motion” , as the artist emphasizes. Thus, in the studio, a personal (knowledge) order emerges in the context of art, something along the lines of “ principles in chaos” , whereby guided chance (serendipity) also comes into play, which is quite evident in the structures, folds, and progressions in her series of “ Brilliant-Blue” paintings. With all the breaks, deviations, intuitions, exceptions, and ambiguities that occur in her art, Dagmar Varady has set out on the “ path of unintentionality” (Ernst Bloch) – an unintentionality that promotes the processuality of art, but which in turn would not come about without a steady place of production, the studio. There, motifs meander from picture to picture in an indeterminate production process, enter into dialogue with one another, and undergo a protean transformation into ever new variants. As such, Dagmar Varady’ s studio is not simply a place of work but, in the artist’ s own words, her “ navel to the world” and, as such, a kind of laboratory in which intrinsic processes play a significant role in determining artistic attitudes and objectives.

Aï cha has been through a lot. She came to France as an adopted child and grew up there in rather difficult circumstances. Today she lives in Mallorca and has embarked on the adventure of painting. Filled with stringency and immediacy, her paintings are undisguised – they are, as far as the artist’ s biography is concerned, characterized by a deep authenticity that encourages viewers to immerse themselves in them. After all, the figures in her recent large-format paintings are life-size and seek dialogue at eye level with us. Aï cha uses painting to get her story off her chest. In her world of images she returns to her childhood and youth, arranges the things of everyday life, orchestrates the little stories. And yet, there is always something threatening, a gloomy mood perceptible in the background. Her pictorial composition does appear classically trained, the interaction of the pictorial objects seems to be formally conceived with complete sovereignty, the motifs instantly communicate themselves to the viewer. Aï cha could very well have been a prominent player in Art Brut, but she paints here and now.

The facelessness of the protagonists in Josef Zekoff’ s paintings is one of their most distinctive features. From emblematic labyrinths – he does also paint ornaments and maps – to drawn stick figures, the in-between space occupied by these paintings encourages self-reflection, which does, however, require courage on the part of the viewer. Or as Florian Waldvogel writes in his introductory text: » Do the protagonists of his paintings seek an encounter with something that goes beyond the world of objects and fixed quantities? Is it, as Martin Heidegger writes in › What is Metaphysics?‹ , about an encounter with the › nothing‹ within › dread‹ ? Does the confrontation with › nothing‹ in Zekoff’ s paintings refer to our fear in the face of the original meaninglessness of the world, to the fact that it is existence that ascribes meanings to things?« The worldliness of the world, according to Heidegger, lies in this emptiness, and Zekoff’ s figures, unlike the viewers, do not dread nothingness. But as in Jacobean tragedy, fear needs the awareness of loss in order to survive. According to Marcel Proust, Florian Waldvogel concludes, the true paradises are those that have been lost.