CONSTRUCTION/DESTRUCTION Organized with Olivier Renaud-Clement

With Fernanda Gomes, Arturo Herrera, Jannis Kounellis, Adam Marnie, Joel
Shapiro and Kishio Suga.
Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce “Construction/ Destruction”, a group
exhibition that brings together the work of six international artists, active between
the 1960s and today. Emerging from divergent contemporary trajectories across the
globe, their work explores notions of destruction, construction and transformation,
as forces of cyclical renewal to define the connections to, or away from, their
own cultural past. The destructive tendency is crucial to the history of modern and
contemporary art. However, presented here, these acts are no more violent than they
are transformational, looking to develop dynamic visual and spatial relationships, or
to construct multi-layered experiences, which engage the artist, the material and the
agency of the viewer.
Together, the works of Joel Shapiro and Fernanda Gomes create a new landscape
of form and meaning, which insists upon a phenomenological experience of space.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, the work of Fernanda Gomes emerges from the traditions
of Brazilian Constructivism and the Neo-Concrete. Created in situ, her installations
reflect upon a process of discovery, assimilation and appropriation. Starkly minimal in
her aesthetic approach, Gomes extracts discarded objects from the world – such as
cotton thread, nails, wood, plastic bags, wire, or paintbrushes – most of which she
paints the color white. Choreographing barely noticeably interventions among the
gallery’s walls and physical space, her work requires extended observation as she
poetically manifests fragments from the world. “The state of things on their way to
disappearing appeals to me,” she explains, “they have a strange density in contrast to
their precarious materiality.”
In a similar manner, American sculptor Joel Shapiro presents a series of new miniature
sculptures, which despite their modest scale, command an unwavering presence.
Sans plinth, his pieces are fixed and spread across the gallery’s floor. In this new
series of intimately scaled works, Shapiro first constructs models of houses made
of wood, which he then burns and later casts in bronze. His use of scale alludes
to an extreme vulnerability, but at the same time conveys an aloof distance. Here,
Shapiro revisits the motif of ‘the house’, a theme which first appeared and, in fact,
dominated the work of his early career. Emerging in the sixties and seventies, in the
wake of Minimalist and Conceptual art, Shapiro developed an iconography that drew
upon private memory, but which sought out formal invention. The immediate physical
experience of the artist’s sculptures is therefore psychologically charged, imbued with
personal associations whilst simultaneously evoking everyday universal forms.
Performing serial acts of destruction, the young New York-based artist Adam Marnie
not only interrogates the boundaries of sculpture, but explores and subverts the
aesthetic of architectural space. Marnie’s work traces the influence of Minimalism,
which he arguably embraces and critiques in a very physical way. ‘Locus Rubric’ (2011)
appropriates constructions materials, such as drywall, which the artist employs to
build boxed forms that have been punctured by two fist-sized holes. As if to capture
the immediacy of the impact, the sculpture has been encased and displayed within
a frame to collect that rubble as it falls. However, through careful looking, the viewer
finds that Marnie’s surface fissures are nothing more than a series of predetermined,
constructed gestures that create tension between artifice and real presentations of
violence.
Although the work of Jannis Kounellis and Kishio Suga developed separately within
a distinctive national context during the postwar period, their work shares affinities
in an approach to material and process, which articulates the artwork as a site of
contingency, open to the possibility of fragmentation and ephemeral states. Japanese artist Kishio Suga is one of the most prominent figures of Mono Ha (School of Things),
whose work emphasizes the close relationship between the fundamental nature of
objects and the spaces in which they exist. In a series of wall-mounted assemblages
presented here, Suga employs natural and industrial materials to create intimate pieces
sparked with improvisational energy, reflecting the physical act of their construction.
Similarly, the sculptures of Jannis Kounellis – one of the forefather’s of the Italian Arte
Povera movement – can be characterized by the juxtaposition of objects and materials
that may be physically and culturally antithetical to one another. Ordinary objects held
a directness and immediacy for Kounellis, who sought to unite art with everyday lived
experiences.
Lastly, Venezuelan artist, Arturo Herrera’s work is rooted in the practice of collage.
Incorporating the use of everyday printed materials into his visual vocabulary, Herrera
combines dislocated fragments of popular imagery to create abstract compositions,
which tap into our cultural subconscious and collective memory. In a recent series of
“Untitled” works, the artist has sourced found books from flea markets in Berlin. An
example of Herrera’s first foray in painting, the artist deconstructs the notion of the
picture plane by employing the book as his canvas. Dipping the objects into paint, the
pages of each book are sealed shut, obliterating their content and destroying their
original form. Continuing to spill and drip paint over the surface, Herrera transforms
the discard paperback and hardcover books into intimate object-based paintings,
which, through built up layers, invoke the process of collage to create compelling new
graphic forms.