MUNTADAS: ELEVEN presents eleven works created in varying periods and under varying circumstances. This exhibition marks the first time these works have been seen in New York, beginning with the earliest, Diálogo, produced in 1980 in Madrid; to the series Sentences, begun in 1999; to Look/See/Perceive of 2009; to recent work like The Ordeal of Picasso's Heirs and Carteras sin ministro, both from 2012. Although Muntadas is well known for constructing critiques of what he calls the "media landscape" in large and complex projects, each of these eleven works embody a particularly direct and personal engagement with issues of perception, interpretation, and representation. Antoni Muntadas was an early pioneer of video and installation in the mid-seventies, and he has continued to work with photography, video, installation, audio recording, and urban intervention. Iterations of his iconic projects—such as Between the Frames: The Forum (1983-93), The Board Room (1985), and the ongoing series On Translation (1995- ) and The Construction of Fear (2008- )—have been widely exhibited at institutions and galleries in North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Muntadas participated in the 1977 and 1997 editions of Documenta, the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1983 São Paulo Biennial, the 2000 Havana Biennial, the 2002 Taipei Biennial, the 2004 Kwangju Biennial, the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, and the 2012 Paris Triennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. In 2005 he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale, where he realized a comprehensive project on the architectural evolution of the Biennale over its history. Recent surveys have included exhibitions at the Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Neuen Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and the Estaçao Pinacoteca, São Paulo. Just closing is "Entre/Between," a major career-spanning exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, curated by Daina Augaitis. Muntadas has received numerous honors, including awards from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz, Laser d'Or in Locarno, and the Premi Nacional d'Arts Plàstiques de la Generalitat de Catalunya. In 2005 the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded him the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Click to view online publication › Heide Fasnacht, Archaeologies, 2011 Since 2008 Heide Fasnacht has been exploring landscapes of cultural destruction and in the process has recovered images long dormant and silent. Against our social climate, marked as it is by an inability to face history, Fasnacht takes on the challenge of excavating the past as she examines the fate of cultural artifacts in times of conflict. She begins in medias res, figuratively and literally, and assembles arrays of things stolen, hoarded, lost, recovered, and demolished as a result of war. Fasnacht draws on multiple sources, including the Nazi's confiscation of art and treasure, the Allies' bombing of Monte Cassino, looting and damage at the Umm al-Aqarib archaeological site in Iraq following the US invasion, the methodical looting of treasure by Japanese forces in WWII, Japanese internment camps in the US, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the London Blitz, the TET offensive, the Monuments Men, and the Rubble Women. The outstanding body of work she has created bears witness to the irreparable waste, destruction, and loss that marks these historical moments, as well as to their continuing and contemporary repercussions. Heide Fasnacht has shown extensively both in the US and abroad since her first one-person show in New York at P.S.1 in 1979. Her work is represented in many major collections and she is the recipient of several grants and honors, including Edward Albee Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner, and Rockefeller Fellowship awards. Click to view online publication › Charles Gaines, String Theory: Rewriting Bataille #9, 2011 Each of the works in "Mind the Gap" operates between and within signs in order to discover, tease out, and make manifest meaning that is neither obvious nor orthodox. The artists presented here respond to our world with particular intelligence and sensitivity to these gaps. It is in their natures to be radical, and each questions and provokes in their own way. DENNIS ADAMS FERNANDO BRYCE HEIDE FASNACHT CHARLES GAINES HANS HAACKE RICHARD HAMILTON ALFREDO JAAR MARK LOMBARDI ANTONI MUNTADAS WALID RAAD The title and spirit of the exhibition take their cue from Lise Patt's description of W.G. Sebald: If there is a Sebaldian method, in Austerlitz we are given its opening line: "mind the gap" between words, between and in images and text, but most significantly, mind the gaps in (not only between) signs. Look at the spaces between seeing and not seeing (where you'll catch a glimpse of "the phantom traces created by the sluggish eye"). Notice the gaps between cards being dealt of pages of a book flipping by. Don't turn away from the visual magma, after-images that "leak" out from their moving sides. Pay attention to the momentary arrest of language required by a period, a comma, an "aside." Don't ignore the "whispered" secrets of the last spoken syllable hanging in the air, or the last written word of a paragraph stranded on its own line. Study those photographs created in slips of the shutter or captured in concert with bodily sighs. These are the gaps that open the way to the production of thought itself, to awaking, not anesthetizing, the creative mind. Lise Patt, "What I Know for Sure," in Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald (Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), pp. 81-82. Click to view online publication › Kent Fine Art's upcoming exhibition Llyn Foulkes: Bloody Heads will be the first show of new paintings by Foulkes in New York since 2007, and an in-depth look at his personal collection of "bloody heads" completed over the past decade. While his previous exhibitions of 2005 and 2007 focused on single emblematic tableaus (The Lost Frontier and Deliverance), the current exhibition will present an intimate and introspective group of works from his Los Angeles studio. Beginning in the early seventies, Foulkes turned up the volume of Baconian horror in his first series of portrait heads, keenly described by Rosetta Brooks in the catalogue for his traveling retrospective organized by the Laguna Art Museum in 1995: Contemporary life is full of all kinds of monsters which many of us either ignore or conceal. Foulkes does neither. His art is constantly grappling with the social schizophrenia characteristic of America, including its inherent violence and its quiet vulnerability. A pioneer of the L.A. Hot and Cool scene of the sixties (along with John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Chris Burden, George Herms, Edward Kienholz, Bruce Nauman, Kenneth Price, and others), Foulkes has continued to be an innovator. His breakthrough tableau work Pop (1986-1990) was exhibited at Kent in 1990 and is now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Pop, along with a group of subsequent paintings selected by Paul Schimmel for his seminal "Helter Skelter" exhibition of 1992, propelled Foulkes to new territory in his art-making, as well as new levels of national recognition. Foulkes's energy, his commitment to continual advancement of painterly possibilities, and his obsessive-compulsive working method have lead him to a "post-Pop" period in which he continues to expand and develop his vision. Foulkes was featured in the 2009 exhibition "Nine Lives" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and he will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Hammer currently being organized by Ali Subotnick. As Subotnick wrote in the catalogue for "Nine Lives": Llyn Foulkes has been exposing the hypocrisies and absurdities of American life since the 1960s, and his influence is vast and unquantifiable. From early constructions like the seminal charred blackboard and chair... to his epic rock landscape paintings and his "bloody heads" and construction paintings, he continually challenges his audience and himself... At seventy-four he's still kicking and screaming. Click to view online publication ›