Kiki Smith

Artist record available on www.fortlaan17.com

---------

At Galerie fortlaan 17

---------

At Galerie Fortlaan 17 Kiki Smith is now showing 14 works from the period 1996 - 2006 which were never on view in Belgium. This selection includes drawings, installations and bronze sculptures. Kiki Smith is bringing our focus back to nature as she did in her first show in Ghent ten years ago…

By ELLEN DE JANS – ISCHA TALLIEU

Ten years ago, in 1999, Kiki Smith exhibited for the first time at Galerie Fortlaan 17 in Ghent. Since her last solo-show in Ghent in 2002, Kiki Smith exhibited at the MOMA and the Whitney Museum in NY, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, SFMOMA in San Francisco, La Coleccion Jumex in Mexico City and more recently in Krefeld and Nürnberg. In the early 1990s Kiki Smith caused quite a stir with her work about the human body. At that time AIDS was spreading rapidly, as was puritanism and, in its wake, censorship, promoted by the then republican government. The social context lends Kiki Smith’s work a strongly political dimension. Though the artist reduces the body to what it really is – a self-sustaining system of organs and bodily fluids – it is obvious that for Kiki Smith the body is not merely physical. The spiritual power and vitality that surface from these works illus­trate that the body is more than just matter subject to laws and patterns.

In the mid 1990s the artist increasingly emphasizes the spiritual and mythical aspect in works like Hive, Standing and White Mammals (sculptures which were on view in Galerie Fortlaan 17 in 1999). Kiki Smith focuses expressly on nature, the animal world, the universe and the position of women in fairy tales, myths and religious narratives. She calls attention to the intuitive, the chaotic, the orga­nic and the creative, all of which have been treated as insignificant in our rational Western culture. Kiki Smith rejects an idealized world view. Instead, she crea­tes her own universe in which she presents us with an exceptional combination of wryness and poetry, beauty and pain. She mingles childish wonder with mature wisdom of the world in works that cannot possi­bly leave anyone indifferent. Their material beauty is amazing, though sometimes hard to digest.

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nürnberg, Germany. She current­ly lives and works in New York. The show ‘Her Memory’ is now on view at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (Februari 20 - May 24, 2009).

Joey Kötting

---------

!! Sale, Soldes, rabajas !!

---------

“I see a darkness”
Bonnie Prince Billy

Joey Kötting was exhibiting at Galerie Fortlaan 17 in 2004 and 2007. The artist continues to be interested in personal and collec­tive history and the way how it stays part of the present. Joey Kötting has always collec­ted and re-used imagery and now he is re­­discovering the images he created. At Galerie Fortlaan 17 he is presenting a collage of his works from ‘STILL (deadpopstars)’ and ‘Notes on Pilgrim(aging)’ in a re- invented context and concept. No matter what language, no matter where you go, no matter where you roam: Sales are omni­present these days. There are discounts of -5%, -50%, -75% everywhere. “Everything must go”. People seem to be desperate. Economy is in crisis. As in the song “I see a darkness” by Bonnie Prince Billy, there is doom and gloom everywhere, until in the second half of the song hope re-appears…

So this exhibition will be a ‘Sale’ too. But for this speci­fic sale, time will be reversed like in the book “Time Arrow” by Martin Amis. Everybody is wanting to go back to the ‘good times’. The exhibition will start with all works by Joey Kötting on sale. Time is going backwards and also the discounts are going backwards. During the exhibition, the prices will go up again to their original price, to what the price used to be. So the earlier you visit the exhibition the lower the prices will be.

Joey Kötting continues his research on painting and icono­graphy and comments on histo­ry and the state of capitalism.
Joey Kötting was born in 1966 in England. Lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY. Lives and works since 2005 in Los Angeles.

Zachary WolLard

---------

Conversion

---------

Zachary Wollard likes to include abrupt shifts in scale, style, surface, pattern and setting within individual paintings. Instrumental to the artist’s practice is rigorous art historical research that works in tandem with a chosen theme to a body of work. The paintings contain elements of landscape, still life, figuration, abstraction, and ornamentation, resisting a single genre for a more open-ended approach formally. He is drawn to geo­graphical and painterly locations where juxtapositions of contexts, settings, styles and symbols challenge us towards new and more complex syncretic possibilities. The paint handling is just as likely to push forward the narrative as it is to withdraw from it.

“The paintings “Sonic Ghost” and “Squat” (on view in this exhibition) are based on memories I have from my childhood in Kansas City. My friends and I would take over these abandoned buildings and throw these impromptu parties. There was a sense of wild abandon to these gatherings that was transcendental. We were all very young and desperate to escape the suffocating structures of family and school. People would be out of their heads, laughing, crying, dancing, making out. Music was central to these events. The friendships I formed during this period had a kind of openness, depth and abandon unlike anything I had experienced up to that point. I think of these paintings as memorials to these “squatting” parties. I wanted them to be compositionally dense. Layers of light and color pour through these spaces in unexpected ways, expressing more of a sense of the chaos of these gatherings and the emotional feeling I have for this time.” – Zachary Wollard

Zachary Wollard was born in 1974 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Munich, and Madrid.

Erica Svec

“The surface of the canvas is the container where I synthesize ideas using abstract and figurative forms, depending on how I need to describe something. This combi­nation of information, taken out of context, is forced together to suggest a different way to see the ordinary.” – Erica Svec

---------

Plenty

---------

Erica Svec is fascinated with the mind’s ability to re-contextua­lize words, ideas, objects and images so that new meanings evolve through narrative associa­tions. The pictorial spaces of Svec’s canvases draw the viewer into a world that is once real and abstracted, strange, yet fami­liar. The narratives that evolve seem highly personal, and often derive from Svec’s own environment (the objects and space of her studio) and her explorations of her own consciousness. But they also reflect the often perplexing qualities of the modern world. Her imagery is recognizable in form but contextually out-of-place. Erica Svec reassembles visual clues from both historic and banal origins. There is a presence of a visual lineage that links the artist’s work to art historical influences. Erica Svec quotes in the painting ‘Plenty’ (on view in this exhibition) the iconography of ‘Lucretia’ as seen in Rembrandt’s painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. At the same time, overtones of the fractured state of the world outside of this constructed universe are also conveyed. There are traces in her work of disparate influence of cubism, surrealism conceptual painting and painterly abstraction. While cultivating a flatness in much of the picture plane, Svec also plays with depth, subverting and still embracing the rules of perspective so that the viewer expe­riences shifts between subjects and settings, which often seem to melt into one another.

Erica Svec was born in 1973 in Muenster, Germany. She current­ly lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She exhibited at Laris­sa Goldston Gallery, NYC in 2006 and 2008.