What does a feminist exhibition on masculinity look like? This was the question asked by curators Eva Birkenstock, Michelle Cotton, and Nikola Dietrich while organizing MASKULINITÄTEN, their three-part exhibition now open in Bonn, Cologne, and Düsseldorf.
The Bonn section—curated by Cotton, head of Artistic Programmes and Content at Mudam, Luxembourg—includes work by Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Alexandra Bircken, PatriciaL. Boyd, Jana Euler, Hal Fischer, Eunice Golden, Richard Hawkins, Jenny Holzer, Hudinilson Jr., Allison Katz, Mahmoud Khaled, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Robert Morris, D’Ette Nogle, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Bea Schlingelhoff, and AnitaSteckel.
The Cologne section—curated by Dietrich, director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein—includes Georgia Anderson & David Doherty & Morag Keil & Henry Stringer, Louis Backhouse, OlgaBalema,Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Anders Clausen, Enrico David, Jonathas deAndrade, Jimmy DeSana, Hedi El Kholti, Hilary Lloyd, Shahryar Nashat, CarolRama, Bea Schlingelhoff, Heji Shin, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Carrie Mae Weems, MarianneWex, Martin Wong, and Katharina Wulff.
The presentation in Düsseldorf—curated by Birkenstock, director of the Kunstverein for theRheinland and Westfalen, Düsseldorf—features the work of Vito Acconci, The Agency, KerenCytter, Vaginal Davis, Nicole Eisenman, Andrea Fraser, keyon gaskin with Samiya Bashir, sidony o’neal & Adee Roberson, Philipp Gufler, Annette Kennerley, Sister Corita Kent, Jürgen Klauke, Jutta Koether, Tetsumi Kudo, Klara Lidén, Henrik Olesen, D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus, Josephine Pryde, Lorenzo Sandoval, Julia Scher, Agnes Scherer, BeaSchlingelhoff, Katharina Sieverding, Nancy Spero, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.
MASKULINITÄTEN will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Koenig Books, with contributions by—among others—CAConrad, Nelly Gawellek, Chris Kraus, Quinn Latimer, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marlene Streeruwitz, and Änne Söll.
Origin stories are essential to Ursula Hauser. Growing up in St. Gallen, Switzerland, she co-founded and directed her family’s appliance business in the city. Although she initially felt a stronger connection to modern architecture than contemporary art, she started buying works by Swiss artists in the 1960s.
“They came and went in our house. And it’s still that way with our artists. We would meet on weekends or were invited to birthdays. To me, support means acquiring something an artist has made. In the mid-1980s, I set up my own showrooms in the abandoned Rohner Textile factory in Flawil: Galerie Arte Nuova. Actually it wasn’t a gallery; I just wanted to give local artists a platform.” — Ursula Hauser*
Hauser—who co-founded Hauser & Wirth in 1992 in Zürich with her future son-in-law Iwan Wirth and daughter Manuela—has remained personal friends with many of the artists whose work she collects, always availing herself of the opportunity to spend time with them in their studios, talking through their process. The new publication THE INNER MIRROR: CONVERSATIONS WITH URSULA HAUSER, ART COLLECTOR—a beautifully illustrated book-length interview between Hauser, Laura Bechter, and Michaela Unterdörfer—is the story of this exchange.
“In the big American studios… you make contact, introduce yourself, or maybe you’ve bought a work, so there’s already a connection. And then you take a very tentative approach, proceed step-by-step, depending on whether the chemistry is there. As a rule, you’ve already met at an exhibition, in a gallery, or in a museum. And finally you peer into all the corners.”*
Whether discovering SoHo in the 1990s with Iwan Wirth, celebrating Parkett’s tenth anniversary with Bice Curiger and Jacqueline Burckhardt, trading cars with Jason Rhoades in Los Angeles, or discovering drawings by Ida Applebroog in the artist’s cabinet drawers, THE INNERMIRROR is a private view into the life and work of this key art world figure. For Hauser, the book’s title refers to something women were seldom afforded the luxury of revealing, something Hauser found through art.
“Women who support a family and have to survive—it doesn’t occur to anyone that they might have personal feelings. You simply have to fight, it’s a struggle, and you have no choice but to make something good, something better out of it… Louise Bourgeois’ work is like a mirror of humanity. For people of my generation, it was impossible to let on that you were vulnerable. You would never reveal the reflections on your inner mirror. That was a sign of weakness and then you would have been lost. And that’s exactly what Louise’s work shows. Her art creates a space where that can be expressed.”*
The works in the Ursula Hauser Collection stay with her—she’s held on to drawings and models by Paul McCarthy for years—and Hauser collaborates with the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen on exhibitions of the collection. This summer in southwest England, the show UNCONSCIOUSLANDSCAPE—WORKS FROM THE URSULA HAUSER COLLECTION—curated by Manuela Wirth and Laura Bechter—brings together sixty-five works by the women who have drawn Hauser’s eye over the last four decades.
This is the last week to see the group show HURTS TO LAUGH at Various Small Fires, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and featuring Sascha Braunig, David Gilbert, Jay Heikes, D’Ette Nogle, Carol Rama, Lee Relvas, Claude Wampler.
HURTS TO LAUGH, through August 19.
VARIOUS SMALL FIRES, 812 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles.
vsf.la/hurts-to-laugh-2017/
See: Sarah Lehrer-Gwaiwer, “Collisions Ahead” (on Brendan Fowler), PARIS LA 11 (Spring 2014): 20–27.
Top: Jay Heikes, Assisted Living, 2017 (detail).
Bottom: Sascha Braunig,Study for “Comber” 2, 2015.
Images courtesy of the artistsand Various Small Fires.
“The reality I use—such as the tires in my work of the ’70s, which represent my father’s factory, which later had to close, we became poor, and he committed suicide—is always an ordinary material, like the knee, or the Eros, of my drawings.” — Carol Rama
CAROL RAMA—ANTIBODIES is the first New York museum retrospective of the work of the Italian artist. “The exhibition at the New Museum brings together over one hundred of Rama’s paintings, objects, and works on paper, highlighting her consistent fascination with the representation of the body.”* Known for the free eroticism of her small, representational drawings and paintings, the impact of Rama’s large rubber-on-canvas abstract collages from 1970 and 1971 is just as great.
The New Museum exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni, assistant curator and artistic director, respectively, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.
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