MOURNING—ON LOSS AND CHANGE, curated by Brigitte Kölle, looks at death and grief through the eyes and works of nearly thirty contemporary artists.
Participants include Bas Jan Ader, Kudjoe Affutu, Khaled Barakeh, Christian Boltanski, Helen Cammock, Anne Collier, Johannes Esper, Sibylle Fendt, Seiichi Furuya, Paul Fusco, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Aslan Ġoisum, Ragnar Kjartansson, Maria Lassnig, Jennifer Loeber, Ataa Oko, Adrian Paci, Philippe Parreno, Susan Philipsz, Greta Rauer, Willem de Rooij, Michael Sailstorfer, Thomas Schütte, Dread Scott, Rein Jelle Terpstra, Rosemarie Trockel, Tilman Walther, and Andy Warhol.
Cammock—recent joint winner of the Turner Prize—makes her German debut with the exhibition, which includes a sound piece produced by Philipsz that “revives the old mourning tradition of keening in the atrium of the Gallery of Contemporary Art.”*
A bilingual exhibition booklet can be viewed here.
MARIA LASSNIG—NEW YORK FILMS 1970–1980—restored by the Maria Lassnig Foundation and the AustrianFilm Museum—comprise live-action and documentary footage, and “enrich and complicate our understandings of Lassnig’s approach to figuration and self-portraiture, as well as other key themes that she investigated throughout her career, including the social roles assigned to women, the tension between public engagement and private seclusion, and questions of technological advancement, especially of imaging technologies and shifts in the way images circulate.” (New York Diary)
These films were largely never finished, nor shown in the artist’s lifetime, which perhaps accounts for their frankness, a type of elucidate meditation on the artistic process, life in the studio, and the psychologies, lives, and bodies of Lassnig’s friends and colleagues. As such, the films of this period become essential to understanding the shift within Lassnig’s practice, which occurred around 1970 following the artist’s move to New York from Vienna in 1968, to be “in the country of strong women.”* Shifting her focus from the personal to that of the body and its relations, her reaction to the sensory overload of Manhattan was not so much an abandonment of an earlier practice of “body sensation” drawings and the subsequent “body awareness” paintings, but rather a redefinition of a transposed body within a cultural and civic environment.** — Mary L. Coyne
*Maria Lassnig, The Pen is the Sister of the Brush: Diaries 1943-1997, edited by Hans UlrichObrist (Göttingen: Steidl; Zürich: Hauser and Wirth, 2009).
**Wolfgang Dreschler, “About the intimate link between the pained and the painter,” in Maria Lassnig (Vienna: Museum moderner Kunst, Ludwig Foundation, 1999).
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.
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