Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs
Anton Ginzburg VIEWs
Anton Ginzburg VIEWs March 28-May 23, 2019
833 Madison Avenue, Third Floor New York, NY 10021
www.HelwaserGallery.comÂ
Table of Contents This publication accompanies the exhibition Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs, organized by Helwaser Gallery, New York from March 28–May 23, 2019.
Foreword by Antoine Helwaser (English/French)
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On VIEW by Meghan Forbes
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Fields of Vision: Anton Ginzburg VIEWs by Junni Chen
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Works in the Exhibition
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Installation Views
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Biographies
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Exhibition History
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Additional Credits
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Foreword
There are no coincidences, only encounters. —Paul Eluard
Préface
Il n’y a pas de hasards, il n’y a que des rendez-vous. —Paul Eluard
In 1986, Helwaser Gallery was founded in rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris. At that time, the gallery featured French masters such as Jean Dubuffet, Jean Metzinger, and Pablo Picasso. Moving to New York City in 2008 marked a transition of the gallery’s focus, to a keen eye on post-war and contemporary American art. Our opening exhibition Red (2008) presented artists including Hans Hofmann, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, amongst others expressing a similar interest
La galerie Helwaser a été fondée en 1986, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, à Paris, où elle présentait des MaÎtres français du XXème siècle tels que Jean Dubuffet, Jean Metzinger et Pablo Picasso. Son déménagement à New York en 2008 souligne la transition de sa mission et le souhait de porter un regard attentif sur l’art américain d’après-guerre et contemporain. L’exposition d’ouverture intitulée Red (2008) mettait en avant les œuvres notamment de Hans Hofmann, Andy Warhol et Jean-Michel
for vibrant hues. Ten years later, it seems only fitting that the gallery charts a new course.
Basquiat au cours desquelles les artistes partageaient un intérêt similaire pour la puissance des tonalités de rouge. Dix ans plus tard, il semble logique pour la galerie de renouveler ses ambitions.
Opening our new gallery on 833 Madison Avenue is a solo exhibition by Anton Ginzburg, a Russian-born artist based in New York. Entitled Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs, the exhibition stages the VIEW painting series, a group of two sculptures, a site-specific mural, and a video work. Ginzburg’s practice is informed by a study of the VKhUTEMAS’ curriculum, a modern art and technical school established by the Soviet Union in 1920. The school was often seen in parallel to the German Bauhaus, as it bore similarities in its mission, organization, and scope. With an emphasis on color theory, construction, and art history, Ginzburg began applying Constructivist methodology to his own practice several years ago. The VIEW painting series manifests this study through the artist’s arresting use of color and plane, with an astute awareness of the figure-ground relationship and the viewer’s relationship to the works. When I visited Ginzburg’s studio, the shape and composition of the VIEW paintings—which are painted on wood panels handcrafted and prepared by the artist—struck me immediately as works that reward long and thoughtful looking. Indeed, the forms’ convergence flanked by the diagonal lines produce an optical effect, allowing viewers to freely engage with the works, highlighting the contemporaneity of the paintings. Contextualizing the works within art history, masters such as Piet Mondrian and Otto Freundlich come to mind, reminding us of art’s quality of simplicity. In addition to the exhibition and this catalogue, we are pleased to host an artist dialogue with Meghan Forbes, which extends the conversation beyond the works on view. Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs marks Helwaser Gallery’s new approach of public exhibitions and programs, continuing the gallery’s history of presenting post-war and contemporary masters, whilst we forge ahead with a new curatorial vision.
—Antoine Helwaser, Gallery Owner, Helwaser Gallery
Installée dans son nouvel espace au 833 Madison Avenue, la première exposition intitulée Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs, présente l’artiste russe basé à New York à travers un ensemble inédit de tableaux, sculptures, une peinture murale ainsi que la projection d’une œuvre vidéo réalisée par l’artiste. La pratique de Ginzburg s’appuie sur une étude du programme de VKhUTEMAS, l’École d’Art Moderne et Technique créée en Union Soviétique dans les années 1920. Souvent présentée en parallèle avec le Bauhaus allemand, elle en partage notamment la mission, l’organisation et l’architecture. Au cours des trois dernières années, Ginzburg a porté une attention aprofondie à la méthodogie Constructiviste, et en particulier à l’étude des couleurs et formes dans l’histoire de l’art du siècle dernier. De par son utilisation saisissante des tonalités et de la surface, Ginzburg souligne avec astuce la relation figure-fond, questionnant au-delà d’une perception visuelle, l’intimité de la relation entre l’œuvre et le spectateur. Lors de ma visite dans l’atelier de Ginzburg, je fus en premier lieu étonné par le format et la composition élaborée des tableaux VIEWs, peints sur des panneaux en bois que Ginzburg a préalablement fabriqués et traités. A première vue, on perçoit le processus méthodique et réfléchi de l’artiste. Plus encore, ce sont des maîtres tels que Piet Mondrian, Otto Freundlich ou Frank Stella qui me viennent à l’esprit et m’évoquent la puissance de la sobriété en art. Cette exposition s’accompagne de la publication d’un catalogue rédigé par Meghan Forbes. Nous avons le plaisir d’inviter celle-ci à une conversation exclusive avec l’artiste, qui nous éclairera sur son intention et sa vision au-delà de notre perception visuelle et sensorielle de l’œuvre. Anton Ginzburg: VIEWs inaugure le nouveau programme d’expositions organisé par la galerie Helwaser, marquant un jalon dans l’évolution de la venue qui illustre son souci de conserver un attachement aux maîtres du XXème siècle tout en forgeant une vision contemporaine de l’histoire de l’art.
—Antoine Helwaser, Fondateur de Helwaser Gallery
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On VIEW by Meghan Forbes
In VIEWs, a series of new works by Anton Ginzburg, the artist speaks to contemporary and autobiographical issues of movement and migration through a language of abstraction. With his paintings on wooden panels of two distinct sizes, and ceramic polychrome columns, Ginzburg encourages the viewer to look closely at the rhythmic geometries of each VIEW, which are formed from lines and planes of color. The physical quality of these new works, in their shape and attention to the angle of vision, their internal geometry and direction of lines that echo the borders of the paintings themselves, evoke the seam—as a point of rupture and a place of coming together. It is this concept that is essential to understanding the works in VIEWs, their display at Helwaser Gallery, and the biography of the artist in relation to his practice. Ginzburg—New York-based and Leningrad-born (in what is now St. Petersburg)— engages with the historical avant-gardes of Eastern Europe, while simultaneously grappling with his own hybrid identity and transnational subjectivity. He was initially educated in the Soviet system, and then in the West (specifically the United States, where he received his MFA from Bard College); Ginzburg’s constant navigation of the histories and cultures of these two sites is incorporated into his practice in the pulsating color planes, sharp angles, and surprising geometries of these works. In the places where colors meet and interact, new colors and new forms are generated at the seams, evoking the range of possibilities inherent in the movement and transition between one place and another. Undulating brush strokes emerge within a field that, at first glance, may seem to be a solid block of color. Close looking makes visible the presence of the artist’s own hand. The tactility of the works in VIEWs belies and resists a connection to the notion of faktura, as it operated in the context of the historical Russian avant-garde. Faktura is often translated as “texture,” but it also encompasses the act of layering, be it of colors, words, sounds, that amounts to a construction. VIEW_3A_05 (2018), executed in a range of blues, startles for flecks of black that glimmer past the horizon, interrupting an otherwise pure field of color. Ginzburg maintains this strategy in several other paintings in the series. In these hard-edged paintings, their play with repetition is interspersed by ruptures. The artist is also present in the scale of these works, which are based on their relation to the human body; there is a
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pre-occupation with how they commune and communicate with the body of the viewer.There is a fascination with the materiality and objectness of a work of art on view which comes across in Ginzburg’s practice, and its connection to social and political processes lays bare the biography of the artist. — The Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński, who was born in Minsk in 1893 and received his artistic training in Russia prior to the First World War, 1 also saw an implicit interconnection between the act of painting and the material conditions in which the work was created. For Strzemiński, abstraction was itself a form of realism; “Realism is not a Platonic metaphysical absolute,” he claimed, “but the historically evolving process of the development of the human cognitive faculty.”2 In an essay for the avant-garde magazine Blok, Strzemiński published his first theoretical statement outlining his conception of Unism (a theory of art articulated together with his partner Katarzyna Kobro), in which he states that, “The law of organic painting requires: the greatest possible union of forms with the plane of the picture.”3 Strzemiński’s articulation of Unism moved beyond formal considerations to express a utopic social vision, rooted in, and nevertheless divergent from, his earlier exposure to Soviet Constructivism. 4 Steven Mansbach has described Strzemiński’s Architectural Compositions—a series of paintings created between 1926 and 1929—as “building sites for the erection of abstract entities” that sought to “creatively explore the pictorial limits and test the abstract implications of his
1 As Christina Lodder records, Strzemiński and his partner, Katarzyna Kobro, “received their training in Russia’s art schools and were stimulated by their exposure to the achievements of the country’s most innovative artists, especially the work of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. During the revolutionary period (1918-1921), the couple became members of the heroic avant-garde […] Strzemiński quickly came to prominence within this milieu.” [Christina Lodder, “Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński in Russia,” in Katarzyna Kobro & Władysław Strzemiński: Avant-Garde Prototypes (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2017), 104.] 2 Władysław Strzemiński, “Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Vision,” post, The Museum of Modern Art, May 30, 2018, trans. Klara Kemp-Welch and Wanda Kemp-Welch, https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1150-wladyslaw-strzeminski-s-theory-of-vision, para. 23. For the original version in Polish, see Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia, ed. Iwona Luba (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1958; Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2016; reprint). 3 In Ryszard Stanisławski, Janina Ładnowska, Jacek Ojrzyński, and Janusz Zagrodzki, eds., Constructivism in Poland, 1923–1936: BLOK, Praesens, a.r.[Exhibition] Museum Folkwang, Essen, 12.5.–24.6.1973, trans. Piotr Graff and Ewa Krasińska (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 1973), 82. Originally published as “B=2, powinno być” in Blok 8–9 (November/December 1924). Emphasis is Strzemiński’s.
Władysław Strzemiński Architectural Composition 13c, 1929 Oil on Canvas. 38 × 23.6 inches.
4 But this model was interrupted by brutal reality. As Yve-Alain Bois has written, Unism nevertheless revealed its limits with the outbreak of the Second World War: “this impasse is more than formal: it is also political, in the broadest sense of the term, and concerns the utopian daydream that was one of unism’s driving forces as it was of all the movements of the first modernist wave.” [Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 131.]
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Unist guiding philosophy.”5 In one of these compositions, 13c (1929), “Strzemiński utilizes three colors, each with slightly differing ‘faktur[a]’ and each taking on a different shape”; forms are created out of “building blocks of color.”6 (Fig. 1) In the same vein, Ginzburg builds up his compositions through a dynamic use of color. In VIEW_3A_06 (2018), a line of blue and green cuts a horizon across the plane. The intersecting lines within the work, together with the edges of the wood panel, generate a series of three triangles in earthen yellow and orange in the foreground. Where two colors meet, a third emerges. In the distance, another smaller triangle of light blue hovers, glinting in the sky as a totem. Ginzburg underscores the importance of the seam as the place where things meet, and works outwards from the place of intersection. At Helwaser Gallery, this is the case so much so that the walls themselves have been painted into conversation with the colors in his paintings. Where Strzemiński and Kobro saw that the “painting possesses natural borders, the limits of the canvas, beyond which it cannot extend,”7 Ginzburg sees the border as both a cut, and a juncture: the painting’s edge and the beginning of the wall beyond are but another seam, similar to the intersecting lines that create new shapes, or the solid planes of a sculpture, which comes up against the space that circumscribes it. With regards to sculpture, Kobro and Strzemiński found the boundedness of painting (that “world unto itself”) to give way, so that “the organic law of sculpture is to unite with space, to be intimately related to space, to meld into and absorb space.”8 Kobro is, in particular, known today for her polychrome sculptures, in which, as Yve-Alain Bois writes, she actualizes “the use of polychromy to destroy the ‘optical unity,’ which would separate the sculpture from space.”9 (Fig. 2) Both Kobro’s work, and Ginzburg’s polychrome columns, instruct a way of being in space, and in interacting organically with the sculptural object. Furthermore, Bois describes Kobro’s sculptures and Strzemiński’s architectural compositions as both employing
5 Władysław Strzemiński quoted in Steven Mansbach, “Strzemiński’s Architectural Compositions,” in A Polish Avant-Garde: Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, eds. Jarosław Suchan and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska (Paris: Skira, Centre Pompidou, 2018), 45. 6 Ibid. 7 Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, “Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms,” October, no. 156 (Spring 2016): 14.
Karzyna Kobro Spatial Composition (6), 1931 Painted Steel. 25 × 9.8 × 6 inches.
8 Ibid. 9 Yve-Alain Bois, “Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited,” October, no. 156 (Spring 2016): 9.
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“a constant proportional system” to articulate distinct planes, “conceived as materializations of the axes of the space of our experience.”10 For this exhibition, two polychrome columns have been inserted into the gallery, which the viewer must circumnavigate, instructing a choreography of the body that accomodates the punctuation of the pillars, the fixed limits of the painted walls, and the space in between. The Russian Futurist, Mikhail Matyushin, whom Ginzburg has claimed as an influence, put forth the notion of “expanded viewing,” which he developed in the 1920s and 30s in his Visiology Center in Leningrad. As Natalia Baschmakoff writes, “For Matyushin the changes in color and form, which he could observe in the laboratory conditions at GINKhUK (State Institute of Artistic Culture), were not merely perceptual but real. […] Matyushin’s understanding of colour perception also included experiments with differently shaped forms in various spatial situations and moving with different speed.”11 It is a notion of colors in space that potentially corresponds to Strzemiński and Kobro’s—and the artists would have perhaps known Matyushin from their time in the same circles in revolution-era Russia. 12 Ginzburg’s own expansive vision for the triangulation of color and space in conversation with a viewing subject, reflects his engagement with the historical avant-garde. Ginzburg’s columns, which are constructed of polychromatic glazed ceramic modules, gesture beyond the confines of their fixed space, and a pre-determined stance of the viewer vis-a-vis their placement. Kobro and Strzemiński argue that “color, coming in contact with space, emanates the force of its energy into it. The influence of color in space could be said to stretch all the way to infinity. Color subdues space and radiates into it.”13 This evokes a sensation of relations that likewise permeate the works in VIEWs, triggering a notion of multiple potentialities, precisely in those places where one plane abuts the next, in the modules of the columns, divided into different fields of color. In VIEWs, a permeation of color into space constitutes the abstract works. This
10 Ibid. , 8 11 Natalia Baschmakoff, “From the ‘Transparent Stone Age’ to the ‘Space of the Chalice-Cupola’. Perceptual Utopias in the Russian Avant-Garde (1910s-1960s),” in Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, eds. David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen, and Harri Veivo (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 209. 12 For instance, Strzemiński studied at SVOMAS (First Free State Art Workshops), where Matyushin taught the course in color. 13 Kobro and Strzemiński, 34.
Anton Ginzburg VIEW_ 3A_02, 2018 Pigment and acrylic on wood 36 × 25.5 inches
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is expressed in both the columns and the planes of the paintings. They gesture insistently at the transactions that preceded the ultimate outcome of mounting the wood panel paintings on the wall, as well as fitting the ceramic modules onto their metal bases. As David Joselit has argued, the painting belongs intrinsically to “networks of distribution and exhibition,” and in response to Martin Kippenberger and his works of the 1990s, Joselit suggests that by now the “individual painting should explicitly visualize such networks.”14 A consideration of the complex and often tenuous networks that bring contemporary art into the gallery is not only a process of writing exhibition history, but is in essence a utilization of abstraction. It can be said, of course, that the inherently non-representational cannot in and of itself tell the nuanced story of migration, education, negotiation, and labor that brought Ginzburg’s paintings onto the walls—and got the walls painted and the columns built, by another set of workers with their own set of histories. But the potential alienation of abstraction urges, at the same time, for closer looking, which might in turn summon contemplation and questions that point towards these larger narratives. An insistence on the capacity for the abstract to be political is a part of the historical avant-garde legacy that is situated in the ethos of Ginzburg’s painting and sculpture. It is through this engagement that his work becomes an activation of the historical avant-garde, and comes into dialogue with contemporary abstract practices of self-identification. Recently, in a conversation with the contemporary Mexican-American artist Marela Zacarias—who has turned from public figurative mural paintings to sculptural abstraction in the past years—the curator Omar Lopez Chahoud pointed to the “social conscience in the process of making abstraction.”15 In turn, Zacarias described her artistic process that draws from a range of sources—from Native American art to Mayan textiles and those of the Mediterranean Sea—as “trying to create [an abstract] language I can use to retell a narrative, to tell stories that are hidden or marginalized or forgotten.”16 Ginzburg, likewise, in a recent interview with Maxim Burov, underscores the geographic and temporal in-betweeness of his influences, stating: “As someone born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), I am
14 David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October, no. 130 (Fall 2009): 125. Emphasis is the author’s.
Anton Ginzburg Stargaze: Orion, 2016 Stainless steel, patinated bronze, paint. 267 × 96 × 132 inches (678 × 244 × 335 cm). Public Sculpture for U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Commissioned by Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State in 2014. Sculpture completed in 2016, and installed in 2018.
15 Omar Lopez Chahoud, “Omar Lopez Chahoud in conversation with Marela Zacarias (Mexico/US) August, 2018,” Sapar Contemporary, accessed November 28, 2019, http://www.saparcontemporary.com/marela-interview, para. 13. 16 Ibid., para. 14.
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familiar and indebted to the Leningrad line of Formalism (GINHUK and OPOYAZ). [But… w]hile it is true that I am studying Formalist methodology that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century, I am searching for ways of applying and making it relevant for the present. Over the last hundred years, Formalist tradition has passed through many refractions and international interpretations (think, for instance, of American Minimalism or the Brazilian Tropicalia movements). All of these iterations should be taken into account, not just the historical Russian Formalist art and thought.”17 Coincidentally, both Zacarias and Ginzburg, each with hybrid American identities, have been commissioned to create installations for consulates and embassies. In the case of Zacarias, her work is located in the American Consulate in Monterey, Mexico, and for Ginzburg, at the US Embassy in Moscow. Ginzburg’s Stargaze: Orion (2016)—a 24-foot stainless steel outdoor sculpture—is intended to place the scale of the human body into conversation with the cosmos, perhaps aspiring towards that “infinity” Kobro and Strzemiński see as the sculpture’s domain. Commissioned under President Barack Obama, its construction was halted by the evacuation of the embassy in 2017 under the current US president, but has since been installed in May 2018. Once again, the history of how a work of art comes to occupy space is the story of a network; it requires a reckoning with the inextricable web of bureaucracy that extends from the hegemony of state power to affect the individual bodies of the producers, as well as the visitors to the consulate. Perhaps vulnerable, and seeking a visa, they might find some solace in the imagination of a more delimited space.
the biography of Ginzburg and the development of his artistic practice. Yet, their simultaneous exhibition of continuity and rupture (in their shape, material composition, and color palette), summon the “interrupted trajectory,” in Ginzburg’s words, of an Eastern European avant-garde. For the viewer to make these connections, close looking is required. “What is significant for me in a work of visual art is its formal grammar and whether or not it succeeds in expressing its own materiality through an economy of expressive means,” claims Ginzburg. 18 And as Strzemiński called for, there is a “labor of thinking, in co-operation with the direct activity of seeing” for the materiality of abstraction to take on this expression. It is a form of work that rewards the viewer in confronting these expanded VIEWs. 19 ◊
The works in VIEWs, in their abstraction and new forms, are intended by Ginzburg to make visible a mediation between East and West, historical and contemporary, in an “expanded” field of appropriation and synthesis. Their deeply material nature inscribes the artist onto the surface of the paintings. The works themselves, perhaps, do not readily offer a narrative of the post-Soviet condition and migration in
17 Anton Ginzburg, quoted in Maxim Burov, “Anton Ginzburg Discusses His Work, Views on Modernism, and the Synthesis of the Arts,” trans. Anastasia Osipova, Anton Ginzburg, accessed March 13, 2019, http://antonginzburg.com/publications/press/ on-neo-modernism, para. 4. For the original interview in Russian, see https://www.colta.ru/articles/art/19278-tema-formy-dlyamenya-yavlyaetsya-tsentralnoy.
18 Ibid., para. 15. 19 Strzemiński, “Theory of Vision,” para. 18.
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VIEW_5A_01, 2018. Pigment, acrylic and oil on wood. 37.5 × 60 inches.
VIEW_5A_02, 2018. Pigment, acrylic and oil on wood. 37.5 × 60 inches.
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VIEW_3A_05, 2018. Pigment and acrylic on wood. 25.5 × 36 inches.
VIEW_3A_06, 2018. Pigment and acrylic on wood. 25.5 × 36 inches.
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Biographies Anton Ginzburg (b. 1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) is a New York-based artist, known for his films, sculptures, paintings, and text-based printed work investigating historical narratives and poetic studies of place, representation, and post-Soviet identity. He earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design, The New School and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Canada, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns in New York, Lille 3000 in Euralille, France, and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Soluna), Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and New York Film Festival/Projections among others.
Meghan Forbes is currently the C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She holds a PhD from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Meghan recently co-curated the exhibition BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels, in the MoMA Library (September 25–November 9, 2018). She is the sole editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019). Besides her academic publications, Meghan publishes regularly in venues of wider readership such as as Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and the Michigan Quarterly Review.
www.antonginzburg.com Junni Chen currently serves as Director of Exhibitions and Programs at Helwaser Gallery. Previously, she has held curatorial positions at the National Gallery Singapore and the National University of Singapore Museum, and has also written on contemporary art and culture at ArtHop and Art Radar Asia.
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Exhibition History
Group exhibitions 2019
Notes on Objects, narrative projects gallery, London
2018
Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Anton Ginzburg
2017
Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy, IPCNY (International Print Center New York), New York, NY
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Born in 1974 in Leningrad (St.Petersburg), Russia
Crossroads 2017, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and San Francisco Cinematheque, CA
Lives and works in New York City
Public formats, Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France
Ultra-seeing, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX
2016
Korea with Korea, Korea Art Forum at Ozneaux Art Space, New York, NY
Power and Architecture, Calvert22, London, UK
Mirrors, Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany
2015
Nature on/off, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Art Arte/Facts, Mota-Museum Transitory, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Re:Start, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
Specters of Communism, e-flux gallery, New York, NY
Education 2015 1997
MFA, Bard College (Milton Avery Graduate School), Annandale-on-Hudson, NY BFA, Parsons School of Design, The New School, NY
Solo exhibitions 2019
VIEWs, Helwaser Gallery, New York, NY [catalogue]
2018
Construction Proxy, Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, TX 2014
Sous la Moquette/la Moquette, ASHES/ASHES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2017
Staring and Cursing, Fridman Gallery, New York, NY
Word Bites Picture, Design Matters Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
SHOW&TELL: films by Anton Ginzburg, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY
1a Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia
2016
Blue Flame. Constructions and Initiatives, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada [catalogue]
2013
Commercial Break, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico
Turo, premiere with Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Soluna Festival, Dallas, TX 2012
Fantastic 2012, TriPostal, Lille, France
2015
Hybrid Gaze, Fridman Gallery, New York, NY
Yeah we friends and shit, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY
Walking the Sea, Daniel Arts Center, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, New York, NY
Back to the Future, CBKU (Centre for Visual Arts Utrecht), Utrecht, Holland
2014
Terra Corpus, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX [catalogue]
2011
Run 3, Room Galleria, Milano, Italy
Commercial Break, Garage Center, satellite project at 54th Venice Biennale, Italy
2010
Lesson of History, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
FQ Test, GMG Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Open Doors Day, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia
2012
Flood, Site-specific installation at Basilica, NADA-Hudson with Braverman Gallery, Hudson, NY
Hyperborea, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
2011
At the Back of the North Wind, Palazzo Bollani, Venice, Italy
Official collateral project of 54th Venice Biennale [catalogue] 2009
Neon Traces, Public commission for Lille3000, Europe XXL, Lille, France
2010
It has never been otherwise, Nevsky_8, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Children of Perestroika, Universam, parallel program of 3rd Moscow Biennale
2009
No echo, no shadow, Galerie Iragui, Moscow, Russia
2008
HereNowThen, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY
2008
Counter Geometries, KK Projects Elysium, parallel program of Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial
2007
Left Pop, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2nd Moscow Biennale
Petroliana, Oil Patriotism, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2nd Moscow Biennale
2005
Post-Diaspora, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 1st Moscow Biennale
International Curators Association exhibition, ICA Gallery, New York, NY
2007
Painter’s Sorrow, Reflex Gallery, Moscow, Russia
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Screenings 2018
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (screening of Ultraviolet), Oct 9–14
2017
SHOW&TELL: films by Anton Ginzburg, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY, Nov 28
Films by Anton Ginzburg, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, Oct 1
New Holland (screening of Turo and Hyperborea), Saint Petersburg, Aug 6, 2017
Moscow International Experimental Film Festival 2 (screening of Turo), Moscow, Russia, July 20–23,
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, Jun 13–18
Crossroads 2017, San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in
Public commissions 2018
Public sculpture, StarGaze: Orion installed for the United States Embassy in Moscow, Russia,
commissioned by Art in Embassies program
2009
Public sculpture, Neon Traces installed in Lille for Lille3000 Europe XXL, France
Selected bibliography
association with the Canyon Cinema Foundation, San Francisco, CA, May 18–21
Fracto Film Festival, ACUD MACHT NEU (Berlin), Berlin, Germany, May 20–21
Monographs:
Films by Anton Ginzburg at Schule Friedl Kubelka, Vienna, Austria, Mar 21
Anton Ginzburg Walking the Sea
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France (screening of Turo), Mar 13–19
Texts by Olesya Turkina, Melanie Marino, Claudia Schmuckli, contributions by Dan Graham
The 11th Punto de Vista Navarra International Film Festival, Pumplona, Spain, Mar 6–11
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. ISBN 978-3-7757-3831-6
Craterlab, Barcelona, Spain, Feb 18
2016
Film series: Ultra-seeing, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, Dec 11
Texts by Matthew Drutt, Anton Ginzburg, Jeffrey Kastner
1st Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Moscow, Russia, Jul 22–24
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7757-3429-5
Soluna Festival (screening of Turo), with live performance of Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Dallas, TX, May 20
2015
ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia, Aug 22–29
EX-Now, International Program, 3EXiS Film Festival, Korean Film Archive, Seoul, Korea, Aug 20–27
Monolith Controversies: Chile National Pavilion, Biennale Architettura 2014 (Venice)
Two Films by Anton Ginzburg: Hyperborea and Walking the Sea, Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Germany, Aug 26
by Hugo Palmarola (Editor), Pedro Alonzo (Editor), text by Boris Groys. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014.
WESTERN FRONT, Grand Luxe Hall, Vancouver, Canada, Aug 18
HOLD FAST Festival as presented by the Eastern Edge and the Rooms, Newfoundland, Canada, Aug 14
More Light: The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Catherine de Zegher (Editor),
Les Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, Jun 23–28
MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2013.
XVI Media Forum: 37 Moscow International Film Festival, Oktyabr Cinema, Moscow, Russia, Jun 21
Not So Static, Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, CA, June 18
Emergency Index. Vol 2, Yelena Gluzman, Sophia Cleary (Editors)
Images Festival, Toronto, Canada, Apr
An Annual Document of Performance Practice, Vol. 2. Ugly Duckling Press, 2013.
Signals: 24/7, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jan
2014
DÉPLACEMENT Les Rencontres Internationales, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France, Dec
Program 13’, 52nd New York Film Festival/Projections at Lincoln Center, New York, NY, Nov
MOVING_IMAGE, a contemporary ABC, Les Rencontres Internationales, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France, Jan
Film program of 5th Moscow Biennale, Moscow, Russia, Nov 12
New Cinema and Contemporary Art: Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Jan
Les Rencontres Internationales at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, Jun
Idea of the North, video_dumbo, Eyebeam, New York, NY, May
Hyperborea at Swiss Institute, New York, NY, Feb
2012
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, Nov
West 21st Street Drive-In (Leave Your Car at Home), Family Business Gallery, New York, NY, Oct
Anton Ginzburg: At the Back of the North Wind
Selected catalogues:
ILLUMInations: 54th International Art Exhibition La Biennale Di Venezia. Curiger, Bice (Editor). 1st ed., Marsilio, 2011. Lesson of History. Backstein, Joseph (Editor). Palais De Tokyo, Paris, 2010. Frontiers Invisibles – Invisible Borders. David, Caroline (Editor). Stichting Kunstboak (Acc), 2009. Crude Oil Paintings. Sorokina, Elena (Curator). White Columns, 2004. Dialectics of Hope 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2005 . Backstein, Joseph, et al. Special Projects. Moscow Biennale (Russia), 2005. Post-Diasporas: Voyages and Missions, the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Kopenkina, Olga (Editor). Moscow, Russia. Moscow Biennale (Russia), 2005.
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57
Additional photography credits:
Exhibition curator: Junni Chen Catalogue editors: Junni Chen, Grace Hong
Anton Ginzburg, VIEW_ 5A_01, 2018 (detail) Pigment, acrylic and oil on wood
Catalogue graphic design and typesetting:
37.5 × 60 inches. p 4
StudioRADIA.com
Władysław Strzemiński, Architectural Composition 13c, 1929
Printer: Printon Printing House
Oil on canvas
Typefaces: Messina Sans and Messina Serif
37 51/64 x 23 5/8 in. (96 x 60 cm), p 6
Paper: MultiArtSilk 150 g/m2
© Ewa Sapka Pawliczak – legal holder of copyrights to works of Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro ISBN: 978-1-7338706-0-3 Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition (6), 1931
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937440
Painted steel 25 13/64 x 9 27/32 x 5 29/32 in. (64 x 25 x 15 cm), p 8 © Ewa Sapka Pawliczak – legal holder of copyrights to works of Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro
© Helwaser Gallery, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
Anton Ginzburg, Stargaze: Orion, 2016
without the copyright owner’s prior permission.
Stainless steel, patinated bronze, paint 267 x 96 x 132 in. (678 x 244 x 335 cm), p. 12
All works by Anton Ginzburg are reproduced with
Photography by Anton Ginzburg
permission of the artist.
Anton Ginzburg, VIEW_ 5A_04, 2018 (detail)
© 2019 Anton Ginzburg. Courtesy of the artist
Pigment, acrylic and oil on wood
and Helwaser Gallery, New York.
37.5 × 60 inches. p 16
Photography by Phoebe d’Heurle
Anton Ginzburg, Burnt Constructions. Gushul Inititative, 2016
All installation views courtesy of the artist
(Based on Alexander Rodchenko’s Spatial Studies)
and Helwaser Gallery, New York.
Burnt wood
Photography by Phoebe d’Heurle
60 x 96 x 80 in. (152 x 244 x 203 cm), p 18 Installation view at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston Photography by Peter Molick Anton Ginzburg, Color and Line, 2013 Video still of digital video with sound, 00:09:15, p 22 Helwaser Gallery 833 Madison Avenue, Third Floor, New York, NY 10021 www.HelwaserGallery.com +1 (646) 476 7760 Tuesday – Saturday: 10AM – 6PM