Pilar Corrias Gallery

Pilar Corrias Gallery

Pilar Corrias Gallery opened in the heart of London’s West End on 16th October 2008. Committed to the realisation and presentation of ideas, Pilar Corrias Gallery seeks to reinstate the idea that the art object and its meaning exist before its market value. Created by the internationally acclaimed architect and conceptualist Rem Koolhaas/The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the gallery’s physical manifestation is determined by the major functions and needs of the gallery providing a room for exhibition and a room for private viewing alongside management offices and storage space. The 3,800 sq foot space will be indefinitely changeable and transformable for each exhibition, with plans for large-scale projects expanding beyond the physical boundaries of the gallery.

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Pilar Corrias Gallery
Pilar Corrias Gallery
15/06/2010

Purity is a Myth

  • Rannva Kunoy, Flash, Acrylic on canvas, 180x143cm
  • Keltie Ferris, Candy Says, Oil, acrylic, oil pastel and sprayed paint on canvas, 209x183cm
  • Elizabeth Neel, Pinocchio 2010, Oil on canvas
  • Mary Ramsden, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 41x31cm

Pilar Corrias Gallery is delighted to present Purity is a Myth, an exhibition bringing together new work by Keltie Ferris, Rannva Kunoy, Elizabeth Neel, Baker Overstreet and Mary Ramsden. Grounded in a rejection of painting as a vehicle for an authentic expression of self, or a purest renunciation of the phenomenal world Purity is a Myth expands beyond the existing dichotomy between figuration and abstraction presenting new possibilities which resist one single reading. The exhibition will open with a performance by Baker Overstreet, his first in a gallery context.

Keltie Ferris (b.1977, Louisville, KY) creates intense constructions of colour, abstract motifs and multidirectional compositions. Direct and frank, her near brushless medium applications result in powerful and unforeseen 'fields of force.'

Rannva Kunoy (b.1975, Faroe Islands) creates vaporous paintings caught up in a perpetual process of becoming. Drawn from motifs borrowed from sources ranging from High Modernist painting to anonymous sci-fi illustration, Kunoy's paintings present visions of a world which remains unknown.

Elizabeth Neel (b.1975, Stowe, Vermont) creates sensually painted, intuitive introspections. Drawn from specific, real world subject matter: from anonymous images sourced from the internet, Neel's 'fictive situations' exist as excavations of life, and the contamination of nature, and death and decay.

Baker Overstreet (b.1981, Augusta, Georgia) creates crudely rendered, vibrant, faux-naive, folkish paintings characterised by a painterly lexicon of personal symbolism and gesture. The focus of Overstreet's new works on view is a floating head, that of Overstreet's invented character June, a trunk performer. These works serve as backdrops, or advertisements for June who makes her gallery debut at the opening of the exhibition.

Mary Ramsden (b.1984, Harrogate, England) creates intimately-scaled abstract compositions in which amoebic forms fuse with bold, gestural mark-making. Delicate in scale, yet raw and ambitious in execution, Ramsden's works are testament to a commitment to painting as a progressive language that demands our attentive engagement.

Enquiries

Date
11 June - 28 August
Address
54 Eastcastle Street
 
London W1W 8EF
Contact
Pilar Corrias
Phone
+44 (0)20 7323 7000
Email
info@pilarcorrias.com
URL
http://www.pilarcorrias.com

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Pilar Corrias Gallery
Pilar Corrias Gallery
21/04/2010

Leigh Ledare

  • Mom as Baby Jane, c-print, 154.9 x 121.9cm
  • Mom in New Home, c-print, 76.2 x 101.6cm
  • Tina and Me n Thrift Store, c-print, 76.2 x 101.6cm
  • Untitled (Entire Roll), c-print, 135.9 x 201.9cm
  • Mother and Catch 22, c-print, 89.5 x 59.4cm

Pilar Corrias gallery is proud to present The Confectioner's Confectioner, an exhibition of new work by Leigh Ledare

Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video and text. Ledare's first solo show at the gallery centres around a unique body of work which forms an archive of the artist's relationship with his mother whilst creating a discursive site. As such the exhibition traces the negotiation of their respective relationships to agency, representation, self-presentation, and authorship, alongside issues proposed by the enactment of the contents of this project in the context of the real world.

At the age of fifty, already having begun to cultivate a highly sexualised persona, Ledare's mother, Tina Peterson, a former professional ballerina, approached her son to document her for posterity. Occupying the main gallery, the resulting photographs exist neither as a diaristic work, nor simply as portraits of a highly sexualised persona, but as an investigation of of the nature of our formation as subjects and its relation to broader shifting cultural forces. Shown alongside texts and archived ephemera, Ledare's portraits of his mother reveal subversive responses, instances of sexuality and vulnerability tactically deployed to multiple economic, personal and psychological ends. Ledare proposes that his mother's complex subjectivity stems not from a failure to perform a multitude of various roles, but from a simultaneous occupation of an abundance of imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled.

In the lower gallery, the continuous shifts between the performative and the real, and the public and the private are played out in three video works screened in London for the very first time. Shown together in close succession, Shoulder, The Model and The Gift (all 2008) explore the agency carried as artist/muse, son/mother, archivist/performer. The latter work The Gift was created from existing video footage originally intended for a soft-core commercial fetish video shot by Ledare's mother and two family friends. The tapes were sent unsolicited to the artist on condition that he create something with the otherwise discarded material. Ledare responded by editing out all aspects of the filmaker's original intention, making visible the real armature of the filmaker's missing narrative.

The various registers of authorship related to the roles of model and photographer are further explored in the Personal Commissions series of 2008 in which the artist answered personal ads placed by women whose desires echoed those of his mother's, and paid them to photograph him in their homes, in a scenario of their choice. Complicating this body of work are a number of photographs from a series entitled Collector's Commissions in which a selection of collectors were invited to photograph Ledare in within the context of their own art collection. These works bring the nature of the solicitation in these situations to the fore, exposing the differences in both the creation of value and the extraction of surplus value from each situation.

The Confectioner's Confectioner serves as an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of our own identities but also at the level of our desires, aspirations and needs - drives which often carry conflicting material, psychological and ethical demands.

Enquiries

Date
15 April - 15 June
Address
54 Eastcastle Street
 
London W1W 8EF
Contact
Pilar Corrias Gallery
Phone
+44 (0)20 7323 7000
Email
info@pilarcorrias.com
URL
http://www.pilarcorrias.com

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Pilar Corrias Gallery
Pilar Corrias Gallery
23/11/2009


Current Exhibition

Ulla von Brandenburg
'Wagon Wheel'
27 November 2009 - 30 January 2010


PilarCorrias_3


Ulla von Brandenburg ‘Wagon Wheel’ Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery

                                                                                                          

Pilar Corrias Gallery is delighted to present 'Wagon Wheel': an exhibition of new works by critically acclaimed artist Ulla von Brandenburg.

Ulla von Brandenburg works in a diverse range of media to create complex, multi-layered narratives that investigate the thresholds that exist between reality and artifice. Working with film; drawing; installation, and performance, von Brandenburg engages with popular cultural forms from multiple epochs as a means to explore contemporary collective experience. Working within seemingly archaic traditions, von Brandenburg appropriates historical source material and transforms it into the present to tacitly reveal the rules that govern our social reality.

For her first exhibition at Pilar Corrias Gallery, von Brandenburg will transform the upper gallery with a labyrinthine installation of hand-made quilts. Created in response to time spent in Memphis earlier this year, these new works take the African American patchwork quilts used in the Underground Railroad as a point of departure. During the 19th Century, these quilts were encoded with vital information on how to proceed on the secret network to freedom, instructing slaves on how to prepare to escape and continue in their flight from the colonies of the New World. For example, the Wagon Wheel pattern to which the exhibition refers signalled slaves to pack up their tools in preparation for the long journey ahead.

Just as the encoded quilts functioned as both metaphors and signs, so von Brandenburg's abstract magnifications of quilt patterns guide the viewer on their passage through the gallery. The journey culminates in a new 16 mm film shown here for the very first time. Shot in Paris this autumn this silent meditation charts our passage through life exploring the obstacles we face and resolutely overcome. Viewed alongside the seven irregularly hung quilts, the film creates a dialogue with the quilts forming a visual language that loops back on itself endlessly repeating and developing.

Ulla von Brandenburg was born in 1974 in Karlsruhe, Germany. She received her MA from Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist's work include: Frac Ile-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2009); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2009); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2008); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2008); Kunstverein, Düsseldorf (2007); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2006). Recent group exhibitions include Fare Mondi 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2009); Torino Triennale '50 Moons of Saturn', Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Palazzina della Societa Promotrice delle Belle Arti, Turin (2008); Yokohama Triennale (2008;) Biennale Jerusalem (2008) ; P erforma 0 7 , Performa, New York (2007); Th e World as a Stage, Tate Modern, London (2007), and Against Time, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2007). The artist has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Kunstpreis der Böttcherstrasse in Bremen (2007), and Arbeitsstipendium Jürgen-Ponto-Stiftung (2006).

Ulla von Brandenburg lives and works in Paris.

                                                                                                          

Enquiries:

54 eastcastle street
London W1W 8EF
www .pilarcorrias.com
tel +44 (0)20 7323 7000
fax +44 (0)20 7323 6400
info@pilarcorrias.com




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Pilar Corrias Gallery
Pilar Corrias Gallery
11/10/2009


PAST Exhibition

Shahzia Sikander
'I am also not my own enemy'
16 October - 21 November 2009


Pilar Corrias 2


In Our DNA  2, 2009
Ink and gouache on prepared paper
38.1 x 28.6 cm
Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery


Pilar Corrias Gallery is delighted to present 'I am also not my own enemy' the London debut of critically acclaimed artist Shahzia Sikander. Since the early 1990s, Shahzia Sikander has been instrumental in the rediscovery, re-infusion, and re-contextualization of Indo-Persian miniature painting. Trained as a miniaturist at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Sikander has pioneered an experimental approach to the anachronistic genre. Encompassing painting; drawing; animation; installation; video, and film Sikander's multi-dimensional praxis radically rearticulates the miniaturist tradition by inserting new dialogue that is often subversive and polemical in nature. Working from a rich 'mental archive of imagery', Sikander's visual vocabulary engages a multiplicity of themes including transformation as narrative, the exploration of disruption as a means to cultivate new associations, and issues concerning labour, scale and time.

Sikander's first presentation at Pilar Corrias Gallery reveals a fascinating insight into her thought processes and methods of meaning making. In Sikander's latest video Bending the Barrels (2009) military rhetoric is staged against military pageantry. Examining the marching band as a political device, the video superimposes scenes of soldiers peacefully playing music with authoritative military pronouncements. Challenging the viewer to explore the way in which the silent, subliminal character of written language functions to subordinate imagery, Bending the Barrels resonates powerfully in the context of Pakistan's long struggle against military dictatorships, Islamic fundamentalism, and failed democratic attempts.

The authority of the text and its relationship with image is further developed in a new large-scale multi-media work in which a graffiti-like declaration 'I am also not my own enemy' is inscribed in Urdu across a meticulously crafted pictorial surface. The phrase is a fragment of a verse from an Urdu poetry genre called Ghazal from the poet Ghalib. Taking the form of a response or a conversation with the metaphorical lover, the Ghazal is notorious for defying interpretation. Fusing a fragment of poetry with formal pictorial imagery, I am also not my own enemy captivates and with deeper study becomes as multifaceted in meaning and interpretation as the Ghazal itself. The power of this work lies in its simple exactness and over arching ambiguity in the questions that it raises.

An array of paintings and drawing rich in overlapping ideas form the third component of the show. Quick, gestural ink drawings seem to follow the dynamic of the video, Bending the Barrels. Providing a metaphorical parallel viewpoint these works exist as a sort of abstract storyboard. Other meticulously detailed ink and graphite works challenge the viewer with their potential for multiple interpretations. 19th Century layouts of real and imagined Langley gardens adorned with iconic imagery and symbols of state have been created as possible future projects. Islamic geometric motifs drawn from art and architecture evolve into telescoping pentagons which are consumed and devoured by their own camouflage. Locked in mathematical union, the result is a stalemate for which there are no possible alternatives - a disquieting result.

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. She received her B.F.A from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan and an M.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Major solo exhibitions of Sikander's work include Para/Site, Hong Kong (2009); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); daadgalerie, Berlin (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); Miami Art Museum, Miami (2005); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2004); The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2004); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C (2000), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999) and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1998).

Sikander has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Achievement award (2006-2011); the National Pride of Honor by the Pakistani Government (2005), the Joan Mitchell award (1998-1999), and the Tiffany foundation award (1997). In 2006 Sikander was a named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Shahzia Sikander lives and works in New York City and Pakistan.

                                                                                                                                                              

 Enquiries:

54 eastcastle street
London W1W 8EF
www .pilarcorrias.com
tel +44 (0)20 7323 7000
fax +44 (0)20 7323 6400
info@pilarcorrias.com