From Oslo with love: Erling Kagge's art collection goes on show ART/ 1 JUN 2015 /BY WESSIE DU TOIT Kagge has a special affinity for artist Trisha Donnelly. Pictured here is 'Untitled' (2007), 'Enam- el on fabric,' and 'Portikus, Frankfurt am Main' installation (2010). Photograph courtesy of Astrup Fearnley Museum. Around the waterfront in Oslo, you can experience what the director of Norway’s In- stitute for Contemporary Art has called the city’s ‘dynamic moment’. Scaffolding sig- nals a new wave of cultural destinations that will join existing gems such as the Opera House, the ambitious Ekeberg sculpture park, and a high concentration of artist-run spaces. Beside the Oslofjord is the sweeping glass roof of the Renzo Piano-designed Astrup Fearnley Museum, which now houses an intriguing collection of contemporary art, titled Love Story. It belongs to Arctic explorer, lawyer, publisher, and all-round thrill- seeker Erling Kagge. Having sailed repeatedly across the Atlantic, conquered the ‘Three Poles’ - North, South, and the summit of Everest - and reached the cover of Time magazine, Kagge began to seek challenges from the world of art. The result is a collection that empha- sises youthful anarchy, pop euphoria, and probing post-conceptual artists. Kagge’s collection includes comprehensive bodies of Raymond Pettibon, Franz West, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Donnelly, Sergej Jenson, Klara Lidén and Wolfgang Tillmans. In a book he has published for the exhibition, A Poor Collector’s Guide to Buying Great Art, Kagge compares collecting to his exploits as an explorer. He likes to gamble on artists early in their careers, buying them in big quantities, and moving on when they become established. The main theme of Kagge’s collection is not a theme at all, but an unresolved qual- ity. ‘I find it difficult to love what I understand. Great art to me is strange’, he says, ‘I strongly believe you sometimes have to break rules to feel free’. He likes artists who embody their work, and has a special affinity for Trisha Donnelly: ‘It is as though her personality has taken form’. While most people who turn to collecting because they’ve done everything else have terrible taste, Kagge’s boldness and curiosity have served him well. Du Toit, Wessie, “From Oslo with Love: Erling Kagge’s Art Collection Goes on Show”, Wallpaper (online), June 1, 2015. NUMBER TEN: TRISHA DONNELLY February 7—August 2, 2015 The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is pleased to present, in its eighth year, its tenth exhibition with a selection of works by US-American artist Trisha Donnelly (born 1974). The presentation comprises works from the collection ranging from moving image, photography, sound installation to sculpture. The ensemble is creating a space saturated with a potential for transformations and reconfigurations of the senses, of realities. In continually fluid interactions between the material and the immaterial Donnelly generates moments of absolute concentration. For press material and images please use the following download link: https://app.box.com/s/euefm6k70d2cbl3uqqrv OPENING: FRIDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2015, 7 P.M. DURATION: 7 FEBRUARY - 2 AUGUST 2015 OPENING HOURS: EVERY SATURDAY & SUNDAY, 11 A.M. - 6 P.M. Press and Public Relations JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION Monika Kerkmann Schanzenstrasse 54 40549 Düsseldorf, Germany Tel.: +49 (0) 211/ 58 58 84-12 [email protected] March 13, 2015 Trisha Donnelly AIR DE PARIS, Paris January 17- March 14, 2015 No text? At Air de Paris, the press release is nowhere to be seen. This recognizable signature of Trisha Donnelly’s exhibitions is one of various measures to limit the documentation of her work: show and work titles are absent in the gallery space, and the dissemination of images outside it is very limited. This operation challenges a certain routine use of textuality as portal to interpretation. By forcing the viewer to move away from this process, the artist creates the conditions for the autonomy of the exhibition as experience. Stripped of text, the works are barren, and writing about them causes an embarrassing feeling of nudity. Nonetheless, these works call for a certain referentiality, but we have to look into the unbound, slimy matter of our memory in order to activate it. On the night of the opening, viewers strolled in the dim, blueish light of Trisha Donnelly’s videos, the droning chatter of the crowd intertwining with reiterative pings coming from one of them, located at the back of the gallery. Amid the shadows, a drawing on paper (all works untitled; all works 2014) was difficult to discern—a stirrup, or perhaps a stirrup bone. Somebody suggested to come back during the day. Another vision. Light passed through a glass door and the drawing’s lines of graphite became visible. The sound was clear in the gallery; all the colors were different. The significance of the light was tangible. The luminescence of the projected images revealed a structure within the gallery’s architectural planes, just as light, in photographic processing, reveals an image. The images shuffled between a set of visible and invisible layers, reminiscent of one another like bodies are reminiscent of phantom limbs. In the first video, a stream of clouds fades into a backwash of ripples in a trapezoid frame, like an inclined plane mirroring the sky. The same motif is reiterated on the rear wall of the gallery in a wide projected frame with rounded corners, calling to mind a rear-view mirror perspective. The animation of cloud and foam is pasted on top of a pixelated image of white, serpentine shapes, interspersing a long, black- and-white sequence showing an automated “dip-and-dunk” machine in progress, mechanically processing strips of film. The movement of spume, repeating itself in a vertical scroll, unveils the images underneath, echoing the work of the machine’s chemical baths. Like a parallel axis of mirrors bookending the exhibition, the two videos refract blind images of a nonexistent sky, generating a complex field of reverberation of the gaze in the gallery space. In between these two works, three looped animations feature abstract figures in movement: silvery lumps spreading, stretches of pearly lines twitching. The images remain flat but contain circular movements, rolling an undefined subject in and out. The motion within a still frame generates the appearance of a living process and gives the image an organic quality. One of these videos features the evolution and transformation of this material substance over a misty violet mountainscape. The gray frame supersedes it and then shrinks to the size of a thumbnail, moving around in a quirky journey over the landscape. Appearing sporadically, it blinks, alters, and proceeds in tune with the pings of its soundtrack, like hints to a riddle. The composition recalls the rear-view of the cloud videos, but in an inverted way, as if it were an abstract organic form over an image of a landscape. It generates the opposite perception, as the gaze doesn’t rebound; the images are centrifugal, focusing our intention on a repeating question that is impossible to answer. Another vision, this time a projected still image at the center of the exhibition, which stands out like an altar in a cathedral. It invests the full height of the space with abstract shapes resembling parts of a camera. Traces like the pattern of marbling paper appear in the background and the iridescence of the pictured objects generates a beautiful gradation of colours. As in most of Donnelly’s works, the shapes are elegant and delightful, but convey an eeriness in the difficulty of identifying the objects. All the images appear as provisional, like the gaseous state of water in the clouds, the foam, and the mist present throughout the exhibition. Liquidity connects the photographic and organic processes within the field of image production. In nature, foam and clouds are created when water is in contact with other matters, “impurities” so to speak: Donnelly’s images stand at a threshold between an ethereal trajectory towards the sublime and the sliminess of their dirt and liquids. Her methodology is not necessarily to provide the viewer with an awareness of what is being watched; rather, to cause an awareness of the subjects’ instability in the experience of seeing. Barbara Sirieix is a writer and curator based in Paris. Sirieix, Barbara. Trisha Donnelly, Art Agenda, March 13, 2015, Online. CRITICS PICKS Trisha Donnelly AIR DE PARIS 32 rue Louise Weiss January 17–March 14, 2015 Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2014, projection, dimensions variable. With her mostly mute recent projections it becomes clear that noise is no mere synonym for sound for Trisha Donnelly but a constitutive aspect of any transmission. Featuring untitled works from this year and the last, this exhibition comprises six projections united by formal resonances and a hypnotic restructuring of time; their am- bient light provides the only illumination for a single, demure drawing. Within the darkness glimmers a subtle approach to thinking through technological media and their relationship to language and experience. In the longest of the looping videos we may recognize an outmoded “dip-and-dunk” film processor in action. That the dark, grainy footage paradoxically exposes the darkroom clearly appeals to Donnelly, whose show is punctuated by similar cognitive blips and flashes. Wave and cloud forms dominate, evoking analogies for signal and noise respectively. Crisp moving images are superimposed on low-resolution stills. Moiré patterns screen foggy valleys. According to Hubert Damisch, clouds expose the limits of linear perspective as a representational system for painting. As a sign, the cloud’s lack of definable surface evades geometric description but is well suited to brushwork and the physical substance of paint. Donnelly is onto something similar with the way she sutures together vaguely photographic and cinematic materials in her projections.