ART & DESIGN A Fiery Splash in the Rockaways and Twists on Film at the Whitney By ROBIN POGREBIN MAY 26, 2016 Japan Society Show When the Turner Prize-winning artist Simon Starling was preparing the piece he would exhibit at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art five years ago, he learned about masked Japanese Noh theater, which inspired W. B. Yeats’s 1916 play, “At the Hawk’s Well.” Now Mr. Starling is building on that project with “At Twilight,” his first institutional show in New York and a rare solo exhibition at Japan Society that features a non-Japanese artist. It is also the first exhibition by Yukie Kamiya, Japan Society’s new gallery director, who used to be chief curator at the Hiroshima museum. The show is organized with the Common Guild of Glasgow, which will present Mr. Starling’s version of the Yeats play in July. Mr. Starling said that he was intrigued by the idea of masked theater, “where nobody is who they appear to be.” Pogrebin, Robin, “A Fiery Splash in the Rockaways and Twists on Film at the Whitney”, The New York Times (online), May 26, 2016 The Grand Tour: Simon Starling 19 Mar 2016 - 26 Jun 2016 Nottingham Contemporary presents Turner Prize-winner Simon Starling’s largest exhibition in the UK to date. The exhibition will include a new artwork developed in collaboration with Not- tingham Trent University, of which Starling is an alumnus and a number of Starling’s major proj- ects, most of which have not been presented in Britain before. Industry is a motif running through the selection – from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to China’s industrial dominance and hi-tech industries today. This exhibition will revisit the art of the aristocrat- ic Grand Tours of the 17th and 18th centuries through Starling’s contemporary vision, featuring a collaboration with Derby Museum which will see Joseph Wright’s The Alchymist Discovering Phosphorus in Nottingham Contemporary’s gal- Simon Starling, La Source (demi-teinte), 2009 © Simon Starling, courtesy neugerriemschneider, leries. Berlin Simon Starling: Zum Brunnen Press release Sustainability, environmental and economic systems - these topics, which are not Exhibition dates 27 February – 14 August 2016 only relevant in light of the very current issue of climate change, are at the center of Press conference the works of the English artist Simon Starling. His idiosyncratic projects deal with Fri, 26 February 2016 11 a.m. cycles of use, the surprising transformations of everyday things, and the related Art section of the Lokremise ideological and aesthetic reevaluations. The artist will be present The occasion for the exhibition in St. Gallen is an unusual art project by Starling that Exhibition opening Fri, 26 February 2016 links Lake Constance with the city of St. Gallen. Entitled Fountain, this major public 6:30 p.m. Art section of the Lokremise project redeploys original elements from the recently refurbished Broderbrunnen, a fountain located in the center of St. Gallen that was created by the sculptor August Opening hours: Mon–Sat, 1–8 p.m., Sun 11 a.m.–6 Bösch (1857–1911) in 1896 in memory of the establishment of a lake water supply p.m. system for the cantonal capital. Starling will produce selfcontained, climate- controlled units that will allow these fragile historical sculptures to be put back on public display and in turn trace the path from the water source at Lake Constance to the heart of St. Gallen. In recent years, works by Simon Starling, who was born in 1967 in Epsom, UK, and now lives in Copenhagen, have been shown in museums around the world. The exhibition Zum Brunnen (To the Fountain) at the Lokremise is his first solo show in Switzerland since his presentation at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 2005. Press contact Irina Wedlich Kunstmuseum St. Gallen Communications Museumstrasse 32 Simon Starling: Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, © Simon Starling, courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin 9000 St. Gallen The work Autoxylopyrocycloboros exemplifies his artistic strategy. In 2006 Starling T +41 71 242 06 85 F +41 71 242 06 72 crossed Loch Long in a restored boat pulled up from the depths of the lake, [email protected] powered by a steam engine. The boat, christened “Dignity,” served as both a vehicle www.kunstmuseumsg.ch and its own fuel. Gradually the wooden boards were burned in order to power the engine, until the boat ultimately sprung a leak and sank back into the lake. Curator: Konrad Bitterli Page 1 / 2 Simon Starling Nine Feet Later The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane 14/11/15 - 06/02/16 Simon Starling has been revisiting the history of forms and objects for two decades. Often taking up key moments in the history of modernism, Starling creates installations, films, photographs and sculptures which unearth often unacknowledged connections or migrations across space and time. His works and journeys are based on acts of transformation or hybridisation, through movement and in situ installations, and investigate the meaning making and the making of meaning. The exhibition Nine Feet Later includes a series of site-specific daguerreotypes, titled Recursive Plates – an ongoing series that Starling began in 2014 in Casa Estudio Luis Barragán, Mexico. The Recursive Plates are made for and in particular spaces – in this case, The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane gallery space. The daguerreotype process is one of the earliest techniques for making photographic images and was developed in France by Louis Daguerre in the 1830s. Like doubled mirrors, each daguerreotype has been produced on a highly polished, mirror-like sheet of silver-plated metal and in turn each silvered surface now holds a ghostly image, a fragile chemical deposit that echoes the exhibition history of the space in which it was made and is now exhibited. The now phantasmagorical works that jostle for position on the reflective surfaces of the Recursive Plates – each a fragment of a larger exhibition by gallery artists installed in the space over the last three years have been reinstalled and carefully re-photographed from a number of fixed camera positions. At times congested, at others sparse, the images orchestrate a form of temporal overlay, a historical collapse or collage, that in turn connects the space’s past with its present and with the sculptural work, Nine Feet Later that occupies the space in front of the photographs. Taking its starting point from a nine-foot long sheet of Japanese cedar wood veneer on which two Japanese scene painters were invited to paint an image of a length of bamboo (the world’s fastest growing timber), Nine Feet Later is a loose assemblage of affiliated objects that together constitute the makings of a time machine of sorts. Along with the image of fast growing bamboo (some varieties grow at 90cm a day), sits the trace of a 15 million year old tree trunk, a nine-foot long piece of petrified wood, turned to stone in something approximating a natural casting process. Somewhat younger is a plank of 45,000 year old Ancient Kauri wood, pickled for millennia in a New Zealand swamp, and here transformed into nine-feet of Gerrit Rietveld’s Zig-Zag Chair (a still-futuristic design from 1932-34). Together with an octagonal oak housing, a powerful reflecting telescope, and a copy of a birch branch – which, unlike the petrified tree trunk, was deposited layer by layer in a matter of hours in a high-tech 3D printing machine – this collection of objects – bound together by their desire to pull and push us through time - begins a conversation with the artworks (now reiterated on the mirrored surfaces of the Recursive Plates) that formerly occupied the space – its collective memory. Simon Starling (b. 1967, Epsom, UK) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Starling graduated from MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (1992). He was Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt between 2003-2013. Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was shortlisted for the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize. He represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and was included in the central exhibition Fare Mondi/Making Worlds in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Starling has exhibited widely with solo exhibitions at Musée d'art contemporain, Montréal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Casa Estudio Luis Barragán/Luis Barragán House and Studio, Mexico City; Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art – MUMA, Caulfield East; Tate Britain, London; VOL. 53, NO. 3 November 2014 CHICAGO Simon Starling MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART/ ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO “Metamorphology,” the economical survey of Simon Starling’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, comprised just eleven works. But complementing the artist’s first retrospective at an American museum, an affiliated show that ran concurrently at the neighboring Arts Club of Chicago (titled “Pictures for an Exhibition”) additionally presented a major new, site-specific installation. Only a dozen works all told, yet each represents such a dense network of material, geographical, social, and historical narratices that one hardly needed more. The MCA exhibition began, appropriately enough, with Flaga 1972-2000 (A Fiat 126 produced in Turin, Italy, in 1974 and customized using parts manufactured and fitted in Poland, following a journey of 1290 km from Turin to Cieszyn), 2002. Hung high overhead on the wall of the museum’s central atrium, Flaga introduced from the outset some of the hallmarks of Starling’s oeuvre —long journeys, often across international borders; the mutual imbrication of economic, political, and artistic histories; the elegant transformation of one thing (an Italian car) into another (the Polish flag).