Exhibition Season 2008-09

Click on the image for a preview of the March-September 2009 lineup

Maria Lassnig

September 27, 2008- January 11, 2009

Organized by the Serpentine Gallery, London

Curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist in association with Rebecca Morrill

This exhibition marks the first solo show for Austrian painter Maria Lassnig in the United States. Lassnig, one of the most inventive and influential European artists working today, continues to produce some of her best work well into her late 80s. Her most frequent subject is her own body, and she describes her artwork as body-awareness paintings. Lassnigs approach to painting as a tool for self-awareness allows her to capture the observation of her internal self and her bodily and sensorial experiences. She expresses this observation through her lush, vibrant style and an astute use of color as a transmitter of feelings and states of being. Since the early stages of her career, Contemporary Arts Centers Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator Raphaela Platow writes, Lassnig has exhibited a fiercely idiosyncratic independence and has persevered in her autonomy consistently eschewing fashionable trends, while remaining oblivious to her standing in the art world. This solo exhibition features Lassnigs paintings from 1999 to the present as well as seven animated films she created between 1971 and 1992. This exhibition comes to the CAC from the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Carlos Amorales

September 27, 2008- September 7, 2009

Curated by Raphaela Platow

In this exhibition, choreography and multimedia artwork come together in dialogue with the architecture of the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. Mexican artist Carlos Amoraless solo exhibition includes animated films, sculptural objects, performances and drawings. Amorales has created over his career a Liquid Archive, an accumulated and growing wealth of digital images of trees, spider webs, wolves, hybrid beings and architectural forms. This archive also serves as a vocabulary of imagery Amorales uses to create sculptures, costumes, animated films and performances. His fascination with horror as both a film genre and as a human emotion informs several recent projects. The CAC will exhibit films and drawings by Amorales as well as a site-inspired installation involving the Cincinnati Ballet in a firstever exhibiting partnership with the CAC. Amorales is drawing from his archive various shapes of spider webs to create sculptural forms using malleable materials. Ballet dancers will be involved with the installation and engage the sculptures periodically throughout the run of the exhibition, impacting the position of artwork in the gallery. The CAC is producing a catalog to be published in the fall, which will be Amoraless first catalog printed in the US and the most comprehensive publication of his work to date. The catalog includes essays by Nestor Garcia Canclini, Jose Falconi, Jens Hoffmann, Joan Jonas (in conversation) and Raphaela Platow.

Donald Sultan: 1976-1983

February 7, 2009- May 17, 2009

Curated by Raphaela Platow

During the late 70s and early 80s, American artist Donald Sultan laid the groundwork for his paintings that successfully merged conceptual and figurative approaches with industrial materials. This first exhibition of Sultans early linoleum paintings demonstrates the artists formative years, when he set himself apart from his contemporaries by creating works that reconciled figuration with Modernist painting using unconventional materials. To create these unique paintings, Sultan glued linoleum on Masonite hardboard and covered the linoleum with tar and rubber. He created imagery by cutting through to reveal the linoleum layer, using the surface material to define negative space in the paintings, or by simply painting on top of the lineoleum. His process preserved painterly qualities and surface texture, resulting in sophisticated, minimalist works made from familiar and accessible materials. Donald Sultan: 1976-1983 explores the ideas, materials and scale of this intriguing body of work during this important time in the artists early career. A publication accompanies this exhibition.

Tara Donovan

February 7, 2009- May 3, 2009

Organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston

The exhibition is organized by Nicholas Baume, chief curator at the ICA, and Jen Mergel, assistant curator at the ICA

This exhibition is the first major museum survey of the American sculptor Tara Donovan. With sensitivity to texture, volume and the inherent physical properties of materials, Donovan transforms large quantities of mass-produced itemstoothpicks, adhesive tape, straws, buttons, pins, plastic cups and Mylarinto stunning sculptural objects and installations. Utilizing the detritus of a culture of mass production, Donovan creates large-scale sculptures that imply organic growth or a random-order arrangement. Her methodology of building sculpture through accumulation and meticulous assembly of quantities and amounts of identical items offers the viewer the experience of complexity and infinity. A monograph accompanies the exhibition and will be available in the CAC Store.

Aya Uekawa

May 30, 2009- September 7, 2009

Curated by Raphaela Platow

This exhibition features new work in painting and drawing by emerging, New York-based Japanese painter Aya Uekawa. In her paintings, Uekawa combines Flemish figuration with the decorative and folk arts. Working in various media, from acrylic on wood panel and stretched canvas to pencil on paper, Uekawa creates work that is also reminiscent of Renaissance master drawings and medieval altarpieces. Sweetly melancholic facial expressions in Uekawas paintings accompany perfectly coiffed hair and formal clothing that adorns the figures. In several works, virtually symmetrical and elaborately braided hair often forms intricate headdresses or crowns or, as in the case of Automatic General Hat, militaristic prison bars concealing the subjects identity.

Anri Sala

Curated by Raphaela Platow

Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

May 30, 2009

Opening in Miami during Art Basel, this first major exhibition of the Albanian artist Anri Salas videos, films and photographs in the United States is carefully calibrated with the architecture of the Rosenthal Center to present a spatial and time-based multimedia experience. Salas presentations can be understood as choreographed installations in which the artist carefully considers the dialogue between the works and the space. In addition to the onsite presentation of Salas work, CAC will present a performance created by Sala. Salas first US publication, an illustrated catalog with essays by Svetlana Boym, Michael Fried, Raphaela Platow, Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA, North Miami Executive Director and Chief Curator and others will accompany the exhibition. Following its presentation at MOCA North Miami, the exhibition will be on view at the CAC during Spring 2009. Though both institutions share the exhibition, in reality the installation should be considered two subsequent, separate volumes, as each presentation is intended to occupy and respond to the respective spaces.