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LA CREVETTE AMOUREUSE

This upcoming edition of the Berlin Gallery Weekend is dedicated to the French avant-garde poet Henri Chopin (1922-2008). Through Peppe Morra, director of the Morra Foundation in Naples, one of Chopin’s close friends and supporters, we have the possibility to exhibit the manuscript La Crevette Amoureuse (1967/1975). It is part of the trilogy of Le Dernier Roman du Monde, which Chopin started to write in 1961. La Crevette Amoureuse, however, was never printed until 1994 and only had its exhibition debut in 2012, as part of the group show “Ecstatic Alphabet” curated by Laura Hopman at the MoMA in New York.

The manuscript is a continuous movement of construction and deconstruction of meaning itself.

True to Chopin’s style, a certain Dada spirit hovers over the narration. We will open these 146 pages to the public in collaboration with the architects Kuhn-Malvezzi who will design the display of the show.

PARROT SOUP

Wild Parrots have infested the park by where I live. A company of twenty moved in, and never left. Parrots are incredibly loud and bossy – like a gang of random thoughts loitering in the public space. They spot the ground and trees with their color, and fill the air with their speech. I imagine these birds, these organic recorders of other people’s sounds, collecting fragments of thought from the people passing by. When the Parrots take flight, their voices fill the air with the amalgamized chatter they have collected – overheard ideas and wonky propositions, repeated elsewhere for the benefit of others.

I stroll with one of these birds, the colored body tucked beneath my arm, re-telling ideas I’ve had about this and that, making them mean a little more. Models and metaphors are explained in detail. I tell accounts of one thing so I can explain another. Thoughts gathered into a story after being loosened. Surfaced in a way that only a good walk can bring about.

As the parrot takes flight, the stories become part of the air. This bird floats through the trees, talking as it goes. Vocalized propositions filling the atmosphere, residues of speech and thought settling onto the landscape below. Ideas about one thing are collected into forms of another.

Parrot Soup is the telling of stories, where thoughts about the big are relayed through the small

Parrot Soup is thoughts collected on the surface of a panel

Parrot Soup is a mobile – 64 eyeballs, a color spectrum, a form of black, and one of pattern

Parrot Soup is language in space

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J. Parker Valentine
24 November 2012 – 6 January 2013

Who Made Who

When we talk about drawing we inevitably talk about movement within time, a stroke, a line, a cut, a present molded instantaneously into a past, another line and a future descends, passes again, past becomes present and the future is long gone. Time travels, utopic in essence.

But when is the decision made, at what point is it finished? Even though she could re-work it again and again, travel further, movement is freedom, inherently we don’t say stop, so when does it suffice? So many decisions to make none of them bigger than that final one, judgment unnecessary, the question of right or wrong has left the game.

We can say that there are factors of sales, expectations, pressure, but if we believe, and we continue to share an optimism not based on opinions but interest, a belief that there is a moment of purity, that the right decision is nothing but personal instinct, a personal moment of clarity, sincerity a necessity, seeing something there that is full, rich and the closest possibility to an end. In this moment the work is free to stand alone to be taken and loved or hated, put in reference, closed and finished, reopened again.

Finished only when placed or hung, J. Parker Valentine’s practice moves from the studio into the exhibition space, where pieces are set in close dialogue with the space surrounding them. Her drawings are mapping devices, prototypes for impossible sculptures, utopic architectures.

Taken in various apartments she has lived in between 2004 to 2009, the video montage in the small room tells a fictional story seemingly placed in one location. Looking out the window it gives us directions, situates us in space, with the impending leave-taking of someone. The moment of departure, the letting go, mirrors the artistic process of the artist while it functions like drawing as we generate lines wherever we go. The photos on the wall are shadows sculpted on a bathroom floor – Gestalten. The artist draws with the shadows to create an uncanny experience always on the edge of nearly becoming something, someone, then again someone else, in a space between memory and imagination. The two large fabric pieces further investigate space creation. Talking to the artist she highlights the importance of the negative space in the works, the body relations, the form that happens between.

Who Made Who is a statement with a feeling of a question, a palindrome that moves back and forth, Who interchangeable with What, the subject of discussion is object. The title implies authorship. It is a phrase about power and control, at the same time referencing found objects or allowing things to happen without control. In this sense the show gives way into the interior world of J. Parker Valentines practice. Although the discrete pieces act on their own, they are connected physically by a structure creating movement through the space that allows for collisions and relationships. A moment arises in which we can find a consensus, not by opinion, but by association and memory that leaves open what we see as the beginning or end for us, finished or unfinished – a reference point to something we have seen before or not yet.

Yael Salomonowitz

Who Made Who is a double solo show realized at Galerie Max Meyer in Düsseldorf and Supportico Lopez Berlin.

CASE MOD
Natalie Häusler’s installation Case Mod (from: Case Modification) exacts from the gallery space a field in which intimate and reciprocal encounters between audience and art practice are put to the test. Häusler compiles a situation, combining several elements derived from a simultaneity of studio and writing practice. Emerging forms, in this case, watercolor, sculpture and poetry, query whether they can uphold their fragilities and force of expression when exposed to the viewer and to each other. They articulate their mutuality when arranged in the exhibition space, producing crosscuts and intimacies, of visual, written and audio material, as well as of object and spectator/reader/listener. The audience becomes belated witness of the art practice as such, which the installation at once showcases and archives. Yet the present moment is highlighted, as the visitors leave their own marks on the piece, subtly shifting the color palette or destroying it altogether. Audio recordings of the voices of close friends, who are practicing artists and writers, reciting the poems, track down their intimate reception by an audience that is involved in both activities, production and reception. They capture the moment of surprise, when the poem was read for the first time. The intimacy of this contact is shared with the passing visitor, who must come close to the audio shelf, to be able to hear the individual reading. These shelves, each of which is cut and built from one sheet of stained glass, and customized for its assigned set of outmoded electronic equipment, serve as seductive support and hazardous repellant at the same time. The temporary construction of a space of this kind is part of Häusler’s inquiry of forms of intimacy, risk, close contact with the material, and inclusion to question modes of reception.
The book “Watercolors” documenting a one and a half year long correspondence in form of watercolors sent via email between Natalie Häusler and Californian artist David Horvitz is part of the exhibition. A book launch will be held on January 12th at Motto Berlin.
NATALIE HÄUSLER, born 1983 in Munich currently lives and works in Berlin. She received her MFA in 2011 from Bard College/Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, New York and a Diploma with honors and Meisterschueler degree from Braunschweig University of Art. A selection of recent exhibitions include: +6|2012 Shortlist Columbus Art Award, Kunsthalle Ravensburg, La Lucidezza, Reception, Berlin (2012), Als Morandi mit der Kinematographie liebäugelte, Supportico Lopez Berlin (2012), An Impossible Distance, Border, Mexico City. Her work has been shown at PS122 Gallery, New York, Soi Fischer Projects, Vancouver (hosted by Butcher Gallery, Toronto), Chelsea Art Museum, New York, Galerie Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne and Schnittraum/Lutz Becker, Cologne. In 2010/11 she received a one-year DAAD scholarship for New York and will be the holder of a grant for the Cité des Artes, Paris in 2013. She is a co-founder of the poetry press American Books (Natalie Häusler/ Ed Steck/ Brett Price).

Architecture of a mothers arms.

Performance launch of E Il Topo Magazine at Supportico Lopez, Berlin

On the 12th issue, and against the archaeological tendencies that led to the research of ultimate sense in sad fossils, E IL TOPO decided, de motu propio, to summon personalities of the art world who passed away during the lapse of time in which the magazine vanished.

Introduced by a series of performances, readings and secret activities, the new publication, a fragile and living organism itself, will be presented in Berlin at Supportico Lopez  with a performance by Steve Piccolo & Gak Sato, Martin Gimenez and E Il Topo, directed by Gabriele Di Matteo and centered on the figure of the late American artist Sibyl Cohen.

The launch of this new issue, a true séance, will brig to ephemeral existence those in the portraits that are no more, blurring with sharp images the concept of life.

Director: Armando della Vittoria

Editorial Staff: Mattia Barbieri, Gabriele Di Matteo, Francesco Fossati, Giovanna Francesconi, Martín Giménez, Francesco Locatelli, Frederic Liver, Y Liver, Monica Mazzone, Luca Pozzi, Franco Silvesto.

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For the spring exhibition of this year Supportico Lopez is having a temporary space upstairs the main gallery. In the main space there is an homage to the great figure of Gino De Dominicis, at Supportico Upstairs there is on view the group show “Als Morandi mit der Kinematographie liebäugelte” with works by Nicholas Byrne, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Marius Engh, Natalie Häusler, David Keating, Alek O, Niels Trannois and a project by Marius Engh & Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen

Supportico Lopez was at Independent NewYork with works by J. Parker Valentine, Michael Dean, Henri Chopin and Jan Peter Hammer.

Independent 2012

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