5 ARTISTS 5 WALLS

Christian Jankowski, Lewis Klahr, Dieter Meier, Matt Mullican and Christine Rebet

Opening hours:
Friday 11–18
and by prior arrangement

Grieder Contemporary is delighted to present 5 Artists 5 Walls with exceptional pieces by Christian Jankowski, Lewis Klahr, Dieter Meier, Matt Mullican, and Christine Rebet. For its last exhibition of 2020, Grieder Contemporary presents works of five renowned international artists. Each artist occupies one wall of the exhibition space, giving way to a dialogue between recent and older pieces, which include photography, installation, drawing and sculpture. Additionally, videos of each artist (except Matt Mullican) will be screened during the exhibition. 

Christian Jankowski (*1968 in Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. In his conceptual and media artworks he makes use of film, video, photography and performance, but also of painting, sculpture, and installation. His work has been showed internationally in numerous galleries and museums including Kunsthaus Hamburg, Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, Haus am Lütowplatz, Berlin,Petzel Gallery in New York, Lisson Gallery London, among many others. In 2016, Jankowski curated the 11th edition of Manifesta, becoming the first artist to assume the role.

Walking logic (2017) is an installation inspired by Jankowski visit to Bratislava. He rests sticks against the walls of the gallery and uses them to hold images that illustrate the use of these sticks throughout the ages. Jankowski was particularly interested in these objects that have been used as a support, weapon and symbol for the walker for thousands of years. A surprising dialogue emerges from the juxtaposition of the carved wooden faces and the illustrated faces.

The hunt (1992) is one of the artist's best known performances. Heroically armed with a bow and arrow, Jankowski rebelled against modern society, to return to nature: for a week Jankowski lived off the goods he hunted in the supermarket. The video of the performance and the photograph of the final result can be seen in the exhibition.

In 2010 Jankowski produced a series of "before and after" photos called Cleaning up the Studio (2010). These photos document the transformation of the late artist Nam June Paik's studio. He hired a professional cleaning company to transform the disorganized studio into a clean and functional workplace. He recorded the process in the form of a video, in which the head of the cleaning company gives an official mission statement, like in a promotional film.

Lewis Klahr (*1956 New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. Klahr’s work has been screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia, including MoMA, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of the Arts, the Whitney Biennial, and Rotterdam, Goteberg, Hong Kong, Berlin, Shanghai and London film festivals, amongst many others. He was awarded the Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Residency Award (2010) and the 2013 Stan Brakhage Vision Award.

Making films since 1977, Klahr is a master collagist and re-animator; he rescues, collects, collates and adjusts fragmentary images into miniature tableaux which are seized, shot by shot, with a 35mm digital still camera and built painstakingly into complex and evocative sequences operating in time and space. The exhibition includes a series of stills for recent films that reflect the process of the artist's film-making but which are stand-alone works that explore the treasure chest of rich associations and chance encounters that make up Klahr's very particular but vast archive.

Dieter Meier (*1945 in Zurich) lives and works in Argentina, Hong Kong, California and Switzerland. His work has been showed in numerous solo shows and group exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum Luzern, Kunsthaus Zurich; Museum Tinguely, Basel; Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Watermill Center, New York; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; documenta 5, Kassel; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Museum of Modern Art, New York (Video Collection); New York Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg.

On show are three large-sized prints of his performances Behind Flowers (1976) series with Bice Curiger presenting enigmatic objects like a news presenter, in front of a monochrome background. In which Meier creates the deliberately a radical ‘non-meaning’ in an effort to counter any hell-bent hunt for meaning and patterns of artistic signification.

The series called A Statement a day (1976) represent ideas that the artist captures in a few seconds by means of a name, a sentence, a word, a letter, a photograph, a drawing, a music score, a scribble, a sketch, etc. As a certificate, dated and signed Dieter Meier reflects 57 ideas during the time period from 2 March to 27 April 1976 made during one of his stays in London.

The series Given Names (1976) is one of the many works that Dieter Meier carried out in the public space. The photographs depict people in the street who were given names invented by the artist. The names seem to match the outer appearance of the unwittingly involved passers-by and raise questions about physical features and premature judgements of people. 

Matt Mullican (*1951 in Santa Monica, California) lives and works in New York and Berlin, has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the early 1970s at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany, the National Galerie, Berlin, Germany, the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, and The Museum of Modern Art, NY.  His work is an incessant probing of the relations between reality and perception. In over forty years of artistic career, Mullican has developed a vocabulary and a system of signs and symbols that offer a polyhedric vision of the universe. 

The Stick Figure Portfolio (1974-75) represents his iconic stick figure from the late seventies. The artist represents an imaginary character called Glen who reduces to the maximum degree of abstraction and the simplest possible graphic representation. The ink drawings combine childlike simplicity and immense power of expression.

Christine Rebet (*1971 in Lyon, France) lives and works in New York. Christine Rebet received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. Her work is based in drawing and develops into forms ranging from animation to the environment, installations and performance art. At the heart of her work is the elaboration of historical traumas in the context of a personal reinterpretation and a consequent reanimation. Rebet has exhibited and held performances in various international contexts including: Parasol Unit, London; The Cartier Fondation, Paris ; Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin; Bureau, New York; LACE, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Grieder Contemporary, Zurich; AlbumArte, Rome; Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore;, Paris; Site Sante Fe, New Mexico; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Shanghai Art Museum; Kamel Mennour Gallery, Paris and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. Rebet’s work appears in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France; and KADIST, Paris, France; San Francisco, CA. 

The drawings in the exhibition are the result of an artist-in-residence programme, during which the French artist has worked in close collaboration with the curational duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi after a long process of exchange and research which began in 2014 in Paris.

The referential origins of the serie of drawings Melting Sun (2014) are the jewelry designs of the French-Italian jewelry dynasty Mellerio dits Meller. This venerable company, founded under the patronage of Maria de Medici in the early 17th century, supplies royal houses and the elite of Europe. Rebet has taken the precious objects, which have always been associated with wealth, beauty and exclusivity, and transformed them into forms offering a raft of associations and socio-critical interpretations. The colorful drawings complement the paraffin wax sculpture,Weight Mimesis (2014), from the serie Compresseur de poitrine (Chest compressor). In this serie Rebet has realised some designs in copper and iron but also in paraffin to visualize their potential for power and violence.