Visual Language: Radical Abstraction (Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Bernar Venet)

Visual Language: Radical Abstraction (Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Bernar Venet)

8F Club Lusitano Building, 16 Ice House Street, Central Hong Kong, China Wednesday, December 12, 2012–Saturday, February 2, 2013


if you aren't political your personal life should be exemplary by jenny holzer

Jenny Holzer

If You Aren't Political Your Personal Life Should be Exemplary, 1998

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selections from survival: finding extreme pleasure... by jenny holzer

Jenny Holzer

Selections from Survival: Finding Extreme Pleasure..., 1983

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face it (yellow) by barbara kruger

Barbara Kruger

Face It (yellow), 2007

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indeterminate line by bernar venet

Bernar Venet

Indeterminate Line, 1984

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de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong is proud to present a collection of the work of three formative artists of the twentieth century. American conceptual artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are presented alongside French minimalist sculptor and painter Bernar Venet. These three unique and distinctive artists have made their stamp on the cultural heritage of their time by bringing particularly into focus language as art and subsequently art as language. Each artist, in separate ways, seek to utilise declarative forms of mass communication through the exploration of large-scale imagery and text creating radical new visual approaches to conceptual art.While the work of both Kruger and Holzer can be easily linked by both medium and message, Bernar Venet (b. Nice, 1941) is an artist that works under a somewhat more subtle, but no less powerful, declarative manner. Venet's paired back and minimal approach to aesthetic and message masks his work in a complex realm of discourse. In the late 60's, by using mathematical equations that had no mathematical significance, Venet asks the viewer to find the perceived message hidden within bewildering mathematical language, such as that presented in the complex and beautiful "Asymptotic Error Estimates for the Guass Quadrature Formula" (1968).