Angela Bulloch
V
March 15 to April 19, 2008
Opening: Friday, March 14, 6 - 8 pm
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present “V”, an exhibition featuring new works by Angela
Bulloch, born 1966. Following the shows “Prototypes” (2000) and “Antimatter3” (2004), this
is our third solo exhibition dedicated to the Berlin-based British artist.
In her work, Angela Bulloch studies the functioning of the control systems and ordering principles
that organize our environment and our behavior. These systems – lights that go on and off,
colors that are aligned according to an intrinsic logic, or lists of rules that apply to specific
places, activities, or standards – confront us with predetermined structures that trigger off an
interaction between the viewer and the work. This interaction, which is based on the coding and
deciphering of signs, requires the viewer to deal with the pieces of information and the conditions
provided within a given framework.
With the installation Vanishing Waiting Room, which has been conceived for this show, the artist
creates an open, rectangular structure within the exhibition room. The lucid geometric vocabulary
of form, the processing of industrial materials such as steel, and the use of mirrors as well
as of monochrome color fields allude to stylistic categories of modernist architecture. A bench
seat placed in the inside invites the viewer to sit down, a reference to the title of the work, which
suggests that we are in a waiting room. The sparse illumination of the room underlines the experience
inherent to waiting as a state of transition in which nothing happens and nothing is
done – a static situation in which space and time appear to be strangely undefined and ‘empty’.
The spatial positioning of the bench is measured in a way that the viewer comes to be sitting at
the exact vanishing point of this waiting zone. With his physical presence, the sitting visitor both
marks and materializes the point of perspective from which the scope of perception opens up.
The two rays of light, which lead from the vanishing point to the opposite wall of the gallery
space, serve as a visualization of the immaterial ray of the human vision and limits the ‘blind’
interim space "as a specific non-place, which is set up in order to fill the non-time of waiting".
In Progression of 8 Perverted Pixels (Twisted ROY), Angela Bulloch widens the conception of
her so-called pixel boxes, which form a basic element in her oeuvre. Each of these cubeshaped
light boxes contains three fluorescent tubes in the colors red, green, and blue, which
together can generate more than 16 million color values. Up to now, these sculptural pixel
works have been presented separately or in pairs, as vertical towers, in horizontal rows, or in
grid formations. What may serve as a visual starting point for these complex compositions of
colored light are film scenes or parts of television shows, whose pictorial data will then be reduced
and thus abstracted beyond any recognition.
Within the sequence of eight floor sculptures unfolds a gradual transformation of a simple cube
into the more sophisticated structure of an irregular polyhedron, whose surface consists of several
more, even faces. In this spatio-temporal sequence, the initially flat and monochrome front
face is broken down into a multitude of differing triangles, which as of now define single color
fields. The progressive dissolution, or break-down, of the formally reduced, two-dimensional
front view of the cube into a ‘broken’ sculpture with varied perspectives once again shows the
artist’s genuinely skepticist working method – in this piece of work, the modernist understanding
of the linear course of time as a passage towards a ‘better’ world is manifestly undermined
up to a point where it is turned into its opposite.
The “Kunstbau” exhibition hall of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, is hosting
Angela Bulloch's solo show “The Space That Time Forgot” from March 27 until May 18. A
catalogue with installation views and texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Matthias Mühing is
accompanying the exhibition.
For further questions, please contact Claudia Klausner at the gallery.
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 12 noon - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 5 pm
