Franz Ackermann - Julien Berthier - Vija Celmins - Blaise Drummond - Cyprien Gaillard
Vidya Gastaldon - Robert Longo - Petra Mrzyk et Jean-François Moriceau - Nick Oberthaler
Raymond Pettibon - Guillaume Pinard - Évariste Richer - Didier Rittener - Ugo Rondinone
Kristina Solomoukha - Sarah Sze - Catharina van Eetvelde - Daniel Zeller
Curator : Matthieu Poirier
11 June – 26 July 2008
An opening and presentation of the book Landscope in the presence of the artists and the
authors will take place on Wednesday, June 11th from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.
PRESS RELEASE
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Matthieu
Poirier. The exhibition will bring together works by nineteen artists of eight different
nationalities to explore the notion of landscape.
Landscope, the exhibition and book, intend to call into question the art historical precedent of
the correlation between landscape and drawing. The exhibition thus assembles, in two
successive shows (Paris and Salzburg), over one hundred works, often in atypical formats,
by artists for whom drawing is often just one medium among others, and landscape, a nonexclusive
genre. Under the neologistic title “Landscope” – a contraction of “landscape” and
“scope” [from the Greek skopein “to behold, to observe”], landscape is regarded as both a
site and a view. The landscapes brought together here are often natural, yet reject
conventional narrative or narcissistic themes. As in the mirror-like illustrations of
Maeterlinckʼs dream of a theatre without actors, these scenes systematically exclude all
human presence and thus contribute to the establishment of a scenography of absence, of a
paradoxical phenomenology of emptiness. Even if these landscapes are completely
deserted, they nevertheless remain “event-scenes [paysages dʼévènements]” (Paul Virilio),
genuine locations, resulting most frequently, from the collision of formal, logical and scopic
motivations, rather than as a result of a narrative. Chosen here for its manifest artificiality and
its necessarily dialectic relationship with the world, drawing appears as the indispensable tool
for reconsidering this notion of landscape as well as the related themes of perspective, space
and representation. It is not so much the spatial landscapes that are observed here, but
through their archetypal characteristics, the very notion of landscape itself.
For further information, please ask for the PRESS KIT or contact Victoire de Pourtalès (+33
1 42 72 99 00; [email protected]) or Alessandra Bellavita ([email protected]).
To obtain visual elements, please contact Zahra KH-Alam ([email protected]).
