Gazelli Art House proudly presents You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry, an exhibition of recent works on canvas and video along with a selection of historically important pieces that mark the three decades of artistic collaboration between Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher (Aziz + Cucher), recipients of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in both 2017 and 2022. Encapsulating the duo’s cross-disciplinary practice, You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry offers familiar and never-before-seen artworks in a multidimensional display.
In the video installation You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry (2019, originally commissioned for MASS MoCA), elements of the carnivalesque signal the theatre of our global financial system. Within six flat-screens of various sizes, costumed characters in deconstructed power-suits dance and gesticulate across quasi-corporate locations, intertwined with images that evoke the spectre of white supremacy. The figures’ oration of financial formulas feed into a multi-layered soundtrack, as visceral as the kaleidoscopic walls, rendered in colours of bank logos. The immersive quality of the work captures the “irrational forces that mould our political and economic systems”.
Expanding on these themes and motifs, a series of new, mixed media paintings (2021—22) translates the kinetic energy of the absurd, suited figures to two-dimensional works on canvas. Satirising the complexity and mystification of the financial system, the costumed figures are here rendered in compositions of mesmerising textural and visual contrasts. The artworks’ meticulous material creation continues Aziz + Cucher’s interest in using dense, pixelated surfaces as analogies for the pervasive information that floods contemporary life.
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the artists’ collaboration and to celebrate this milestone La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) and Gazelli Art House are pleased to present XXX: Aziz + Cucher 1992—2022. Covering the artists’ entire career, this monograph will include 130 full colour reproductions of the work that the artists have created together since 1992. Essays by independent curator Agustin Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D’Souza will be featured, along with a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.
