Upcoming Exhibitions Winter 2007

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

WINTER 2007 January 26–April 15, 2007

Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation The first full-scale museum exhibition of Sadie Benning’s work is also the first presentation of this influential video artist’s paintings and works on paper. Organized by the Wexner Center, the show highlights Benning’s playful, lo-fi aesthetic in works that touch on such issues as sexual ambiguity, loneliness, and city life. It features the premiere of the two-channel video Play Pause, a rhythmic, affectionate portrait of city life that moves from streets to parks to gay bars. The video is made from hundreds of Benning’s drawings and was developed, shot, and edited in the Wexner Center’s Art & Technology studios. Also on view will be a selection of large-scale portraits, which exude a gawky charm. The catalogue will feature an introduction by Jennifer Lange—curator of this show and the Wexner Center’s associate curator of media arts—with essays by poet Eileen Myles, writer Aleksandar Hemon, and Wexner Center Chief Curator of Exhibitions Helen Molesworth, as well as an interview between Benning and artist Amy Sillman. Based in Chicago, Benning was a Wexner Center Residency Award artist in media arts in 2003–04, and has been at the center on and off over the past 2 1⁄2 years to work on her new video and this exhibition. Tour dates will be announced.

Architecture Interruptus This exhibition focuses on one single structure designed by influential 20th-century architect Le Corbusier: the Église Saint-Pierre in Firminy-Vert, France. Commissioned in 1960 and designed with his young associate José Oubrerie, now on the faculty at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture, this church is only now being completed due to lack of funding over the years. Oubrerie has brought the project to fruition, rendering the church a true partnership between these two architects and calling into question who is ultimately responsible for its design. The exhibition, which will feature sketches, photographs, and a commissioned large-scale model, will strive to bring the experience of this remarkable church to the Wexner Center galleries. It is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Megan Cavanaugh Novak. The catalogue features essays by Novak and noted architectural theorist and critic Jeffrey Kipnis, as well as reprinted essays by Oubrerie and Anthony Eardley. A symposium featuring architects, critics, and scholars from the U.S. and Europe will be held January 26.

Glenn Ligon: Some Changes This internationally touring survey of the politically charged works of African-American artist Glenn Ligon features more than 40 works from the past 17 years in such media as neon, painting, video, and the web. At the forefront of a generation of artists who came to prominence in the 1980s, Ligon has become known for his wry, edgy, often text-based works that explore issues ranging from race to gender to pop culture, incorporating such diverse texts as James Baldwin’s writings and Richard Pryor’s comic routines. This exhibition will include an on-site installation. Organized by the Power Plant in Toronto and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The tour also includes: Contemporary Art Museum Houston (January–April 2006), The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (September 30–December 31, 2006), The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia

(summer 2007), and Mudam (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) in Luxembourg (October 6–December 17, 2007). Catalogue.

SUMMER 2007 May 12 – August 12, 2007

Zoe Leonard: Analogue New York-based artist Zoe Leonard produced this poignant body of images—over 300—using an antiquated Rolleiflex camera on walks through New York and other cities. Installed in an elaborate grid, this poignant body of images documents a kind of urban texture that is fast disappearing beneath the tide of multinational homogeneity, and brings attention to local markets and mom-and-pop shops noted for their hodge-podge displays, hand-lettered signs, and worn storefronts. This exhibition marks the culmination of Leonard’s Wexner Center Residency Award in Visual Arts. It is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Helen Molesworth. The catalogue features essays by Molesworth and Charity Scribner, an interview with Zoe Leonard by Lyn Cook, and selected quotes by Leonard.

Chris Marker: Staring Back This show consists of almost 200 photographs spanning six decades by legendary French filmmaker Chris Marker, including a stunning series focusing on the 2006 student protests in Paris. Selected by the artist himself from his own archive, the black-and-white photographs are portraits of individuals—some celebrated, most not—that Marker has encountered during the course of his world travels. While some of the people would then appear in his films (including La jetée, Sans Soleil, and The Case of the Grinning Cat, among others), they testify primarily to Marker’s boundless curiosity about cultures other than his native one. It is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s Director of Media Arts. The catalogue includes texts by Marker, Horrigan, and Molly Nesbit, scholar and contributing editor to Artforum.

State Fare: Three Ohio Artists The Wexner Center presents its first statewide juried exhibition, showcasing works by three artists from the state of Ohio. The artists will be selected by a blind jury of three distinguished arts professionals from the across the country: Elizabeth Armstrong of Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Elizabeth Smith from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Hamza Walker, Renaissance Society, University of Chicago.

Robert Beck: Dust Robert Beck’s drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations draw from personal experience and popular media and culture to investigate violence, sexuality, psychology, and masculinity. Beck explores the interactions of fact and fiction, memory and imagination, family relationships and ritual. This exhibition brings together work in a variety of media by the New York-based artist. It is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Bill Horrigan, director of media arts. Catalogue.

WINTER 2008 February 2–April 13, 2008

Solitaire: 3 Painters in New York In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Joan Semmel each painted ambitious canvases at a time when the very activity of painting was coming under fire form the most advanced circles of the New York art world. Despite the prevailing tendency toward abstraction, they each painted in a highly representational mode. Despite the rise of feminist art, which challenged the solitary practice of a painter in his studio, they chose to paint alone. And what they painted might be called a kind of hyper-realistic image-making, or conceptual painting— representing the world not as it is but rather how it appeared to them. Plimack Mangold painted the boundaries of her studio and home; Semmel’s paintings feature either nudes, often in post- or pre-coital arrangements whose heads are always radically cropped out of the picture. And Lozano made paintings of everyday objects—watches, hammers, razor blades—that are rendered anthropomorphic. This show explores the highly individual practices of three artists, each of whom pursued their own artistic vision despite the prevailing tastes of the art world. Solitaire offers three small retrospectives, bound together as a group exhibition, in order to offer fresh historical and critical perspectives on these important but relatively under- represented American artists. This exhibition is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Helen Molesworth. It will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Johanna Burton, Richard Meyer, and Helen Molesworth.

SPRING/SUMMER 2008 May 10–August 24, 2008

Moyra Davey Canadian-born photographer Moyra Davey has been documenting the banal, the everyday, city street life, and her domestic interior in series of understated and moving photographs for the past two decades. Unlike much of the large-format spectacular digital imagery of much contemporary photography, Davey remains committed to film and concerned with the history of photography as a medium. She often looks to the traditions of still life (witness her series of empty scotch bottles) and street photography (her series of newspaper stands in New York). She has also tirelessly documented the neverending production of dust in her New York apartment as well as a series of photographs of bookshelves which document the life of the mind as much as the obsession of the collector. Organized by the Wexner Center; curated by Helen Molesworth. Catalogue. Tour dates to be announced.

Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone This nationally touring show is the first retrospective of work by influential New York- based painter Mary Heilmann. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from popular culture and craft traditions, Heilmann is one of the most important yet least recognized artists in the United States today. One of the very few female abstract painters of her generation, she has nevertheless maintained a steadfast commitment to producing eccentric, engaging, visceral paintings. Featuring 75 works from the last three decades, the exhibition also explores Heilmann’s interest in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Organized by the Orange County Museum of Art. The show also tours to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in

2008. A catalogue featuring essays by Elizabeth Armstrong, Johanna Burton, Dave Hickey, and Al Ruppersberg accompanies the exhibition.

FALL 2008 September 20, 2008–January 4, 2009

Luc Tuymans The Wexner Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are co-organizing the first major retrospective in the U.S. of the work of Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, one of the most highly regarded artists of his generation. Born in 1958, Tuymans represented his country at the 2001 Venice Biennale, participated in Documenta XI, and was recently featured in a major exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Using a muted palette to create images that can be enigmatic and disarmingly stark, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, photography and painting. At the same time, his works evoke a powerful sense of history, investigating such themes as colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the Holocaust, and Christ’s Passion. Co-curators: Helen Molesworth, Wexner Center, and Madeleine Grynsztejn, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. On view at SFMOMA mid-May through mid-August 2008. Additional venues to be announced. Catalogue.