Thursday, 2 April 2009

Whitechapel Gallery reopens

Whitechapel gallery, East London, has finally re-opened it's doors to the public after a costly make over (£13.5m!). There is a buzz over the new gallery space which has seen it's first new coat of paint for a few years. The curators have many events planned to keep the hype in motion. The first exhibition opens on Sunday (5th April), entitled: Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!
Here's what the Whitechapel Gallery website has to say about the exhibition,

"In her remarkable pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, German sculptor Isa Genzken immersed visitors in a series of environments on the theme of ‘Oil’. Like a three dimensional collage the pavilion presented a poetic culmination of the major themes in her work: the psychedelic qualities of industrial materials, architectural form, the loss of the natural world, the properties of colour, and the energy and violence of western culture.

This is the first retrospective of a major European artist whose fusion of photography, paint, architecture and found objects into the realm of sculpture has influenced generations of younger artists. The show commences with early floor works from the 1970s and continues with a sequence of windows, rooms and buildings cast from plaster and concrete in the 1980s. Living and working in Germany and in New York, Genzken’s column structures of the 1990s draw on the vertiginous, reflective forms of Manhattan skyscrapers, adapted in 2000 into proposals for improvements to the architecture of Berlin.

The exhibition also features elements from more recent installations such as Oil, 2007 and Ground Zero, 2008. They are created with toys, souvenirs, furniture, building materials — the stuff of consumer culture, arranged in associative scenarios that are in turn funny, poetic and disturbing."
Other exciting events coming up are:
Gallery Talk: William Mann
Michael Craig-Martin in Conversation with Andrea Tarsia
Mother Foucault with Will Self
England: A play by Tim Crouch
Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity & Jay Street Film Project

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