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Almond, Darren: All Things Pass

Almond, Darren / Blechen, Carl: Landscapes

Almond, Darren: Terminus

Arnolds, Thomas

Bonnet, Louise

Brown, Glenn

Brown, Glenn: And Thus We Existed

Butzer, André

Butzer, André: Exhibitions Galerie Max Hetzler 2003–2022

Chinese Painting from No Name to Abstraction: Collection Ralf Laier

Choi, Cody: Mr. Hard Mix Master. Noblesse Hybridige

Demester, Jeremy

Demester, Jérémy: Fire Walk With Me

Dienst, Rolf-Gunter: Frühe Bilder und Gouachen

Dupuy-Spencer, Celeste: Fire But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

Ecker, Bogomir: You’re NeverAlone

Elmgreen and Dragset: After Dark

Elrod, Jeff

Elrod, Jeff: ESP

Fischer, Urs

Förg, Günther

Förg, Günther: Forty Drawings 1993

Förg, Günther: Works from the Friedrichs Collection

Galerie Max Hetzler: Remember Everything

Galerie Max Hetzler: 1994–2003

Gréaud, Loris: Ladi Rogeurs  Sir Loudrage  Glorius Read

Grosse, Katharina: Spectrum without Traces

Hains, Raymond

Hains, Raymond: Venice

Hatoum, Mona (Kunstmuseum
St. Gallen)

Eric Hattan Works. Werke Œuvres 1979–2015

Hattan, Eric: Niemand ist mehr da

Herrera, Arturo: Series

Herrera, Arturo: Boy and Dwarf

Hilliard, John: Accident and Design

Holyhead, Robert

Horn, Rebecca / Hayden Chisholm: Music for Rebecca Horn's installations

Horn, Rebecca: 10 Werke / 20 Postkarten – 10 Works / 20 Postcards

Huang Rui: Actual Space, Virtual Space

Josephsohn, Hans

Kahrs, Johannes: Down ’n out

Koons, Jeff

Kowski, Uwe: Paintings and Watercolors

La mia ceramica

Larner, Liz

Li Nu: Peace Piece

Mahn, Inge

Marepe

Mikhailov, Boris: Temptation of Life

Mosebach, Martin / Rebecca Horn: Das Lamm (The Lamb)

Neto, Ernesto: From Sebastian to Olivia

Niemann, Christoph

Oehlen, Albert: Luckenwalde

Oehlen, Albert: Mirror Paintings

Oehlen, Albert: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990

Oehlen, Albert: Interieurs

Oehlen, Albert: unverständliche braune Bilder

Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman

Oehlen, Albert | Schnabel, Julian

Phillips, Richard: Early Works on Paper

Prince, Richard: Super Group

Riley, Bridget

Riley, Bridget: Paintings and Related Works 1983–2010

Riley, Bridget: The Stripe Paintings

Riley, Bridget: Paintings 1984–2020

Roth, Dieter & Iannone, Dorothy

True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties

Tunga: Laminated Souls

Tursic, Ida & Mille, Wilfried

de Waal, Edmund: Irrkunst

Wang, Jiajia: Elegant, Circular, Timeless

Warren, Rebecca

Wool, Christopher: Westtexaspsychosculpture

Wool, Christopher: Road

Wool, Christopher: Yard

Wool, Christopher: Swamp

Wool, Christopher: Bad Rabbit

Zhang Wei (2017)

Zhang Wei (2019)

Zhang Wei / Wang Luyan: A Conversation with Jia Wei

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Bridget Riley
Text Éric de Chassey


French / English
Hardcover
24 x 30 cm
38 pages
20 color illustrations
978-3-935567-81-7

$ 50.00
available in the US


Leaf through the book

 

Two years after being awarded the 2012 Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, Bridget Riley created a ten-metre wide wall painting for the local Museum of Contemporary Art. It was in stark black and white, composed from black angles and arcs on a white ground. After decades of exploring the subtle effects of colours, with this painting the artist revisited and developed the work she had started in the early 1960s as a pioneer of op art. Then, in 2015, at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris, she showed a focussed selection of five related works: a nearly nine-metre-wide wall painting, as well as two monumental and two smaller panel paintings. They were all in black and white and built on variations of a modified triangular shape with one side rounded convexly or concavely. The two smaller paintings themselves were shaped in triangular form. The different dimensions of the works and the repeating forms they were based on offered a complex interplay within the exhibition spaces. This book now renders the connections between the works as clear as a walk through the gallery. An essay by French art historian Éric de Chassey puts the development of this new series in a context with examples of famous paintings from the artist’s earlier work phases.


UNBOUND CERTAINTIES
(excerpt from the essay by Éric de Chassey)


... In thus revisiting her own past, Riley does not forsake her allegiance to the principles of modernism, which entails that each work of art is an adventure with an unforeseeable result reached through a process of trial and error, and not the illustration of a pre-existing idea or the mere formalisation of a floating image. Riley simply leaves aside – as she has long since done – the teleology that went with modernism up until the 1970s, in order to direct the viewers’ attention to the particular effects created by each painting.


The scale of the new paintings makes them not only a visual experience, but a bodily experience, too. Far from inducing the ‘radical disembodiment’ associated with Riley’s 1960s works, these paintings have their roots in the here and now of a bodily perception that can only function in the presence of a stable object. We identify an image on the surface of the painting at the same time as the image’s complex perceptual effects make themselves felt, whether or not we are conscious of them, concentrating on them or simply looking while paying no particular attention. But unlike the large curve paintings, where ‘one is unavoidably reminded of human gestures and movements’, the new black-and-white paintings are thoroughly non-figurative, without any suggestion of bodies: they are to be experienced by an incarnated eyesight, which is not replicated nor even hinted at in them. They are more like landscapes, or rather, because they are reduced to a contrast of black and white, they are like the movements of light and shadows that you can experience on a stable surface or moving across a field. Although this field is that of a picture or wall, it relates to experiences made in nature: ‘It did begin in Cornwall with walks on the cliffs’, Riley has acknowledged. ‘You walk one way and you walk back and the light is different.’ This is where the address of these paintings rests – not on the basis of a teleological notion of progress to which viewers would be led indiscriminately through excitation – but on that of a one-on-one relationship. What we experience first in these paintings are some harmonious certainties (and our uncertain world demands some certainties because we are lost enough in our everyday lives), which never lock themselves onto closed identities, but, within a prolonged viewing, are at our disposal to be freely and pleasurably analysed, broken apart, recomposed, started anew – each time in a personal way.

 

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris