Encore Wols, Eileen Quinlan, Josephine Pryde, Atelier E.B, Jazz Leeb Organized by Helena Papadopoulos On the occasion of the publication of Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan
Location: 36 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002 Dates: October 30 – December 8, 2019 Event: Wednesday, October 30, 7pm Cello performance by Alex Waterman followed by a reading by Domenick Ammirati
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Wednesday, October 30th, of Encore, a group exhibition featuring work by Wols, Eileen Quinlan, Josephine Pryde, Atelier E.B, and Jazz Leeb. The exhibition will be on view at our 36 Orchard Street location.
Encore is conceived as a set and a stage for the release of Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan (Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, 2019). The book—a companion to the eponymous exhibition, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016—further explores the relationship between the work of two artists: Wols (1913–1951), whose opaque experience of the world translated in photographs, paintings, watercolors, poems and aphorisms, and Eileen Quinlan, who explores the material boundaries of the photographic. Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual the book owes its immersive design to David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister). With contributions by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Olivier Berggruen, Papadopoulos, and two conversations with Quinlan, it reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of photography as a process.
Encore takes the idea of circular time and common crossings as its object and material and includes works by Josephine Pryde from her “Liver” series (2006), also reproduced in the book; new silver gelatin prints by Quinlan from her “An Image (Haunted by Wols)” series; newly published posters of the latest Atelier E.B (Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie) designs and details; photographs by Wols from a series commissioned for the Pavillion de l’Élégance at the World Fair in Paris (1937); and wax sculptures by Jazz Leeb, inspired by his trip to Paris with Quinlan, who was commissioned by Atelier E.B to photograph the backstage of their exhibition Passer-by at Lafayette Anticipations (2019), in the spirit of Wols.
This latest reprise opens with a special appearance by artist, musician and writer Alex Waterman who will perform Anna Magdalena’s copy of J.S. Bach’s Suite for Violoncello Solo No. 2 in D minor from Six Suites a Violoncello Solo senza Basso composeés par Sr. J.S. Bach Maitre de Chapelle, a salute to Quinlan and Wols, an accomplished violinist himself who was said to be often playing Bach on his banjo. Writer, Domenick Ammirati will read a text written especially for the evening, and select pieces from Atelier E.B’s Jasperwear collection will be circulating in the gallery.
Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan Radio Athènes and Sequence Press, November 2019 Softcover w/ dustjacket, 227 x 182 mm; 220 pages, 20 color, 81 b/w illustrations; ISBN 978-1-7336281-3-6 The publication was made possible through the generous support of Goethe-Institut, Miguel Abreu Gallery, The Circle of Friends of Radio Athènes, and the sale of Eileen Quinlan polaroids. It is available in the Sequence bookshop located within Miguel Abreu Gallery and distributed worldwide by the MIT Press.
88 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002 • 212.995.1774 • [email protected] www.miguelabreugallery.com
Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfang Schulze) (1913–1951) was a German-born artist who created most of his work in France. In 1929, while living in Dresden, he started using a still camera and became involved with experimental photography. He considered enrolling at the Bauhaus and the Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin, but on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy he moved to Paris in 1932. There, he started signing his work with the pseudonym Wols from 1937. That same year he was commissioned to photograph the Pavillon de l’Élégance at the World Fair in Paris. When World War II broke out, he was interned for fourteen months as a German refugee. After the war he presented two exhibitions at Galerie René Drouin in Paris; although commercially unsuccessful, the shows made an impression on poets and artists including Francis Ponge and Jean Paulhan. Wols’s paintings and drawings were presented in the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel (1955, 1959, 1964) and at the Venice Biennale in 1958. His photographic work of the 1930s , however, was largely ignored until historian Volker Kahmen and photographer Georg Heusch rediscovered the negatives and produced new prints in 1976. Major solo exhibitions of his photography include Wols Photograph: Der gerettete Blick, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (2013), and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, (2014); Wols Photographs, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums (1999); and Photographies de Wols, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (1980). Wols died stateless in Paris at the age of thirty-eight. He is now celebrated as one of the pioneering artists of Art Informel.
Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) is an artist interested in the false transparency of the photographic image: it’s not a window, but a mirror. Her work presents an opportunity for contemplation alongside an alienation effect that interrupts it—an awareness of the mechanics of presenting and consuming images, or a sudden bracing encounter with the clumsy hand of the artist, attempting to adjust the veil. Recent solo exhibitions include Wait For It at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2019) and Enough at Gallery TPW in Toronto (2018), while Quinlan has also recently participated Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019), Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018 at LUMA in Arles (2018), VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2017), Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Her fifth solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Too Much, was on view in the fall of 2018, coinciding with the release of her first monograph, Good Enough, published by OSMOS. Quinlan currently has work on view in Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, MoMA, and in November she will also participate in Objects Recognized in Flashes at MUMOK, Vienna.
Josephine Pryde is an artist, writer, and Professor for Contemporary Art and Photography at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation d’enterprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2019); The Vitalist Economy of Painting, Galerie Neu, Berlin (2019); In Case My Mind Is Changing, Simon Lee Gallery, London (2019); lapses in Thinking By the person i Am, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2015); and Objects Recognised in Flashes at Mumok, Vienna (November 2019). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2016. Her texts have appeared in Texte zur Kunst and Artforum among other publications.
Atelier E.B (Edinburgh Bruxelles) is the company name under which the designer Beca Lipscombe and the artist Lucy McKenzie sign their collaborative projects. The group was formed in 2007, and since 2011 the pair have operated as a fashion label which uses local production methods and alternatives forms of distribution and display. Lipscombe and McKenzie place art and design on an equal footing, applying methodologies from both spheres (for instance, embedding critique into clothing and utilising the notion of “styling” as an artistic strategy). Their designs are produced, sold and promoted ethically, yet are too stylistically hacked to be marketed as an “eco brand.” Their most recent project Passer-by was presented at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2018).
Jazz Leeb (b. 1990, San Jose, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn. He attended the Virginia Commonwealth University Post-Baccalaureate Program, Richmond, VA (2014) and holds a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL (2013). He has recently shown in group exhibitions at Marlboro College, VT and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
Alex Waterman is an artist, musician, and writer exploring how social bodies can live and interact with one another in more musical ways. His practice centers on the idea that music is the social body sounding, engaging musical models in order to facilitate collaborations and dialogues with other artists and writers. His work has been exhibited and performed at institutions and galleries such as the ICA and Serpentine, London, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, Miguel Abreu Gallery, White Columns, the Swiss Institute, Kunstverein Amsterdam, and the Donaueschingen Musiktage, among others. Together with Will Holder, he has produced a series of publications on the musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing. He has held teaching positions at Bard College, NYU, and Wesleyan University, among other institutions, and he will teach at the New School this autumn. His writings appear in Dot Dot Dot, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and The Third Rail. His record label collaboration with Dexter Sinister, D.S. al Coda, was featured in Art Record Covers (Taschen, 2019).
Domenick Ammirati is a critic and writer of fiction based in New York. His work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, DIS, Mousse and LARB. He has been selected for residencies at Denniston Hill, the Albee Foundation,
and the Core Program at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he was a 2013–14 Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA. Excerpts of his novel The Bottom of the Top have appeared in BOMB and Tammy; and in 2017, received an honorable mention in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition.
Helena Papadopoulos is a curator and writer based in Athens and founding director of Radio Athènes, Institute for the Advancement of Contemporary Visual Culture. She works closely with local and international artists, writers, curators, and institutions to produce exhibitions, performances, readings, publications and screenings in the fields of contemporary art, literature, philosophy, dance, and the applied arts. Recent exhibitions and projects include Amelie von Wulffen: Hedwig’s Betrayal, Iris Touliatou: Overnight, and Dora Economou: Representation (2019); and A Book Affair, a 7-month-long project in collaboration with Goethe-Institut (2018). She is the editor of Always Starts with an Encounter: Wols—Eileen Quinlan published by Radio Athènes and Sequence Press (2019).
For more information or for visuals, please contact the gallery:
Miguel Abreu Gallery 88 Eldridge Street (between Hester & Grand) / 36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester) New York, NY 10002 Telephone 212.995.1774 • Fax 646.688.2302 • [email protected] Wednesday – Sunday, 10:30AM to 6:30PM and by appointment Subway: B, D to Grand Street; J, M, Z to Delancey / Essex Street; F to East Broadway
