Artists: Sandra Gamarra, Marco Maggi.

3rd Bienal de Montevideo
September 29 – December 4, 2016
Palacio Legislativo, Salón de los Pasos Perdidos
Montevideo, Uruguay

• Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

Unfolding
September 10 – October 24, 2015
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
New York, NY, USA

Like in the Venice pavilion, Maggi separates the two basic elements of drawing. He draws with paper on the walls in the main space, and presents an installation of pencils in a separate area. “Drawing is a dialogue with a superficy and a certain superficiality. It is a superficial discipline that allows oneself to take distance from the depths of thinking in order to de-multiply an empathy for the insignificant. Drawing for me is like writing in a language that I don’t understand. I don’t believe in messages or ideas. Ideas have the tendency to become fixed and aspire ultimately to the status of ideology.” (Marco Maggi, 2015)

A portable kit composed of thousands of elements cut-out from self-adhesive paper becomes an insignificant alphabet folded and pasted onto the walls during the months preceding the exhibition. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. Some areas throughout the gallery are infected with color, the edge of the wall in red, blue or yellow, like the margins of a misprinted sheet of paper. The colonies of stickers on the walls enter in dialogue with the light upon them. Myriads of shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections aim to slow down the viewer. The main ambition of the project is to promote pauses and make time visible.

In Putin’s Pencils, ten pencils are pointed against the wall, held by the tensions of bowstrings, ten arrows ready to be projected. The trajectory of these Soviet era color pencils is frozen, almost going backward in time. Leading to the project room, a ladder made of Fanfold, the already obsolete perforated computer paper, grows upward and downward from two dimensions to three-dimensional space in a symbiosis of hardware and software. Inside the room, two individual panels of cutout stickers face each other. Another wall installation, Stacking Quotes (Black Cachet), suspends bound sketchbooks with fragments of colored stickers pressed within their pages. These small referential stickers act as words cut out from a larger message, recoding the original context.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi lives and works in New Paltz, NY and Montevideo, Uruguay. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America in galleries, museums, and biennials. This year, he represents Uruguay at the 56th Venice Biennale, on view through November 22. His first monograph was published on this occasion. Maggi’s work is also on view at the concurrent exhibition Déplier Marco Maggi at Galerie Xippas, Paris. In 2013, he received the Premio Figari (Career Award). Selected exhibitions include Drawing Attention, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2015); Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2015); Functional Desinformation, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012); Optimismo Radical, NC-arte, Bogota, Colombia (2011); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Poetics of the Handmade, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Fifth Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2004); VIII Havana Biennial, Cuba (2003); 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002); and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001). Public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; The Drawing Center, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Cisneros Collection, New York; and Daros Foundation, Zurich.

• Happenings

Monochrome Undone
SPACE Collection

Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
October 24, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA

Artists: Ricardo Alcaide, Alejandra Barreda, Andrés Bedoya*, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Danilo Dueñas, Magdalena Fernández, Valentina Liernur, Marco Maggi, Manuel Mérida, Gabriel de la Mora, Miguel Angel Ríos, Lester Rodríguez, Eduardo Santiere, Emilia Azcárate, Marta Chilindrón, Bruno Dubner, Rubén Ortíz-Torres, Fidel Sclavo, Renata Tassinari, Georgina Bringas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Thomas Glassford, José Luis Landet, Jorge de León, Bernardo Ortiz, Martin Pelenur, Teresa Pereda, Pablo Rasgado, Ricardo Rendón, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Mariela Scafati, Gabriel Sierra, Jaime Tarazona, Adán Vallecillo, Horacio Zabala.

The monochrome as a focus in the SPACE Collection began in a spontaneous form and soon became a systematic field of research. This exhibition is about the contemporary monochrome in Latin America. The monochrome is one of the most elusive and complex art forms of modern and contemporary art. If we think about its origins or meaning, we find that the monochrome is many contradictory things. The monochrome is neither a movement nor a category; it is not an “ism” or a thing. It may be painting as object, the material surface of the work itself, the denial of perspective or narrative, or anything representational. The monochrome may be a readymade, a found object, or an environment—anything in which a single color dominates. The monochrome can be critical and unstable, especially when it dialogues critically or in tension with modernism. This exhibition is organized into four different themes: The Everyday Monochrome, The White Monochrome, The Elusive Monochrome and The Transparent Monochrome. These themes have been conceived to create context and suggest interpretations that otherwise might be illegible.  These may overlap at times, pointing to the multiplicity of content in many of the works. The unclassifiable and variable nature of the monochrome in Latin America today is borne of self-criticality and from unique Latin contexts, to exist within its own specificity and conceptual urgency.

To purchase the catalogue click here.

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El monocromo, como enfoque de SPACE Collection, comenzó de forma espontánea y a poco se convirtió en un campo de investigación sistemático. Esta exposición trata sobre el monocromo contemporáneo en América latina. El monocromo es una de las formas de arte más elusivas y complejas del arte moderno y contemporáneo. Si reflexionamos acerca de sus orígenes o su significado, nos encontramos con que puede albergar muchas cosas contradictorias. El monocromo no es un movimiento ni una categoría; no es un “ismo” ni una cosa. Puede ser la pintura como objeto, la superficie material de la obra, la negación de la perspectiva o de todo lo representativo o narrativo. El monocromo puede ser un readymade, un objeto encontrado, un cuadro o un ambiente: cualquier cosa definida como una superficie cromáticamente uniforme donde un solo color predomina. El monocromo puede ser crítico e inestable, especialmente cuando se dialoga críticamente o en tensión con el modernismo. Esta exposición está organizada en cuatro temas: el monocromo cotidiano, el monocromo blanco, el monocromo elusivo y el monocromo transparente. Estos temas han sido concebidos a fin de crear un contexto y sugerir interpretaciones que de otra manera podrían ser ilegibles. Éstos pueden superponerse a veces, apuntando a la multiplicidad de contenidos en muchas de las obras. La naturaleza indeterminada, inclasificable y variable del monocromo en Latinoamérica hoy en día es producto de la autocrítica y de los contextos propios, para existir dentro de su propia especificidad y urgencia conceptual.

• Projects

Artist: Marco Maggi

Drawing Attention
June 19 – November 1, 2015
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kansas City, Kansas, USA

At the center of this exhibition, featuring Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi, is his ambitiously scaled paper installation Great White Dialogue (2000) which reveals an encoding of the world in macro and micro, linear and aerial perspectives. From a distance, the stacks of thousands of sheets of paper (24,549 total) that are set out in a grid onto the floor suggest a landscape, circuit boards, or an architectural model for an imagined city. Viewed more intimately, delicate sculptural forms have been cut and raised from the top layer of paper, creating shadows that extend along the paper’s surface. The perplexing abstract language of Maggi’s tiny incised paper sculptures promotes longer viewing time and shifts our bodily relationship to an intimate viewing experience.

Accompanying Maggi’s sculptural installation is a related two-dimensional work, Global Myopia (2001), made by carefully pressing into aluminum foil. The network of impressions made to the malleable metal’s surface acts as the artist’s method of drawing, developed from his interest in the printmaking technique of plate etching.  He creates a patchwork of lines that impart a sense of movement across the surface of the piece. The pairing of these works emphasizes Maggi’s ability to call attention to the transformation of everyday materials he often uses, such as coated office paper, aluminum foil, apple skins, and plexiglass, as detailed and poetic expressions of the expanded language of contemporary drawing.

Marco Maggi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He earned his MFA from the State University of New York, New Paltz, and had his first solo museum exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. Maggi is representing Uruguay with a site-specific installation of paper and pencils, Global Myopia II, on view through November 22, 2015, at the Venice Biennale in Italy. The Uruguayan pavilion is one of the twenty-nine national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale.

• Happenings

Marco Maggi
Into Whiter Space

June 13, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA

The Sayago & Pardon Collection is proud to present Into Whiter Space, a project of Abstraction in Action. Marco Maggi’s Into Whiter Space, 2015 is a site-specific installation at SPACE, Sayago & Pardon’s headquarters located in Irvine, California. Into Whiter Space was produced in the context of the exhibition Monochrome Undone, opening at SPACE October 24, 2015.

Into Whiter Space alludes to the purist and conclusive modern idea of a uniform white painterly surface of the monochrome.  The piece is proposed as a sort of textured and irregular, but delicate, skin on two large facing walls. These walls are intervened with hundreds of small white stickers cut in different shapes. The artist comments:  “…around them [are] more and more stickers, like growing towns to build a big city [L.A.?] or adding letters, sentences, paragraphs, chapters to write a novel. Homeopathic process, constructing or demolishing syntax.”

The artist aims not only for us to slow down, but to lose our daily sense of purpose while observing the work.  Our eyes make sense of the world through the interaction of the focal and the peripheral visions. Whereas the focal allows us to focus on details and represents our conscious vision, the peripheral helps us to organize space and encompass shadow to create context. Through one pragmatic act of seeing, Marco Maggi’s Into Whiter Space can neither be apprehended in its totality, nor its many details. The complex, structured, yet unpredictable surface challenges a deliberate single-minded gaze for us to discover a freer, slower, and broader way of seeing.  Maggi’s monochrome does not function as a blank purified space of order and control; instead it is paradoxically unsubordinated and it denaturalizes the conceptual neutrality associated to white. Time slows down and totality is not possible. Into Whiter Space will have a second life, as a digital platform on Abstraction in Action. The Internet will provide an intimate experience allowing the particularities of every cutout to be explored in detail while the whole still remains elusive.

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• Projects

Artist: Marco Maggi

Global Myopia II
May 9 – November 22, 2015
Uruguay Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Venice, Italy

Marco Maggi will represent Uruguay at the upcoming Venice Biennale, opening to the public on May 9 and on view through November 22, 2015. The Uruguayan pavilion is one of the 29 national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale. Marco Maggi’s drawings, sculptures and installations encode the world. Composed of linear patterns that suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, his drawings are a thesaurus of the infinitesimal and the undecipherable. Marco Maggi’s abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global era, and his work challenges the notion of drawing itself. For the 56th Venice Biennale he will present Global Myopia II, a site-specific installation of paper, stickers and pencils on the inside of the pavilion, and a large floating sculpture on the outside.

Saying that the world is myopic sounds depreciative: a planet without perspective, moving forward without any clear sense of direction. Marco Maggi, on the contrary, claims and prescribes myopia as the extraordinary ability to see from very close. Nearsightedness allows one to focus carefully on invisible details, it challenges the acceleration and the abuse of long-distance relationships characteristic of our era. After a farsighted 20th century with solutions for everyone and forever, it is time to stimulate our empathy for the immediate and the insignificant.

In Global Myopia II, paper and pencil, the two basic elements of drawing, get separated and the act of drawing is split into two stages. A portable kit composed of 10,000 elements cut out of self-adhesive paper becomes an insignificant alphabet that the artist will fold and paste onto the walls during the three months preceding the biennale. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the specific traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. The colonies of paper sticker on the walls enter in dialogue with a custom lighting track provided by Erco. Myriads of high-definition shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections will aim to slow down the viewer. The only ambition of the project is to promote pauses and closeness.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi lives and works in New Paltz, NY and Montevideo, Uruguay. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America in galleries, museums, and biennials. He is represented by Josée Bienvenu in New York. In 2013, he received the Premio Figari (Career Award). Selected exhibitions include Functional Desinformation, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012); Optimismo Radical, NC-arte, Bogota, Colombia (2011); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Poetics of the Handmade, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Fifth Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2004); VIII Havana Biennial, Cuba (2003); 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002); and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001). Public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; The Drawing Center, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Cisneros Collection, New York; and Daros Foundation, Zurich.

The 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia is directed by Okwui Enwezor, curator, art critic and writer, and the Director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The Uruguayan Commissioner is artist Ricardo Pascale and the project is curated by Patricia Bentancur, Senior Curator and New Media Director at the Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo (CCE), a leading space for Iberoamerican art.

Image: Marco Maggi, Putin’s Pencils, 2014. Soviet era color pencils and bowstrings. Image courtesy of the artist and Josée Bienvenu Gallery.

• Happenings

Artists: Matisse, Mondrian, Schiele, Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Twombly, Kippenberger, Dumas, Maggi, and many more.

Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions
Curated by Isabelle Dervaux
February 13 – May 24, 2015
Morgan Library & Museum 
New York, USA

In 2005, the Morgan Library & Museum embarked on a new program of drawings acquisitions with the goal of bringing to the present a collection that was known for its Old Master and nineteenth-century holdings. During the ensuing decade the institution put together a formidable collection of modern and contemporary drawings, representing a wide range of artists and movements. Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, opening February 13, features more than eighty works from the collection and explores the dynamic creativity that revolutionized the medium in our time. The exhibition runs through May 24.

Embracing Modernism includes work by artists from Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Egon Schiele, to Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Rothenberg, Martin Kippenberger, and Marlene Dumas. The exhibition is divided into five sections. Each focuses on a particular departure or shift in emphasis in modern drawing—such as the approach to the use of the line—that sets it apart from its antecedents. The exhibition is organized by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan, who has led the museum in this area since 2005.

“The Morgan’s decision to collect modern and contemporary drawings underscores its belief that artists of our day are part of a long continuum that celebrates the primacy of the medium,” said Peggy Fogelman, Acting Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Embracing Modernism presents an extraordinary collection of works by some of our greatest artists. The Morgan is deeply grateful to the collectors and donors who helped build our collection over the last decade and make possible an exhibition such as this.”

Exhibition Sections

The Autonomy of the Line

An essential component of drawing from its origins, line took on a new role in the twentieth century as artists eschewed naturalistic representation. Liberated from its descriptive function— as the outline of an object or a figure—line achieved greater autonomy. Drawing became, in Paul Klee’s words, “an active line which moves freely; a walk for a walk’s sake, without aim.” The sheets by Matisse, Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Saul Steinberg in this section show them investigating the expressivity of the line, whether continuous or broken. During the 1960s and 1970s, artists such as Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin eliminated any remaining illusionistic function of a line on a ground with the adoption of the grid format, in which the line is a basic modular unit.

More recently, contemporary artists have used the line to visualize aspects of man’s relationship to the world in dense, labor-intensive drawings. Examples include Giuseppe Penone’s extension of a fingerprint into growth rings of an ancient tree, or Marco Maggi’s nod to the electronic age with an intricate network of nearly invisible incisions.

Gesture and Trace

Drawing as a gesture—the record of physical engagement—is central to twentieth-century expressionist tendencies. It reflects a conception of art as a direct, spontaneous experience as seen in the work of Cy Twombly, Michael Goldberg, and Joan Mitchell. But the gesture can also be more automatic, calling into question the traditional notion of the hand of the artist. The Surrealist Max Ernst was the first to explore the technique of frottage (rubbing) to create unexpected patterns intended to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. During the 1960s, the technique was revived in process drawing—drawing as the trace of an action independent from usual artistic practice—as in Robert Overby’s rubbing of his studio wall.

Contemporary artists’ fascination with the use of chance has led them to rely more and more on unconventional modes of drawing. Gavin Turk, for instance, produced his elegant Rosette by placing a sheet of paper in front of the exhaust pipe of his van before starting the engine.

High and Low

In the modern era, the interplay between art and popular culture considerably broadened the range of drawing styles available to artists. Inspired by commercial illustrations, comic books, graffiti, tattoos, and posters, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Paschke, Red Grooms, and Martin Kippenberger gave their drawings a new kind of energy At the same time their work questioned the very nature of what constitutes “artistic” drawing as opposed to any other form of mark making.

The use of non-traditional art material was another way to bridge the gap between art and everyday life. Following the lead of the Cubists, who first introduced fragments of newspapers and labels in their papiers collés, Kurt Schwitters created collages from scraps of contemporary urban culture: ads, ticket stubs, candy wrappers, torn packaging. The practice has remained a vital form of expression to the present day as can be seen in the collage books of John Evans and the poignant compositions of Hannelore Baron.

Everyday Objects

Although the depiction of everyday objects has a long tradition in the genre of the still-life, the range of items deemed worthy of the artist’s attention has expanded in modern times, as attested by the cigarette-butt, ice cube, soup can, and portable electric heater in the drawings on view in this section by artists including Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. Artists also explored new modes of representation, notably in compositions that favor odd cropping and extreme close-up, largely influenced by photography and film.

From Melancholia to Schizophrenia

Nowhere is the disruption of the academic tradition in modern art more visible than in portrait and figure drawings. Liberated by photography from the necessity to produce a likeness, and stimulated by psychoanalytic revelations about the complex inner life of individuals, artists set out to render emotions and mental states with unprecedented immediacy. Various formal means— fragmentation, distortion, exaggeration, awkward poses and cropping—were used to convey sensations and feelings, from the psychological tension of Walter Sickert’s bedroom scene to Anne-Marie Schneider’s vision of a schizophrenic bus passenger who imagines himself in the luggage rack.

Self-portraits offer particularly rich territory as artists used drawing to probe their most intimate psychological states and lay bare on paper their fears and anxiety. Examples in this section include work by Egon Schiele, Lucas Samaras, Philip Guston, and Maria Lassnig. Others, such as André Masson, Jackson Pollock, and Steve di Benedetto, relied on a range of visual metaphors—including the labyrinth and other intricate patterns—to conjure the workings of the unconscious.

Image: Marco Maggi, Too Close too Far, V, (Detail) 2001, Pencil on clay 36 x 24 inches.

• Happenings

Artists: Ana Bidart, Jonathan Callan, Beth Campbell, Martí Cormand, Elena Del Rivero, Marco Maggi, Stefana McClure, Lauren Seiden, Sérgio Sister, John Sparagana, and Julianne Swartz.

The Suspended Line
January 10 – February 14, 2015
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
New York, NY, USA

The Suspended Line includes a series of intense tensions and ethereal suspensions: thoughts suspended in submerged books, knitted music sheets, perforated porcelain towels and socks, gold leaf constellations, fatigued newsprint, disjointed bricks: the works in the exhibition challenge the division between two and three dimensions and Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

Ana Bidart’s work is concerned with the possibilities and impossibilities of drawing, in space and across time. She explores nomadic and hyperactive art forms by bringing to life found objects: the formally exquisite yet intrinsically disposable or the materially precious but casually discarded. With Disappointment she reconstitutes meaning in potential interactions between two found objects. Born in Montevideo in 1985, she lives and works in Mexico DF.

Jonathan Callan explores the relationship of disembodied knowledge to embodied experience.  The books that form the footprint of Range are forever held in sedimentary layers that will never be opened. Knowledge is often thought to precipitate down through history and accumulate as the sum of many human additions, but here the plaster, like snow, sprinkles down in mountain peaks denying access to the books under the weight that covers them. Born in Manchester in 1961, he lives and works in London.

Beth Campbell creates works that challenge the notion of a physical world beyond our perception. Drawing upon philosophy, phenomenology and psychology, Campbell choreographs space, crafts uncanny objects, and maps thought. In Campbell’s installations and recent sculpture, what appears at first glance to be a facsimile of the everyday will reveal startling complexity: forms repeat and stutter, interiority is externalized and the familiar becomes strange. Born in 1971 in Illinois, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Martí Cormand’s work is a testimony to the degradation of certainty. For the past two years, he has been investigating the notion of conviction by observing and rendering iconic works of the conceptual art movement  “When no one has too many certitudes any more, processes become essential. I have nothing urgent to communicate, no absolute convictions. I investigate the certainties that others had in the 1960s and 1970s. My favorite subject is the study of conviction” (Martí Cormand).  Born in Spain in 1970, he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Elena del Rivero’s works are rooted in estrangement and recollection. Work and daily routine often intermingle in her oeuvre to become one. In most of del Rivero’s work, delicacy and a sense of loving attention coexist with a feeling of neglect and abandonment. In Wound, a hint to Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, the punctured 24k gold leafed paper surface, bears the tool of its making with a needle and a thread, left over hanging in the center of the work. Born in Valencia, Spain in 1948, she has been living in New York for the last 30 years.

Marco Maggi’s drawings and sculptures encode the world. Composed of linear patterns that suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, his drawings are a thesaurus of the infinitesimal and the undecipherable. Marco Maggi’s abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global era. Marco Maggi divides the act of drawing.  Born in Montevideo in 1957, he lives and works in New York and will represent Uruguay at The 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia this year.

Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize Stefana McClure’s drawings and sculptures. All of her work involves translation, transposition and reconstruction as music is changed into text, and text is turned into image. The Planets (op. 32), is a spectacular symphonic suite scored for large orchestral forces and a wordless chorus, written by Gustav Holst between 1914 and 1916. The 192 page score has been sliced and rejoined as continuous lengths of paper yarn and each of the seven movements have been knitted back together again. McClure unveils and reveals the visual fabric of The Planets (op. 32): drawings to a symphonic suite by Gustav Holst as she translates and transposes the synesthetic structure that connects music and image. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, she lives and works in New York.

Lauren Seiden’s work explores the essential elements of process and materiality through an intuitive and intimate layering of graphite, breaking down the surface and transforming the paper into a physical, textural and structural form, further expanding upon the notion of drawing as painting and painting as sculpture.  The act of folding strengthens the structure while weakening the surface allowing for necessary manipulation of the material in order to maintain stability. These dualities of strength and fragility are encapsulated within a process that, like the work itself, strikes a balance between the internal and external. Born in 1981, she lives and works in New York.

Sergío Sister’s work stands at the edge between painting and sculpture. The Ripas, ladrillos, pontaletes appropriate the names of the manufactured products from which they are derived. Sergío Sister’s work relates to the US tradition of minimalism and to the Neo-Concrete movement of the 1960’s in Brazil. Many bridges can be drawn between Sister’s attempts to incorporate three-dimensional space and Mira Schendel’s Sarrafos or Willys de Castro’s Objectos Activos. Made of wooden beams dressed in canvas, Sisters ladrillos investigate surface and depth through subtle color dislocations. Born in São Paulo in 1948, he lives and works in São Paulo.

For more than a decade, John Sparagana has been working with found magazine images as his primary material.  His work has developed into a full-fledged investigation into the way information is presented and disseminated visually within contemporary culture. Born in 1958 in Rochester, New York, he lives and works in Houston and Chicago.

With lightness and gravity, Julianne Swartz places equal importance upon negative space, ambient sound, interruptions of sculptural line, and the interface between outside and inside. Her work encourages a quizzical reconsideration of our relationship to our body, to each other and to our surroundings. Lean, a steel rod defies reason as it leans towards a wall but doesn’t touch it, pushing the limits of physical gravity very literally, while exploring gravity metaphorically, in reference to the limitations, fragility and endurance of the body, and the weight of human relationships. Born in Phoenix, AZ in 1967, she lives and works in Kingston, New York.

Image: Elena Del Rivero, Wound, 2014, 24k gold leaf on punctured abaca paper, needle, thread, 11.75 x 11.75 inches

• Happenings

Artists: Saâdane Afif, Mahmoud Akram, art & language, François Azambourg, Katinka Bock, Rebecca Bournigault, César, Pierre Henri Chauveau, Claude Closky, Nicolas Delprat, Guillaume Delvigne, Judith Deschamps, Florence Doléac, Stéphane Ducatteau, Joakim Eneroth, Dario Escobar, Antoine Espinasseau, Didier Faustino, Samuel Gassmann, Miriam Gassmann, Shilpa Gupta, Zaha Hadid, Jakob+ MacFarlane, Patrick Jouin, Studio Katra, Itvan Kebadian, Nandita Kumar, Li Lihong, Valentin Loellmann, Marco Maggi, Piotr Makowski, Cecilie Manz, Philippe Mayaux, Mathieu Mercier, François Morellet, Sarngsan Na Soontorn, Nøne Futbol Club, Navid Nuur, Melik Ohanian, ORLAN, David Pergier, Olivier Peyricot, Benoit Pype, Bruno Romeda, Olve Sande, Laetitia Sellier, Olivier Sidet, Augustin Steyer, Sebastiaan Straastma, Studio Minale Maeda, Jeanne Susplugas, Hitomi Uchikura, Felice Varini, Florian Viel, Sacha Walckhoff, Andy Warhol, Victoria Wilmotte, Jens Wolf.

Private Choice
October 18 – 23, 2014
Paris, France

An imaginary and ephemeral collection of contemporary art works and design inhabits for its second edition a new historical space.  At the birthplace of famous filmmaker George Méliès, is a beautiful opportunity to acquire art and design pieces composing this universe.  This adventure is possible thanks to the loan of art works from galleries and partners. It is here that upon the invitation of homeowners and collectors, Pierre-Henri and Marie Chauveau, that project designer, Nadia Candet has chosen to present Private Choice n°2.

Ascending the Staircase
Upon crossing the threshold, the house invites you ascend the staircase where you are met by three tapered toucan beaks by young artist Florian Viel.  At the top of the stairs sits Pavillion nomade II by architects Jakob + MacFarlane. Digital drawings, moving structures, imaginary and preparatory sketches for a project of mobile architecture on brain research spreads rightfully in this house. Facing it is Super Ghost Mirror by designer Olivier Sidet, a mirror reflecting everything but the person looking in it, preferring, besides self-contemplation, attention to environment. Throughout the home are site specific works by Felice Varini connecting each room.

Three Movements
The intimate architecture is reflected in works by Zaha Hadid, who has designed two vases and crafted by event partner, Lalique, Manifesto and Visio are slender crystal towers created specifically for Private Choice.  Didier Faustino presents a domestic vanitas Dead Domesticity Zone, wall to wall carpet sewn as an emptied skull to be walked on, and an installation: Threesome where, an ensemble of three double armchairs, not far from the staircase designed by Le Corbusier.

Under the sky of the living room, with the survival blanket and Dario Escobar
The living room, the central space of the house, is visited by artists from all over the world with the linking language, English, is imbedded in the mural installation of Iranian artist Navid Nuur. On an isothermal blanket, an aluminum drawing form the words: Not like a piece of pie but like rope in a net. On both sides of the entrance to the dining room, two paintings by Polish artist Piotr Makowski. Near the windows are hung motor oil compositions by Guatemalan artist, Dario Escobar and his installation Observe & Reverse. On a pillar, are paintings by Norwegian Olve Sande, and on the table, the powerfully discreet universe of Marco Maggi who will represent the Uruguayan pavilion during the 2015 Venice Biennale. Dividing the territory, using everyday material as universal binder: engine oil, football balls, survival blanket, or rug.

Evidence rooms
It must be mentioned that more than 100 works, 55 artists, 24 participating galleries and editors, and over 10 brand partners fill the space. But like any house, this house reveals itself fully during the visit, exposing mysteries of the space that holds the collection: it shelters as in any living place, a second ghost, (with the one of Olivier Sidet, an apparition from Melik Ohanian), and a pharmacy (Jeanne Susplugas), a penne necklace (François Azambourg), a coveted piece of jewelry (Laetitia Sellier), cufflinks (Samuel Gassmann), a kitchen knife (Shilpa Gupta), a carpet (Cecilie Manz, collection 2014 Chevalier édition, partner of Private Choice), Brillo (Andy Warhol), footprints (César), a mask (Mathieu Mercier), a wedding video (Nøne Futbol Club) and the peculiar story of collector Dorith Galuz (Judith Deschamps).
« That’s life ».

• Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

West vs. East
May 10 – June 28, 2014
Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco, CA, USA

Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi fills more than 6,000 square feet of exhibition space with miniscule drawing and sculptures that are virtually invisible except for the shadows they cast. Glance around the exhibition and you’ll see little but vast white space. As you slow down and really look, you’ll discover astonishing density, precision, beauty and wisdom. With this warehouse-scaled, site-specific installation of inconspicuous objects, Maggi hopes to change your perspective, forcing you to examine what you think you know, and revealing it inadequate.

Marco Maggi is renowned for virtuoso drawing and innovative applications of common materials uncommonly used in art-making. His tightly-packed, inscriptive encryptions have been compared to microchips, satellite imagery and archaic alphabets. But there’s more to the work than technical skill and formal allure. Maggi continues to use blindness as a metaphor for our inability to digest the mass of information in the information age; our incapacity to see through the half-truths of mass media; our ineptitude at considering the perspective of ‘the other’; our incompetence at focus; and our unwillingness to take the time to learn.

Maggi’s art is awe-inspiring, but he makes you work for it. He compels you to move around until the light catches the glint of graphite or casts a shadow from a delicately carved slice of paper. He forces you to look obliquely at his tiny megalopolises, to gaze into security mirrors, even to crawl around on the floor. Having you physically change your position to decode his artwork is a metaphor for viewing the world from a different perspective – through someone else’s eyes – and, literally, someone else’s eyeglasses, in the case of one of the pieces in this exhibition. It’s only by changing your viewpoint that you gain insight.

The content and context of this exhibition are geopolitics. We read or see second, third or fourth-hand reports of events that don’t make sense, happening in places we’ve never been, between cultures we don’t understand. How can we begin to comprehend our world? Maggi says, “Focus is not the object or the subject, but the time between the object and the viewer. I am interested in the pace of the viewing process.” By slowing the viewer, Maggi hopes to evoke empathy and hence consciousness.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Marco Maggi lives in New Paltz, New York. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America since 1998. His work is in major public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Daros Collection, Zurich; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

*Marco Maggi, “Stacking Quotes”, 2014, Cut paper, bound notebooks, shelf

• Happenings

Artists: Ricardo Brey, Jorge Cabieses, Yamandú Canosa, Paula Delgado, Sigismond de Vajay, Cao Guimaräes, Ricardo Lanzarini, Marco Maggi, Vik Muniz, Michel Pérez Pollo, Pablo Reinoso, Jorge Satorre, Eduardo Stupia, Janaina Tschäpe, Dani Umpí, Pedro Varela

Latina
February 14 – March 22, 2014
Xippas Art Contemporain
Geneva, Switzerland

• Happenings

Marco Maggi: fanfold
November 7 – December 19, 2013
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, Texas, USA

• Happenings

From CNN to the DNA, I focus my attention on reaching surfaces without the minor hope to get informed. Everyday, we are condemned to know more and understand less. This antiseptic process prefigures the first global semiotic indigestion. Reality collapses when one tries to portray an ocean by depicting drop after drop of water. My vision of the world is as precise as it is mistaken, and that is why I draw for hours with intense attention and no particular intention.

Traducido del inglés

De CNN al ADN, enfoco mi atención a alcanzar superficies sin la menor intención de estar informado. Todos los días estamos condenados a saber más y entender menos. Este proceso antiséptico prefigura la primera indigestión semiótica global. La realidad se colapsa cuando uno intenta representar un océano al ilustrar cada gota de agua. Mi visión del mundo es tan precisa como errada, y es por esto que dibujo por horas con intensa atención y sin particular intención.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 1998: MFA, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2012: XVII Premio Figari, Museuo Figari, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2012: Figari Prize XVII, Museo Figari, Montevideo, Uruguay
• 2012: “Functional Desinformation – drawings in Portuguese”, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• 2012: “Lentissimo”, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA.
• 2012: Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador.
• 2012: “No Idea”, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, USA.
• 2011: “Optimismo Radical”, NC-arte, Bogota, Colombia.
• 2011: “From Huguenot to Microwave”, Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY, USA.
• 2005: “El Papel Del Papel”, Centro Colombo Americano, Bogota, Colombia.
• 2003: “Construcciones & Demoliciones, dibujos en español”, Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 2001: “Global Myopia”, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA.

Group Exhibitions 

• 2013: “MOCA’s Permanent Collection: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• 2010: “Al calor del pensamiento, Works from the Daros LatinAmerica Collection”, Fundacion Banco Santander, Madrid, Spain.
• 2008: “New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930-2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.
• 2008: “Drawn to Detail”, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA.
• 2008: “WALL ROCKETS: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha”, curated by Lisa Dennison, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA.
• 2006: “Off/Fora”, 29th Pontevedra Biennal, Pontevedra, Spain.
• 2006: “Gyroscope”, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., USA.
• 2005: “Drawing From the Modern 1975-2005”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.
• 2003: “Vision & Revision: Works on paper since 1960”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.
• 2002: 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Publications

• 2006: “100 Latin American Artists”, EXIT Publishers, Madrid, Spain.
• 2005: “Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing”, Phaidon Press, New York, NY, USA.
• 2004: Gwangju Biennial, catalog, text by Marco Maggi.
• 2003: Havana Biennial, catalog, text by Ana Tiscornia.
• 2003: IV Mercosur Biennial, catalog, text by Gabriel Peluffo.
• 2003: “Construcciones & Demoliciones”, essay by Robert Hobbs, Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 2002: Weintraub, Linda. “Being Gently Subversive”, In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, d.a.p. Sao Paolo Biennial, catalog, text by Marco Maggi.
• 2001: III Mercosur Biennial, catalog, text by Angel Kalemberg.
• 2001: “Marco Maggi: Global Myopia”, Text by Dana Self, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA.

Collections

• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA.
• The Drawing Center, New York, NY, USA.
• Daros Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland.
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA.
• Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
• Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA.
• Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, USA.
• The Rachofsky House, Dallas, TX, USA.
• El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA.
• The Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, NY, USA.
• Cisneros Collection, New York, NY, USA.
• Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA.
• Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA.
• San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA, USA.

Links

• Micro & Soft On Macintosh Apple – Marco Maggi e Ken Salomon, 2004 (cortesia Galeria Nara Roesler)
• Marco Maggi, Clip of “Untitled”
• Fuera de Marco- Out of Frame (2004)
• Marco Maggi: D Ream
• Parking Any Time 
• By Disappointment Only 
  

• Artists