ART-PRESENTATION: Andrei Koschmieder & Robert Gober
“Andrei Koschmieder, Robert Gober” is the first in a series of exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery’s 529 West 21st Street space. This series of exhibitions pairs an older artist who has previously shown with the gallery with a younger artist in order to bring artistic generations together. From the Gallery’s first exhibition* in 1968 to the present day the gallery’s agenda has remained focused on Conceptual and Minimal art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Paula Cooper Gallery Archive
Andrei Koschmieder studied at the Academy of Arts in Frankfurt. In 2006 he received the city of Russelheim scholarship and in 2008 he won the Ermenegildo Zegna travel scholarship. He primarily works with photographs, layering drawings and graffiti on top of images, and using words and symbols to alter the meaning of the original sources. The images in Koschmieder’s work are culled from a wide range of sources, including advertisements, magazines, graffiti, thermography diagrams, and popular culture. In 2010, Koschmieder began a series of works based on the architecture near Ground Zero. Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-80s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. In 1984 Paula Cooper Gallery in New York hosted his first solo exhibition, consisting of a single work “Slides of a Changing Painting” (1982–83). To make this work, Gober spent a year painting and repainting a small board, taking hundreds of photographs of the various transformations. The images constituting this “Memoir of a painting”, are projected onto the gallery wall; as one image dissolves into the next, they offer a deeply personal record, like the pages of a diary.” as the artist says. Andrei Koschmieder has created a new work for this show: a group of pipes constructed with cardboard, tape, spackle, glue, and aluminum paint. The pipes are alternately blank and embedded with tiny photos of: drug deals, the subway transfers or the drink order. On view by Robert Gober is “Untitled (Pair of Brains)” (1982), a rarely seen early sculpture made shortly before his seminal work “Slides of a Changing Painting” (1982-83). The artist’s positioning of a pair, rather than a single organ, automatically sets up an interaction, and, though it is left mysterious whether that interaction is social or simply physical, it is, by construction, equal.
*Paula Cooper Gallery, the first art gallery in SoHo, opened in 1968 with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The exhibition included Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing and works by: Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman.
Info: Curator: Laura Hunt, Paula Cooper Gallery, 529 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 3/11-20/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.paulacoopergallery.com
