JEAN-LUC MOULENE & ANNE NEUKAMP EXHIBITIONS AT GALERIE GRETA MEERT
Jean-Luc Moulène
- Until 01.05.2022
© Hugard & Vanoverschelde
Conceived like a scale model, Jean-Luc Moulène’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Greta Meert addresses visitors and passerby alike. In a series of assemblages titled with the affirmation OUI, the artist combines axe handles, shovel sticks, turned wood pieces and dibbers into non-hierarchal structures. The handles that usually give objects their orientation are turned inward, imbricated, and joint together. These multidirectional structures populate the street-level gallery space like loosely untangled knots, they are at once selfcontained and rhizomatic — visual manifestations of thought made tangible. Positioned in-between all things, his assemblages act as transmitters, they create links without ligatures. With different ink colours and resin coatings, these two and three-dimensional constructions evoke the practice of drawing by delineating pictorial planes and mapping out architectural volumes.
Logic and rhetoric are concurrently made to split and collide throughout the exhibition. The anatomical cut of a human bone sealed under a thick layer of caramel coloured epoxy sits on a custom plinth like a decadent French dessert. A scythe and a gallows seem to merge in an ominously shaped device that leans against the wall. Supported by a structure made out of their own wood frames, two standard-sized doors coloured with red and blue Bic ink are suspended at an angle like defensive shields. Bones, cuts and knots are recurring motifs in Moulène’s work, they concurrently produce junctions and disjunctions that allow the artist to articulate various modes of thinking.
By connecting and merging different realms of philosophical and technical knowledge within the concrete bounds of objects, Moulène approaches abstraction in a way that bypasses the self- reflexive dead-ends of contemporary art. In the words of Reza Negarestani, “Jean-Luc Moulène practices abstraction in a long- forgotten tradition in which the procedure has evolved as a force of thought that rends matter and gives the inert a noetic thrust that determines the trajectory of thought and imagination.” As in the small wall-mounted piece Untitled(Réthorique), which functions as a kind of conceptual model for the exhibition, Moulène’s allegorical combinations and formal protocols structurally disrupt and reconfigure the logics of attribution.
Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955) lives and works in Normandy, France. Recent solo exhibitions include: More or Less Bone, SculptureCenter, New York, U.S.A. (2019); The Secession Knot, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2016); Il était une fois, Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2015); Documents and Opus (1985- 2014), Kunstverein Hanover, Germany (2015); Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2013); Modern Art Oxford, U.K. (2012); Opus+One, Dia:Beacon, New York, U.S.A. (2012); Carré d’art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France (2010); Le Monde – Le Louvre, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2005); He participated to several biennales: 58th Venice Biennale, Italy (2019); Taipei Biennale, Taiwan (2016); Biennale Internationale Design, Saint-Etienne, France (2015); Sharja Biennale, U.A.E. (2011) and at the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2002).
Anne Neukamp
"Pile ou Face"
- Until 01.05.2022
© Hugard & Vanoverschelde
Heads and tails appear and disappear throughout the illusionistic space of Anne Neukamp’s paintings. Pile ou Face, the background becomes the foreground, the signifier escapes the signified, shadows drop before our eyes. In her pictorial approach to semantics, Anne Neukamp composes with the idiomatic motifs, logos, pictograms, and mascots that populate our informational subconscious. Deceptively, she juxtaposes layers, merges them, and makes them transparent or opaque. Permeated by the materiality of painting and stripped of their functionality, signs and images designed for everyday efficiency take on sculptural proportions.
The piles of coins and tokens in her recent series of large-scale paintings appear tangible yet they remain out of reach — money without wealth, currencies without nations, accounts without passwords. In these numismatic abstractions, which occasionally morph to resemble half-eaten biscuits, Neukamp summons the liquidity of money to construct shape-shifting edifices. Similarly, in a series of works on paper, the grid-structure of a calendar becomes the site of painterly occurrences that suggest the scattered rhythm of daily life punctuated by bills and shopping lists.
By layering oil, acrylic, and tempera, the artist plays with the spatial properties of her materials. In her paintings, gestures and renderings are as entangled as the fragments of reality they depict, conceal or surround. Guided by a pictorial logic of montage, Neukamp’s repertoire extends beyond the realm of painting; it encompasses graphic design, typography and the technical image in its various forms. Her paintings exist in-between screen space and physical space; they blur the boundary between software and hardware.
Anne Neukamp (b. 1976, Düsseldorf), lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Pitching Pennies, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf, DE (2020); Alt-Moa-Bit, Gregor Podnar, Berlin, DE (2019); The Prop Master, Rosenwald-Wolf-Gallery, University of the Arts Philadelphia, US (2018); Gamberge, Galerie Valentin, Paris, FR (2018). Pile ou Face is Anne Neukamp’s third solo exhibition at Galerie Greta Meert.
