GALLERY YVON LAMBERT PARIS, till May 31.
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Kendell Geers third solo show Solve et Coagula which will be held at the gallery from April 26th to May 31st. In this exhibition, South African artist presents a new selection of works, which question the relation between art creation and transgression by using different medias such as paintings, installations and performance.
Beyond all idea of Beauty or romantic form of Sublime, Kendell Geers’s work interferes with in the experience of the spectator as an appearance of a fantasy of violence. Strongly influenced by the political context he comes from, Kendell Geers transforms his artistic production into an act of a potential fraction towards history and art history. For this exhibition Kendell Geers confronts us with a necessary break, which is preliminary to all reconstruction. In terms of alchemy, the maxim of Solve et Coagula signifies the inevitable dissolution of a body before its transfiguration into spirit. Also, during the performance Ritual Resist — which is directed by the artist —, the dancer’s bodies initiate a dialogue of power with their own image, held prisoner by their reflection. Equally inspired by the theory of the Ligne de Fuite of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Kendell Geers situates us in a place
of instability which is both spatial and social, and where the spectator is led to take almost an ethical position. Indeed, his large paintings detain us by their tribal looking motives, by which Kendell Geers plunges us into a real Theatre of Cruelty. Also, the troubling image of the swings who’s seat is set of broken glass, undeniably sends us back to Fragonard’s famous painting Les Hasard Heureux de l’escarpolette (The Swing), a metaphor of the moral decline of nobility a few years before the revolution in 1789.
Each work of the artist comes within the context of a form of a sensitive experience of a limit, in which the shades of an account, tormented by contemporary history, appear.
Kendell lives and works in South Africa. He was born in May 1968.
His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions : Vienna Secession and MAK in Vienna, AT ; Würtembergischer Kunstverein and Schloss Solitude de Stuttgart, DE ; MACRO à Rome, IT ; MART – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, IT ; Castello di Ama per l’arte contemporanea Lecchi in Chianti, IT ; Proyecto de arte contemporaneo, Murcia, ES ; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent, BE ; at BPS 22 à Charleroi, BE ; in Basel for an Unlimited project, CH ; Salon 94, New York, US ; South African National Gallery, Cape Town, ZA ; Consortium de Dijon, FR ; Musée d’Art contemporainde lYon, FR and au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR
He participated in several collective shows Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL ; de Appel Art Center, Amsterdam, NL ; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE ; Documenta 11, Kassel, DE ; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE ; Kunstlerhaus, Graz, AT ; Kunsthalle Bern, CH ; MNAC, Bucharest, RO ; Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, PT ; MUHKA, Antwerp, BE ; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK ; 52nd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, IT ; Villa Medici, Rome, IT ; Le Magasin, Grenoble, FR ; Collection François Pinault Foundation, Lille, FR ; Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon, FR ; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR et au PS1, New York, US.