DAVID LAMELAS

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2006

July 6 – September 10, 2006
Galerie, Grafisches Kabinett



David Lamelas, Secession 2006


Since the 1960s, David Lamelas has been among the most important proponents of a conceptual approach to art. Especially his early structuralist films and media installations, made when he was living in Belgium, London, and Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies, display a highly individual treatment of time and space. In his projects, Lamelas deals impressively with the question of the limits of art’s temporality and its potential for creating alternative processes of communication and cognition.



David Lamelas, Secession 2006


David Lamelas’ installational interventions reject the supposed neutrality of minimalist practice in clearly critical terms, with particular emphasis placed by the artist on examining the concept of the artwork itself in relation to the role of the author and the viewer. Rather than contenting himself with viewing the artist simply as a political subject or intensifying this role, he creates spaces for a process of critical analysis that eschews moralizing. With his works, Lamelas pursues recurring motifs whose almost singular orthodoxy, embedded in the language of modernity, express a great analytical will and a sense of imagination and utopia.



David Lamelas, Secession 2006


Lamelas’ interest manifests itself in a definition of art that is not local or national but immaterial. In the architectural and three-dimensional interventions created parallel to his film works, he undertakes an almost visionary study of the relations between space, time, and place. Here, too, space is not measured in geographical dimensions but considered solely in terms of its intellectual and transnational scope.



David Lamelas, The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare, Argentina/USA/Germany/France/UK, 2002-05, 85 min, Video


For the Galerie at the Secession, Lamelas has devised a site-specific intervention which temporarily redefines the determinants of the space. A long, walk-in wedge made out of wood runs through the entire gallery. As a communicating counterpart to this piece, a film loop is shown in the Kreuzraum which constitutes a media rendering of the three-dimensional volume.



David Lamelas, The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare, Argentina/USA/Germany/France/UK, 2002-05, 85 min, Video


(Spatial) volume is transferred into (film) time. The film shows a sequence of the ocean at morning in Los Angeles. On the visual level of the film image, the apparent rigor of the conceptual and analytical correspondence between the two settings is cancelled out in an archaic image of (the ocean’s) timelessness and endless space.

In an interview with the British curator Lynda Morris, Lamelas describes this ambivalence between analytical rigor and an immaterial (even poetic) gesture, which plays a key part in his work, as follows: “It is impossible for me to make definitive statements. A piece is defined by the person who looks at it.”



David Lamelas, Sketch for the installation at the Secession, 2006


In the Grafisches Kabinett, Lamelas will show his new film The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare, made over several years in London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles. Here, too, time and space are defined via a conceptual structure. It is a film noir divided into five sections, each showing more or less the same action, running through the urban scene of the five above-mentioned cities in which David Lamelas has lived in recent years. It describes an eternally returning episode, referring equally to the temporality of the urban and to major narrative themes and gestures of Hollywood productions.


PUBLICATION

DAVID LAMELAS 68 pages, 20 color illustrations authors: Lynda Morris, Eric de Bruyn Secession 2006, ISBN 978-3-901926-94-5 ___________________ available in the shop

EXHIBITION DISCUSSION
featuring David Lamelas and Lynda Morris
Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 6 p.m.
An event of Friends of the Secession


DAVID LAMELAS, born in 1946 in Buenos Aires, lives and works in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Paris.
SOLO SHOWS (selection): 2006 David Lamelas. Part 1 and Part 2, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; 2005 David Lamelas: foreigner, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; 2004 David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality, ICA, Philadelphia; David Lamelas: SPACE/TIME/FICTION, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; Time as Activity. Warsaw / Czas jako dzialanie. Warszawa, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; 2003 David Lamelas - Edge I+II, Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner, Berlin; 2000 The Invention of Dr. Morel und Berlin, Time as Activity, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. GROUP SHOWS (selection): 2006 The Expanded Eye, Kunsthaus Zürich; LOS ANGELES 1955-1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Thank You For The Music, Sprüth Magers Galerie, Munich; FRAC. Mouvement, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; 2005 Today is just a copy of yesterday, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; behind the facts, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s, Miami Art Museum; 2004 3. berlin biennale 2004, Berlin; The Last Picture Show, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; X-Screen, MUMOK, Vienna; 2003 The Last Picture Show: Photography, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 2001 doublelife, Generali Foundation, Vienna.


Installation shots: Pez Hejduk



This exhibition takes place with the kind support of: Hotel Altstadt Vienna; LUX, London

The exhibitions are realized through support of:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession

ISA GENZKEN

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2006

For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Urte Schmitt-Ulms
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at