'Lines' at Hauser & Wirth Zürich

LINES CURATED BY RODRIGO MOURA 22 MARCH – 31 MAY 2014

GETA BRĂTESCU JOHANNA CALLE MARILÁ DARDOT CHANNA HORWITZ IVENS MACHADO NASREEN MOHAMEDI LYGIA PAPE R.H. QUAYTMAN LIMMATSTRASSE 270 8005 ZURICH WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

LINES Curated by Rodrigo Moura Hauser & Wirth Zürich 22 March – 31 May 2014

This exhibition brings together a group of international artists active between the 1950s and today, all of whom explore new frontiers for abstraction. The exhibition examines how the element of the line is used by these artists to introduce new meaning to Formalism, and to find new uses for geometric form – continuously challenging the limits of abstract art. The line functions in a variety of ways, including: writing, weaving, notating, diary-keeping, nature, the body, the environment, and the everyday; each resulting in expanded, eroded, and perverted grids generated by a liberating line.

'LINES' is not an attempt to trace the usage of a geometric element in the history of art from the past 50 years, nor does it try to point out rigid genealogies and lineages in order to create a perfect nexus, but rather it embraces incompleteness and fragmentation. Rodrigo Moura brings together artists that have approached the subject working in different contexts and regions and, in many cases, without knowledge of each other. Grids and weaves – other possible combinations of lines – are important outcomes from research into the line, and could be considered two opposite but complementary models.

An environmental unfolding of the line can be identified as early as in the mid-1950s Brazilian neo-concrete art. A key name in this movement, Lygia Pape is represented in the exhibition by a wide range of early works on paper as well as with

a late architecturally-oriented thread installation from the 'Ttétia' series. It is worth noting how, within a range of almost 50 years of work, the artist remained faithful to an interest in the line as a means of challenging bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional space. By referring to weaving, Pape expands our perception both culturally and in a phenomenological way. Her work is paired with other artists in the exhibition, such as Channa Horwitz. The American artist's logically derived compositions are systematic works on paper generally structured around linear progressions using the number eight. Her series 'Sonakinatography' (meaning sound – motion – notation) displays a same-titled system that plots the activity of eight entities over a period of time using numbers, colours, and the 1/8 in squares of the graph paper. If, in her drawings, Pape seems to give depth to paper, Horwitz in turn seems to approximate time and movement on paper.

An analogous interest in challenging surface and in creating relations between geometry and the body appears in the intricate ink and graphite small-scale drawings by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The concentration required to operate in such a reduced surface alludes to a conditioned body and to a model that denies the mechanisation of life in everything. Photographic works by Mohamedi are also on display, in which the artist depicts nature and weaving looms, inferring that culture and nature are key to the understanding of non-representational art.

Press Release

Works on paper play an important role in the exhibition, as lines have always been a central element in drawing. The 1970s works on paper

by Brazilian Ivens Machado are a thorough examination of the highly politically-charged space of the notebook – and therefore of formal knowledge and education. In these rarely seen works, Machado deconstructs the rigid logic of ruled paper by imposing small perversions such as staining, cutting and scratching, trompe l'oeil, appropriation of damaged examples, repetitions etc. The Colombian artist Johanna Calle operates with a different logic, expanding the possibilities of the grid by distorting, softening and eroding it, thus bringing it closer to the experience of the real. Her work could be situated between the purist calculation of the architects and the actual experience of those who live in the city.

Written language is present in the works by Brazilian Marilá Dardot and R.H. Quaytman, from the USA. In Dardot's installations, the straight line and the grid are perverted, respectively by hand labour and by nature, embracing chance and the organic. Quaytman's print is an exposé of her activity as an art dealer, in the form of a spreadsheet with all financial movement of an art gallery. If from close-up, the work reveals normally well-kept secrets from the art world, from a distance, numbers and lines become a strange version of minimalist and op art.

A film by Romanian artist Geta Brătescu shows her hands playing in front of the camera. In a

work that brings together drawing, performance and cinematic narrative, Brătescu evokes manual activity as a condition of the artwork, but also suggests that the relationship between the artwork and the body is stressed.

Rodrigo Moura

Geta Brătescu 'For me, the line is the essence. Drawing is the foundation of my language. I draw with a pencil and I draw with scissors, with a pen, with anything.'

Interview with Geta Brătescu by Adriana Oprea, ARTmargins, 23 December 2013

Geta Brătescu was born in 1926, in Ploieşti, Romania, outside Bucharest. She studied at the School of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest and at Bucharest's Academy of Fine Arts until 1950, when she was forced to interrupt her studies due to political circumstances. She completed her education in 1971. Brătescu's body of work comprises drawing, collage, engraving, tapestry, objects, photography, experimental film, video and performance. Furthermore, she published several books – documents of daily studio notes, reflections about art and travel experiences.

Considering the oppressive political context in Romania between 1945 and 1990, as well as Brătescu's rather secluded position in the Romanian art world, the openness in her conception of her work is noteworthy. The artist's practice refers not only to problems of the professional art context of her time, but also deals with the fundamental question of establishing a practical role for art in daily life. Topics like gender, corporeality or the relationships between the design of everyday objects, art and human experience become subjects of her work.

Officially, Brătescu worked as a graphic designer, eventually as the artistic director of the art magazine Secolul 20. It was in the 1970s when the most innovative and experimental period of her career began – at a time when the political situation for artists in Romania eased. Brătescu expanded her practice to include (recorded)

performance, photography, photocollage and textile-based works, all underpinned by a strong conceptual framework.

During this ease, when many Romanian artists emigrated to the West, she made the film 'Les Mains' (1977), on show within Hauser & Wirth's 'LINES' exhibition. A film that zooms in on the artist's hands playing with some string: 'When I made films and videos in which I played with my hands, I was seeing my hands as objects. I have lots of drawings with hands. I stopped drawing at some point, but afterwards I was afraid I had forgotten how to draw. The most difficult model to draw from is the hand. So I started drawing hands again as a test.'

Interview with Geta Brătescu, by Adriana Oprea, ARTmargins, 23 December 2013 Geta Brătescu lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. Recent exhibitions include: 'A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance', Tate Modern, London, England (2012 – 2013); La Triennale, Paris, France (2012); 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2011); 'Museum of Desire', MUMOK Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria (2011); 'Ostalgia', New Museum, New York NY (2011); 'Alteritate', Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany (2011) and Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna, Austria (2010); 'The Work, The Image, The Sign', Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, Romania (2011); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Germany (2008).

Geta Brătescu, Self-portrait / Mrs. Oliver in her traveling costume,1980 – 2012 Courtesy the artist, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Johanna Calle 'I left behind the use of color to focus in marks and lines. I found a favorable field in which I could work more freely.'

Interview with Johanna Calle by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Molaa online, 2012

Johanna Calle was born in 1965, in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works. After her studies at the Chelsea College of Art, London, England and at the University Andes in Bogotá, Calle started using oil paint, but turned to drawing as her sole medium in 1994. Her work deals experimentally with the definition of drawing. 'Drawn', in the sense of a graphical gesture, not only with Indian ink and pencil, but also with copper cable, galvanised metal fence, iron filter and typewriter lettering on paper.

At times Calle sews or stitches her 'drawings' on canvas.

Her working process often has a destructive element – she cuts, replaces, covers, deforms and forges. In the end, geometric and clearly arranged structures are broken-up. The content deals with practical things from Colombian daily life, such as sex and gender, violence, abuse or ecological subjects. Characters and language are often found in Calle's works and represent linguistic conventions, which are social agreements and always have to do with power.

To the artist, drawing is a kind of language that constantly transforms itself, including new expressions, terms and voices.

Calle's work is currently featured in 'America Latina, Photographies 1960 – 2013', Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France (2013 – 2014). Recent exhibitions include: 'When Attitudes Became Form, Become Attitudes' (curated by Jens Hoffmann), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco CA (2012); 'K' (curated by Juan Andrés Gaitán), Wattis

Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco CA, (2012); 'Irregular Hexagon, Colombian Art in Residence' (curated by José Roca), Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2012); 'Submergentes: A Drawing Approach to Masculinities', Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach CA (2011); 'Untitled', 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2011); 'The Air We Breathe', SFMoMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA (2011); 'Últimas Adquisiciones de la Colección del Banco de la República', Museo del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia (2010).

Johanna Calle, Reticulas rotas VI (Circular), 2010 – 2012 Courtesy the artist and Galeria Marilia Razuk

Marilá Dardot 'The grid announces modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. Never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground. Development is precisely what the grid resists.'

Excerpt from the text 'Grids' by Rosalind Krauss, 1985 (edited by the artist)

Marilá Dardot is a contemporary Brazilian artist. She was born in 1973 in Belo Horizonte and lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. The variety of Dardot's sculptures, objects and installations, her videos and books, speaks of her deep engagement with language and literature. Her conceptual strategy draws on an appropriative collaboration with other artists, theorists or public spaces, and her work is realised in relation to place, time and circumstance. Words are essential protagonists and the artist poetically plays with their culturally defined meaning. In her work, as in today's world, our vocabulary forms and transforms the way we communicate, and nature stands in contrast to this arbitrariness of meaning in its free development. The straightness of the literary definition and, in contrast, the vastness of nature become visible in her installation '++', a plant project developed in 2002 in Brazil, now re-structured for the 'LINES' exhibition for display indoors. Young plants grow out of a grid structure filled with soil on a table construction.

They sprout and grow, thereby unhinging the single letters placed on top of each small square, re-forming a text extract from Rosalind Krauss's 1985 essay about the grid phenomenon. For many Modernist artists, the grid, although a symbol for political rigidity, provided the freedom of literal communication. This is present in '++', where the surface structure is interrupted by nature, causing it to unravel and for the words to appear arbitrary.

A similar transformation of the verbal universe into the visual and conceptual is Dardot's new

wall-installation 'Strait-Line' (2014). The title is a play on words, namely on the essential Irwin chalk markers called strait-line, used for this installation and Friedrich Nietzsche's 'All that is straight lies'. Dardot plays on the universalism of sentences such as in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Rosalind Krauss: a poetic response to political and cultural paradigms.

Recent solo exhibitions include: The Wanås Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2013); Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil (2011).

Marilá Dardot, ++, 2014 Installation view, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007 © Marilá Dardot

Channa Horwitz 'I have created a visual philosophy by working with deductive logic. I had a need to control and compose time as I had controlled and composed two-dimensional drawings and paintings. To do this, I chose a graph as the basis for the visual description of time.'

Channa Horwitz writes in Flash Art, July – August 1976 Channa Horwitz (1932 – 2013) was a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles CA. At the age of 18 she began studying Fine Art at the Art Centre School of Design in Pasadena CA, and at the California State University, Northridge CA. She dropped out of the programme to raise her children and later continued her studies at the prestigious California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles CA. At CalArts, she studied with renowned artists such as John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow, however, her work was mostly created in isolation from the art world.

Horwitz's work was developed against the backdrop of Minimalism and Conceptual art and was driven by her fascination for the translation of motion into drawing, resulting in her invention of a mathematical system of rules as the basis of complex pictorial structures. These logically derived compositions are systematic works on paper generally structured around linear progressions using the number eight. A famous example is her work series 'Sonakinatography' – meaning sound, motion, notation. Her compositions within the 'Sonakinatography' series are not only drawings, but have also been performed via percussion, dance, spoken word, and electronic instruments. Because of the initial choice of this particular graph paper, Horwitz kept using the number eight consistently throughout her work. Each of her series is developed from the investigations for her preceding series, even though the works may be as diverse as a Poem Opera reading (first staged in 1978), a sequence of drawings called 'Levels in Time and Space' (which visualise motion as structure

on paper sheets as long as sixteen feet), performances or self-published books about time and motion (such as the publication 'And Then There Was None' from 1978).

Although she worked in isolation from the rest of the art world throughout her career, Horwitz's work has been gaining recognition in recent years. Recent exhibitions include: Kunsthalle LA, Los Angeles CA (2010); 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013); 'The Encyclopedic Palace', Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany (2013), M HKA Museum van Hedendaagste Kunste, Antwerp, Belgium (2013); New Museum, New York NY (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA (2012); ZKM Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012).

Channa Horwitz, Sonakinatography I Movement # III for Multi-media, 1969 Courtesy of the Channa Horwitz Estate and Franรงois Ghebaly

Ivens Machado 'When I reproduce ruled notebook pages and act over their strict pattern, I have been attempting to destroy an entire order (…) as in a seismograph, where I try to detect yet imperceptible tremors.'

The artist in a statement to Roberto Pontual, in Jornal do Brasil, 21 July 1974

Born in 1942 in Florianópolis, Brazil Ivens Machado, who emerged on the Brazilian art scene in the early 1970s as a draughtsman and pioneer of video art, is today one of the greatest living sculptors in his country. He studied at Escolinha de Arte do Brasil and with Anna Bella Geiger at her atelier in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

with calculated indiscipline and critical rigour, as well as sexual brutality. His practice occupies a unique space, 'born of a very personal noncategorical psychology' as Milton Machado has stated. The artist himself has quoted Michel Foucault to define his sculptures as 'indistinct nocturnal pleasures'.

Machado's contribution to Hauser & Wirth's exhibition 'LINES' encompasses 12 conceptual drawings dated between 1974 and 1980, in which the artist undertakes graphic interventions on ruled school notebook papers.

In the works 'Untitled' (1974 – 1976) a minor gesture by the artist's hand (later by direct interference in the rule-printing machines), alters the standardised structure in an attempt to free the expressive potential of the line. Likewise creating political tension, the series 'Bruised and Cured' (1980) operates viscerally through the use of unconventional material in red hues, like antiseptic Merthiolate and wine. Although the artist abandoned drawing after 1980, these early rebellious lines run like a thread through his artistic production which continues to contradict ideas of norms and control.

Ivens Machado has lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro since 1964 – 1965 with long periods in Italy. He possesses an extensive national and international curriculum, having participated in five editions of the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (1973, 1981, 1987, 1998 and 2004), in the XIII Biennale de Paris, Paris, France (1985), the Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (1997), as well as numerous other group exhibitions and solo shows throughout the world. The retrospective exhibition 'Ivens Machado: The Engineer of Fables', covering a career spanning 35 years, travelled through Brazil in 2001 and 2002.

Ever since his emblematic presentation of a monumental concrete piece implemented with sharp glass-shards at the XVI São Paulo Biennial (1981), the appropriation of weighty raw and urban construction material, also comprising iron, wood and tiles, has become the artist's trademark. Crude forms adverse to beauty and often with a grotesque or surreal component, Machado's sculptures are fuelled

Juliane Peiser, 22 February 2014

Ivens Machado, Trompe L'Oeil, 1972

Nasreen Mohamedi 'My lines speak of troubled destinies...'

Nasreen Mohamedi writes in her diary, Diaries, 3 September 1967, p. 87

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990) was born in Karatschi, India (now Pakistan) and grew up in Mumbai, India. Mohamedi studied at the renowned St. Martin's School of the Arts, London, England from 1954 to 1957 and went on a scholarship to Paris, France to work at Monsieur Guillard's atelier between 1961 and 1963. Afterwards, the artist returned to post independence India and joined the Bhulabhai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai, before she started teaching at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India in the 1970s. At times of Indian Modernism and prevailing representational and figurative arts, her poetic but at the same time daringly minimalistic and conceptual drawings, architectural photographs and diary pages reveal a unique preoccupation with the line. Her diverse interests in industrial production, geometry, design, abstraction and nature accumulate in her photographs of the environmental architecture of mankind.

It was in Baroda, where she began to work on her signature grid-base drawings, some of which are on show at Hauser & Wirth for the 'LINES' exhibition. Mohamedi's oeuvre is completed by her very personal diary pages, which allow the observer an insight into the artist's sharp and detailed perception about the self, as well as her observation of time and space.

Mohamedi's work and her distinctive vocabulary became visible to the western audience only late in her life, when she took part in an exhibition about Indian artists at the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris, France only five years

before passing away. In 2007 at dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany her work was paired with – and ever since has often been connected to – Canadian-American abstract painter Agnes Martin, even though Mohamedi did not know Martin for most of her life.

Mohamedi's work will be shown in an extensive solo exhibition at the Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England in Summer 2014. Other recent solo exhibitions include Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India (2013) and The Drawing Centre, New York NY (2005).

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. 1970 Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York / New Delhi

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. 1970 Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York / New Delhi

Lygia Pape '– lines are arranged into varied directions, varied widths like paths or movements to be traveled on painting surfaces – by the eye.'

Lygia Pape, 'Não Fala Nada' (Nothing was said), in the exhibition catalogue 'Lygia Pape, Magnetized Space', Serpentine Gallery, 2011

Lygia Pape (1927 – 2004) was an influential Brazilian artist, active in the concrete and the neo-concrete movements in the Brazilian art world. Her work comprises sculpture, engraving and filmmaking; later she produced videos and installations with sarcastic and critical metaphors against the Brazilian dictatorship.

Her artwork draws on geometry and often relies on the intellectual and physical participation of the spectator. Pape was a member of the well-known neo-concrete group 'Grupo Frente' (1953) of Brazilian artists who opted for a more open understanding of art. Alongside other members of that group, she experimented with what would become known as 'participative art', which engages the public and creates sensorial experiences for the observer.

The major sculptural installation 'Ttéia' (first version dated 1979) installed at Hauser & Wirth is a vivid and reflective web of gold and transparent filaments tied in a symmetrical order to the gallery's walls. It captures the observer's attention as its shape depends on the angle of observation and the movement of light, and thus is never fully recognised. In her drawings, the artist outlines a spatial diagram similar to the installations. In her 'Tecelares', Pape plays with structure, volume and texture, creating black and white calculated geometric shapes.

These shapes suggest movement and space in an otherwise flat and motionless drawing. Both groups of work, the sculptures and the drawings, hint at the Brazilian tradition of weaving, and at Brazil's indigenous culture.

Recent exhibitions of Pape's work include solo presentations at the Serpentine Gallery, London, England (2011) and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2011). Her work was also included at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2009); Folder Museum of Modern Art, New York NY (2009); Kunsthalle Kiel, Kiel, Germany (2008).

Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1957 Courtesy the Lygia Pape Estate and Galeria Graรงa Brandรฃo

R.H. Quaytman 'I want to make paintings that can be read on their own terms, without footnotes. But if, as a viewer, you persist in asking questions, you'll find answers.'

Art in America, June / July 2010, p. 92

R.H. Quaytman is a internationally-recognised New York based artist. Born in Boston, she grew up in the New York art world of the 60s and 70s and later received a BA from Bard College, New York NY in 1983, and an MA at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland in 2001. Quaytman's work blurs the boundaries between image and text and its many layers combine past and present, time and space, depth and surface as they draw upon archives of all sorts – art historical, institutional, personal and scientific. Her approach includes a system that determines the paintings' content. Each painting can stand alone, but all are made in series called 'chapters', which again relate to the site where each was first exhibited.

From 2005 until 2008, Quaytman was the director of the collaborative gallery Orchard on New York's Lower East Side, which was founded as: 'A direct response to the reelection of George W. Bush and to the strong feeling, among the people I knew, that there was a real disconnect between the booming art market and the political disaster we were in.'

Art in America, June / July 2010, p. 90 Her involvement with Orchard also became subject matter for her paintings: the work on display in Hauser & Wirth's exhibition 'LINES' is a conceptual drawing based on the idea of a financial spreadsheet. The spreadsheet presents a complete list of Orchard's three

years of programming between 2005 and 2008: recounting every exhibition, artist, artwork exhibited, title, date, media and price, followed by whether or not the individual work sold, to whom and finally, what percentage of the sale went towards Orchard's operating expenses and how much commission was earned for the seller and the artist.

Recent solo exhibitions include: The Renaissance Society, Chicago IL (2013); Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2012); Museum Abteiberg, MĂśnchengladbach, Germany (2012); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2011); SFMoMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA (2010). Her work was part of group shows at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2013); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2011); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2010).

R. H. Quaytman, Orchard Spreadsheet (detail), 2009

FRONT / BACK: IVENS MACHADO DESENHO / DRAWING, 1976 INK ON PAPER 29.7 x 21 CM / 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 IN