Alexander Gorlizki: Variable Dimensions

alexander gorlizki VA R I A B L E D I M E N S I O N S

Notes for an exhibition

Curatorial Notes Variable Dimensions: “An entity without fixed boundaries. Shifting, multi-faceted experiences not reducible to a single interpretation, imaginative worlds that can be viewed in different and occasionally contrasting terms—spiritual and prosaic, as clear as a cartoon, as elusive as a dream.” Alexander Gorlizki (AG) +++++ Become unhinged, as Alexander Gorlizki moves across formats, media and sensations, mixing narrative and abstraction. Drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography and the applied arts— carpets, textiles, wallpapers, and erotic hardware—are in store.

Laugh at the absurdity of our urgency to rationalize, narrate, systematize, and interpret. Succumb to his mischief, as he uses traditional techniques to subvert traditional expectations.

What do we find?

Rich color Outbursts of form amid infinities of pattern Frisson of the impossible Awe, humor A moiré of expectation and sense experience Endearing and funny contraptions The freedom of not knowing, the vast universe of possibilities, boundless play infused with sensuality—a blending of male and female forms—technical brilliance, a foil for Eros. +++++ Pictorial elements in Alexander Gorlizki’s visual universe have powerful emotional effects, but how do they relate?

Connections are yours to make; the artist tells stories, but they may be back to front, upside down. You are the storyteller should you wish a narrative; you are the meaning-maker, should you look for meaning.

Faced with a Gorlizki image, the connection-driven mind chases its prey in curious, absurd, delightful webs, catching implications of outline | gesture | contiguity | scale | color…the raw materials of art without reason’s reductive syntax.

But, no relative vision need hold us except to delight or exhaust itself from spark to ember. Without attachment, we move beyond.

Precise and open. +++++ Gorlizki crosses boundaries effortlessly.

The Portal. A doorway to imagination at play. The shape of the doorway: a waving arm? a cactus? a friendly phallus? Can it not be more than one?

Doorway Wallpaper. A tantric pattern? An all-knowing motherboard?

Krishna connecting through the eyes of a folk deity? Is the creature inside the doorway with a floppy-petaled sunflower-like head the artist? +++++ What goes on in looking at a Gorlizki? The viewer is engaged in making the work of art, but the art is also engaged in making the viewer.

Moments of seeing ourselves within the universe and the universe within ourselves. The form that the imagination creates is our formless self in action. Freedom.

It’s a naked moment with many ways to clothe ourselves—drapes and swags, pipes, and patterns. Like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a nonsense poem of exacting words and meter, parameters of communication are embedded in Gorlizki’s pictures. Not nonsense— not without sense. Playing at the edge of sense, tipping the mind and feelings where they will go.

One game the artist sets for a viewer to play is tracking the appearance of some favorite motifs. Found in one image, a motif is likely to appear in others, and an experiential thread draws the viewer criss and cross, front and back, weaving, in the process, a nest of the familiar. Gorlizkiland.

The Rolodex. A compendium of motifs that intrigue the artist— “Cone Face,” men on chairs, mountain-lights, cactus-phallus-horn shapes, antlers. Bits awaiting relationship, alive with energy specific to their forms. +++++ Tension among elements—different species, different sizes, blobs and arabesques sharing spaces, miracles—rainbow-colored fish, substance finding its way through space, a root here, footholds there, sliding away, looping, climbing.

Exhilarating: forms and patterns are morphing before our eyes.

Tension among clashing contexts. Is the marble sculpture “Hands on Knees” in a planter now a piece of garden art?

Gorlizki trained as a sculptor. Sculptural tension is found in both his two- and three-dimensional works. Even fields of pattern are suggestive of three-dimensional form, hovering between geometric solids and linear design. In one sketch, Gorlizki aligns photographs of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column and a drawing of the truncated pyramids reduced to line, playing with the slippage between two and three dimensions. Variable dimensions. +++++ The artist is a fierce draftsman. His whole shoulder and arm radiating from his torso are aimed at the flow through his (left) hand. The direction the line will take is anyone’s guess.

“Drawing is at the heart of everything I do. It’s language, form, and design, but also a metaphor for exploring, prodding, drawing things out to make connections. Paul Klee said that drawing is taking a line for a walk, but when you really let go, it’s the lines that take the mind and the eyes on unexpected journeys.” (AG) A selection from the artist’s Studio Wall is brought into the exhibition, displaying fragments of paintings, drawings, textiles, photographs, drawings, torn papers—stimuli. +++++ Gorlizki’s decades-long collaboration with Jaipur miniature artist Riyaz Uddin is seen in many of his works on paper. Elegant traditional Mughal and Rajasthani stylistic characteristics enchant: disciplined geometries, intense, insistent. Impossibly beautiful patterns and exquisitely refined figures.

The artists often exchange a work several times, occasionally over an extended period of time. Gorlizki directing, Riyaz Uddin and his apprentices meeting the challenge. Riyaz Uddin is the master of the Jaipur Studio; it is he who brushes the flawless, unimpeded line that profiles delicate faces. +++++ Gorlizki picks up on a tradition popular in India with the advent of photography in the 19th century—mixing photography with painting, particularly in portraiture. He doesn’t limit himself to two media: with the aid of digital technology, he introduces characters from other dimensions—cartoons, collage, other photographs.

In one “photograph” on view, he radically alters a typical arrangement of sitters for a group portrait. Not only does he add flora and fauna to the group, but front and center he introduces the valiant hero Hanuman in a mythic moment from the Ramayana. Monkey business captured in a “photograph,” with its imprimatur of “truth” and “modernity.”

Plunging into the intersection between freedom and tradition. Free association. Mining visual intelligence. Subverting pomp. +++++ In one painting, we pay homage to a finely painted elephant-headed Princely Ganesh (or a Ganeshly Prince) straight out of an Indian miniature: stately jama, lotus flowers in his crown. We can follow a melodic gold line on the fringe of his ear, painted with the tiniest of brushes—only a few fine squirrel hairs.

Let’s play: Free association. Lucid dreaming. Variable dimensions.

Here’s one story: Perhaps our Ganesh Prince has gone traveling to see the volcano, across the seas. In a border, a diver in a very chic wetsuit appears.

Young princes in a bathtub brandish lotuses under the blue light of a bikini-clad bulb; a powerful current of blue washes down from the north; it will slake the thirst of the tired mule. As our Ganesh Prince scratches his nose, he seems to have caught sight of a scaly multicolored coral-shaped genie coming into the picture.

Down below, mushrooms emerge from a Mughal garden. Now what kind are they? Magic to be sure. And not to be missed is the world’s largest rodent, the super guinea pig capybara! (Native to South America.) So super is the guinea pig that a plushy pink poodle stays upstairs.

What story do you see? The artist has intentionally created a visual field that invites multiple stories, formations in variable dimensions. +++++ Color is one of the great pleasures of Gorlizki’s works. In one painting on view, he sets himself the task of taming popsicle colors by surrounding them with a color of reasoned judgment—and strikes a perfect note in a quiet but grounded grey green, which a black line pattern further subdues. +++++

The artist has a wide range of reference points: Indian miniatures of the Mughal period, Central Asian textiles: Katawaz and Katai embroidery, Khirgiz felts, Baluch saddle bags, and artists Franz West, Louise Bourgeois, Alighiero Boetti, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Schütte, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Marcel Broodthaers, Philip Guston, Sonia Delaunay, Alexander Rodchenko, Kasamir Malevich, Kenneth Price.

Gorlizki stands with the league of irreverent artists and art movements: Hieronymus Bosch, Dada, Fluxus, the Chicago Imagists, and California Funk. He has Interest in collectives such as the Omega workshop of the Bloomsbury Group intent, to transform living into an aesthetic experience, Constructivism and Productivism of the Russian avant-garde. +++++ The artist’s works have a strong sense of graphic design. The aesthetic easily references the epigrammatic language of advertising and signage. See it as an abstraction of a pictorial composition or a pre-figuration of the pictorial; either approach brings it squarely into the visual language in the 21st century—particularly in the global visiosphere where contextualization is haphazard at best. +++++ Alexander Gorlizki describes himself as “a pattern farmer, harvesting patterns, colors, and shapes that exist in the world.” With these he cultivates and generates new forms, alive with mischief, elegance, surprise, humor, and the insight of non-attachment. Eros flows within jeweled embankments along paths guided by his genius.

Caron Smith, Curator Emeritus, Crow Collection of Asian Art AUGUST 2015

Born in London, England in 1967, Alexander Gorlizki received his M.F.A. from the Slade School in London and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; the Museum Kunst Palast, D端sseldorf, Germany; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions include Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India; Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne, Germany; Baldwin Galley, Aspen, Colorado; Van Doren Waxter Gallery, New York, New York; and Galerie Eric Mouchet, Paris, France. +++++ Gallery Notebook to accompany the exhibition Alexander Gorlizki: Variable Dimensions at the Crow Collection of Asian Art, 2010 Flora Street, Dallas, TX September 12, 2015 through March 20, 2016 crowcollection.org +++++ Exhibition presented with support from the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District