CCA News
The CCA Wattis Institute For Contemporary Arts Presents The Exhibition The Magnificent Seven: Kris Martin: Hammarby!
Posted on Wednesday, March 23, 2011, by Sarah Owens
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts will present the exhibition "The Magnificent Seven: Kris Martin: Hammarby!" from February 15 through April 9, 2011, in the upper Logan Galleries on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts. The exhibition is free and open to the public. It begins on February 15, and there will be a reception event on Tuesday, March 29, 2011, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Over the course of this semester, Martin is living in San Francisco and serving as a guest faculty member at CCA. He is leading a class of 13 graduate Fine Arts students in creating new works on the subject of time, a universal truth with which all artists—and of course all people—must contend. Graduate school is a period when art students are developing their own practices, their own career paths. And so, Martin finds it appropriate to transform the private space of the classroom into the public space of an art gallery, with the latter’s new set of expectations around finished pieces and the status of the working, professional artist. The gallery is divided into 13 autonomous-but-public spaces, one per student, via a grid of red lines. Martin is working in a 14th space, the entire gallery, and has given himself the same task that he has given his students: to devise new works that investigate issues of time and duration.
The seminars and tutorials associated with the course will take place within this gallery, together with the physical production of the new works. The gallery is open to the public during the Wattis’s regular hours. Over the spring semester the lines that divide these studios, and the isolation they imply, will probably blur. In the final weeks, the project will culminate in a formal exhibition occupying the entire space.
About Kris Martin
Martin is based in Ghent, Belgium, and he is among the most celebrated European artists of his generation. His conceptual practice centers on the fragility of the human condition; his frequent use of the readymade—from boulders to texts by Dostoyevsky to common nails—alludes to the poignancy inherent in everything that surrounds us. Martin’s work draws attention to temporality and, in the centuries-long tradition of the memento mori, provokes viewers to remember death’s inevitability. Rather than being entirely somber and ominous, however, his minimal sculptures, drawings, photography, and installations possess incisiveness and grace as well as a disarmingly earnest humor and wit.
Martin was born in Belgium in 1972. His first exhibition in a public institution on the West Coast was in October 2008 at the Wattis Institute, as part of the Passengers exhibition. Martin has presented solo exhibitions at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010), Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2009), and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2007). He has recently participated in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, London; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art.
About the CCA Wattis Institute
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts was established in 1998 in San Francisco at California College of the Arts. It serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary art and curatorial practice. Through groundbreaking exhibitions, the Capp Street Project residency program, lectures, symposia, and publications, the Wattis Institute has become one of the leading art institutions in the United States and an active site for contemporary culture in the Bay Area. For more information about the Wattis Institute, visit www.wattis.org.
About California College of the Arts
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is noted for the interdisciplinarity and breadth of its programs. It offers studies in 21 undergraduate and seven graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, master of fine arts, and master of business administration degrees. With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, CCA currently enrolls 1,800 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl. For more information about CCA, visit www.cca.edu.
CALENDAR EDITORS, PLEASE NOTE:
February 15 to April 9, 2011
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents the exhibition
The Magnificent Seven: Kris Martin: Hammarby!
California College of the Arts, San Francisco campus
1111 Eighth Street (at 16th and Wisconsin)
Reception: Tuesday, March 29, 2011, 6-8 p.m.
Gallery hours: Tues. and Thurs., 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Wed., Fri., and Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Sun. and Mon.
Cost: Free
Info: 415.551.9210, www.cca.edu, www.wattis.org
http://www.cca.edu/calendar/2011/magnificent-seven-kris-martin
PRESS CONTACTS:
Brenda Tucker 415.703.9548 btucker@cca.edu
Sarah Owens 415.703.9549 sowens@cca.edu
PUBLIC CONTACT: www.cca.edu, www.wattis.org