15 April 2011 – 4 June 2011

ANDREAS GRIMM MÜNCHEN (www.andreasgrimmgallery.com) is delighted to announce the third solo exhibition with Lisa Tan. The artist’s work negotiates her longstanding interest in loss as a constant yet shifting condition of being that shapes the quotidian while anticipating the profound. Her works are marked by an elegant visual economy, and have taken the form of photographs, videos, sculptures, drawings, writing…and a champagne cocktail.

For this exhibition, Tan has assembled discreet pieces that relate to one another rather obliquely, leaving open spaces for the viewer—perhaps to imagine questions emerging from the oddly fatalistic title of this exhibition. What is an ordinary situation, and how does forgetting generate its own reflective state? Consisting of works on paper, with the exception of one photographic piece, the works here propose an aesthetic of forgetting, stemming from transitions between language and image, different states of visibility, and the effects of time and nature.

The ordinary situations in this case include an enduring friendship—captured in the letters written to the major figure of French romantic painting, Eugène Delacroix, from his life-long friend (and former lover), the aptly named Mme de Forget. The series, titled In Search of the Forgotten, Letters from Mme de Forget to Eugène Delacroix, 2010-2011, consists of delicate chine-collé prints that are reproductions of a selection of letters that were written over several decades (special acknowledgement and gratitude to the Archives départementales du Val-de-Marne).

Two sister works on view include, Alle Worte, die sich nicht allein mit Worten beschreiben lassen (Duden, Mannheim 1970), 2011, and Bilder, die alle Worte beschreiben, die sich nicht allein mit Worten beschreiben lassen (Duden, Mannheim 1970), 2011. For an English-speaking viewership, these titles translate to: “All the words that cannot be described by words alone” and “The images that describe all the words that cannot be described by words alone.” Tan has been looking at various foreign language dictionaries, accounting for an experience of loss—in the way language perpetually and paradoxically obscures and displaces the thing it signifies. In doing so, the works also imagine how images too become displaced and more curious in their supposed explanation and definition of a thing.

In the “blind-stamped” letterpress drawing 2 Americans, 2010, the text is derived from an article about the crash of Air France flight 447, written in early June of 2009, as published in The New York Times at a point when the commercial aircraft could not be located between its origin of Rio de Janeiro and its destination of Paris. The barely visible text lists the nationalities of those who died and read like a dissonantly irreverent cast of characters in a play.

The only photographic work in the exhibition, Alter Nordfriedhof May 2007, 2011, is a collection of casual snapshots taken in the nearby Alter Nordfriedhof cemetery on a spring day, during the artist’s previous visit to Munich. From afar, the framed work looks like a verdant grid. A closer examination reveals how vines and flowers have obscured all but each of the tombstone’s general shape, creating a beautiful anonymity.

Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm and New York. She received her M.F.A. from The University of Southern California (USC). Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Artists Space (New York), Galerie VidalCuglietta (Brussels), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Galerie Nordenhake (Stockholm), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Galeria Marília Razuk (São Paulo), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York).

In 2010, artist Lisa Tan proposed a second chapter to her Recoleta project started in Buenos Aires in 2007. She reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience.

In May of 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with Lisa Tan. While in Buenos Aires she made a collection of grave rubbings from the Cementerio de La Recoleta and sent to the Garage daily images and thoughts on her experience of the city. See ‘Related Content’ below for this project.

On September 5, 2007 Lisa Tan presented her project Recoleta at the haudenschildGarage and was in conversation with former San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick Cartwright and LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg.

Lisa Tan, New York, January 2010

We often preserve the memory of an indefinable charm from these towns we’ve merely brushed against.   The memory indeed of our own indecision, our hesitant footsteps, our gaze which didn’t know what to turn towards and that found almost anything affecting… — George Perec[1]

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Cover

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. — Jorge Luis Borges[2]

The guidebook read: “The cemetery’s giant vaults, stacked along avenues inside the high walls, resemble the rooftops of a fanciful utopian town from above”[3].   It sounded compelling, given an emergent attraction I had to cemeteries—and so I packed a pad of 11 x 14 inch paper and some black pencils, and one day—after we arrived back to Buenos Aires from the northern Patagonian Pampa—I went to the Recoleta Cemetery and spent a couple days making grave rubbings—avoiding any text or overly decorative textures.

The walk from the hotel to the cemetery took me past a small bakery, then the Israeli Embassy Memorial (it was bombed in 1992), then across Avenida 9 de Julio—the iconic wide street that bears the white obelisk, toward an ornate fountain near the Brazilian and French embassies, fancy retail spaces, a grand hotel, and then finally, a family of huge Banyan trees.  Along this route, the international modernist apartment buildings, that are so plentiful in downtown Buenos Aires, give the walk a decidedly cosmopolitan tone.  This became part of a ritual of going to the cemetery and coming home, and these nighttime walks would inform another work of mine.  Both inside and outside of the cemetery I was fascinated by the built space around me and how each had formed its own image of the unknowable.

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Open

When I went back to Buenos Aires the next time, it was with the generous assistance of the haudenschildGarage.  I had decided that I wanted to make very large grave rubbing drawings (84 x 48 inches each) to capture the scale of the structures.  It took the better part of a day to make one.  I thought they would turn out to be impressive monochromes that had a weight and aura imbued by way of a literalist minimalism.  The experience was truly amazing, but not long after I transported the suite of drawings back home, I realized that they failed to hold much resonance.  The small drawings were still convincing to me though, and the haptic process mattered somehow in relation to their scale.  They could be inventoried in a single stack, and I could hold and flip through them, one structure after another.  I decided that this was the best way for the piece to live, and so I designed a cloth-covered box, blind-stamping it with “RECOLETA”.   Perhaps it is a tomb for the unknowable.

I continued to go back to Buenos Aires, and last year I completed a video about the apartment lobbies, called Language Barrier.

Lisa Tan, Recoleta, Detail

ABOUT LISA TAN

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).

———

[1] George Perec, edited and translated by John Sturrock, Species of Space and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, 1997, p. 64.

[2] Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964, p. 114.

[3] Danny Aeberhard, Andrew Benson and Lucy Phillips, The Rough Guide to Argentina, Rough Guides, Second Edition, p. 122.

In May of 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with artist Lisa Tan. While in Buenos Aires she made a collection of grave rubbings from the Cementerio de La Recoleta and sent the Garage daily images and thoughts on her experience of the city.

*On September 5, 2007 Lisa Tan presented her project Recoleta at the haudenschildGarage and was in conversation with former San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick Cartwright and LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg.

*In January of 2010 Lisa Tan revisited her project Recoleta and reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience. See ‘Related Content’ below for a link to her text.

Provisionally titled Recoleta, this project began during my first trip to Argentina in August of 2006. The Recoleta cemetery is located in a well-heeled neighborhood in Buenos Aires that bears the same name. Initially, this site piqued my interest when I learned that it is configured like a city. It is in fact a city of a couple hundred mausoleums—a distinctive and elite necropolis.

The graves vary in style, density, and material. Some are ornate over-built structures that could house a small café, and others are minimal blocks of smooth granite. They all exist side by side along paths that branch off from main “boulevards,” mimicking the cosmopolitan surroundings just beyond the cemetery walls.

To take this potent site into account, I decided to make grave rubbings of select mausoleums, while avoiding all literal and figurative aspects—including areas of text, image, or overly descriptive textures. Marble statuary, glass doors, bronze plaques, and crosses, all dissolve into a collection of black monochromes. En masse, they vary little from one rubbing to the next; they become voids that reflect of a repository of unknowable histories.

Over the course of my stay in Buenos Aires, I will be posting a selection of images of my daily experience in the city. (Viva Argentina!) — Lisa Tan

About Lisa Tan

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).

On September 5, 2007 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK with Lisa Tan who presented work from her May 2007 trip to Buenos Aires for her Garage Project Recoleta.  She was in conversation with Derrick Cartwright (Director, Seattle Museum of Art) and Lauri Firstenberg (Director, LAXART). Following the talk was a Pizza Challenge – challenging directors of museums and alternative spaces to choose the best.

FUEL: Pizza

*In January of 2010 Lisa Tan revisited her project Recoleta and reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience. See ‘Related Content’ below for a link to her text.

About the Participants

Derrick Cartwright

Derrick R. Cartwright, who has headed the San Diego Museum of Art since 2004, was appointed director of the Seattle Art Museum in 2009. Cartwright, a native of San Francisco who was educated at UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Michigan (PhD, 1994), is a scholar of North American art and architecture, 19th-century French art and the history of photography. Prior to his time in San Diego, he directed the Musee d’Art Americain in Giverny, France, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Lauri Firstenberg

Lauri Firstenberg is the Founder and Director/Curator of LAXART, Los Angeles, CA and received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University in 2005. She founded LAXART in 2005 – the leading independent nonprofit exhibition space in Los Angeles. She is currently curating the 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art. Exhibitions Firsenberg has curated at LAXART include Daniel Martinez: How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb, Ruben Ochoa: Extracted, TOROLAB: SOS Emergency Architecture, Lisa Tan: One Night Stand, Michael Queenland: Museum of Romantic Life, Adria Julia: A Means of Passing the Time, amongst others. She co-curated with Anton Vidokle Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life at the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theatre), 2006 and Isaac Julien: True North, and Amir Zaki: Spring Through Winter, Mak Center, 2005. Firstenberg was formerly the Assistant Director/Curator of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Schindler House, Los Angeles and Curator of Artists Space, New York. She has contributed to a host of publications on contemporary art including Art Papers, Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Nka, Art Journal, Parkett, Lab 71 amongst others. She is the founder of L’art a new online publication for contemporary art. She is Adjunct Faculty in the Public Art Program at USC Roski School of Art and at Sciarc, Los Angeles.

Lisa Tan

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).