Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based Romanian artist Daniel Knorr. Depression Elevations will be Knorr’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and will include a series of resin sculptures accompanied by a limited edition artist book.
In the main gallery, Knorr explores the surface of Los Angeles in Depression Elevations, a series of resin sculptures cast from impressions of city streets. Knorr’s topographical concern is biopolitical; while infrastructure is produced by the state to facilitate connectivity, it also proscribes social movement and imposes parameters upon a population. The city’s vast and complex network of roads leaves an indelible mark upon the wide, flat plane of Los Angeles, begetting a cultural landscape dominated by car culture and urban sprawl.
The hollows of the street, however, worn by the ravages of time and human use, provide a small footprint of the city’s past. In casting from these puddles and potholes, Knorr catches history in his mold, engendering form and substance from a literal void. The resultant sculptures derive an evocative power not from their undeniably beautiful façade, but from the intimate aura of a swiftly fading past.
To mark his inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles, Knorr has produced the ninth edition of Carte de Artiste, his series of global encyclopedias. Titled On Los Angeles, the book takes as its subject the castoffs of our daily lives; Knorr traverses the city streets, seeking out discarded objects and pressing them between the pages of a book. In cataloguing the transitory elements of an urban landscape, Knorr addresses the transformative and destructive complexities of representation.
Since his representation of Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Knorr has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Kunsthalle Wien. Over the next several years, Knorr will mount a series of exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the first of which debuted in December of 2008. He has participated in group shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Liverpool Bienniale, and the Berlin Bienniale, and his work is held in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Migros Museum in Zurich, the Stasi Museum in Leipzig, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Knorr was born in Bucharest, Romania and lives and works in Berlin.