Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present exhibitions by Michel Auder and Giulia Piscitelli. Ten films and several photographs by Auder from the 1960s to the present will be on view in the West Galleries. Piscitelli’s exhibition in the Main Gallery will include recent drawings, sculpture, tapestries, and photographs.
For forty years, since he bought his first portable video camera in 1969, video art pioneer Michel Auder has recorded his daily life, from the mundane to the extraordinary. His radical approach to the medium–diaristic, immediate and unrelenting–anticipated the current fascination with personal videos. However, Auder’s works defy any type of prescribed genre. He has amassed an enormous archive of footage from which he selects unaltered excerpts from his life, at times supplementing them with staged scenes, hired actors, and recorded broadcasts. In describing the works, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri wrote that their “perceptiveness = their openness. Their lessons or truths are made possible by their remaining irreverent and even hostile to the demands of film qua 'movie' or video qua 'art.' Thus, what may appear as subjective, first person, home-made video, has the capacity to open up to an impersonal account of life amidst other lives, singular - neither general nor specific - a life. “
Auder has had exhibitions or screenings of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Lund Kunsthalle, Sweden; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. He lives and works in New York.
In Giulia Piscitelli’s exhibition–her first in the United States–she explores themes of loss, renewal, and transformation. Many of the objects and materials that Piscitelli uses in her work, such as books, textiles, and old clothes, have been found or collected by her over many years. She embraces the prosaic by embalming, erasing, restoring, and revisiting everyday objects and in the process imbues them with alternative meanings. For example, the artist uses thinner to "draw" a collection of crack pipes on starry blue mylar giving them celestial status; a wool blanket typically used for comfort is rolled, covered in latex, and suspended from the ceiling as a punching bag; the stately aura of a series of tapestries is subverted through abstract compositions in bleach based on views from the spy holes of prison cells; and the coveralls of a worker, also coated in latex, become a proxy for the headless Greek heroes immortalized in statues throughout the artist's native Italy. Also included in the exhibition is a new set of drawings which continue her series based on windows and American Skin, an animal’s hide which she conceived as paradoxically symbolic of both disappearance and restoration: One can, in a shamanistic fashion, restore life by occupying another’s skin.
Piscitelli’s works have been included in exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2011), The Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2011), Kunsthalle Basel (2010), the Berlin Biennial (2008), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007). She was born in 1965 in Naples, Italy, where she lives and works.