Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of two new works by award-winning British artist and film maker Steve McQueen, which will open to the public on Tuesday, January 19th and will run through Saturday, March 6th.
On view in the North Gallery will be Giardini, 2009, a major work first shown at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 2009, when McQueen represented the UK. This will be the first U.S. presentation of the work and its New York premiere. A second new work, Static, 2009, made especially for this exhibition, will be on view in the North Gallery viewing room.
Giardini, a visually sumptuous film of 30 minutes, is composed of two projections set side-by-side, which steadily gather a series of evocative vignettes. As the title suggests, the film is set in the famous exhibitions grounds in Venice – as T.J. Demos writes in his essay in ‘Giardini Notebook’ “the location of the ageing national pavilions. These otherwise well known monuments are shown here in an unexpected light, during the interim between biennales, in the down-time and during the nights, in the shadows of spectacle.”
Demos continues, ‘Like McQueens’ past films such as ’Carib’s Leap/ Western Deep’, 2002 and ‘Gravesend’, 2007, ‘Giardini’ denies clear links between representation and significance, between form and content – not to exclude reference but instead to allow the image potential meanings to crystallise, its facets reflecting numerous paths of fabulation. Indeed, the film’s suspension of its images in a field of multiple possibilities defines its power: to release life from belonging to any certain code, clear narrative, or restrictive regiment…. . ‘Giardini’ constructs a fictional world and does so with great care… In [it] beauty arises in the imagination of life beyond and outside the conventional orders of art and politics… The revelation in ‘Giardini’ concerns… the experience of a film that generates the space of contingency so powerfully in its experiential register, wherein the possibility of survival outside of conventional orders may transform from the virtual dimension of the image into realisation elsewhere."
Steve McQueen was recipient of the Turner Prize in 1999 and an OBE in 2002. He attended Chelsea School of Art, London (1989-90); Goldsmith College, London (1990-93); and Tisch School of the Arts, NYU (1993-94). Born in London in 1969, he currently lives in Amsterdam and London.
Upcoming projects include a film to be directed by McQueen based on the life of Fela Kuti, the African musician and activist who died in 1997, and a solo survey exhibition in the U.S. and Europe slated for 2012-2013.
Steve McQueen’s work has been included in numerous solo exhibitions hosted by worldwide institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Prada Foundation, Milan; ARC/Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris; Art Angel, London; Fundacio Serralves, Porto; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona, Milan, Tate Britain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Vienna Kunsthalle, Vienna, and many others.
