Gavin Brown’s enterprise is pleased to present Ignorant Transparencies, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard
September 14 – October 26, 2013
620 Greenwich Street, New York
212 627 5258
T – Sa, 10AM – 6PM
Melgaard cannot stop. He is the most prodigiously compulsive, excessively promiscuous exhibitor working today. In the past 24 months alone he has staged 7 exhibitions – at Maccarone (2011; After Shelley Duvall ’72), Ramiken Crucible (2012; Ideal Pole; baby tigers), ICA, London (2012; A House to Die In; with Snøhetta), Luxembourg & Dayan, NY (2012/13; A New Novel; doll houses and Proenza Schouler), Venus Over Manhattan, NY (2013; Gang
Bust; black W. Copley, black Allen Jones, Big Fat Black Cock, Inc.), Rod Bianco, NY (2013; Mary Boone paintings), and White Columns, NY (2013; Sverre Bjertnæs, including an incredible ‘interview’ on film).
His oppressively constant creation becomes instantaneous, lionhearted fulfillment, no matter how amoral or antisocial the art. Questions of taste and quality become slippery and messy, in an all-out irrational, anti-narrative pathos. Like his Pepto-Bismol-hued alter ego, the Pink Panther (a perfect embodiment of the Norwegian’s ongoing berzerking of aesthetic cancellation), Melgaard is simultaneously the fearsome predator and also the uncool loser – don’t forget that relentless erzatz-jazz theme tune to accompany this vision of the horrifying loneliness of our existence.
In a startling and depressing downward spiritual development, we have moved from William Blake’s encounter with cosmic fearful symmetry – our original, earliest other – to Bjarne Melgaard (in his words a “45-year old worn-out faggot”). Melgaard makes a perversion not only of the notion of an artist, but also the artist’s relationship with the physical ‘natural’ world – in his hands now an irrelevance, invisible and grotesque. In Melgaard we find complete
alienation and extreme asymmetry.
Melgaard’s starkly anti-aesthetic and anti-formalist art offers a new, more complicated, last-chance idea of beauty, one always on the precipice of breakdown and shame. In a crescendo of paint, dolls and crystals, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise Melgaard will present his most ambitious, tragic and unwieldy exhibition to date – Pink never felt so dismal.
About Bjarne Melgaard: Melgaard is a Norwegian artist (b. 1967 in Sydney, Australia), who lives and works in New York. He grew up between Norway and Australia and attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and the Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht. Aside from his encompassing artistic practice, Melgaard is a frequent curator, has written some 14 novels, and produced a number of films.Melgaard has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including solo presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; Luxembourg & Dayan, New York; de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo and Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and MARTa Herford, Hannover, Germany. In 2011, Melgaard represented Norway at the 54th Venice Biennial, Venice. Upcoming projects include: 9 Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (curated by Bartholomew Ryan) (cat.); 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (curated by Gunnar Kvaran); Momentum 7, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway (curated by Erlend Hammer and Power Ekroth); and a collection display at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway.
To see Melgaard’s complete CV, as it is quite impressive! Go: HERE
To see more of his work go: HERE
To know more about Gavin Brown’s Enterprise go: HERE
All images courtesy of: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
