Miners' Monument, 1988 steel sculpture Conrad Atkinson Collaborations The past and the present coalesce in "Collaborations", an exhibition comprised of paintings, drawings, and everyday objects that interact with curatorial and museum practices and codes, weaving art history, the tradition of poetry, and contemporary sensibilities and events. An embroidered suit, "theorized" to have been worn by Wordsworth whilst writing the poem Daffodils, and an accompanying curatorial text reveal microscopic evidence of now extinct species and early Industrial Revolution pollution. Using the metaphor of the West Nile virus as an early Jackson Pollock painting, Atkinson comments on the penetration of the developed world by the underdeveloped world and the awful symmetry of their mutual destruction. Referring to contemporary news events, Atkinson has created a work based on the theme and size of Picasso's "Guernica" (Fallujuernica?) that uses wounds depicted on paintings in The Metropolitan Museum and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London. Related to his signature newspaper works, Atkinson "uncovers" Van Gogh's partially severed ear, multiplies it like Warhol's soup cans, and places it beside wounds rendered on a vase by Euphonious. Atkinson investigates our damaged world, questioning who controls the meaning of politics, history, and aesthetics. Atkinson's 1972 exhibition "Strike" was the subject of a recent tribute by one hundred British artists. In New York, his early work was a recent subject of debates at White Box with Tim Rollins, Alfredo Jaar, and others. A Distinguished Visiting Professor to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2002, Atkinson was the first artist to exhibit in its collection. Other recent solo exhibitions in England were mounted by the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the British Center for Romanticism's 3ºW Gallery (Grasmere). Public collections include: the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Australian National Gallery. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California at Davis and the official artist of the U.S. campaign to ban landmines (Vietnam Veterans Trust). Exhibition: December 2 - 24, 2004 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 10 am - 6 pm, Monday by appointment Ronald Feldmann Fine Art 31 Mercer Street USA-New York, NY 10013 Telephone +1 212 226-3232 Fax +1 212 941-1536 Email info@feldmangallery.com www.feldmangallery.com |
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