Ghosts and Spectres overview RH Contemporary,New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres, overview RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Artist Talk, November 6th, 2014 with Alex Bacon and Carol Kino
Untitled, 2014 Lithographie (edition of 50)
EXHIBITIONS
Ghosts and Spectres (solo)
RH Contemporary, New York, 2014
Ghosts and Spectres
Starting point for the exhibition is an eponymous text by Jan Verwoert, ‘Living With Ghosts’. In this text he speaks freely about ghosts and specters. Ghosts and specters are there and are not there at the same time, says Verwoert, they’re autonomous creatures and they are only imaginative, you can have them and can’t have them simultaneously.
The works and installation in the exhibition relate to these ideas of being present and being absent, between you can have them and you can’t. Visitors have to become mutual witnesses to the work, negotiating the meaning of it, without ever having it. This reflects important issues of the contemporary: the oscillating relation between autonomy and heteronomy – how much can we and how much can works determine their own conditions and how much do they refer to different contexts, as well in the exhibition space as more external, for instance to (art) histories and texts.
This basic dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy is reflected in recurring issues in the exhibition such as patterns that refer to design versus the grid, questioning the canvas versus the canonical in painting and thinking through traces versus living with fragments. These relations are never fixed, they are to be negotiated over and over again.
Bas van den Hurk
Bas van den Hurk studied Fine Art at Academy St. Joost in Breda, The Netherlands and did his MFA in Philosophy of Aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam. His work has been show extensively worldwide at, amongst others, Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and
Autocenter, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Hopstreet, Brussels and Rod Barton, London and groupshows at Cell Project Space, London, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Martin van Zomeren Gallery, Amsterdam . Current solo exhibitions include RH Contemporary, New York and Ginerva Gambino, Cologne. Forthcoming is a solo booth at NADA Miami for Rod Barton and group shows at Lehmann Gallery, Berlin and Dresden and Brand New Gallery, Milan. Van den Hurk sometimes curates and he teaches contemporary theory at MFA AKV/St. Joost. He currently lives and works in Tilburg, The Netherlands. www.basvandenhurk.com
Bas van den Hurk is also the co-founder and co-director of Whatspace. Whatspace is a roaming independent platform for contemporary art and cultural debate founded in 2008. Whatspace tries to find inherent inducements presented in ideas and works in order to create and give guidance to an engaged discourse that reaches further then the art world alone. whatspace.com