Paula Cooper Gallery at Art Basel 2019

Paula Cooper Gallery in Booth B7 June 11–16, 2019
Hall 2 — Messe Basel

Paula Cooper Gallery Art Basel | June 2019

The gallery is pleased to present works by gallery artists including Carl Andre, Tauba Auerbach, Jennifer Bartlett, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jonathan Borofsky, Sophie Calle, Sarah Charlesworth, Bruce Conner, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Robert Grosvenor, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt, Christian Marclay, Justin Matherly, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Paul Pfeiffer, Walid Raad, Joel Shapiro, Rudolf Stingel, Kelley Walker, and Dan Walsh.

UNLIMITED

Bruce Conner: REPORT June 10–16, 2019

Hall 1 — Messe Basel

Kohn Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery are pleased to announce a joint presentation of Bruce Conner’s film, REPORT (1963-1967) in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel 2019. One of the foremost American artists of the postwar era, Conner (1933-2008) worked across a vast range of media, including pioneering works of film. Using found footage of ubiquitous or iconic imagery, his films challenge the viewer to reexamine or deconstruct well-established cultural narratives. Recently restored by the Conner Family Trust, Conner’s REPORT is a thirteen-minute meditation on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy that also dissects the phenomenon of the news media as a means of processing the event. Comprised of two parts, the first addresses the assassination directly through radio broadcast recounting the frenzied aftermath of the gunshots. Brief television clips from the day are repeated, extended, and reordered, their familiar images becoming increasingly strange with each iteration. Intercut with alternating clear and black celluloid that accelerates to stroboscopic effect, the act concludes with audio confirmation of Kennedy’s death set to a recursive countdown. The second part of REPORT, the epilogue, explores the media’s deification, commodification and obscuration of the president. Radio commentary of Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas plays against archival footage of him spliced with a multiplicity of symbolic appropriated scenes: a bullfight, Hollywood films, television advertisements, war imagery. In sum, the film’s two acts tease the viewer by omitting footage of the actual shooting, foregrounding the power of the media to shape a national narrative. Compelling the viewer to unscramble its high-density plot, REPORT collapses the personal with the public. “REPORT bends cinematic time into the time-made- strange of traumatic memory,” mirroring the experience of mental processing.

PARCOURS

Matias Faldbakken: Tile Drawing and Lacquered Brick Sculpture June 10–16, 2019

Sportsplatz, Rittergasse 5, Basel

Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Paula Cooper Gallery are pleased to announce a joint presentation of work by Matias Faldbakken in the Parcours sector of Art Basel 2019. For Parcours, Faldbakken has created two new works: The Tile Drawing is a development of his tile series, which Faldbakken has been working on since 2006. Instead of erasing or obscuring the motive as he has previously done, the artist uses a tiled wall area as a ground for a drawing, bringing a handmade motive to the forefront. His tile series has always conveyed an atmosphere of ‘governmental worry’ into the exhibition space; the tile works reference locations where authorities are usually paranoid about people’s smutty behavior: pools, public toilets, subways, underpasses, schools, and various dead spaces or off-spaces in a city. The Lacquered Brick Sculpture is a structure made by laying bricks, free hand, on the spot, corresponding to the surrounding area. The finished structure is painted in glossy paint and subsequently looks more ‘baroque’ (with its decorative shiny lacquer) than Faldbakken’s earlier, more conceptually restrained works, but the disavowal of easy dichotomies is nonetheless very present.