PAINT BOOTH — IN THE RACK ROOM #23

PAINT BOOTH — IN THE RACK ROOM #23

RUTGER DE VRIES
Open by appointment until JANUARY 28, 2023

LAGE EGAL [IN THE RACK ROOM]
Liselotte-Herrmann-Str. 26 (HH)
10407 Berlin
Contact: sonderlage@lage-egal.net

We kick off 2023 with a site-specific installation featuring works by Dutch artist Rutger de Vries. For his solo exhibition, the artist will transform the space into a large painting: a construction of wooden frames is placed inside the room, covered with a transparent sheet and from which blank canvases are suspended. By doing so, a new space within the exhibition space is created, which becomes the starting point from which the artistic process emerges. Soon after, a sprinkler system, which De Vries works with regularly, is activated by the artist, painting the previously empty canvases in the room in succession. With the explosion of paint, the paintings come to life as a vibrant assemblage of color.

The exhibition is constructed in two phases that will be open to the public at different times. The first phase, which opens on January 14, shows the process of working on the paintings in situ. It reveals a room covered in paint from floor to wall and ceiling, featuring a wild collection of movement and color. In the second phase, opening January 26, the space will be stripped of all traces of the process to present the paintings in a white gallery cube. As such, the exhibition references and pays homage to Brian O’Doherty’s ideas in which not only the relationship between production and exhibition is questioned, but also the way art is made.


ABOUT THE SERIES
The new exhibition series curated by Pierre Granoux for the IN THE RACK ROOM focuses again on the exhibition space itself, the context and starting point being his own studio which he left in 2010 shortly before the creation of LAGE EGAL: What is the relationship between artist, artwork and the space in which it is created? What happens when the studio becomes an exhibition space, what happens when it becomes a work of art itself? And how can the studio be located within the “white cube” as a “medium of transformation”?

I was also very touched by the news of his death on November 7th, so I decided to curate and invite a small selection of artists to RACKROOM to celebrate what O’Doherty summarised as a “the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed”. Rutger de Vries and his monumental and very colourful installations will be the first guest. (Pierre Granoux)

* After Bloody Sunday, the artist Brian O’Doherty protested by taking the name Patrick Ireland for all his artwork until ‘such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights’. The burial of the name Patrick Ireland 36 years after is, says the artist, a realisation that there is now peace in the North and represents a gesture of reconciliation. Forty years later, Pierre Granoux’s proposal for one exhibition in Ireland (Golden Thread Gallery, Great Patrick Street, Belfast) is a simply street sign dedicated to the memory of Patrick Ireland — “war name”” of Brian O’Doherty — and realized after the model of the Marcel Duchamp street sign in Paris.”