Melnikov project

Kiaer’s solo exhibition, ‘Melnikov Project, Cylindrical House Studio’, presented work based on the artist’s research into notions of sleep, and painting’s death, as prompted by the house of architect Konstantin Melnikov. Curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Chief Curator of the Aspen Art Museum, the exhibition brought together key installations from a developing body of Kiaer’s work which had been shown previously in international exhibitions including ‘L'Image Papillon’, MUDAM Luxembourg (2013); ‘All of This and Nothing’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); ‘In the Days of the Comet’, British Art Show 7, Hayward touring exhibition (2011); and ‘Arte Essenziale’, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2011). The research used Melnikov’s building as a proposition for an ideal synthesis of working and dwelling, which, owing to Stalinist censure, became a kind of working tomb for the architect – a meditation on redundancy and death – where he turned to the hermetic studio inquiry of minor painting, still lives and portraits. The findings of this research opened a sustained inquiry into painting’s position in relation to poiesis and praxis, production and presence. These concerns have been increasingly brought to the forefront within contemporary practice by artists such as Gedi Sibony and Paul Sietsema, whose work, together with Kiaer’s ‘Melnikov Project’, was presented in the exhibition at the Hammer Museum (2011). An accompanying catalogue includes texts by Kiaer and by Michael Newman and Zuckerman Jacobson. Other catalogues and reviewing articles include: ‘All of This and Nothing’ (Del Monico Books Prestel, 2011, pp.74–81); ‘Arte Essenziale’ (Silvana Editoriale, 2011, pp.109–120); ‘Picpus’, (Issue No. 4, Autumn 2010, with text by Kiaer); Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘British Art Show 7’ in Frieze issue 136 (2011); and Adrian Searle, ‘British Art Show 7: Have I got spews for you’ in the Guardian (2010)

What Where

Kiaer’s solo exhibition ‘What Where’ presented a major review of the artist’s work from the past 10 years. Comprising 23 multi-part installations, the exhibition represented seven areas of Kiaer’s research. A particular research concern was how the house could be interpreted as a model of thought, looking specifically at Curzio Malaparte’s Casa Malaparte, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Kundmanngasse. Asking how notions of dwelling proposed by such buildings might inform different modes of making, Kiaer presented artworks that originated from the studio, probing the rapport between materials and motifs, groupings and spacings, and the made and the found. The exhibition included works previously exhibited at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Manifesta 3, 10th Istanbul Biennale, 6th Berlin Biennial, 50th Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1 New York, MCA Chicago, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Watari-um Museum Tokyo, Witte de With Rotterdam and Kunsthalle Basel. \ud Articles reviewing the show included Barbara Casavecchia, ‘Ian Kiaer, theatres of vision’ in Mousse (2009) and Jonathan Griffin, ‘From room to room’ in Frieze (2010), where he describes Kiaer’s work as ‘an art of entropy and disintegration. Formally and philosophically, he tests the propensity of things to hold together, to prise apart of to float irredeemably away from one another’. Many of the works in the exhibition manifested research that arose from Kiaer’s doctorate; chapters from his thesis were published in A Prior no. 20 (2010) and Kaleidoscope (2010). A monograph accompanying the exhibition was published by Archive Books, Berlin (2009) in both Italian and English editions. The publication includes seven essays by Elena Volpato, Dr Andrew Renton, Chris Sharp, Dr Roger Cook, Luca Cerizza and Professor Robert Harbison. Each text comments on a singular aspect of the artist’s research, concerning the fragment as theory and method, and the potential of the artwork as model

Painting as Minor Form

COMMA 15 was one of three solo exhibitions under the rubric ‘Painting as Minor Form’, which asked how marginal modes of painting can operate as critique of more established formalist painting canons. Kiaer’s research generated a provisional and fragmentary position for painting within contemporary art practice. The three exhibitions proposed three different qualities of the minor form. At (COMMA 15) Bloomberg SPACE, London (2010), Kiaer looked into the underlying narrative of Alexandre Dumas’s Black Tulip for its motif of the offset bulb as a mode of refinement towards black. For the Kunstverein München (2010) Kiaer re-evaluated the original premise of the Kunstverein – whose concern was the mercantile presentation of minor still-lives, portraiture and genre paintings – as an alternative to the institution of the academy, which was primarily interested in the grand gestures of history painting. The exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2011) provided an opportunity to look at the work of 18th-century painter Pietro Longhi in conjunction with the architect Carlo Scarpa, both of whose practices could be understood in minor terms of refinement, taste, and manners as an alternative means of critique to formalism. In a review for Art Forum (2010), Gilda Williams identified this inquiry into painting as a minor form as offering an alternative route in painting to what has become an over-generalised understanding of ‘painting in the expanded field’. Works from these exhibitions are now in public collections, including Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and FRAC Île-de-France, Paris. Interviews, articles and reviews of this project have been published in Art Forum, Art Monthly, Guardian online, Art World and Tate etc

Ian Kiaer

This solo exhibition presented Kiaer’s on-going research project ‘Endless House’, a term appropriated from the architect Frederick Kiesler. Kiesler’s proposal for a single-unit family dwelling remained un-built and was continually modified in model form between 1924 and 1950. In this body of work, Kiaer uses Kiesler’s notion to enquire into the model’s potential for representation, experimentation, and proposition, opening up new ways of understanding how an artwork might convey fragmentary and contingent information. The exhibition was reviewed in Frieze and Art Review amongst other publications. Significantly, Kiaer’s research investigates the possibility of a ‘model as form’, identifying in it qualities of resistance to more determined approaches of making. Curator Harald Krejci writes in ‘Utopie Gesamtkunstwerk’ (2012) that Kiaer’s works ‘are characterised by artistic interpretation of historic texts and projects, which have essentially shaped the theoretical discourse. Thus, in times of a predominance of the Young British Artists, Kiaer elaborated a subtle and complex reference system, which grants his multi-part installation pieces an approximate character.’ Kiaer’s research was presented in The Clever Object, a special issue of Art History (2013) edited by Matthew C. Hunter and Dr Francesco Lucchini. Artwork developed from Kiaer’s research project was also exhibited in ‘Social Diagrams. Planning Reconsidered’, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, Germany (2008); ‘Peripheral Vision and Collective Body’, MUSEION - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy (2008); Xth Biennale de Lyon, France (2009); ‘The Responsive Subject’, MuZee, Ostend, Belgium (2010); ‘Au loin, un île!’, Fondation D'Entreprise Ricard, Paris, France (2011); and Les Prairies – Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Rennes, (2012). ‘Endless House Project’ was reviewed in Flash Art (2008). A solo exhibition presenting this research took place at Champs d’Expérience, International Centre for Art and Landscape at Vassivière Island (CIAP), Limousin in 2013

Champs d’Expérience

This solo exhibition presented Kiaer’s on-going research project ‘Endless House’, a term appropriated from the architect Frederick Kiesler. Kiesler’s proposal for a single-unit family dwelling remained un-built and was continually modified in model form between 1924 and 1950. In this body of work, Kiaer uses Kiesler’s notion to enquire into the model’s potential for representation, experimentation, and proposition, opening up new ways of understanding how an artwork might convey fragmentary and contingent information. The exhibition was reviewed in Frieze and Art Review amongst other publications. Significantly, Kiaer’s research investigates the possibility of a ‘model as form’, identifying in it qualities of resistance to more determined approaches of making. Curator Harald Krejci writes in ‘Utopie Gesamtkunstwerk’ (2012) that Kiaer’s works ‘are characterised by artistic interpretation of historic texts and projects, which have essentially shaped the theoretical discourse. Thus, in times of a predominance of the Young British Artists, Kiaer elaborated a subtle and complex reference system, which grants his multi-part installation pieces an approximate character.’ Kiaer’s research was presented in The Clever Object, a special issue of Art History (2013) edited by Matthew C. Hunter and Dr Francesco Lucchini. Artwork developed from Kiaer’s research project was also exhibited in ‘Social Diagrams. Planning Reconsidered’, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, Germany (2008); ‘Peripheral Vision and Collective Body’, MUSEION - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy (2008); Xth Biennale de Lyon, France (2009); ‘The Responsive Subject’, MuZee, Ostend, Belgium (2010); ‘Au loin, un île!’, Fondation D'Entreprise Ricard, Paris, France (2011); and Les Prairies – Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Rennes, (2012). ‘Endless House Project’ was reviewed in Flash Art (2008). A solo exhibition presenting this research took place at Champs d’Expérience, International Centre for Art and Landscape at Vassivière Island (CIAP), Limousin in 2013

Endless house : models of thought for dwelling

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Trigger Point : Lisbon

Trigger Point: Six speculative guides to Lisbon reimagine the contemporary urban environment by exploring overlooked livelihoods, traces of profound social mutation, and the scars of past natural disasters, economic crisis and human conflict. These propositional interpretations of Lisbon are the result of innovative collaborations across Art, Architecture, Civil and Territorial Engineering, Physical and Human Geography and Social Anthropology