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From: PRESS RELEASE
Date: 06 Apr 2010
Time: 10:49:24 -0500
Franz Ehmann and Jorge Rivera Private View: Wednesday 14th April 2010, 6-10pm Exhibition dates: 14th – 25th April 2010 Opening times: Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm Artists-in-conversation: 2pm, Friday 16th April 2010 Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos and Ismail Erbil Schwartz Gallery presents the work of Franz Ehmann and Jorge Rivera as part of a series of two-person shows questioning exhibition-making practice. The programme aims to create an innovative platform for dialogue between the work of contemporary artists while not being a collaboration. This exhibition is the last two-person show in a series of five that opened the programme of exhibitions at Schwartz Gallery in 2010 with more two-person shows scheduled for the second half of the year. Ehmann’s site-specific newsprint installation covers a large section of the gallery floor. Together with the artist’s performative engagement with the piece a sculptural text environment is formed questioning the production of opinion and value in cultural and media spheres. Ehmann engages with this proposition by creating subversive inter-linkings between his own body as an artist and a subject of the very same sculptural text environment. ‘The newspaper floor is hermeneutically fixed, a continuum of interpretations and translations. A speeding and ever increasing form of word and physical violence spreading out into every living space.’ Franz Ehmann. Rivera uses the intimate relationship between the bullfighter and the bull as a metaphorical tool to investigate the internal dialogue between the artist and their sculptural practice focusing on emotion as a site for the production of meaning in both instances. ‘In this show I am trying to capture the reverie, the moment of transformation I went through when my body entered the empty passages of the bullfighting arena. The heroic position of the sculptor/bullfighter/initiate, is here aimed to be subjected and transferred to the spectator.’ Jorge Rivera. While addressing different areas of concern the work of both Ehmann and Rivera reference ideas of private versus public systems of asserting a sense of territory and identity and of the intense and at times fraught dialogue and interaction between the two. The materials used by both artists are akin to theatre props propelling the viewer into the psycho-active/re-active environment of the gallery space. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Franz Ehmann is a B.A Fine Art graduate from Northern Territory University ( Charles Darwin University), Australia. Recent solo exhibitions include Yes we can, Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz, Austria,2009, Relentless (without beginning nor end), BBK Galerie, Augsburg, Germany and Maximum acceleration, Conny Dietzschold Multiple Box, Sydney both in 2008. Group Exhibitions include In der schönen neuen Welt, Koloni, Dresden, Germany in 2009,Vienna Biennale, Vienna, Austria and Plan B, Kleine Altstadt Galerie, Dachau, Germany both in 2008. Franz Ehmann was the Director of Soapbox Gallery from 1997-2005 in Brisbane, Australia. He lives and works in Brisbane. http://www.soapboxgallery.com.au/Franz.html Jorge Rivera is an MA graduate and Ph.D. candidate at the Royal College of Art Sculpture School. Recent solo exhibitions include Gulbenkian Gallery Royal College of Art, 2009 and “Erotogenicity, Gneme del Narcisismo primario” Galeria SCQ, Santiago de Compostela in 2005. Group exhibitions include Degree Show, Royal College of Art in 2007, “New Life and the Dream Garden”, Fieldgate Gallery, London, 2007 ,“Self-Space” Airvideo@Airspace Gallery, Stoke on Trent and The Museum of Sorrow, Union Chapel, London in 2006. Rivera lives and works in London.