NEW YORK, NY.- Marian Goodman Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Niele Toroni, which opened Saturday June 6th and will be on view through Thursday, July 30th, 2015.
This small focused exhibition, held in our Third Floor Gallery space, is dedicated to works from the late eighties to the present. It features a site specific wall painting which is a direct intervention onto the walls of the gallery, and three new works on canvas shown in conjunction with a group of works on paper and on newspaper from 1989-1991. The latter were featured in an historical exhibition of Toroni’s work, L’ Album, held at the Pompidou, Paris in 1991.
The gallery show is presented in collaboration with an important solo survey, the first in a New York museum, of Toroni’s work which is currently on view at The Swiss Institute. On view through September 6th, it spans close to five decades of the artist’s work, and features imprints on waxed fabric, canvas, paper, and new site specific works.
Toroni’s reductive, systematic working process is one of inscription, of ‘travaux/peintures’ developed over close to fifty years of practice. He has utilized site specific environments and diverse surfaces in which to activate space and free painting from authorship and from its prescribed, mimetic, representative conditions. His method, imprints of regular brushstrokes defined by the temporal and spatial conditions in which they are applied, are made with a no. 50 paintbrush and repeated at systematic intervals of 30 cm. This process began at a debut in 1967 in Paris at an exhibition-performance at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris.
Writing for a catalogue essay for an exhibition at the Stedelijk in the mid nineties, Rene Denizot, elaborates: “An imprint is left by the pressure of the brush on the support where it has been applied. There is an imprint where the support is impressed with paint. An imprint is never alone. It does not exist by itself. It has no existence prior to its production. It is a physical effect of the painter’s tools of trade. It is not the artistic touch of an impressionist or an expressionist gesture. It is not the acknowledgement of an aesthetic genre. It is not the reproduction of a paradigm. It is an actual experiment in the act of painting. Here and now, each imprint is like a crime incriminating and discriminating its perpetration….Painting surfaces as its ground spaces out though the repetition of imprints. This repetition, at regular intervals, punctuates and actuates a field of appearance and disappearance for painting. It is an open field. A field of action, not a field of contemplation. Painting is being tried, exposed to be or not to be, with equal liberty and necessity. Its field is never filled. It’s a present field of painting, not a field of representation. It’s a field of experiment, not a field of acknowledgement. If it bears the marks of a history of painting, these marks limit and sign a definition of painting which is here and now exposed to the representation by which a painting proceeds… There, located in time and opened in space, is the condition of an outrageous exhibition of painting, because it is not the representation of a preconceived visual aesthetics, but the renewed experiment of the visible and the invisible though which plays and is to be played again the visual destiny of the Western world…” (Rene Denizot: Difference and Repetition in the Work of Niele Toroni or Painting as Crime, p 29, published by Stedelijk Museum 1994).
Upcoming projects by Niele Toroni include a solo exhibition forthcoming this fall at Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, France in September 2015, as well as a solo exhibition planned for the following year at Musee d’Art Moderne, Lugano, Switzerland, in 2016.
His work is currently on view in a group exhibition, Listening to the Lines, Ginza Maison Hermès, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Tokyo through July 5th, 2015.
Niele Toroni was born in 1937 in Muralto, Switzerland. He currently lives and works in Paris, France. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Villa Pisani Bonetti, Bagnolo di Lonigo, Vicenza, Italy (2012); Museo Civico di Belle Arti, Lugano, Switzerland (2005); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany (2002) and Musée d`art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France (2001).
He was the recipient of the 2012 Meret Oppenheim Prize awarded by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, the 2003 Wolfgang-Hahn Prize awarded by the Museum Ludwig Cologne, and a French Vermeil Medal awarded by the City of Paris in 2001.
His work is featured in a number of public collections: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, France; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland; Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany; The Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, France; The Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany; CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France; and The Kunstmuseum, Luzern, Switzerland.
He has been included in numerous important group exhibitions over the years, including Documenta 9 (1992) and 7 (1982); Venice Biennial, 72-76, Cantieri navali della Giudecca, Venice, Italy (1972); the São Paulo Biennial (1991); Lyon Biennale, Musée Saint-Pierre-Art Contemporain, Lyons, France (1991); and Sydney Biennial, Sydney (1982).
