FUTUREPROOF
15 NOVEMBER - 21 DECEMBER 2012
A show presented by Jacobson Space, downstairs at 6 Cork Street, W1.
As we move further into this exciting but troubled new millennium, we become ever more aware of the significance of quality, solidity and value. At the same time, the themes of technology and the fast-maturing space age are constantly reaching our eyes and ears through the myriad of available media. Futureproof combines an interest in all these desirable characteristics into a neat museum-quality show that is not primarily driven by cynicism, fashion or hype. Instead, we present a selection of the most attractive options for the contemporary viewer or collector to see some of the very best post-war art.
The artists represented in this show are there for a variety of reasons. Helen Frankenthaler adumbrated a way forward for modern American painting. She became one of the most influential post-war American artists, thus making her work futureproof. Frank Stella, once dubbed the father of Minimalism, became dissatisfied with this type-casting and broke new and equally influential artistic ground through his later works, which are well represented in this show. Lucian Freud brought a strong sense of psychology to contemporary art with his intense, fleshy subject matter in his now very sought after paintings and etchings. Robert Motherwell was a major American abstract expressionist painter, he is the real poet of his group, including Pollock, Kline, De Kooning and Guston. Bridget Riley, who so famously fitted into the contemporary art scene in the swinging sixties with her psychedelic, optical art is featured in the show too. Also included is the great French painter Pierre Soulages who was given the grand honour of his own retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2010 and is looking forward to the opening of a museum dedicated to his work in Rodez, Southern France in 2013.
"FUTUREPROOF" is presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NX.
Admission Free.
"NO LIPSTICK"
1 SEPTEMEBER - 2 OCTOBER 2010.
A contemporary art exhibition presented by Jacobson Space, Downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1.
“No Lipstick” is the second exhibition for Jacobson Space, Jesse Jacobson's showcase space & dealership for modern & contemporary international art.
Jacobson Space invites you to visit "No Lipstick", an exhibition of contemporary art presented by Jacobson Space, downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1.
Featuring works by internationally renowned artists such as Bram Bogart and Tom Wesselmann and younger upcoming artists including Jason Martin and Sam Irons, this exhibition is influenced by the so-called Lipstick Effect, an observation made by modern economists that during difficult financial times, when sales of most goods go down, Lipstick sales double.
The exhibition is intended to provide visitors with an insight into the visually fun & cosmetically cool artworks that are currently available through Jacobson Space.
"No Lipstick" is presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NX.
Admission Free.
Nowhere … do we go from here?
5 to 30 January 2010.
A contemporary art exhibition about our uncertain times presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1.
Written by Oliver Harris.
“Nowhere” is the launch exhibition for Jacobson Space. Featuring both established artists such as Gerhard Richter and Larry Bell, and younger artists including Swiss painter Pia Fries and new British photographer Sam Irons, it has been assembled to reflect a hiatus: political, cultural and economic. The exhibition tackles this historic moment, before the last decade has become history and the new one begins assembling itself, to present a set of artists whose engagement with uncertainty has never been more relevant. What seems to connect their recent work is an attempt to take themselves out of the picture making process and while doing so creating a sense of nowhereness ... perhaps with a promise of place and purpose just beyond the horizon.
Pia Fries and her one-time mentor, Gerhard Richter, have consistently pushed painting to the limits of representation and, in the process, have developed a very confident post-painterly abstraction. Confronted by Fries’s crisp abstract works we become conscious of her art’s effort to assert itself in a contemporary context. Her works force the viewer’s eye to travel across unconventionally laid down paint, without the compass of icon, through an emptiness that seems both meditative and unsettling at the same time. Jason Martin’s work, likewise, can seem simultaneously expressive, unearthly and hypnotic. His monochrome surfaces - paint scraped across stainless steel, aluminium or plexiglass – are unnerving precisely because they position themselves between the human gesture and the mechanised.
Elsewhere in the exhibition landscape is a common thread. In particular, we see uninhabited spaces that must make themselves from nothing and threaten to revert to being ‘nowhere’. Mankind has always been haunted and tantalised by the image of a world without its own presence. Even the great creation myths contain within them a cataclysmic destruction or a flood - a glimpse of how close we exist to a world without the human. With this comes a perennial instinct to start afresh. Andreas Gursky turns to the fantasies of the recent vacuous and generic developments fuelled by money so new it hasn’t yet been made. Here we see a new vision of mankind, human effort versus desert emptiness, roads going nowhere but into themselves, a train with no station. Olafur Eliasson has turned to the desolate atmosphere of his native Scandinavia for this imagery. In these pictures the very distinction between nature and culture becomes challenged. In his own bare, haunting works Sam Irons shows that it is the act of prohibition that defines the human trace: the blank back of a casino in New Mexico; the tantalising tape drawn across a vacant art fair. ‘It is the forbidden that makes a place of nowhere,’ Irons claims. He demonstrates the ways in which photography contains its own barriers, inherently surreal because photographs must always ‘promise a knowledge they can’t deliver’.
The hiatus is the absence of narrative. In the hiatus attention is drawn to the material itself: sand, paint, glass. Larry Bell’s elusive cubes seem to exist as a geometric twilight, at once transparent and reflective. Since the 1960s his experimentations with vacuum-produced glass planes have been responsible for some of the most exquisite and exacting minimalist sculpture. Young-Jin Choi’s equally evocative photographic prints are caught between the semi-abstract beauty of the images themselves and the manmade ecological destruction they record. Choi’s photographs of South Korea’s coastline lie between the aesthetic and the tragic; they create their own moment of suspension, freezing the catastrophe and rendering it sublime.
A hiatus is both stasis and transition. It suggests the resumption of normal service soon, but also offers a space between, a place of nowhere in its own right. We might choose to stay in the moment of indeterminacy, safe within the still eye of the storm, or we might choose to hear the demand within it for a movement forward. The only question is: where to?
"Nowhere ... do we go from here?" is presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NX.
Admission Free.