USED / solo Show + LIKE / Group Show
Solo show by Richard Kern
Group show featuring works by Aurel Schmidt, Andrew Pope, Bjarne Melgaard, Brad Phillips, Chloe Wise, Duncan Hannah, Gillian Carnegie, Joe Andoe, Lucy McKenzie, Rita Ackermann, Todd Bienvenu, Walter Robinson and Yui Kugimiya
26 May – 2 September 2017
We are pleased to present Richard Kern’s new solo exhibition at the gallery, for which he will assume the dual role of both artist and curator.
USED and LIKE are two related exhibitions presented in the same venue that open up a dialogue between Richard Kern's photographic work (USED) with his taste for contemporary painting (LIKE).
USED presents a selection of 50 vintage photographs all of a similar size, 7 x 5 inches.
This is the format generally used for “test prints”, roughly the double of a Polaroid.
Beyond the practical and economical aspect for artists, these dimensions provide specific aesthetic qualities. Scarcely larger than the standard silver prints used for family and amateur photos, they obviously evoke these now obsolete objects. This format also elicits the idea of quantity. Through a single photo, you can envision beyond this one or that one, the entire series of images realised by Richard Kern over the years, his practice, his method, the repetition of his gesture, and his obsession.
His technique was born in the heart of New York City’s 1980s underground scene, where some of his first models became iconic personalities such as Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Lydia Lunch, Courtney Love, or more recently Lucy McKenzie.
Richard Kern, Kim and Joyce Wave, 1999
Richard Kern, Kim and Joyce Wave, 1999
Since then his work has continued to propose playfulness and a shared expression with his models, creating thereby its iconography, and thus desacralizing the fantasy image of the American youth conveyed by the dominant media.
LIKE is a group exhibition conceived by Kern, made up exclusively of paintings that include works from his personal collection. Because Richard Kern the photographer is also a painting enthusiast.
His personal collection mainly consists of exchanges with artists through encounters, affinities, or friendships.
Through the sharing of his vision, this exhibition also provides us with a glimpse of contemporary pictorial creations gleaned from Richard Kern's artist associations over the last 30 years up to the present, with whom he shares the same history, and the same crossed paths.
There is Aurel Schmidt, Andrew Pope, Bjarne Melgaard, Brad Phillips, Chloe Wise, Duncan Hannah, Gillian Carnegie, Joe Andoe, Lucy McKenzie, Rita Ackermann, Todd Bienvenu, Walter Robinson, and Yui Kugimiya.