Group Show
Dove Bradshaw. William Anastasi, Margrete Sørensen, Torben Ebbesen
Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 14A
7.3. to 4.4.1998
Press Release
At Stalke Gallery:
Breath
William Anastasi
One of the great impediments to an optimistic attitude towards humanity and its future is the persistent nature of the persecution of the Jews. Christianity’s greatest heresy is anti-Semitism.
William Anastasi, 1987
In 1981 Anastasi made a drawing of the word “Jew”; in 1985, the first painting. Motivated by remarks of Freud—“Hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity”—and Voltaire—“...it is clear we all ought to become Jews, because Jesus Christ...was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew, and said expressly he was fulfilling the Jewish religion”—Anastasi has written: “Speaking in the broader...cultural sense...we are all Jews. The view from this tangent offers the clearest explication for the historical persistence of anti-Semitism. Prejudice, the purest mirroring of self-loathing, can in this light be identified as both engine and fuel, and it tells why ‘Jew’ is our most charged word. Where one ear discerns the single syllable which can conjure forth the very source of our culture, another hears an accusation wider and deeper than any in language.”
In Thomas McEvilley’s catalogue essay, William Anastasi’s Painting of the Word ‘Jew’, he notes that almost all of Anastasi’s work relates to structures of cognition. But in this quarter we find virtually his only work “directed straight at society and history, pointing unambiguously at social problems and issues and social and political history.”
This exhibit consists of etched panels of shatterproof glass, each with the words “I am a Jew” in fifteen languages.
Dove Bradshaw will be showing six cement paintings from 1998. Cement has not been ignored by sculptors, particularly since the ‘60s. But no paintings come to mind. A humble substance, yet epitomizing strength, it creates a displacement when used in painting.
2v0, 1971–1998 is number one of an edition of ten commissioned by The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh. The original was designed in 1971. When vertical it is a clock in sympathy with Jarry’s “Pataphysics” in that it tells a different time whenever consulted. When horizontal, it is a level without a benchmark. Bradshaw has said about this work, “I was interested in misidentifying time and space in a single instrument, at first not thinking of it as art but as a useless invention.”
Thomas McEvilley said in conversation with John Cage: “Dove’s work seems to act according to nature.” Cage responded: “Particularly when it doesn’t seem to be art.”
Stalke Galleri
Review:
The Thunder of Silence
Minimalistic, clear, and quietly expressive exhibition by four talented aesthetes at Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen.
“Are we all Jews?” the American visual artist William Anastasi asked with his work Jew, posed on museum and gallery walls since the early 1980s.
Jesus was a Jew, Anastasi points out. Does that not make us all Jews? And is that why Jews have been persecuted so extensively? Is it ourselves we hate?
Whatever the case, Anastasi continues to explore the subject in the exhibition at Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen, where the phrase “I am a Jew” is repeated in 15 different languages on panels of shatterproof glass.
Dove Bradshaw contributes a series of untitled minimalist wall objects in a clear aesthetic arrangement that discuss the possibilities of monochrome painting and the relationship of objects to space and surroundings. Her explorations of materials like cement and various forms of acid-treated metals give the works a crisp, nature-like feel.
Poetic Sculpture
Dove Bradshaw, who also hails from the USA, additionally exhibits a small poetic sculpture consisting of two connected glass spheres filled with liquid.
The liquid can be made to move from one sphere to another, prompting reflections on concepts such as time, fullness, and movement, while ultimately reminding us of humanity’s limited ability to oppose the laws of nature. Left to itself, the water balances evenly, and everything returns to normal.
Margrete Sørensen contributes a piece in the otherwise serene and aesthetic exhibition at Stalke that reflects the individual's self-perceived existence in relation to close personal relationships. Each individual in a given social circle is replaced by symbolic and secretive speech, and as one steps into the work—and it is strongly suggested that one does—the artist’s systematization of her surroundings can be easily transferred to one’s own personal reflections on magic and loss.
Torben Ebbesen, who is currently also exhibiting at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, participates with a series of landscapes where fragments of everyday life appear with varying clarity, and a complex sculpture where constructive and organic forms intertwine to create a possible image of the world.
By Torben Weirup
