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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present new work by Christian Marclay, incorporating collage, video animation, and photography. The exhibition continues Marclay’s investigation into the relationship between sound and image through sampling elements from art and popular culture, and reflects the anxiety and frustration of the current global pandemic and political crises. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery from January 21 to March 25, 2021.
We are pleased to present a virtual performance of No!, in which Marclay’s collage serves as a score, starring vocalist Elaine Mitchener. The performance will premiere on this page Thursday, March 4th at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT. No registration necessary (an email reminder will be sent to the address used to access this viewing room).
The gallery is currently open by appointment. Click here to plan your visit.
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The voice is at the center of the exhibition. In a series of photographs showing screaming faces, cut and torn fragments from comic books, movie stills, and images found on the internet are arranged into haunting, mask-like composites, and then recorded by the camera. Capturing the paper’s inherent creases and tears, the photographs mix analog and digital elements, and investigate the computer screen as a contemporary physical surface.
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This exhibition marks the premiere of Fire, 2020, a hypnotic new animation. Using small pieces cut from comic books, the single-channel video work is an impressionistic representation of fire. Over fifteen hundred photographs shown in rapid succession suggest a flip book, creating the illusion of a flickering, fiery mosaic in motion.
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Flames are also the subject of Raging Fire, 2020, a large collage made of paper cutouts from comic book illustrations of fire. The piece transforms representations of all manner of war, catastrophe, explosion, and arson into abstracted yellows, oranges, and reds in a variety of styles.
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Also on view will be No!, 2019, a suite of 15 original collages made from comic book fragments. Conceived as a graphic score for a solo voice, these original collages were scanned and made into an edition to be used by performers. While earlier works such as Manga Scroll, 2010, incorporated onomatopoeias disconnected from their generative action, No! uses vocal utterances, facial expressions, and body movements to prompt a performance.
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Writes Marclay, “Like my earlier graphic scores dating back to the 1990s, the use of words that illustrate their sonic counterparts engages non-traditional visualizations of sound as a possibility for generating music.” As in his music and video works, which splice together found recordings and film footage, the comic book segments are culled and recontextualized in vibrant, dynamic ways.
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Photo © The Daily Eye
Christian Marclay (born 1955) works in a sampling aesthetic, using fragments from the ephemera of popular culture to create new forms and meanings. Marclay's work has been shown in museums and galleries internationally, including recent major one-person exhibitions at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as Kunsthaus, Zurich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Marclay received the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 54th Venice Biennale for his 24-hour virtuosic video piece, The Clock, which has been shown widely to great acclaim. His work is in the collection of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
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The gallery is currently open by appointment. Click here to plan your visit. For any questions, please contact inquiries@fraenkelgallery.com
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Further Reading
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Christian Marclay: Index
Edition Patrick Frey / D.A.P. Forthcoming PublicationThe Xerox as sketch: Christian Marclay’s inventive method for creative thinking.
Marclay’s high-contrast black-and-white Xeroxes resemble scribblings in a notebook—the first stages of experimentation toward more finished works. Designed in collaboration with Laurent Benner, a graphic designer who has worked with the artist on various other books and record covers, this new book brings together the source material that has informed Marclay’s practice over the past few years.
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Christian Marclay: Things I've Heard
Fraenkel Gallery / Paula Cooper Gallery 2013Photography has been an integral element of Marclay’s practice since his earliest years as an artist. With an eye keenly (and paradoxically) attuned to sound-related subject matter, his photographs function both as source material for his works in other media as well as sophisticated, subtle works of art on their own terms. With an appearance of casual snapshots, Marclay’s photographs evidence a keen awareness of the history of the medium, particularly of Atget, Evans, and Eggleston. Things I've Heard is the first book dedicated solely to his camera-related photographs.
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Christian Marclay: stereo
Fraenkel Gallery 2008Spanning Christian Marclay's entire career, stereo explores themes of doubling and echoing that have been central to the artist’s work since the early 1980s. Through sculpture, photography and mixed media works, Marclay investigates the visualization of sound and music. As a visual artist who also works as a musician (Marclay pioneered the use of a turntable as a musical instrument in the late 1970s), the relation of the audible and the visual remain the driving force of his work. Designed by the artist himself, and printed by the craftsmen at Trifolio in Italy, stereo is an important addition to Marclay’s oeuvre.
Link To Publication
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Christian Marclay
Current viewing_room