Fia Backström & Christian Philipp Müller To Exhibit At Murray Guy 1/8-2/19

Fia Backström and Christian Philipp Müller will show 8 January - 19 February 2011 at Murray Guy. The exhibit will open Saturday, 8 January, 6 - 8pm. Also, on Friday, 14 January at 6:30pm there will be a performance by Christian Philipp Müller at 1OAK.

Murray Guy is very pleased to announce two exhibitions, by Fia Backström and Christian Philipp Müller, opening on Saturday, January 8. Both artists share an interest in reflecting on structures of authority and circulation, re-configuring processes by which information is made to take on a physical form. Each prowls for ways to conceive of representation and speech at a time when the categories of public and private or real and virtual seem entirely supplanted by the complexity of modern living.

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Fia Backström will install an arrangement of displays and screens which asks the viewer to imagine how value, authorship and agency might be produced within a shifting set of relations between context and content. As in many of her previous works, for instance Herd Instinct 360º, a working-through of formats for collectivity, or Studies in Leadership, a multi-part exhibition that examined models of leadership and authority, Backström encourages the viewer to reflect on various modes of rhetorical address and their multifarious visual forms.

Each element in Backström's environment communicates to the viewer by enacting a set of displacements or translations: Short verse printed on aluminum plaques seems to produce a feeling of meaning out of a recycled familiarity. The text evokes HSBC's "Different Values" advertising campaign or the 140-charater Tweet or "status update," but without shifters such as "we" or "you," the plaques disrupt any imagined intimacy. Wooden furniture-a bench, a bar, a wall segment-expands upon the existing wainscoting beneath the gallery's windows, recalling the socially designed atmospheres (inseparable from social media) of countless Brooklyn restaurants or bars, which transport a sense of legitimization to the rapidly gentrifying frontier. Linen curtains reproduce the design templates of Facebook and YouTube, configuring them as ambient backdrops while emptying out their collective threads. Reflective aluminum display systems present digital images--a computer keyboard, glass curtain walls, an image of the CEO of Toyota publicly apologizing-as though they were movable slats in a window blind.

Backström's installation seems at once to address the viewer intimately and at a distance, replacing the invitation to participate-"What's on your mind...?"-with the prompt-"Who's asking, and why?"

Christian Philipp Müller's "31 in Chelsea" takes up the rapidly changing neighborhood where Murray Guy has been located since its establishment in 1998. This work builds on two previous projects: Interpellations, presented in 1994 at American Fine Arts Co. in Soho, in which Müller insertEd Mock entries for the art gallery into New York travel guides, and Around the Corner, conceived in 2006 at Orchard on New York's Lower East Side, during which he offered a series of guided walking tours of the gallery's environs. In both of these works, Müller staged a cluster of relations between specific art galleries and broader neighborhoods and inhabitants, coordinating "disconnected times and spaces to bring the contradictions of the present into a sharper focus."

Müller's new project examines the structure of an urban neighborhood at a time when the very concept of a neighborhood-whose components are defined by their geographic proximity-is itself being rapidly reshaped by new forms of communication, exchange, and circulation. Beginning with the question "What is Chelsea?", Müller has arranged 31 visits and conversations with a broad cross section of Chelsea residents, organizations, and businesses. Not programmed by any overall sociological or demographic strategy, his visits comprise a sort of derivé, where one encounter leads to another. These range from the Hudson Guild Senior Center to the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a nightclub promoter, an executive at Google, a painter, and a restaurant owner, to name but a few.

Müller will use the gallery to stage the traces from his visits, organizing this archive into 31 boxes (one for each day of the show), which will confront the viewer as a hybrid between portrait, a map and a calendar. On January 14 at 6:30pm, he will gather his collected material into a performance, to be presented at the nightclub 1OAK, which has been located for the past 3 years in a lavishly renovated space below Murray Guy.

Müller and Backström have designed a new banner which will replace Murray Guy's existing flag for the duration of the exhibition, as well as an announcement card which Müller has addressed by hand to the gallery's mailing list.

Fia Backström (b. 1970 Stockholm, Sweden) will represent Sweden at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She recently presented a project at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Misty Harbor - At Your Leisure, which was commissioned as part of the museum's Nine Screens program, and her installation The Worker Through the Ages is currently on view at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009); the ICA, London (2009), White Columns, New York (2008). She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Backström is also a prolific writer, whose many essays and interviews with other artists have been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, North Drive Press, Pacemaker and Art on Paper, among many others.

Christian Philipp Müller (b. 1957 Biel, Switzerland) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. Major projects include Fixed Values at the Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1991), A Sense of Friendliness, Mellowness, Permanence at American Fine Arts Co., New York (1992), Green Border, Austrian Pavillion, 45th Venice Bienniale (1993), Interpellations, American Fine Arts Co, New York (1994), A Balancing Act, Documenta X, Kassel (1997), Hudson Valley Tastemakers, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2003-present), and Apollo Soyuz, Manifesta 7 (2008). From 2006-2008, Müller was a partner in the collaborative gallery Orchard, where he organized the exhibitions Around the Corner (2006) and Cookie Cutter (2008). In 2007, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which coincided with the publication of a monograph on his work by Hatje Cantz.

With thanks to the Consulate General of Sweden in New York for their generous support of this exhibition.

For more information, visit http://www.murrayguy.com/