Grieder Contemporary is proud to present, for the first time in Switzerland, the work of the acclaimed American artist film maker, Lewis Klahr. This exhibition is a collaboration with Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, and it will feature the world premiere of a major new work, Circumstantial Pleasures (2016).
Making films since 1977, Klahr is a master collagist and re-animator; he rescues, collects, collates and adjusts fragmentary images into miniature tableaux which are seized, shot by shot, with a 35mm digital still camera and built painstakingly into complex and evocative sequences operating in time and space.
"Miming the processes of memory, Klahr pulls together the discards of contemporary life into scenarios that seem like Hollywood films dimly remembered after a night of serious drinking... Klahr's films generate a blend of melancholy and desire from this interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting" (Tom Gunning)
Circumstantial Pleasures is the title film of a planned feature length trilogy. The film is a departure and vacation from the artist's signature use of found, mid-century images. As Klahr says: "Circumstantial Pleasures instead employs contemporary sources - the disposable paper and plastic detritus (receipts, foils, envelope interiors, product wrappings) that is omnipresent yet so overlooked as to be nearly invisible - to depict an everyday ecology of the present tense. A soundtrack of three '80s pop songs structures and guides the unfolding. That all three songs are from the 1980's suggests not so much backward looking as the reality that the imagery to depict their world view wasn't available till the present moment."
In addition to the film, the exhibition will include a striking series of stills for recent films and, for the first time, a group of unique collages that reflect the process of the artist's film-making but which are stand-alone works that explore the treasure chest of rich associations and chance encounters that make up Klahr's very particular but vast archive.
In 2015 MoMA presented the world premiere of Sixty Six, a feature length film organized in twelve discrete chapters. Sixty Six is a summation of Klahr's decades-long work in collage filmmaking. The film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Screened in June this year at Tate Modern, we are delighted to announce that Sixty Six will receive its Swiss premiere on Friday September 30, 2016 at 5:15 pm at Cinema Corso 3 as part of the Zurich Film Festival, followed by a conversation with the artist and Marcy Goldberg. BOOK TICKETS HERE
Lewis Klahr (*1956 New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. Klahr's work has been screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia, including MoMA, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of the Arts, the Whitney Biennial, and Rotterdam, Goteberg, Hong Kong, Berlin, Shanghai and London film festivals, amongst many others. He was awarded the Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Residency Award (2010) and the 2013 Stan Brakhage Vision Award.
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