ARTE, esposizioni. Parigi, Galleria Andréhn-Schiptjenko: prima personale di Terence Gower

Lavorando contemporaneamente su una serie di corpi, ciascuno oggetto di ricerca e produzione per diversi anni, a volte addirittura decenni, realizza installazioni che vengono spesso riconfigurate ogni volta che vengono esposte

La Galleria Andréhn-Schiptjenko presenta la prima mostra personale di Terence Gower, esposizione che sarà aperta al pubblico dal 1 febbraio al 15 marzo 2025. Gower, nato nel 1965, è un artista canadese che lavora a New York e Città del Messico, oltreché in Francia. Egli si applica a molteplici media, quali video, scultura, disegno, installazione, suono e costruzioni architettoniche a grandezza naturale. Lavorando contemporaneamente su una serie di corpi, ciascuno oggetto di ricerca e produzione per diversi anni, a volte addirittura decenni, realizza installazioni che vengono spesso riconfigurate ogni volta che vengono esposte. Il risultato della sua ricerca è, sovente, l’appropriazione di fotografie d’epoca, film narrativi e documentari, materiale d’archivio e manufatti storici. Interessato al modo in cui le forme astratte veicolano idee astratte, inclusi i concetti ideologici, si dedica in massima parte allo studio e alla raccolta di forme, principalmente nei regni dell’architettura e dell’arte.

TERENCE GOWER: THREE INSTALLATION

Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery presents Terence Gower’s first solo-exhibition from February 1st to March 15th, 2025. Terence Gower (b 1965) is a Canadian artist working in New York, Mexico City, and France. Gower works in many media including video, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, and full-scale architectural constructions. Working on a number of bodies of work concurrently, each in research and production for several years, even decades, his installations are often reconfigured each time they are exhibited. As a result of his research, Gower often appropriates period photography, narrative and documentary film, archival material, and historical artifacts. Interested in how abstract forms represent abstract ideas, including ideological concepts, much of his work is spent studying and collecting forms, mostly from the realms of architecture and art. This exhibition brings together three projects that each demonstrate a different process of form generation, in several different media, including sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and installation.

HUMAN INDUSTRY

Human Industry (Escalator), 2025 is a suite of sculptures and works on paper based on the truncated form of a common escalator, an artefact of public and commercial sites that feature dense collections of humans on the move, such as train stations and shopping centres. The series emerged from observations during a day hike in Lower Austria in the summer of 2023, related in a short narrative that is shown adjacent to the works in the installation. «Near the end of the hike I passed a small warehouse surrounded by a scrub-filled yard. At the end of this yard the colossal hulk of a stainless steel escalator lay abandoned among the wild grasses, like a beached whale. This stark signifier of our human habitat was like the grand finale at the end of the day, and the powerful form soon found its way into this series of sculptures and drawings rendered in materials that relate back to the objects and their context».

GRUEN IN TEHERAN

Gruen in Tehran (2018 – ongoing) is a wall drawing and print series that employs woodblock, aquatint, silkscreen, letterpress, and digital techniques. The project is based on research in the Victor Gruen papers at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and tells the story of Gruen’s invitation by the Shah of Iran to conceive a new urbanism scheme for Iran’s capital in the early 1960s. Gruen’s professional history (from Austrian Jewish exile shop designer in 1930s New York, to his invention of the shopping centre typology in 1950s California, to global city planner in the 1960s) is detailed in a short, historical essay than runs through the twelve prints in the series. The work foregrounds the performative mark-making of Gruen the 1960s urbanist, who drew his schemes onto aerial photographs, resulting in geometrical compositions that were designed to actually shape the way we urban dwellers live in the cities we inhabit. These compelling geometric forms, interlacing in the wall mural like a complex Islamic ceramic composition, are all rendered using inks and paints that contain pigments sourced at the Tehran Bazaar.

FREE ASSOCIATION

Free Association (2010 – ongoing) presents the viewer with a cloud of suspended, fragmentary shapes, laser-cut from 6 mm aluminum and coated with a variety of coloured enamels. This work is based on the eponymous psychoanalytic technique, in which phrases, images, and memories are excavated from a patient’s unconscious. The shapes that make up the sculpture were likewise drawn from Gower’s unconscious, seemingly randomly, using automatic drawing, and those pen-and-gouache drawings were then used as templates for the mobile’s suspended forms.

INFO

Terence Gower

Three installations

February 1st – March 15th, 2025

Opening February 1st, 2025,  4 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Andréhn-Schiptjenko

56 rue Chapon

75003 Paris

Opening hours

Tuesday-Friday: 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Saturday: 1 p.m. – 7 p.m.

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