helmut lang

past

make it hard

07.22.11 - 08.08.11

the fireplace project

east hampton, usa

 

press release

installation views

video excerpt

selected press

 

 

THE FIREPLACE PROJECT, a contemporary art gallery/project in East Hampton, is pleased to present the next exhibition: MAKE IT HARD, a solo exhibition by Helmut Lang. The exhibition is presented by Neville Wakefield.

 

"The columnular forms that rise from floor to ceiling invoke forces of nature and culture. They suggest both the accretive geological slowness of stalactites, and the destructive force

of tornadoes. And if their material has been subjected to similar violence here it takes on the graceful abstract form of the endless columns; odes perhaps to Brancusi’s sculptural connection between terrestrial form and spiritual grace, life, and afterlife. Lang’s ambiguous forms are made not of stone or bronze, but of the objects and things he created during his twenty odd years as a fashion designer. The archive that stood testament to his immense achievement within that field—he had shredded. The materials and fabrics he used to give temporary definition to the body are now just traces of natural and synthetic fibers, plastics, metals, leathers, fur, skins, feathers and hair—erasing the past and the difference they once stood for. Thus metabolized, the material began to take the form of strangely beautiful excretions: witnesses to both the transience of our creative endeavors, and the enduring need out of which such efforts are born." —Neville Wakefield

 

HELMUT LANG was born in 1956, in Vienna, Austria. He lives and works in New York and Long Island.

 

THE FIREPLACE PROJECT is located in the former Talmage garage at 851 Springs Fireplace Road, in the Springs historic district of East Hampton, across from the Pollock- Krasner House.