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May 3, 2007- June 9, 2007
Reception: May 2, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Tim Hawkinson
PaceWildenstein
545 W 22nd St Tim Hawkinson Scout (2007) |  Tim Hawkinson Head Plant (2007) |  Tim Hawkinson Totem (2007) |
How Man is Knit also coincides with Hawkinson’s current exhibition of five new works at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Zoopsia: New Works by Tim Hawkinson (through September 9, 2007) and Tim Hawkinson: Sculpture at NyeHaus, 15 Gramercy Park South (through June 16, 2007).
Public receptions for the artist will be held on the evening of Wednesday, May 2nd from 6-8pm at PaceWildenstein, 545 West 22nd Street, and at NyeHaus to celebrate Tim Hawkinson: Sculpture from 7-9pm at 15 Gramercy Park South. As with all groups of Tim Hawkinson’s work, the connection between each piece can be tenuous, yet in this exhibition, How Man is Knit, the themes are considerably more evident than usual. As John Yau states in his catalogue essay, “None of these things is out of the ordinary, but what the artist makes them become, often through such simple means as weaving, piling, and stringing together, is viscerally and visually startling. His work is capable of stirring up our most inchoate feelings, those primal anxieties we cannot quite put a name to, and most often choose to ignore.” While the Getty group is entitled “Zoopsia”, or animal-based hallucination, clearly living up to its name, the work PaceWildenstein will exhibit revolves around systems of sense perception and organized mechanically around matrixes or network-like systems.
The Sensory theme is typified by objects as divergent as Head Plant, a bouquet of sense organs on stalks reminiscent of esophagi and ear canals, and Scout made from cardboard, box strapping, and urethane foam to form a “Buck Skin” outfit designed for a 6 foot tall sensory homunculus, the grotesquely distorted textbook depiction of a human used to illustrate the density of sensory nerves in different parts of the body. Seen throughout the exhibition, the systems of networks are best demonstrated by the Klein Basket. Here the artist applied newly acquired basket weaving skills to the unlikely task of fashioning a “Klein Bottle”, a kind of three-dimensional Mobius strip where, Felix Klein, the late 19th century mathematician, explained, the inside and the outside of a volume could be made contiguous by twisting the form through fourth dimensional space. In practice, Hawkinson’s version made of bamboo strips and mounted on gimbals to allow it to turn through two axes becomes a sort of hand-made screensaver, occupying space in the real world.
Like the Klein Bottle, these themes and systems fold through the exhibition, asserting themselves differently in each work, yet maintaining a general direction for the artist’s inquiry.
PaceWildenstein and Tim Hawkinson would like to thank Doug Harvey, L.A. Weekly writer, for creating the anagram “How Man is Knit” for the exhibition title.
Tim Hawkinson (b. 1960) was born in San Francisco, California. He has a BFA from San Jose State University (1984), and an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles (1989). He has continued to live in Los Angeles ever since, participating in more than 60 group shows and exhibiting in more than 30 solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
In addition to the current exhibition at the Getty, Hawkinson was the subject of a retrospective organized by curator Lawrence Rinder in 2005. The exhibition was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art and later the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney is currently planning a major exhibition set to open in December 2007.
Tim Hawkinson’s work can be seen in numerous public collections throughout the United States including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; UBS Art Collection, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego. The Stuart Collection commissioned the artist’s 2002 large-scale sculpture Bear; a 180 ton, 23-1/2 ft teddy bear created from eight uncarved granite boulders which will remain on permanent view.
Art Reviews of How Man is Knit
| Artforum.com May 8, 2007 | Dawn Chan | "If the sculptures on display at NYEHAUS cement Hawkinson’s reputation as a ingenious tinkerer who creates fully formed objects of marvel, then the charm of his newer work, on view at PaceWildenstein, shifts slightly in nature: Now it’s his turn to marvel at modernity’s prefab contraptions...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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