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Accidentalism represents a loosely affiliated art movement related to assemblage, conceptual art and process art during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is characterized by the interplay and tension between human systems and their physical instantiations often to surprising and humorous outcomes. Artists associated with the movement are Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Greg Colson, Terry Winters, and Tim Hawkinson.
By the end of the 1980s, Fischli/Weiss had expanded their repertoire to embrace an iconography of the incidental, creating deadpan photographs of kitsch tourist attractions and airports around the world. For their contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale, at which they represented Switzerland, Fischli/Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called "concentrated daydreaming"—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zürich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on. [1] For the Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), Fischli/Weiss planted a flower and vegetable garden conceived with an ecological point of view and documented its periodic growth through photographs. [2] In an early review of Colson’s 1988 “Accidental Non-Un-Intentionalism” exhibition at Angles Gallery, Brian Butler wrote in New Art Examiner , “The main feeling these works project is one of investigation, not completion. A visual/intellectual questioning – a search into the quality of meaning, object, and the environment – is the ultimate outcome.” The diagrams and maps Colson deploys speak to the detached, abstract quality of much human analysis, at the same time smuggling social critique into each work. Roberta Smith of The New York Times described Colson’s 1990 debut exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery: “In nearly all of Mr. Colson’s works, the combination of modesty and grandiosity, of mental exactness and physical imprecision adds up to an odd, sad beauty. Elliptical as they are, his pieces often seem to scrutinize the conflict between the active center and deserted margins of industrialized society.” [3] Throughout the 1990s and onward the scale of Winters’ work and its visual complexity has grown considerably. Continuing to take from the natural sciences and information systems, amongst other subject matters, the construction of his compositions has transitioned from occupied fields to plaited grids and networks that offer unpredictable images. [4]
Winters reforms his subjects to maintain their resonance and referentiality – what one sees in his compositions is ambiguously familiar – while waxing to an analog for the act of their making. [5] Hawkinson tinkers with everyday materials to build surprising mechanical art works. “I guess it comes from early on in childhood, a fascination with moving parts and sort of the magical,” he suggests. In his studio, Hawkinson explains how he used gears, switches, nozzles, buckets, and pie tins to build a drumming machine that captures random drips of rain, amplifies them, and organizes them into music. “It’s not even electronics. I don’t know what it is,” he admits. One of Hawkinson’s largest projects, "Überorgan," is an inflatable installation in a space the size of a football field. For a version of the artwork the artists created a score for the organ using old church hymns. [6]
Joseph Kosuth, an American conceptual artist, lives in New York and London, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including Ghent and Rome.
The Douglas Hyde Gallery is a publicly funded contemporary art gallery situated within the historical setting of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
Tim Hawkinson is an American artist who mostly works as a sculptor.
The Way Things Go is a 1987 16 mm art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects and industrial materials in the manner of a Rube Goldberg machine, though without the trope of accomplishing a relatively mundane task at the end.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were a Swiss artist duo that collaborated beginning in 1979. Their best-known work is the film Der Lauf der Dinge, described by The Guardian as being "post apocalyptic", as it concerned chain reactions and the ways in which objects flew, crashed and exploded across the studio in which it was shot. Fischli lives and works in Zürich; Weiss died on 27 April 2012.
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still lifes. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting simple subjects, mainly vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.
Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea and the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Hollywood. Founded in 1991 by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints. The gallery has three exhibition spaces in New York City and two in Los Angeles.
Terry Winters is an American painter, draughtsman, and printmaker whose nuanced approach to the process of painting has addressed evolving concepts of spatiality and expanded the concerns of abstract art. His attention to the process of painting and investigations into systems and spatial fields explores both non-narrative abstraction and the physicality of modernism. In Winters’ work, abstract processes give way to forms with real word agency that recall mathematical concepts and cybernetics, as well as natural and scientific worlds.
Afterall is a nonprofit contemporary art research and publishing organisation. It is based in London, at Central St Martins College of Art & Design. It publishes the journal Afterall; the book series Readers,One Works and Exhibition Histories.
Sprüth Magers is a commercial art gallery owned by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and offices in Cologne, Hong Kong, New York and Seoul. The gallery represents over sixty artists and estates, including John Baldessari, George Condo, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, David Ostrowski, and Rosemarie Trockel.
Greg Colson is an American artist best known for his works that straddle the line between painting and sculpture, which address concepts of efficiency and order. Using scavenged materials, Colson allows the physicality of his makeshift constructions to intrude on the precise systems he paints or draws upon their surfaces - striking a balance between subject and context, image and support, order and chaos.
Parkett was an international magazine specializing in art. The magazine ceased publication in Summer 2017 with its 100th issue and now continues online as a time capsule and archive with some 270 in-depth artists portraits, artists documents, newsletters and more at www.parkettart.com.
Yale Union was a nonprofit contemporary art center in southeast Portland, Oregon, United States. Located in the Yale Union Laundry Building built in 1908, the center was founded in 2008. In 2020, the organization announced it would transfer the rights of its building to the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF). It dissolved the nonprofit after wrapping up its program in 2021 and completing the building and land transfer. The space is now the Center for Native Arts and Cultures.
Sharon Lockhart is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography, often engaging with communities to create work as part of long-term projects. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1993. She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Rockefeller fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She was an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts, resigning from the school in August 2015 in response to the continued administrative turmoil at Roski to take a position at the California Institute for the Arts. Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Boyd Webb is a New Zealand-born visual artist who works in the United Kingdom, mainly using the medium of photography although he has also produced sculpture and film. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988. He has had solo shows at venues including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is a contemporary art gallery, owned by Eva Presenhuber, with locations in Zurich, Switzerland and Vienna.
Rock on Top of Another Rock is a sculpture by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss which was exhibited outside the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens in 2013. It consists of one large rock balanced on top of another large rock. An earlier incarnation of the work was a similar sculpture on the plateau of Valdresflya which was one of the artworks installed on each of Norway's eighteen scenic highways.
Peter Chanel Peryer was a New Zealand photographer. In 2000, he was one of the five inaugural laureates of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.
Peter Schweri was a Swiss artist, painter, illustrator, photographer and from 2008 on a music composer. He is a representative of the "Zurich constructivism".
Elizabeth Armstrong is an American curator of contemporary and modern art. Beginning in the late 1980s, she served in chief curatorial and leadership roles at the Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Palm Springs Art Museum. She has organized numerous touring exhibitions and catalogues that gained national and international attention; among the best known are: "In the Spirit of Fluxus", "Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art", and "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury". She is also known for organizing three California Biennials (2002–6) and notable exhibitions of David Reed and Mary Heilmann. Armstrong's curatorial work and publications have been recognized by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Getty Foundation Pacific Standard Time project and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other organizations.