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Generali Foundation presents Morgan Fisher. The Frame and Beyond

The Generali Foundation in Vienna presents Morgan Fisher. The Frame and Beyond, an exhibition on view through July 29, 2012.

Morgan Fisher (b. Washington, D.C., 1942; lives and works in Los Angeles) came to prominence in the early 1970s as an experimental filmmaker in the context of structuralist film, where the primary focus was not on the content to be represented but on an analysis of the medium itself. From the mid-1990s, based on a post-conceptual position, he turned to monochrome painting and installations of monochrome paintings.

Entirely foregoing the illusionism of narrative, Fisher reveals the conditions that underlie our perception, reflecting the production and constitution of the filmic image, as well as the relationship between film and time/space. The exhibition Morgan Fisher. The Frame and Beyond is accompanied by a selection of four films that have already been shown at international film festivals: Production Stills (1970), Picture and Sound Rushes (1973), Cue Rolls (1974), and the critically acclaimed Standard Gauge (1984).

The “frame” in the exhibition’s title refers not only to the film frame, but also to that of painting. The exhibition at the Generali Foundation includes two central series of paintings: the Italian Paintings (1999) and the New Alien Pendant Pair Paintings (2011), consisting of twelve monochrome canvases made for the Translations show at Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), created in response to the museum’s specific architectural spaces.

The two series highlight Fisher’s engagement with monochrome painting, the frame, the world inside and outside this frame, the relationship between figure and ground, and the specific relationship between work and viewer—themes that have been under close scrutiny since the abstraction of modernism and Minimalism.

The exhibition Morgan Fisher. The Frame and Beyond sheds light on the turn from film to painting in Fisher’s work. At the same time, it highlights the relevance of experimental film to a still-ongoing media critique and to attempts to revitalize painting in spite of immanent resistance.

Curated by Sabine Folie in collaboration with Ilse Lafer

Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15
1040 Vienna, Austria
T +43 1 504 98 80
[email protected]
foundation.generali.at

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