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Kunsthalle Basel opens Paul Sietsema exhibition

Kunsthalle Basel presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Europe of recent works by Paul Sietsema, on view 14 June–26 August 2012.

Paul Sietsema, exhibition poster, Kunsthalle Basel 2012, design: Robert Dallas Gray

Born in 1968, the Los Angeles and Berlin based artist has lately been receiving considerable attention for his films and other works. Each specific work by Paul Sietsema can be described as a formalization of the work process — the end phase or perhaps just the suspension of this process — following several years of researching, constructing and layering of the varied, often personally connoted cultural material. Thus, the durational character of films is equaled by the duration of the process of their making — a particular work ethic that informs the work’s proper subject, while the motif and medium may vary. Sietsema’s drawings and paintings, often realized with the use of idiosyncratic, labor-intensive techniques devised by the artist, usually involve working through existing artifacts, which serve as a starting point for series of material transformations. Thus, a conventional found photograph of a sail boat was used for the series of four Calendar boats (2012). The work emerged in a complex process involving mechanical reproduction, coating the surface with latex and stripping it off after it was treated with ink. In works such as Painting for assembly, State museum painting or Chinese philosophy painting (all 2012), the artist restretched the canvases of found paintings of minor historical value back to front on the original stretchers to show their empty, unprimed surface and use it for making new enamel paintings.

The films, shot on 16 mm, are composed of still images of specific objects, collected and manipulated by the artist, staged in sequences or encounters among things that can range from found objects to drawings, painting frames and photographic prints. Sietsema’s interest in the very idea of work corresponds to his inquiry in the material quality of pre-digital era images, which cannot be separated from their carriers and in time show signs of wear and change — such as celluloid tape and photographic paper. Prior to the finished artwork, the laborious treatment of the objects brings them in relation with their function and history. The circumstances of the objects’ own making are revealed precisely through their careful un-making in the studio, a process to which younger artists are often invited to contribute. A plural authorship is thus created, while the errors made by beginners are incorporated to the final result.

KUNSTHALLE BASEL
STEINENBERG 7, CH-4051 BASEL
T: +41 61 206 99 00
F: +41 61 206 99 19
www.kunsthallebasel.ch

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