Jack Hanley Gallery
395 + 389 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Xylor Jane: Twin Prime in 389
Erwin Wurm in 395
November 4 - December 4, 2004
The Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco is pleased to present two exhibitions by artists Erwin Wurm and Xylor Jane in 395 and 389 Valencia, respectively. Highly contrasting in style and medium, these two exhibitions present the artists’ differing approaches to the exploration of visual systems.
Xylor Jane’s new works on paper continue to explore her interest in numerical systems. Through an obsessive repetition of colored dots, executed on a clockwise spiral, she charts out graphs of sequential order. Through slight alterations of the dot arrangement the compositions become descriptive visual fields. Utilizing bright color and variations in dot size these highly controlled works, often guided by faint grids, are surprisingly warm and aesthetic. The essentially abstract drawings, despite the constrained process, retain a sense of the artist’s hand as it moves systematically across the page. The rich fields of the drawings are reminiscent of similar geometric patterning used in the work of Sol Lewitt or in the formal arrangements of quilts.
Erwin Wurm’s art practice questions our expectations of quotidian environments and the way in which social mores operate. Wurm incorporates people, objects, and physical sites from everyday life to create temporary sculptures that transform their normative roles. Thinking through the locations of work, home, and leisure his conceptual sculptures subvert these classifications by performing unexpected acts that work against their perceived social system. This exhibition of photographic documentation provides access to these moments of deviation.
The Jack Hanley Gallery in Los Angeles, will also be presenting an exhibit of the work of Erwin Wurm, which will run from November 4 - December 4, 2004. Both exhibits coincide with I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 23, 2004 - January 9, 2005.