de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong is proud to present a collection of the work of three formative artists of the twentieth century. American conceptual artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are presented alongside French minimalist sculptor and painter Bernar Venet. These three unique and distinctive artists have made their stamp on the cultural heritage of their time by bringing particularly into focus language as art and subsequently art as language. Each artist, in separate ways, seek to utilise declarative forms of mass communication through the exploration of large-scale imagery and text creating radical new visual approaches to conceptual art.
About the Artist:
Jenny Holzer (b. Ohio, 1950) is an American conceptual artist from the Feminist era of the post-minimalist American aesthetic. Most famous for her text-based large-scale public installations Holzer has spent her career usurping approachable modes of public discourse such as t-shirts, billboards, broadsheets, plaques, marble benches and giant projections. Holzer's success lies with her ability to question and challenge threats to the status-quot with a poetic grace and sooth-saying foresight that has been both terrifyingly cutting and exact throughout her career. Within "Visual Landscape - Radical Abstraction" de Sarthe Gallery presents two of the artists most defining works with "Finding Extreme Pleasure …" (1983 - 85), a large Danby Imperial White marble bench that is part of Holzer's Survival series and "If You Aren't Political Your Personal Life Should Be Exemplary" (1998), a Bronze plaque.
Barbara Kruger (b. New Jersey, 1945) is an American conceptual collage artist whose distinctive aesthetic of black and white photographs overlaid with text explore the issues of identity, gender and politics. Kruger has been consistently confronting social relations in a bold way with her punchy, pronoun-heavy combinations of videos, sculptures, photographs, prints, books, T-shirts and knickknacks since the late 1970's. Although her work can be described as straightforward, making simple statements such as "I Shop Therefore I Am", the work itself is potent with complex questions about social norms. de Sarthe Gallery will present an example of both early and recent work of Kruger's with "Untitled (Specific)," a photostat print with tape and plastic self-adhesive lettering in the artists frame from 1979 alongside, "Face It" a ink pigment print on Halnemuhle Photo Rag.
While the work of both Kruger and Holzer can be easily linked by both medium and message, Bernar Venet (b. Nice, 1941) is an artist that works under a somewhat more subtle, but no less powerful, declarative manner. Venet's paired back and minimal approach to aesthetic and message masks his work in a complex realm of discourse. In the late 60's, by using mathematical equations that had no mathematical significance, Venet asks the viewer to find the perceived message hidden within bewildering mathematical language, such as that presented in the complex and beautiful "Asymptotic Error Estimates for the Guass Quadrature Formula" (1968).
Image: © Barbara Kruger, de Sarthe Gallery
