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Locks Gallery presents an immersive exhibition in homage to French author Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), on display from April 1 to May 13, 2011. Contemporary artists Thomas Chimes, Rebecca Horn, and William Kentridge recreate the beguiling atmosphere of Jarry’s absurdist scenarios. This exhibition of film, painting, installation, sculpture, photography, and prints will include a historical prologue of artworks by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Joan Miró. A catalog will be available in English and French.
Jarry believed in the use of masks onstage to convey “a character’s eternal quality” and his creation Ubu Roi indeed achieved posterity in the visual arts. In the exhibition, William Kentridge’s animated film Ubu Tells the Truth will be projected next to Pablo Picasso’s print strips The Dream and Lie of Franco. Both pieces inherit from the ignominious monarch, who they place respectively, in the aftermath of the South African Apartheid, and at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
Isolated in a dark room, Rebecca Horn’s mechanical installation Cinéma Vérité fuses its aqueous and light movements to draw a theatre of shadows on the wall. Her paintings on paper, scaled to the extent of her body gesture, further explore her reflection on the mechanical and the sensual, and science and alchemy, which also fueled Jarry’s thinking one century ago.
Deeply informed with Jarry’s writings and code of conduct, Thomas Chimes’s successive portraits of Jarry and his imaginary double Doctor Faustroll end up in some of his most mysterious and almost monochromatic white paintings. To Chimes, these shades of white constitute a “universe supplementary to this one” -in other words, the subject-study of Jarry’s Pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions”.
Locks Gallery is located at 600 Washington Square South in Philadelphia, PA. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For additional information please contact Locks Gallery: info@locksgallery.com / +1.215.629.1000.
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