Frantiska +Tim Gilman
We are formed by our past, but it is precisely the passages that we have forgotten that are profoundly radical and shape us the most. So to understand ourselves, to understand the past, we have to concentrate not on material forms, but on traces.
Minimalist artists introduced the psychological idea of gestalt into art, that the art is what you see in front of you, basic, comprehensible and fundamental forms. It seems today that their work was emblematic of their understanding of the world – decisive, apparent, rational, understandable.
We feel like we are on much shakier ground. There seems to be no bedrock for belief, and we don’t live in certainty. We don’t define our lives, our work, with concrete principles. Each day we react to what we apprehend, with the multitude of messages and information and changes that we witness.
So for this show we revisit works in the Minimalist tradition, which look like attempts to create absolute forms. These works reflect the solidity of a system, the mind, the human experience. The common materials these artists favored, their lack of adornment or deliberate aesthetic enhancement leaves clear a path to finding the transformational potential inherent in the object, that which can free us.
We draw them from memory, from storage, from the pages of books, to revitalize them. But our process runs counter to their systems of belief: we use illusion, the immaterial, not the gestalt, but the impression.
The appropriation of their work is a jumping off point for our effort to engage with this shift in solidity that makes today distinct from the history we draw upon. We endlessly search for something in the future that resides in the past. Without knowing what we seek, we remember that we forget, and forgetting is essential.
Frantiska + Tim Gilman vivent à Prague et à Brooklyn. Ils ont une création artistique commune et oeuvrent ensemble comme critiques d’art et commissaires d’exposition.
Expositions solo
2005 Futura, Prague
Circa, Montréal
2004 “The King’s Two Bodies” Davide Dimaggio Mudimadue, Berlin et Milan
2003 “Solo” Gallerie NOD, Prague
“In Practice” Sculpture Center, NY
2000 Gallerie V.Spaly, Prague
Expositions de groupe
2004 “Open House : Working in Brooklyn” Brooklyn Museum, NY
“Nowhere else but here” Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, Londres
2003 “Regionale” Kunsthalle Basel
“Exit Biennial : The Reconstruction” Exit Art, NY
2002 “Painting as Paradox” Artists Space, NY
1999 “Fauna” Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Varsovie
“Perplex” Gallerie V. Spaly, Prague
