Tony Tasset

Opening Reception: March 8, 7-10 PM
March 8 – April 26, 2008

Gallery Hours:
Thursday - Friday 12PM – 6PM, Saturday 11AM – 4PM

Kavi Gupta Gallery - Leipzig
Spinnereistr. 7, Halle 4 B
04179 Leipzig, Germany
+49 (0) 341 478 42 926
www.kavigupta.com

Kavi Gupta Gallery / Leipzig is pleased to present our first solo-exhibition of Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset, who is well known for his conceptual practice which is continually engaged in a dialogue with postmodern theory, humor, love and mortality. Using himself, his family, natural surroundings, art historical and pop-cultural references, Tasset conveys highly charged iconography through a subtle, absurd, tragic/comic narrative. Not able to be held to a specific medium, Tasset’s work spans across all forms of media from sculpture, performance, photographs, video, and installations.

Tasset’s exhibition in Leipzig will include three sculptural works that allude to collective childhood experiences; a life-sized dirty snowman, unclothed with outstretched twig arms and a crude face made with dried leaves and punched in eyes and mouth, a stack of children’s mud pies, decorated with sticks, a feather, and an autumn leaf and a minimal gesture of two rocks stacked atop each other. Each work is a meticulously crafted trompe l'oeil reproduction of actual objects, constructed of various art materials including resin, plastics, acrylic paint and brass. These works all present the primitive and first gestures of sculpture forming mass from snow into a simple figure remaking out of dirt, the pie Mom makes in the kitchen or simply placing one object on top of another as a marker or simple memorial. Tasset says about this work, “I manipulate and remake quotidian imagery in order to reveal new meanings, examine context, subvert clichés and honor the everyday.”

Tony Tasset (b. 1960) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Tasset has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe. A solo exhibition with an accompanying catalogue just closed at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO where he also completed a major public sculpture commission. He is currently exhibiting in Recent Acquisitions: Focus on Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions also include Into Me/Out of Me at the Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii. His work has also been included in exhibitions at Kunsthalle, Bern; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. He has won the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. He is also in the permanent collections of many institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, The San Francisco Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

For more information on the exhibition please contact info@kavigupta.com or call: +49 (0) 341 478 42 926