Lisson Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent film and photographic
works by Gerard Byrne. This will be Byrne’s first solo show in the UK for two years
and will present new works, previously unseen in this country.
Gerard Byrne exploits the ambiguities inherent in historicising the legacy of
representational forms to address broader critical questions. Referencing diverse
sources from Modernist theatre to Playboy magazine articles, Byrne questions the
history of cultural consensus that grows around these subjects. Through selection and
carefully nuanced reproduction, Byrne’s work exposes the anomalies that affect the
materiality of a picture, object or fact when transposed from its original historical
context to the present time. With a keen awareness of how representation
fundamentally alters the subject observed, this exhibition proposes a loose
correspondence among historical materials, obliquely assembling a class of ‘more
archetypal forms’.
Works on show will include video installation Untitled Acting Exercise (in the Third
Person). First shown at the 2008 Sydney Biennial, Byrne records the efforts of two
actors and a director to understand a script through dramatisation. The script uses
passages taken from published accounts of interviews conducted by US military
psychiatrists in 1946 with P.O.W.s awaiting trial at Nuremberg, depicting the act of
dramatisation as a fractured attempt to understand history through a coherent
narrative.
Read moreAlso on show will be Byrne’s 2008 film work ‘68 Mica & Glass (a Demonstration on
Camera by Workers from the State Museum), for which Byrne asked two conservators
to dis-assemble and re-assemble Robert Smithson’s Untitled, 1968. The film depicts
the conservators handling the work according to a carefully choreographed sequence
of movements and gestures, inducing what Byrne describes as “a sort of
performativity in time”. ‘68 Mica & Glass is a meditation on how Smithson’s works
exist in time. There is a sense of inertia inscribed in the development of the film; the
work is at no point shown in a state of completion, as if suspended somewhere in
the loop platter of the film projector.
Born in Dublin in 1969, Byrne studied in Dublin and in New York at the Whitney
Independent Study Programme, graduating in 1999. Byrne received the Paul Hamlyn
award in 2006 and represented Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in June 2007. He
lives and works in Dublin.
Press enquiries Catherine Mason at Calum Sutton PR catherine@suttonpr.com
+44 (0)20 7183 3577
Recent Solo exhibitions include the ICA Boston and the Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen (2008) as well as the Kunstverein Dusseldorf (2007).
Gerard Byrne’s work has been widely exhibited in significant international exhibitions
including: The Turin Triennale; The Gwangju Biennale and The Biennale of Sydney (all
2008); The Lyon Biennale (2007), A Short History of Performance 3, Whitechapel Art
Gallery, London; 3rd Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2006); Eindhoven - Istanbul,
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2005); The American Effect,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Istanbul Biennale, (2003);
Manifesta 4, (2002).
Forthcoming exhibitions include a new commission for the Henry Moore Foundation,
group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern (30 January – 22 March 2009) and the
Kunstmuseum Basel (16 May – 15 August 2009) and solo shows in 2009 at the
Glasgow International and the Renaissance Society Chicago.
Visitor Information
Lisson Gallery 29 & 52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm; Sat 11am-5pm
Admission: Free
Nearest Tube Station: Edgware Road
