Lotte Lyon : 1 : 2
1.9 – 2.13. 2010
AOYAMA | MEGURO is pleased to announce Lotte Lyon’s solo exhibition titled “1:2″ as our first show in the new year. Born 1970 in Graz, Austria Lyon presently lives and works in Vienna. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Europe and other places, including group show “Minus Space” at PS1, New York, in 2008.
Made with ordinary wood panels and paints available at do-it-yourself stores, each of her past sculptures has an intermediate size – not too big, not too small – resembling some kind of furniture such as a dining table, sofa, or bookshelf. Due to their non-functionality and vivid color patterns composed in a fresh manner that echoes minimalism, the sculptures have a certain richness and charm while having quite simple appearances.
The work “1:2″, from which the title of this exhibition comes, is based on the first space of our gallery (the one before the last space), a renovated small room of an old apartment building. When Lyon first made a visit to prepare her Japan-debut exhibition in 2006, she got deeply impressed by the space’s compactness and efficiency. In this new sculptural work, the space is reproduced by reducing two times from its original size, with the same Burberry check-like colored patten on its sides as a sculpture exhibited in the debut show. This work, which Lyon has planned for a long time since her initial visit, is an attempt to recreate the space without its function as a gallery.
Not only this sculpture, but also the other pieces in this exhibition, two series of photographs, deal with the issues of scaling and variation of size. In one series, Lyon set up ordinary items that she had purchased in Tokyo and photographed them. As a result, the photographed objects present new views of their own, appearing as sculptural volumes without revealing to the viewer what they really are, since they have lost their original colors and wholeness. The other series is about an office chair Lyon found in her studio in Tokyo, which had lost one of its casters. The artist decided to employ it as an ideal object for her new work, following her artistic experiments in recent years to take various things out of their usual contexts by disabling their functions.
The whole installation will consist of the sculpture, of 11 photographs from the two series, and drawings. All these new works emerged from the artist’s participation in the Austrian government’s residency program in Tokyo from August 2009 to January 2010.
This exhibition is also the first show after the gallery’s (minor) renovation.
2010.1.15.sat – 2.7.sun
1-8-28 Kami Meguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-0051 Suzuka apartment 1-A
2010.1.15.sat – 2.6.sat
*1.16 (Sat) 1.23 (Sat) 1.30 (Sat) 2.6 (Sat) 14:00-18:00 also appointment .
We will participate in New Tokyo Contemporaries from 26 January-21 February.
