Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed installing his solo exhibition RIO at David Zwirner, New York in 2009
Born (1971-03-02) 2 March 1971
Constantine, Algeria
Nationality French
Known for Contemporary art
Notable work Coup de tête (sculpture) (2012) Décor (2012)

Adel Abdessemed (born 2 March 1971, in Constantine, Algeria) is a French-Algerian conceptual artist. He lives and works in Paris and London. He is represented by Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv).

Biography

Adel Abdessemed spent most of his childhood in Batna, Algeria.[1] He then studied in Algiers at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he left in 1994 after the assassination of director Ahmed Asselah and his son inside the school.[2]

Afterwards he lived and worked in Lyon (École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1994–1998), Paris (Cité internationale des arts, 1999–2000), New York (P.S.1 Scholarship, 2000–2001), Berlin (2002–2004), Paris (2005–2008), New York (2009), Paris (from 2010 to present).[3]

About

"Abdessemed's art is love deprived of all romantic weakness. Love as a force, never a feeling." - Francesco Bonami[4]

"Establishing a true state of exception is the horizon of Abdessemed’s art, whether he is twisting the cabins of airliners like paper toys, floating a skeleton more than 55 feet tall in the air, or summoning wild animals to the streets of Paris. But the young acrobat suspended from the rope of a helicopter appears as a reminder and a warning." - Patricia Falguières[5]

"(…) Abdessemed seems to believe in a totemic spirituality. His works with animals resonate with memories of sacrificial rituals and primordial powers. True, Abdessemed does not want to go back to magic – on the contrary, he firmly believes that totems, like taboos, must be broken, since art is first of all "a means of liberation from oneself." - Massimiliano Gioni[6]

"(…) contemporary languages and media should be invented to provide the relevant expressions for this unknown world and its modes of living. Abdessemed has created a huge number of works that are clearly iconoclastic of the established world. At the same time, they embrace and celebrate this upcoming unknown world and its uncertain but exciting orders in a state of permanent remaking…" - Hou Hanru[7]

"(…) Abdessemed is at his most incisive on the topic of animality when dealing with human animals, a notion that stands the enlightened arbiter of reason—the humanist subject—on his head. As Larys Frogier reminds us, the artist refuses to anthropomorphize his subjects, such that non-human animals embody human feelings or accommodate our sentimental projections. On the contrary, the artist estranges the humanist subject from himself in order to reveal what is animal about him: those mechanical instincts and behaviors in which the relentless capacity to subjugate the Other is rationalized through the language of animality." - Pamela M. Lee[8]

"To the ambient fear, he responds with something resembling a fearless aggressivity. And as in the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, the point at which these two strands cross is where those elements that fall outside of the reigning social order, those elements for which dominant ideologies cannot account, become visible. Abdessemed’s artworks are precisely materializations of that crossing, emerging from the unresolved conflicts of the present." - Tom McDonough[9]

"In the same way that a dream’s meaning cannot be reduced to its narration but refers back to more remote phenomena taken from childhood, the meaning of Abdessemed’s works cannot be limited to their immediate, occasional origin. They refer rather to a horizon at once more distant and more ancient, made up of the totality of images and texts that have left their traces in the artist’s memory." - Philippe-Alain Michaud[10]

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Adel Abdessemed has also had solo exhibitions in galleries such as: Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv ("Conversation" in 2006, "Poursuite" in 2007, "NU" in 2011) ; Venus (Los Angeles: "From Here to Eternity" in 2015); David Zwirner Gallery (NYC : "Rio" in 2009, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" in 2012 ; London : "Le vase abominable" in 2013).

International art events

References

  1. ↑ "The Persuasionist: Wonder at the Weird World of Adel Abdessemed".
  2. ↑ "Algerian Teacher and Son Killed At School".
  3. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2015-11-21. Retrieved 2015-11-21.
  4. ↑ Adel Abdessemed. Les ailes de dieu/Le ali di dio, cat. exp., Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2009, p. 23.
  5. ↑ Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, cat. exp., Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, p. 210.
  6. ↑ Adel Abdessemed. Les ailes de dieu/Le ali di dio, cat. exp., Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaugendo, 2009, p. 62.
  7. ↑ Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, cat. exp., Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, p. 153.
  8. ↑ Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, cat. exp., Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, p. 174.
  9. ↑ Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, cat. exp., Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, p. 191.
  10. ↑ Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, cat. exp., Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, p. 109.
  11. ↑ Voir sur thecommonguild.org.uk.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Adel Abdessemed.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/20/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.