Buenos Aires. Zinny/Maidagan
The Artists
Links
Texts
As their fisrt presentation in Fundación PROA, Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan, present Buenos Aires, a group of twenty works thought especially for Proa´s contemporary exhibition space. The artists continue with the site-specific pieces, exhibited on different locations, that have been characteristic along their career. Zinny/Maidagan´s works communicate with the exhibition space. Their inquiries are concentrated on the angles, on the small corners that subtly and without notice present variations in the space, remaining unobserved.
At PROA they decided to work on the space between the two floors, filling it, thus transforming into a new space through the use of festive colors, enclosing it. Taking the geometry exposed by a glass frame illuminating the reading room, Zinny/Maidagan offer a new experience, and with it a change in the visitor’s familiar and constant attitude. Suddenly the Library appears to have a bright green roof, not allowing light into the room. The method of enclosure makes us think and feel the upper floor, later taking us upstairs to find a chromatic dance of colors and fabric that play around the Cafeteria.
Drawings and sketches illustrate the roots of the project and their approximation to the space. Plexi glass painted with color spray paint and familiar images of Buenos Aires reference experimental works and geometric abstraction, the works of Madi, Argentinean artworks of the 40s and a generation of artists concentrated on saturating our memory.
Used in the beginning of the 20th century by the avant-garde movements, abstraction is redefined by their work in a contemporary way. It is no longer a question of abstraction as a mean to its own nor as an opposition to the concept of representation; but as a use of geometrical elements in order to redefine the bond between spectator-work-space, looking to catch the spectator’s interest using pure geometrical forms. It is about the subjective link between spectator and emplacement, which is determined by the poetic, political and social interpretations. pectator’s subjectivity.
Dolores Zinny (1968) and Juan Maidagan (1957) were born in Rosario, where they studied respectively Art and Medicine. In 199o they started working together and established MIMI studio in Rosario. In 1994 they moved to New York where they lived until 2002, when they moved to Berlin, city they are currently based on. In 1995, they were selected for the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. In 1998, they got the J.S. Guggenheim scholarship. During this period they had many solo exhibitions including “Offside” (1999) at New Museum and “Where the lion goes trough” (2000) at the Artist Space. This show was showcased that same year at the Museo Rufino Tamayo under the curatorship of Tayiana Pimentel.
In 2000 Stockholm’s Moderna Museet hosted a solo exhibition: “Movement in Art”.
In 2002 they were selected to be part of the DAAD program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm. Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Berlin. As part of this program, they exhibited “Such a Good Cover” (2003).
Since then, they have had regular exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. They participated in 2003’s Venice Biennale, 2008’s 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2008’s 7th Kwangju Biennale and 2006’s 2nd Seville Biennale. In Argentina, they showed “Variaciones” (Variations, 2000) at Ruth Benzacar’s Gallery. Curated by Leire Vergara, the show “La costa. El ataque lo mismo” (“The Cost. The attack the same”) was exhibited in Bilbao on 2007.
In 2009 they presented “Das Abteil” (Compartment, 2009) at MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst) in Frankfurt and Main, show that anticipates the artist’s work for PROA.
Their work has been included in several European museum’s collections and has been the subject of many essays.
http://www.sparwasserhq.de/talk/doloresjuan.htm
http://www8.umu.se/art/personal/tidigare_anstallda/dolores_zinny/dolores_zinny.html
http://universes-in-universe.org/esp/magazine/articles/2008/zinny_maidagan
http://www.arsmagazine.com/100114-N2.html
http://artnews.org/gallery.php?i=673&exi=19218
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/7519
http://www.generalpublic.de/
http://www.fundacionbiacs.com/site_es/artist-pages/91_artist.htm
http://www.mmk-frankfurt.com/
http://www.macromuseo.org.ar/
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/3951
http://www.clockworkgallery.com/Dolores%20Zinny%20&%20Juan%20Maidagan/installation.html
"Foreword" Compartment / Das Abteil. Sculpture / Stage. Exhibition Catalogue
Sussane Gaensheimer
Director, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Frankfurt am Main
The “poetics of the site-specific”, as Ranjit Hoskote terms the metaphors, the references and intimations, the quotations and the semantic transpositions innate in the works of Zinny & Maidagan, perfectly encapsulates the essence of their oeuvre. Their artistic approach is from the outset fundamentally defined by a reference to the exhibition site and its architectural, political, social, cultural and psychoemotional significance. This intellectual inquiry is then subjected into their works to constant poetic transformation. The room and all its connotations form the system of coordinates within which they anchor their installations, sculptures, paintings, models and collages. Zinny & Maidagan use concepts and words to codify these coordinates in language. In this context, the intellectual reference points the artists take for their spatial reflections are specifically the 20th century’s architectural, philosophical and literary modernisms.
In recent years, Zinny & Maidagan’s works have involved strong site-specific references and they have sought to include the viewer in the way their architectural installations function. Spatial and symbolic themes, such as the fold, are realized in the widest range of forms and materials or as the footprint for expansive architectures. Their works using fabric curtains whose interplay of folds, seams and wraps was transposed onto the architecture to blur the dividing line between what is in front and what is behind, highlight the symbiosis and relationship of architecture and volume in their work. In the context of these works, they produced a large number of collages and models that served not only as the conceptual framework for their sculptures and installations, but also to convey their vision of space.
Zinny & Maidagan developed a group of sculptures, paintings, collages and models for the “Compartment / Das Abteil” exhibition at MMK Zollamt. For the first time they are presenting works that consistently advance the central development strands of their oeuvre while at the same time abstract away from the unequivocal site specificity that typified their output in recent years, and thus achieve a high degree of formal autonomy. As their starting point they have taken the year 1927, when the former City of Frankfurt Customs Office designed by Werner Hebebrand that later morphed into the MMK Zollamt was first erected in the very dense residential fabric of the old town, something that was to be completed destroyed in the Second World War.
The works’ titles and the different concepts that Zinny & Maidagan specifically weave into their collages, create a veritable web of references: Das Neue Frankfurt, the epitome of modern urban planning and pioneering for the residential estates of the 1920s, Futuropolis, an expression for the urban civil society of the future, Das Abstrakte Kabinett by El Lissitzky, Gernsback Continuum, borrowing from the literary work of the same name by William Gibson while also alluding to Hugo Gernsback, editor of the first sci-fi magazine “Amazing Stories” dating from 1926-7, Hombres Pelearon, a novel by Jorge Luis Borges, likewise dating from 1927, Kap Arkona, the first streamlined modern cruise-ship and the model for the future of shipbuilding and finally, floating above all else, Marcel Broodthaers’ Département des Aigles.
After their many years of intellectual effort, I would like to thank Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan for this exhibition, which is formally and conceptually so inspiring, for their trusting cooperation and our friendship. My cordial thanks also goes to all the other persons who contributed to the realization of the exhibition and this publication: Bernd Reiß, who together with the artists devised the exhibition and organized the catalog, to Sophie von Olfers for her work on the exhibition and catalog, to Carsten Wolff of Fine German Contemporary for designing the catalog and to Margaret Warzecha of hauser lacour kommunikationsgestaltung for the design of the room at MMK Zollamt. I am especially grateful to the Jurgen Ponto-Stiftung zur Förderung junger Kunstler und Ralf Suermann for their generous funding for the exhibition and to Matthias Kunz and Sabine Knust, who so enthusiastically supported the project and helped finance the catalog.
The Irresistible Call of the Future
On Zinny + Maidagan’s ‘Das Abteil/ Compartment’
Ranjit Hoskote
Fragments.
As in any reflection on the art of Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan, we begin with the site.
The Zollamt, as its name suggests, was the main customs office of Frankfurt am Main from the late 1920s to the 1980s. It now stands across the street from the Museum für Moderne Kunst, and serves the MMK as a project space. Built in 1927, the Zollamt was an anomaly on arrival: it was the only modernist building in the city’s mediaeval old quarter, centred around the Römerberg; the other modernist buildings of the 1920s, which formed what is called the ‘New Frankfurt’, das Neue Frankfurt, were situated in other districts. And so matters remained until World War II came to an end in May 1945, when the Zollamt was among the few structures left standing in the Altstadt, most of which had been destroyed in the devastating Allied bombardment of Frankfurt. Through an unexpected turn of events, the Zollamt became an anomaly all over again, for a different reason: having previously been too new for its old surroundings, it was suddenly too old for its new environment. It became that paradoxical object: a relic of the modern in the midst of the gradual reconstruction and restoration of the old quarter between the 1950s and the 1980s. And yet, precisely as an isolated relic of the modern, it carries within itself the promise of renovatio that inspired many of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, the Constructivists, the Surrealists, the contending exponents of Art Deco and the pioneers of the International Style, the enthusiasts of rocketry and interplanetary travel, the melancholy elegists of the future metropolis in cinema and the optimistic visionaries of the high-rise and grid-mapped city of tomorrow. The Zollamt embodies the guiding premise of these diverse and often mutually antagonistic movements: that the modernist object is charged with the mandate of transformation; that it incarnates the irresistible call of the future, irrespective of its present context.
At least four of the elements from which Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan have developed their richly complex and compelling constellation of sculptures, models, collages and interventions, ‘Das Abteil/ Compartment’ (December 2009-February 2010) at the MMK Zollamt, are already present in this brief narrative about the site. First: the date, 1927, as a point of anchorage in history, around which a variety of events, personae, proposals and perspectives are constellated. Second: the dramatisation of newness as a shifting horizon of newness, brought into play by the destiny of the building in relation to its changing historical and topographical contexts. Third: the spectral presences of diverse aesthetic and political avant-gardes, which have accompanied the building through its change of purpose, as it has transited from being a node of bureaucratic regulation to a site of cultural production. And fourth: the belief, favoured by the 1920s avant-gardes, in the modernist architectural or art object’s capacity to dominate and transform its surroundings with its own confident newness; a belief that Zinny + Maidagan do not relay as an unexamined legacy, but with which they engage critically.
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Like their fellow Argentine, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Zinny and Maidagan never forget that the simplest of incisions, folds or crimps can transform the nature of space, time and consciousness. Since coincidence, verging on a Borgesian serendipity or a Jungian synchronicity, attends all the activities of Zinny + Maidagan, it was, of course, in 1927 that the Italian-born Fontana returned to Italy after 22 years in Argentina, to study with the sculptor Adolfo Wildt.
Spending time with the art of Zinny + Maidagan, we find ourselves arcing across to another source of avant-garde ideas in the 1920s: Constructivism. We think of El Lissitzky’s 1930 account of the reciprocal influences that had emerged among the newly liberated arts of the Soviet epoch, and especially his assessment of the distinctive contributions of Malevich and of Tatlin: “In the course of this work, two clear and definite conceptions… have been crystallised. ‘The world is given to us through sight, through colour’ was the first conception. ‘The world is given to us through touch, through materials’ was the second. In both cases the world was a geometrical order. The first conception [that of Malevich] demands no more than pure spectral colour confined in abstract form within the rational ordering of geometrical elements – a plane geometry of colour. A world of crystalline organicism. This world emerges within an endless visual space. Its further consequences were the renunciation of the colours of the spectrum and the renunciation of the planimetric figure that finally remained (black and white). Painting was thus superseded and gave way to pure volume formation. The architectonic character of this stereometric formation was immediately understood. Thus painting became a transfer point for architecture. A new asymmetric equilibrium of volumes was set up, the tensions of bodies were expressed in a new dynamic way, and a new rhythm was established.”