The Pace Roberts Foundation for Contemporary Art asked Robert Storr, curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York, to select the first three artists for its International Artist-in-Residence Program. Storr chose national and international representatives for the program and then came to San Antonio in September, 1994, where he visited 40 studios in order to select a regional artist. Annette Messager of France, Felix Gonzalez-Torres from New York, and Jesse Amado who lives in San Antonio will prepare new works at ArtPace prior to its public opening on January 15, 1995. "New Works for a New Space" will be open to visitors until February 26, Wednesday through Saturday, noon through 6:00 pm and by appointment.
Annette Messager
Annette Messager was born in Berck-sur-Mer, France and now lives and works in Paris. After achieving acclaim as an artist in Europe, Messager, who is fifty, has come to the attention of museums and galleries worldwide, In 1995 her work will appear at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Los Angeles County Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Anne Rochette and Wade Saunders write in Art in America, March 1994, that Annette Messager "seems to treat taxidermy and photography as interchangeable in their capacity to preserve living things for eternity." For her installations, Messager uses dead birds and animals, photographs, stuffed toy animals, knitted garments, and written words which appear to unravel like so much yarn on the wall. The artist deconstructs and then reconfigures the world, working in series with names like "Effigies," "My Trophies," and ''Voluntary Tortures."
According to French critic Mo Gourmelon:
The works of Annette Messager do not necessarily go hand in hand with the morbid, although they seem to rub shoulders with it ... Her work exists between the lightness of a daydream and the darkness of a nightmare.
Messager is an inveterate collector of objects and images. She arranges them in relationship to each other in ways which jar the viewer. She also deals with fragments of the human body, inquiring into the nature of human identity and the role of women in society, including her own. Her new works at ArtPace will build on these images and ideas
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres lives and works in New York City. Not yet 40 years old, his biography lists solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries across this country and in Europe including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and the Renaissance Society in Chicago. A major survey of his work, curated by Nancy Spector, will be held at the Guggenheim Museum in February of 1995.
Gonzalez-Torres uses simple materials -- stacks of paper, pieces of wrapped candy, a string of lights, or a beaded curtain - to express complex, even conflicting ideas and emotions. The environment for his work is sometimes as broad as the cityscape surrounding one of his billboards. This is "outdoor art," he specifies, not public art. "Just because it's out on the street doesn't make it public." Other times, his audience is as narrow as the individual collector who purchases an empty box on the promise that the artist will fill it, over time, with objects. Gonzalez-Torres also exhibits his work in museums and art galleries, challenging seasoned art audiences to physically interact with the work, counter to their prior experiences. He encourages visitors to deplete his pile of candy or his stack of paper and take something home. The work is replenished from time to time by the gallery, much as we attempt to replenish our lives, one way or another, after a significant loss.
According to Simon Watney, London-based critic and writer:
Gonzalez-Torres finds and mobilizes materials which may function as analogies for experience and emotions which are not "explained" in any extended biographical supplementary exegesis. They are works about love, desire, loss, death, and mourning ... They encourage us to make as many associative connections as we like in relation to the materials assembled before us, as well as in relation to previous works.
The artist says, "I want my artwork to look like something else, non-artistic yet beautifully simple." He acknowledges his Cuban roots and his being gay, but does not conform to a predetermined cultural persona or visual preoccupation; Gonzalez-Torres confronts issues through elegant metaphor. His work for the opening of ArtPace, "Untitled (Beginning) 1994," addresses the Foundation's new venture and yet also evokes broader meaning.
Jessie Amado
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Jesse Amado, has spent the last decade rapidly building a name for himself in the visual arts. Amado received his MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1990. Since that time, he has been awarded a visual arts fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and artist-in-residence grants from the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia (through the NEA) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska.
In a review of his work at Davis/McClain Gallery in Houston, Houston Chronicle art critic Patricia Johnson said:
Jesse Amado is primarily a sculptor. The abstract elegance of his felt and metal objects suggests an orderly, cool approach to solving problems of proportion and scale, material and idea, as well as inside and outside. His direct antecedent is the late Joseph Beuys, whose materials Amado appropriates. Where Beuys intellectualized the shamanistic art of creating, however, Amado understands it directly and intuitively.
Amado was chosen for Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum exhibition "Texas/Between Two Worlds," and Johnson included him in her newly published book, Contemporary Art in Texas. In discussing his work, the artist says, "I think it's apparent I am very much influenced by minimalism, but I want to think of ways of overcoming it. I want to soften it, but keep its skeletal form. I want to make minimalism more personal, more subjective and ambiguous." Amado regards his residency at ArtPace as an opportunity to christen the new space as well as to find a new beginning for his own work.