Liz Deschenes

London Opening, Sunday 29th September from 6 to 8pm

Liz Deschenes
29.09.2019 - 17.11.2019
30. 30.Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Keystone, Liz Deschenes’ 8th solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition consists of a non-linear survey of existing works from 1995 to present, after being exposed to external conditions and physical interventions by the artist. Deschenes thus re-authors her own work, changing their usual protocol of circulation and pretended material identity to address broader, irresolute aspects of value creation. The exhibition follows a non-hierarchical reading of the artist’s pivotal series. Dye transfers, monochromatic screens, moirées, silver-toned photograms and blue wool works escape their chronological succession and their differential value to operate as keystones, essential structuring elements that hold the other pieces in place. The works’ varying status, depending solely on the agency and decision of the artist, delves into the conventions that define works as artistic. By altering the work’s life cycle, Deschenes delays value over time and suspends the accelerated chain of art production. The surface alterations of the works result from different factors and were all approached differently, according to their materiality and circulation history. Some photograms were further exposed to light, continuing their development over time, or were affected by other chance events that changed their morphology. By leaving room for the unplanned, the works separate the idea of authorship from the exclusive imprint of the artist. Other works underwent manual interventions such as wiping, brushing or scraping, seeking to remove rather than add elements, paradoxically resulting in Deschenes’ most expressive visual work. Keystone is a turning point in Liz Deschenes’ work as much as it is a continuation of her exploration of photographic processes and their response to time. The works resume Deschenes’ interaction with the experimental side of avant garde practitioners of the 20th century, based on unpredictable, non-strategic results, associated with the exploration of open-ended aspects of a medium. Photography detaches from its mimetic capacities to affirm itself as an object in a constant state of flux, recording its own history and unpremeditated evolution.

Liz Deschenes (1966) lives and works in New York. Her work is currently presented in a group exhibition at Punta Della Dogana / Pinault Collection, Venice. She had a survey exhibition at the ICA Boston with an accompanying monograph (2016). Recent solo exhibitions include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); MASSMoCA, North Adams (2015) and Secession, Vienna (2012-2013). Deschenes’ work was included in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner at the Whitney Museum, New York (2015) travelling to the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016). Past exhibitions include Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at MoMA, New York; the Whitney Biennial 2012 and Parcours at the Art Institute of Chicago with Florian Pumhösl (2013). Her work is part of the permanent public collections of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee.