May 5 – June 16, 2007
Andreas Grimm München, Munich, Germany
Andreas Grimm München is pleased to announce the opening of The Baudelaire Itineraries, a one-person exhibition of new works by New York based artist Lisa Tan. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.
For the exhibition Tan has created travel itineraries to see works of art referenced in the footnotes of Charles Baudelaire’s review of the Salon of 1846.* The minimal installation consists of both text-based works on canvas and photographs which are all unique pieces. The highly aestheticized “paintings” are paired with the photographs of the source material. The series explores how art is experienced and how our understanding of the world is always filtered though the history of representation.
There are a total of nine works in the exhibition and each work is based on a single page taken from the Baudelaire Review. Based on rigorous research, the spare formal aspects of the framed canvases exist in contrast to their rich and complex content. Focusing on the pivotal year 1846, just two years before revolution brought Louis Napoleon to power and marked the start of the events leading to the second empire in France, the series focuses on the end of the Romantic movement and the beginnings of Decadence which Baudelaire, as a dandy and Symbolist poet, was a leading figure.
* All works are derived from Jonathan Mayne’s Art in Paris 1845-1862, Salons and other Exhibitions, Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, published 1965 by Phaidon Press Limited. The footnotes are a combination of Baudelaire’s and Jonathan Mayne’s.
Selected reviews
Smolik, Noemi. “Lisa Tan: The Baudelaire Itineraries.” Artforum. Sept 2007.link / pdf