KENDELL GEERS

Please see below information on a new controversial exhibition by Kendell Geers which opens at BALTIC on 21 September with a preview for media on the morning of 20 September

Attached is a single low-res image of Fuckface:The Passion. If you would like to see more images please let me know.

KENDELL GEERS

IRRESPEKTIV

21 SEPTEMBER 2007 – 6 JANUARY 2008

LEVEL 4

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents Kendell Geers' first major solo exhibition, Irrespektiv. The work of Geers is compellingly recognizable, confrontational and challenging while being laden with complex and deep political implications. The exhibition, which opens on Friday 21 September, will include over 20 of Geers works consisting of wall paintings, a selection of painted ready-mades, neon sculptures and video work.

The exhibition results from a major new co-promotion between BALTIC and four other European galleries; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K) Belgium, B.P.S.22 Espace de Création Contemporaine Belgium, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon France and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) Italy. Each presentation of Irrespektiv is unique and the BALTIC show includes five newly commissioned works. Accompanying the exhibition is a new catalogue published by Bom.

Geers creates work that aims to disrupt commonly accepted moral codes and principles. He has been described as an activist, however as Geers explains:  “I’m always looking for the limits when I find them I try to collapse them, and then I start again. We understand ourselves and our world through limits such as morality and social etiquette.” Through his work he examines the psychology of things that cannot be controlled, things beyond the gallery space that art cannot touch, from extreme phenomena to emotional states. He employs a strategy of disruption, using weapons of sexuality, violence and fear - his work is where language and value systems become physical.

  Approaching the exhibition the visitor is immediately confronted with 48 hours a wall wrapped in wallpaper featuring enlarged newspaper print. On closer inspection each article describes a tragic killing, immediately drawing us into Geers world of violence, death and trauma. Stepping inside the exhibition Geers reveals razor-sharp humour that plays with the viewer’s repulsion and ridicules racial or religious stereotypes. Covering the entire back face of the space the visitor encounters the wall painting PostPopFuck 31, comprising an ornamental pattern of hardly decipherable rippling letters, in which the viewer eventually recognizes the word ‘fuck’. The concept is carried on with FuckFace, the skull of an executed man with a bullet hole behind the ear and The Passion Considered both of which have been ‘desecrated’ with the font. The graphical design is a provocative and cynical gesture which rejects a cultural heritage that is perceived as oppressive.

His artistic strategy is about transparency - working as a crystal creating a lens with which trauma can be examined. As the visitor navigates the exhibition they will encounter a burning car wreck, Monument to the Unknown Anarchist , a work created as part of the five gallery co-commission programme.

The sense of a ‘nowhere’ in Kendell Geers’ work erodes any controlling languages, and does not submit to any ideological systems, its relevance is worldwide. As Geers expands: “I am living in a time of contradictions where Contradiction, Truth, Desire, Passion and Anarchist are nothing more than names of perfumes. I live in an age of digital reproduction where truth no longer exists in an image, where every image can be altered and changed and anybody can be erased from or inserted into history.”

 For further information regarding BALTIC please contact:

Ann Cooper, BALTIC Media Officer 

T: 0191 440 4915 E: annc@balticmill.com

NOTES TO EDITOR

Kendell Geers Biography

Kendell Geers has exhibited extensively around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Hung, Drawn and Quartered, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2004/2005); Sexus, Cimaise et Portique, Albi, France (2004); In the Flesh, Salon 94, New York (2004); The Forest of Suicides, MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2004); TerroRealismus, Migros Museum, Zurich (2003); Prototype, Red Sniper (with Patrick Condeyns), Grand Salle, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003); Inferno, Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan (2003) and Sympathy for the Devil, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002). Geers has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, most notably the 8^th Biennale de Lyon (2005), Dionysiac, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005), Transcultures, The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2005) and Dokumenta 11, Kassel (2002). In early 2007 Geers presented a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent, and later his year will present at B.P.S.22 and the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon.

Exhibition Catalogue

Catalogue I RRESPEKTIV is published by Bom and is available from the BALTIC shop and online www.balticmill.com, retailing at £30.00.

Further Information

To find out more about Kendell Geers as well as other exhibitions at BALTIC visit the BALTIC Library & Archive online database http://archive.balticmill.com The database contains over 100 films and audio files documenting the artists and their work.

BALTIC is a major international centre for contemporary art situated on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, . BALTIC presents a constantly changing, distinctive and ambitious programme of exhibitions and events, and is a world leader in the presentation, commissioning and communication of contemporary visual art.

BALTIC has welcomed over 2.5 million visitors, since opening to the public in July 2002.

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

Gateshead Quays

South Shore Road

Gateshead

NE8 3BA