Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

Rockbund Art Museum is very pleased to present the first major survey exhibition of the renowned Swiss artist John Armleder in China. Again, Just Again will be on display from 16 October, 2021 to 19 December, 2021. As the inaugural highly anticipated exhibition after the museum’s major renovation, Again, Just Again is a celebration of his influential five decades of work and inspired by the many inter-disciplinary detours in art throughout this journey. The exhibition features an ambitious display of new and existing work such as painting, ready-mades, works created on-site, works on paper, site-specific wall drawings, and archival material. With each floor of the museum, the spaces inside and outside of exhibition halls have been transformed through a unique scenography assembled to guide the audience through a choreography of unexpected encounters and visual experiences.

Taking the spirit of the artist’s embrace of chance, open-endedness, and collective experimentation, the exhibition is also proud to include collaborations between the artist, the museum, and other practitioners to intervene, translate, and ultimately to extend new associations and meanings in response to different elements of Armleder’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Following the artist’s long curiosity into inviting collaborators outside of the world of art to re-appropriate and completely redefine the order and way of seeing his work, the museum is delighted to commission the acclaimed Shanghai-based photographer, Leslie Zhang, to take authorial direction over an entire exhibition hall on the third floor, transforming the space into a contemplative mis-en-scene, whose spatial and aesthetic design will draw on his own personal language and memories in response to a curated selection of Armleder’s works. Elsewhere on the fifth floor, an ambitious and rare display of the artist’s drawings and experimental works on paper, ranging from pen and ink, watercolor, gouache, acrylic oil and collage, will be installed in conjunction with archival material and a unique site-specific wall drawing, a rich and layered ensemble created especially for the exhibition in conversation with the artist.

For the duration of Again, Just Again, Rockbund Art Museum will host a series of public programming and educational events including: guide tours, walk and talk, lectures, conversations, panel discussions, live music, performance, body workshops, adult and family workshops. Highlighting key concepts of chance, repetition, and appropriation, the program looks to further expand on the themes in the exhibition to encourage audiences to probe, experience, and acquire an in-depth look into and behind the exhibition through a fun and inspirational way.

With Armleder’s multi-sensorial repertoire of different art-making rules and techniques, compositional questions such as improvisation and order serve as an underlying concern in many works, connect to the artist’s longstanding interest in the history of painting and the evolution of its form. Many of his works push, short-circuit, or collapse the specificity of painting through challenging the conventions that connect the paint, canvas, and stretcher. Actions such as pouring, splashing, and chemical reactions loosen or heighten the level of authorial control by the artist. As Larys Frogier, the Director of Rockbund Art Museum elaborates, “John Armleder always cultivates ambiguous visual and conceptual situations where patterns, colors, objects are very much clinically or rigorously organized, composed, installed, repeated, while they are conveying a strong feeling of uncertainty and visual experience that everything is possible as long as we are available to welcome the chance, the accident, the displacement.” His connection to experimental painting is often in dialogue with other mediums and influences outside of the field of art; sometimes they are traces created from a performance, or arranged together like a visual score, allowing works to be repeated using different materials and in circumstances that create further variation, blurring the separation between the before and after.

Rather than isolated objects, his paintings and other series of works are regularly presented with other objects, such as furniture, to highlight or contrast their formal qualities, textures, color, or symbolic function as they collide with other media. Therefore, the emphasis of chance takes on a new dimension as a path to go beyond what is expected or easily predicated, giving the chance to escape an arbitrary limit. This approach defines Armleder’s consistent refusal to stay within the margins of one singular style, format, or rule. He joyfully skates between different boundaries of an eclectic range of genres and artistic influences: from Modernism to Constructivism, Op-Art, Pop, Fluxus performances, and abstract or gestural painting. Likewise, the flux between art and everyday life is constantly utilized as a creative energy to cross-fertilize with other influences outside of the field of artworld: from high and low design, avant-garde music, and Hollywood B-movies.

In many ways, art is an imitation of life, and perhaps poetically this influence extends the other way into another potential ecology, where life begins to simulate the beauty of forms created by art. If art can exist anywhere or be activated in any place, the accumulations series by Armleder is perhaps the most playful version of the readymade by the artist. On each exhibition floor, there are different orders of piled objects consisting of flotsam, decorative ornaments, cheap copies and everyday detritus assembled into unexpected spaces in the museum building. Held in a delicate poise, they appear incongruous as a random displacement, or as left-behind objects, soon to be taken away at any noticed. Beauty exists in how disparate materials gravitate towards one another into accidental sculptures, without the prompt to look more carefully, these are the moments in daily life that often pass us by unnoticed.

“We never sought to approach this exhibition as a retrospective, simply because we discovered very quickly that John never stops experimenting with new ideas and methods of creating art. Even with existing works, they transform according to the time and place they are presented, continuously evolving into a unique scenography with each exhibition. It will be fascinating how the audience will interact with the exhibition to continue this process of non-stop experimentation,” says Billy Tang, Senior Curator at Rockbund Art Museum

Special Supported from: ROCKBUND, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts CouncilOutdoor Media Partner: OXO SENSESMobile Video Promotion Partner: Douyin

上海外滩美术馆荣幸地宣布，将于2021年10月16日至2021年12月19日举办瑞士著名艺术家约翰·阿姆莱德在中国的首次大型个展 “再，再”。作为美术馆全面翻新后备受期待的首展，“再，再”以艺术家跨学科的多元创作实践为线索，向国内观众呈现了他五十余年的艺术探索之路。除了最具标志性的代表作，展览还将呈现艺术家的近作和为上海外滩美术馆特别创作的作品，展品涵盖绘画、现成品、在地创作、纸本、特定场域墙绘及文献材料等。同时，美术馆每一层展厅的内外空间都通过独特的置景进行了改造，引导观众开启一场精心编排的不期而遇和视觉盛宴。

秉承艺术家一贯拥抱偶然性、开放性和集体实验的精神，展览同期亦发起了艺术家、美术馆及其他实践者的合作，以更好地介入并解读阿姆莱德如此丰富的作品创作所蕴含的不同元素，并最终延伸出新的联想和意义。在长达半个多世纪的创作生涯中，艺术家始终保持着敏锐的好奇心，积极邀请艺术界以外的实践者共同合作，对观看作品的顺序和方式进行再度挪用和重新定义。延续艺术家长期跨领域合作的传统，此次上海外滩美术馆特别委任著名上海摄影师张家诚负责整个三楼展厅的设计。张家诚将空间转变成一个舞台式置景，把自己的个人语汇和记忆融入空间和美学设计中，与阿姆莱德的作品形成交流和对话。另外，美术馆的五楼将呈现一系列珍贵手稿和实验性纸本作品，包括钢笔画、墨水画、水彩、水粉、丙烯画和拼贴画。同时，这一展厅还将展示部分文献资料和一件巨幅墙绘作品，层次错综、元素丰富，是艺术家专门为美术馆空间而特别创作的作品。
“约翰·阿姆莱德：再，再”展览期间，上海外滩美术馆将举办一系列公共教育活动，包括：导览、游读、讲座、对谈、圆桌会议、现场音乐、表演、身体工作坊、成人和家庭工作坊等，旨在突出偶然性、重复、挪用等重要概念，以进一步探讨展览中涵盖的话题，鼓励观众以既有趣味又有启发性的方式探索、体验和深入了解展览及其背后。

阿姆莱德擅长运用不同的艺术创作原则和技术调动观众的多元感官体验，即兴和秩序等构图问题成为他许多作品的核心关注点，继而关联到艺术家长期以来对绘画历史及其形式演变的探索兴趣。他的许多作品向颜料、画布和画框间的传统关系发起挑战，进一步挖掘、突破或瓦解绘画的特殊性。倾倒、泼洒和制造化学反应等行为或稀释、或加强了艺术家对创作的把控程度；上海外滩美术馆馆长拉瑞斯·弗洛乔形容道，“阿姆莱德常营造模棱两可的开放式视觉和概念情境，各种图案、色彩、物体的组织、构成、布置、乃至反复看似不偏不倚、严丝合缝，却散发着一股强烈的不确定感，从视觉上让观者感受到万事皆可能，只要我们张开双臂拥抱一切偶发、巧合和错置。” 他的实验绘画常常是与艺术领域之外的其他媒介和影响的对话；它们时而是从表演中产生的痕迹，时而又像一段视觉配乐，让作品通过不同的材料在不同情况下得到重复，衍生出更多变化和发展，消弭前与后之间的区隔感。

不论是绘画还是其他作品，阿姆莱德的创作呈现的从来都不是孤立的物体，而是与其他物体（如家具）的结合，在与其他媒介的碰撞中突出它们的形质、纹理、颜色或象征功能，并强调不同媒介之间的差异。因此，对偶然性的强调提高到了一个新的维度：超越预期，又难以预测，这便为真正实现不受任何限制提供了可能性。这一手法奠定了阿姆莱德拒绝单一风格、范式或规则的实践基础；恣意徜徉于多种流派和艺术影响的不同边界之间：从现代主义到建构主义、欧普艺术、波普艺术、激浪派表演，以及抽象或行动绘画。同样，艺术与日常生活之间的互相渗透不断被他用作一种创造能量，与艺术界之外的其他表现形式相互融合：包括高档与平价设计、前卫音乐和好莱坞 B 级片等。

在许多方面，艺术是对生活的模仿，而这种影响或许又诗意地延伸到另一个潜在的生态系统中：在那里，生活开始模拟艺术创造的形式之美。如果艺术可以在任何地方存在、或在任何地方被激活，那么阿姆莱德的“堆叠”系列或许称得上是他最为有趣的现成品创作。本次展览中，美术馆的每层展厅都会出现根据不同规则堆砌而成的堆积物，其“原材料”包括各种废弃物、装饰品、廉价山寨货和日常闲置，出人意表，引人玩味。这些堆砌物造型虽不失别致，但看起来却格格不入，像是某种马上要被清理的临时堆放物或废置物。不同的材料在相互堆叠下形成偶然的雕塑，自成一种美感，但如果不特别加以留心观察，这些又恰恰象征着日常生活中我们未曾注意便消然流逝的各个瞬间。

“我们从来没有把这个展览当作回顾展，原因很简单，因为约翰从未停止新的艺术思考与创作实验。即使是现有的作品，每当它们与新的时间和地点组合在一起时，就会不断演变成新的场景，赋予每一场展览不同的景观。我十分期待看到观众与展览的互动，那肯定非常有意思，同时也是阿姆莱德这场从未停歇的艺术实验的延续和衍生。” 上海外滩美术馆资深策展人曾明俊表示。

特别支持：洛克·外滩源、瑞士文化基金会上海办公室户外媒体合作伙伴：奥所传媒独家短视频合作伙伴：抖音