Mitchell Anderson and Jon Rafman at Maria Bernheim

Artists: Mitchell Anderson and Jon Rafman

Exhibition title: Posthumous Lives

Venue: Maria Bernheim, Zurich, Switzerland

Date: June 11 – August 27, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich

Let’s begin with an inherited belief — a vague picture of what exists beyond this life and extends uncertainly so into the next. Rendered material and concrete, this spirit is bound up in mundane stuff and built into vacant containers: dead stock trading cards, stacked up produce crates, idle confessionals. These things in themselves move us, provide a platform for an idea, demarcate a portal to a vision – a second life, a better life, a fully lived life. A certain kind of feeling exceeds these containers to transmit the promise of pleasure, all guaranteed by the touch of this talisman or the clutch of that prosthesis. Typically these objects are unremarkable, special for their generic qualities. For instance, cheap cloth adorns the table, or a medieval gif, lifted from some archive, decorates the chamber. Here they’re turned. Mostly by themselves. These mantles lend to the projection of reveries, passions. The works in this exhibition express this spirituality, anchoring us to the decidedly unspectacular. It becomes the other. Our expectations push, rub up against these prosaic things to reveal the magic of purported gravitas. These artworks ground an other world in this one; they confess the basic human search as formed in the present.

–Piper Marshall

Mitchell Anderson (b. 1985 USA, works in Zurich, CH) is currently featured in the Swiss Art Awards 2016 and his work has recently been shown at Le Manoir in Martigny, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Zurich and Wake Forest University, USA. He runs the Zurich off-space Plymouth Rock.

Jon Rafman (b. 1981 CAN, works in Montreal) has installations presently on display at Manifesta 11 in Zurich and the 9th Berlin Biennale as well as a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, The Zabludowicz Collection, London, and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster as well as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.

Mitchell Anderson, Un Symposium sur ‘Alien’: a semiotic square, 2014-2016
Laser etched titanium steel, 138 x 138 cm

Mitchell Anderson, Un Symposium sur ‘Alien’: a biological analogue, 2014-2016
Laser etched titanium steel, 138 x 138 cm

Mitchell Anderson, Un Symposium sur ‘Alien’: a sliding signifier, 2014-2016
Laser etched titanium steel, 138 x 138 cm

Mitchell Anderson, High Zest, 2015-2016
Trading cards (sealed retail boxes), marble, 22 x 13.5 x 13.5 cm

Mitchell Anderson, Tarot Card Table Piece, 2016
Street vending display, Piazza Colonna, Rome, 67 x 49 x 29 cm

Jon Rafman, Dragons Fucking Car I (Relief), 2016
White Carrara Marble, 152 x 126 x 20 cm

Jon Rafman, Dragons Fucking Car II (Relief), 2016
White Carrara Marble, 152 x 126 x 20 cm

Jon Rafman, Dream Journal (Wound Man Closet), 2016
CNC engraved wood, acrylic paint, video, TV screen, two speakers, electrical cables, 180 x 66 x 103 cm