Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Stereo, a survey investigating concepts of doubling and echoes in the work of Christian Marclay, on view from May 1st through June 28th, 2008.
Since the early 1980s, Christian Marclay has explored the visualization of sound and music through his sculpture, photography and mixed media-based works. As a visual artist who also works as a musician (Marclay pioneered the use of a turntable as a musical instrument in the late 1970s), the relationship between the audible and the visual and the incongruencies existing between the two remain the driving force of his work.
The approximately twenty-five works included in Stereo span the artist’s entire career. In an early work entitled Yin and Yang (1983), from his Recycled Records (1980–1986) series, Marclay elegantly slices two records and reassembles them. The new record’s distinctive yin-yang shape is created by the opposing colors of each original. This visual “recycling” renders the originally recorded music unplayable. In the artist’s photographs, such as New York (1998), the viewer is asked to consider the visual representation of sound in unlikely, everyday places: a couple walks down a New York street carrying an umbrella decorated with a pattern of musical notes. Musical sound is represented visually, but we hear nothing. Marclay uses hand-tooled glass to create Drumsticks (2000), an exact replica of wooden drumsticks that would easily shatter if put to use. In works such as Extended Phone (1994), Clarinet (1999) and Double Tuba (1992), Marclay employs collage techniques to manipulate vehicles of sound.
Christian Marclay lives and works in New York and London. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others.
Stereo is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery. This is Christian Marclay’s first solo exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery.
