FRANCES STARK

Clever/Stupid promotional prize poster with parrot pair, or ‘Art offers the possibility of love with strangers’ (2019)

‘An invitation to escape from the relentless tyranny of Now that keeps us hooked to the irresistible fruit of American Empire,’ is one of the sentences I got paid to write for Raymond Pettibon’s New Museum catalogue in 2017 (2018)

A book object made for Parkett in 2013 called Dishonest But Appealing (2019)

Bobby Jesus’s unwritten picaresque memoir in the form of a book object with a hidden chamber between the pages to stash away secret things (2019)

Reading Ian Svenonius’s Psychic Soviet from 2006 (2019)

Reading the Gore Vidal book of interviews Julian Assange was carrying as he was carted off to prison in April 2019 (2019)

Reading about the Americas before and after Columbus in the 15^th century (2019)

Chain Brain (pink) (2018)

Chain Brain (black) (2018)

Reading Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare from the mid-1940s (2019)

Reading Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death written in 1985 (2019)

Reading James Baldwin’s last interview from 1987 (2019)

Reading Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual from 1994 (2019)

The index of Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion from 2009, or War comma Warhol (2019)

In a book commemorating Ed Ruscha’s 2005 American Pavilion I contributed an essay (alongside Joan Didion no less!) entitled Always the Same, Always Different (2019)

Reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantamo Diary on the laptop by the fire not long before he was finally released after 17 years (2019)

Study for Censorship Now! (2016)

I’m not making a syllabus but rather capturing these haptic engagements with (mostly) American voices critical of empire. And then there’s the choice to paint, the re-orientation/transposition of long-form thought, my own battle with an inability to write and utter failure to feel stabilised by any sense of value or agency—an unmoored mind, trapped in the market, confused about what constitutes community and the social... The title of the show is snatched from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking My Library’: ‘It is a frequent occurrence that someone gets stuck with a high purchase price because he kept raising his bid–more to assert himself than to acquire the book. On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place, and bought it to give it is freedom–the way the price bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.’

—Frances Stark, 2019

Galerie Buchholz announces the fifth solo exhibition by Frances Stark since 2000, and her second in our Berlin gallery. Frances Stark (Newport Beach, California, 1967, lives and works in Los Angeles) has had recent survey exhibitions including Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991–2015 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015–2016) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016–2017, and Intimism at the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her works have been presented in major international exhibitions, including Censorship Now! in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), Bobby Jesus’s Alma Matter... at the Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2013), Put a Song in your Thing at Performa, New York (2011), and her digital video My Best Thing, first shown at the 54^th Venice Biennial (2011). Additional solo exhibitions by Frances Stark include the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2013); MoMA P.S. 1, New York (2011); the M.I.T. List Center, Cambridge (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008); FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2007), and the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2007), among others. She was a 2018 nominee for the Hugo Boss Prize, and the 2015 recipient of the Absolut Art Award. Her work is included in the collections of the MoMA, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and others.