Gazelli Art House proudly presents You're Welcome and I'm Sorry, an exhibition of recent works on canvas and video along with a selection of historically important pieces that mark the three decades of artistic collaboration between Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher (Aziz + Cucher). Encapsulating the duo's cross-disciplinary practice, You're Welcome and I'm Sorry offers familiar and never-before-seen artworks in a multidimensional display.
In the video installation You're Welcome and I'm Sorry (2019, originally commissioned for MASS MoCA), elements of the carnivalesque signal the theatre of our global financial system. Within six flat-screens of various sizes, costumed characters in deconstructed power-suits dance and gesticulate across quasi-corporate locations, intertwined with images that evoke the spectre of white supremacy. The figures' oration of financial formulas feed into a multi-layered soundtrack, as visceral as the kaleidoscopic walls, rendered in colours of bank logos. The immersive quality of the work captures the 'irrational forces that mould our political and economic systems'.
Expanding on these themes and motifs, a series of new, mixed media paintings (2021—22) translates the kinetic energy of the absurd, suited figures to two-dimensional works on canvas. Satirising the complexity and mystification of the financial system, the costumed figures are here rendered in compositions of mesmerising textural and visual contrasts. The artworks' meticulous material creation continues Aziz + Cucher's interest in using dense, pixelated surfaces as analogies for the pervasive information that floods contemporary life.
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the artists' collaboration and to celebrate this milestone La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) and Gazelli Art House are pleased to present XXX: Aziz + Cucher 1992—2022. Covering the artists' entire career, this monograph will include 130 full colour reproductions of the work that the artists have created together since 1992. Essays by independent curator Agustin Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D'Souza will be featured, along with a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Anthony Aziz (B. 1961, USA) and Sammy Cucher (B. 1958, Peru) have worked together as artistic duo Aziz + Cucher since 1992. Experimenting across a variety of media including digital imaging, sculpture, animation, and video-installation, their work is marked by a distinctive concern for technology and its impact on the human body, consciousness and society.
Regarded as innovators in the field of post-photography, Aziz + Cucher have long held a cross disciplinary conversation between the painterly and photographic. Not only were earlier series, such as Dystopia (1994-95), based on the conventions of portraiture established in the Renaissance, but their production involved a kind of electronic painting where pigment and paint were replaced by pixels and data. The dynamic relationship between these two mediums tipped decisively towards the painterly in later series, such as Synaptic Bliss (2003-4) and Scenapse (2007-2013) where colour and line became key expressive elements.
More recent series have encompassed ideas of collective consciousness, political and social unrest, and the effects of technological mediation. Fascinated by the pictorial storytelling and exacting craftsmanship of classical weaving, Aziz + Cucher's tapestry series Some People (2014-16) looks to evoke the senselessness and futility of these ongoing conflicts and the anxiety of the historical moment we all inhabit.
Aziz + Cucher have been exhibited globally, notably at the 46th Venice Biennale, with works held in museum collections including: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The New School Art Collection, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Gallery of Australia. Based in Brooklyn, the artists are members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design (New York).
Press release courtesy Gazelli Art House.
39 Dover Street
London, W1S 4NN
United Kingdom
www.gazelliarthouse.com
+44 207 491 8816
Monday – Friday
10am – 6pm
Saturday
11am – 7pm