ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ
READING ROOM FOR THE WORKING ARTIST
From January 28 to March 18, 2005. Opening on January 28 at 4:00 pm.
Exhibition Views | biography
Reading
Room for the Working Artist, the result of several
years spent collecting, selecting and assembling visual
and textual material related to modern art and culture,
straddles the boundaries of artistic and curatorial practice.
Inspired by Aleksandr Rodchenko’s 1925 Workers’
Club, created for the Exposition internationale des
Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes de Paris,
Angela Grauerholz’s installation consists of reading
room furniture, a film projection and a series of twelve
books containing a wide range of documents (press cuttings,
letters, book covers, postcards, reproductions, and artworks).
It invokes the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total
artwork), the central artistic concept for most of the
artists and authors to which the installation refers –
Duchamp, Warhol, Borges, Benjamin, Malraux, Zweig, etc.
–, all of whom attempted to achieve a synthesis
bewteen art and life. Bringing together various aspects
of Angela Grauerholz’s practice, Reading Room for
the Working Artist recounts a somewhat utopian yet thoroughly
personal history of art and of artists. The installation
permits a retrospective look at the very substance of
the artist’s methodology, her artistic production,
and her reflective process.
Biographical Notice Angela
Grauerholz was born in Hamburg, Germany, and has lived
in Montreal since 1976. She has been teaching at UQAM’s
École de design since 1988. She is a co-founder
of Artexte, a contemporary art information centre located
in Montreal. Her works have figured in numerous solo exhibitions,
notably at the Blaffer Gallery, Houston (2003), the Contemporary
Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002), the Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland
(1996), and the Musée d’art contemporain
de Montréal (1995). She has also participated in
such international events as the Biennale de Montréal
in 2002, Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1995,
Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, and the Biennale of Sydney
in 1990. Angela Grauerholz is represented by the Olga
Korper Gallery in Toronto and by Art 45 in Montreal.
credit : Michel Brunelle
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