wizz eyelashes

Walter De Maria, Katharina Grosse, Sol LeWitt
September 18, 2014 - June 7, 2015
Curator: Richard Julin, Tessa Praun

The exhibition wizz eyelashes is a play on both the history of art and Magasin III’s own exhibition history. Works by the conceptual minimalists Sol LeWitt and Walter De Maria have been installed alongside with Katharina Grosse’s expressive and abstract painting. All three artists have previously had solo exhibitions here at Magasin III. Their work is now being brought together for the first time and in some cases they even physically touch.

Sol LeWitt exhibited his first wall drawing in 1968, introducing an approach that would change the way we understand art today. At Magasin III in 2009 seven of his wall drawings were installed in the same room in which wizz eyelashes appears today. We are now showing a wall drawing by LeWitt from our collection for the first time—a work drawn by five people full-time over a five week period this summer. The exhibition also includes two sculptures by LeWitt from our collection. In 1988 Walter De Maria was the first artist ever to be featured in a solo exhibition at Magasin III. Now, twenty-six years later, we are once again showing Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 13 in the same place in the same room as it first appeared in 1988.

Ten years ago Katharina Grosse painted directly onto the walls, ceilings and floors of Magasin III, transforming the exhibition space into a painting that visitors could enter and within which they could move. In wizz eyelashes we are showing two of the paintings on canvas that were part of Grosse’s 2004 exhibition. Based on images of part of the large site-specific painting created directly on our walls and floor, she has created a completely new installation of printed fabric that hangs where the original used to be, now hidden under many years of layers of wall paint. In collaboration with Grosse we have chosen to let her new work act like a kind of backdrop for De Maria’s work, which feels very exciting.

We are particularly pleased that Grosse has also created an outdoor installation for the exhibition, a painting in the form of six enormous spheres. The work is made specifically to be experienced at Nybroplan in Stockholm (Sept 18–21, 2014) and thereafter in the Free Port (Sept 25–Dec 14, 2014).

With wizz eyelashes Magasin III continues to be a place where artists have the opportunity to explore new directions and where new art is created. Now that we are becoming in name the museum that we have long since been in practice, we would like to reinforce this with an exhibition in which contemporary art meets art history in a soft collision. Richard Julin and Tessa Praun Exhibition curators