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bis 15.03. | #4568ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Linienstraße) shows from the 15th. February 2025 (Opening: 14.02.) the exhibition “jb & dv” by the artists James Benning and Danh Vo.
The long-time friendship between James Benning and Danh Vo, cultivated around a mutual exploration of histories through details and relics, physically manifests, for the first time, in jb & dv at neugerriemschneider. Found, collected and reproduced objects, depicted or re-presented in matter-of-fact stagings, stand at the core of the artists’ methodologies. Their approaches see immediate surroundings appropriated and transformed, as political and personal significances are extracted from divergent geographical and cultural origins as subtle narratives. This two-artist exhibition highlights their shared tactics through a selection of recent filmic, sculptural and photographic works, each dissecting portraiture, tributes, memory and ecology as tenets that define their practices as they cross, entangle with and negotiate one another.
The deconstructed portrait is critical to both, functioning as a means of examining its subjects through their effects, distilling personas in actions that reimagine the process of identification. Physical traits are isolated, highlighted or done away with entirely, with what remains functioning to define figures a new. Benning’s clothes (2024) comprises garments worn by eight figures formative to the artist’s conception of the iconoclastic radical – Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Elizabeth Eckford, Rick St. Germaine, Father James Groppi, Patty Hearst, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John Lennon – their sweaters, jackets, dresses and shirts accompanied by the widely disseminated photographs from which they are excerpted. A passage from Benning’s upcoming memoir too expands the bounds of portrayal. In the 1972 diary entry on display, he touchingly recounts an exchange with his father, concisely elucidating his character and his impact on the artist’s personal and creative growth. Benning, in each work, collapses time on itself, questioning archival, likeness and embodiment. In Vo’s untitled (2021), a first-century Roman head hewn from marble, its features worn, rounded and shallowed by time, sits on a wooden structure atop a refrigeration unit. A pair of bronze legs modeled on those of artist Heinz Peter Knes hang in the cube’s center, framed by glass-and-steel, their feet crossed and toenails polished. It’s not enough to bronze Knes’ feet, Vo also keeps them cool. Witty and sexy, this may also be a portrait of the act of preservation.
For Benning and Vo, the natural world is a bearer of and conduit for memory, the environmental necessarily entwined with the human in an infinite exchange. In his three-channel film Poppy Fields near Gorman (2019), Benning pictures fields of poppies amid a superbloom. Following months of heavy rainfall upon the dry desert, hillsides become blanketed in yellows, oranges and purples during this rare event, transforming the arid Southern Californian landscape into one awash with color. The projections’ flowers sway in the wind, slowed by Benning as to allow each frame to dissolve into the next. Reduced to just a fifth of their natural speed, the images, accompanied by an ambience of birdsong and gently rushing wind, take on a painterly softness that belies the threat inherent in natural wonders, and the devastating periods of drought that yielded this spectacle.
Vo’s 2.2.1861 (2009 – ongoing), written in his father’s calligraphic hand, reproduces a letter from Catholic missionary Théophane Vénard (1829 – 1861) who likens himself to a flower cut down by a gardener as he bids farewell to his own father before being put to death in Vietnam. When Vo moved to Güldenhof, a farm north of Berlin, he made lush candid photographs of the flowers growing there. Vo’s images were generic enough to give the prints an encyclopedic aura, something he accentuated by having his father write out the two Latin names of each flower in pencil. For the body of work on view here, Vo returned to Berlin and documented a local flower shop. He had his father write just the intimate first half of each photographed flower’s Latin name (Rosa, Chrysanthemum). Shown are cut flowers, made for commercial distribution into the human sacraments of life, love and death. The city flowers, like the images, are implicated: they can’t shake society, but still carry an earthy mystique.
James Benning (b. 1942) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including FAHRBEREITSCHAFT, Berlin (2024); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2015); Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2014); VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal (2014); Natural History Museum, Vienna (2014); and Argos, Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2012). Notable group exhibitions presenting work by James Benning include the Whitney Biennial, New York (1979, 1981, 1983, 1987, 2006, 2014); documenta 12, Kassel (2007); and documenta 6, Kassel (1977). Screenings and retrospectives of James Benning’s film have been held at numerous institutions worldwide, including at Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and Arsenal, Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin. Benning lives and works in Val Verde, California.
Danh Vo (b. 1975) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Secession, Vienna (2021); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2021); The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2020); South London Gallery, London (2019); M+, Hong Kong (2018); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2016); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2015); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014); Villa Medici, Rome (2013); Museion, Bolzano (2013); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2012); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2012); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2011); Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2010); Kadist, Paris (2009); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2009); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008). Vo lives and works in Berlin, Güldenhof and Mexico City.
For further information, please contact: mail@neugerriemschneider.com.
Opening: Frida, 14. February 2025, 6 – 9 pm.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 15. February 2025 until Saturday, 15. March 2025
To the gallery
Title image caption: James Benning, Poppy Fields near Gorman, 2019 © James Benning. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
Exhibition James Benning & Danh Vo – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
