19 Dec 2016

KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art

Essentially, Tom Hackney's Chess Paintings, which are based on the great chess games of Marcel Duchamp, make conceptual reference to two significant texts of the 20th century, one being Duchamp's famous 'preface' to The Large Glass (1915–1923), which he wrote on a slip of paper around 1915 and later, in 1934, published in the Green Box. The other text is Max Bill's precise and remarkable essay in the catalogue accompanying Marcel Duchamp's first solo exhibition in a public institution, which this famous Swiss artist curated himself in 1960 at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zürich. Tom Hackney's paintings start on the one hand out from Duchamp's games of chess and, on the other, give a new, post-avant-garde dimension to the paintings of the Zürich Concrete artists around Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse. Hackney subesequently endows Duchamp's at once playful and seriously existential games of chess with a statically visual aspect—Duchamp would have called it an 'ultra-rapid delay'—by beginning.' In other words, Tom Hackney's works are directly related to Marcel Duchamp's concept of the instantaneous state of rest but in a style of painting characteristic of the Zürich Concrete artists, not only giving the idea of 'movement' a new dimension but also embracing a fruitful reason for the appropriation or reanimation of abstract painting today.

Aldo Walker (1938–2000) is one of those great artists whose significance has to this day not been fully appreciated. He produced an amazing oeuvre, which materialized particularly in two outstanding series, namely his Logotypes (experimental sculpture-like configurations) and Pictograms (figurative line pictures). They are among the great undiscovered highlights of international art of the 1970s and 1980s. This profound and captivating analysis by Stefan Banz, a close friend of the artist, appears in the wake of the very successful solo show of the artist's work in 2013 at the MAMCO in Geneva, organized by the author.
232 pages, 87 images in color and black and white, hard cover, € 20.00, ISBN 978-3-903131-69-9.