Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present What a Strange Day it has Been, an exhibition which runs concurrently with the artist’s retrospective, Intellectual Property 1968-2018, on view at the Hammer Museum through May 2019.
The central focus of the exhibition is an 11 x 33 foot autobiographical installation papering the main gallery wall with images and objects from the artist’s life. The work, titled Background/Foreground: A Memoir, is replete with material from the artist’s collection of newspapers, magazines, books, photographs and other literary and visual sources. A multi column index to the memoir, superimposed on the explosion of images, completes the piece.
A series of four works, each titled What a Strange Day it has Been, 2018, merge “normal” American quotidian scenes with historic, “strange,” or catastrophic events such as the assassination of President Kennedy, the death of Elvis Presley, or the resignation of Richard Nixon. A vintage work, Paper Drive (For Claire), 1975, exemplifies the artist’s long running fascination with the American newspaper both as a vanishing information source and as a collectable item. A unique collage executed on a suite of eleven lithographs (originally published by Landfall Press), begs the question How Many Conceptual Artists Know How to Make Prints? while the humorous Honey I Rearranged the Collection completes the show with a dry, witty tone.
Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944) graduated from Chouinard Institute, Los Angeles, in 1967. He is a first generation California conceptual artist and had meaningful relationships with John Baldessari, Allan McCollum, William Leavitt and many other conceptualists.
Ruppersberg’s first retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. An important international exhibition, One of Many – Origins and Variants, was shown at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle, Germany (2005); the Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2007); the Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2006); and the Centro Adnaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Seville, Spain (2006). No Time Left to Start Again and Again was on view in 2014 at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, following an appearance at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012-2013. Ruppersberg has been the subject of over 60 solo shows and included in numerous group shows such as Under the Big Black Sun at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles during the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980. His work is in the collections of public institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Denver Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.