The Renaissance Society presents a major commission by Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna. For this exhibition, Poledna will create an installation that juxtaposes a new 35mm film with a comprehensive reimagining of the architectural and institutional setting of the venue.

Poledna’s art most commonly takes the form of highly concentrated film works that unfold a complex tension between the visuals and their critical and cultural implications. His work, as Michael Bracewell writes, suggests “a form of conceptualism, philosophical in basis, which attempts to engage with paradox as a means of enquiry.” In Poledna’s films and the rigorously formal environments he creates for them, salient beauty and visual restraint collude in a viewing experience that encompasses both affect and detachment.

Poledna’s concise presentations underscore a mode of production in which the artist frequently involves specialist collaborators in order to articulate a highly specific frame of vision. The films draw on the artist’s panoramic range of interests, from the music of post-punk and a rainforest in Papua New Guinea to 1930s style animation, as in his seminal 2013 film, Imitation of Life. Although invariably newly produced, they often create the impression of having been found as they are, seemingly extricated from present-day or historic collective imaginaries.

For his exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Poledna proposes iconoclasm, both as a concept and as enacted in manifold historical contexts, as a backdrop against which both film and architectural intervention can be engaged. His presentation foments a multi-layered conversation between histories of the site, concepts of public space and private property, the paradoxical legacies of historicism and modernism in architecture and design, and more broadly, the production and circulation of images within spectacle.

The Renaissance Society will publish a comprehensive catalog that documents and critically reflects on the exhibition. Conceived by the artist, it will feature new essays by Amy Knight Powell, Associate Professor of Art History at University of California, Irvine; Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator at MOCA Los Angeles; and Andrew Weiner, Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism at NYU Steinhardt, New York.

Mathias Poledna (b. 1965, Vienna) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Hello Pal! Imitation of Life at the Austrian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); at Secession, Vienna (2013); A Village by the Sea at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2013); and Mathias Poledna/Florian Pumhösl at Raven Row, London (2011). Group exhibitions include Sydney Biennale, Sydney, Australia (2014); What is to come has already arrived, at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla (2014); and Figures and Prefigurations at City Gallery Prague (2013).

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Tags: Hyde Park, Mathias Poledna, The Renaissance Society