Walead Beshty: Gastarbeiten

Gallery Capitain Petzel is happy to present an exhibition by Walead Beshty. It is the first exhibition with the gallery. Here again Beshty uses hidden or invisible work needed in the production of art and the traces left of heavy labor and the immaterial office labor. Beshty continues his series of copper work surfaces, as well as desks and tables. The people of the gallery make the tables dirty by using it during their daily activity. Copper is a very reactive metal and when touched it registers where the body made contact. In other words, the tables become dark by the touch of the hand, marks that come from the immaterial labor in the gallery. Furthermore these tables are mirror polished and reflect the room that surround the work. The other works are without-camera photography, that have marks from the production that are made by the hands of the workers and the machines they use to produce these works. Here the workers are present in the medium of the work. These are hand pictures of art which show us our relationship to art. The other works are broken machines, spike by a metal rod that has the height of Beshty. The televisions have a hole but still are working. The normal television image becomes an abstract image because of the hole. The viewer actually looks into a technological image. The life of the artist, is alike to all cultural workers, it is spend in hotel rooms and airports. Beshty uses these in-between moments to make the works. Here Beshty shows drawings on paper made with ball pen on the journeys he did as an artist.

Walead Beshty born in London Great Britain in 1976. He is an artist and make many exhibitions in the world, for example at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Tate Britain, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Barbican and many more. He works with Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Petzel Gallery, New York and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and more.