march 4 - march 27
refusalon is pleased to announce its march
exhibition, herman de vries
and Chris Drury: works from there and here. Both Drury and de vries are
widely known in Europe as artists working in the forefront of the
interaction of art and the natural environment.
Born in northern Holland and trained as a botanist, herman de vries
began his art career in the 1950’s. Working in tandem with artists of
the Zero movement, which included Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, and Otto
Piene, de vries produced reductive white paintings and initiated a
decade long exploration into the use of chance procedures to create the
collage works entitled: Random Objectivations. In the early 1970’s, de
vries left his post at the Institute of Applied Biology and went to live
in Eschhenau, a small village in Northern Bavaria, on the edge of the
Stegerwald. Once there, de vries began to work directly with nature,
presenting and selecting objects and circumstances from the larger
environment. With the artist’s declaration "my poetry is the world",
these works in nature have continued to the present day, reflecting the
artist’s interest in chance, change and the environment. His large
scale work: sanctuarium, was a center piece of the Munster outdoor
sculpture project in 1997, and was one of the 2 works selected by the
cities populace to remain permanently on display. His exhibition at
refusalon will feature a selection of works on paper surrounding a large
floor installation entitled: hanf und hemp (oats and hemp), made from
200 pounds of hemp and oat seeds. de vries was recently awarded the
oeuvre prize by the Dutch government in recognition and honor of his
life's work.
Chris Drury was born in Colombo, Sri lanka, studied sculpture at the
Camberwell School of Art in the late 1960’s, and currently lives in the
south of England. Drury is closely associated with the group of British
artists, which includes Hamish Fulton and David Nash, who merged
conceptual practice into landscape-based art. He is equally known for
undertaking large scale outdoor constructions of dwellings such as sky
huts (cloud viewing chambers) as he is for re-integrating traditional
arts such as basket-making and weaving back into the discourse of
contemporary British sculpture. Drury’s work is primarily made with
materials gathered directly from the environment, and ranges from stone
to mushroom spores. The exhibition at refusalon will feature 2
site-specific works by the artist, a 16 foot kayak structure woven from
willow, and a pair of wall drawings made from mud taken from the
Sacramento river delta.
Drury was recently
awarded the Scottish Environmental Award for his
work: Hut of the Shadow, a stone viewing chamber constructed on the
island of Uist off the Scottish coast. In 1998, Abrams published Chris
Drury: Found Moments in Time and Space, a monograph which provides an
overview of 2 decades of his sculptures.
Gallery Hours:Wed.-Sat. 12-6 Thurs.12-8 And by appointment
20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco,
CA 94105
vox: 415 546 0158 fax: 415 546 7081
