NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Christian Marclay. The exhibition, which will be on view at 534 W 21st Street, opens on November 22nd.

This new group of works consists of silk-screen on painted backgrounds, featuring onomatopoeias that evoke the sound of painting actions (SPLORCH! SLLURP! WHOOMPH!). Torn from comic book pages, collaged, blown up and printed on canvas and paper, the onomatopoeias extend Marclayʼs investigation into the relationship between sound and image, sampling elements from art and popular culture. As in his music and video works, which splice together found recordings and film footage, the comic book sound effects are recontextualized in vibrant, dynamic compositions. Swirling, acqueous text and color combine mimetic words with puddles and splatters across the surface, conflating the painted and the printed in a surprising mix.

Marclay began silk-screen printing in 2006 for a body of work based on a detail from Andy Warhol’s famous Electric Chair image from his Death and Disaster series. The paintings on view also relate closely to Marclay’s vocal score Manga Scroll (2010), part of a body of work incorporating onomatopoeias clipped from Japanese Manga and American comics. Like his earlier “graphic” scores, which employ non-traditional visualizations of sound as possibilities for generating music, the new paintings present arrangements of sonic text that interact with the painterly gesture. Chance operation and playful irony underscore Marclay’s Cageian influence as well as an engagement with the history of painting.

Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, California) grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. His work has been shown at international venues including the Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; Kunsthaus Zürich; Tate Modern, London. In 2011, he received The Golden Lion for his presentation of The Clock at the Venice Biennale. The work has since traveled to numerous venues internationally. In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a one-person exhibition titled “Festival.” In 2004, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, organized a midcareer retrospective, which traveled to France, Switzerland, and Great Britain. Marclay lives and works in New York and London.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com