Ian Kiaer
Date/Time
Date(s) - 17 Feb 2012 until 22 Apr 2012
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM
Location
Aspen Art Museum
Category(ies)
Ian Kiaer: February 17–April 22, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 16, 6–8 pm
Thursday, February 16, 5 pm
A gallery conversation with artists Mark Grotjahn and Ian Kiaer led by AAM Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.
Thursday, March 1, 6:30 pm
Join us for I Don’t Get It—a no-questions-barred conversation about the exhibition Ian Kiaer with other community members and Aspen Art Museum curators.
British artist Ian Kiaer creates groupings of ephemeral sculptures that become carefully composed landscapes of found objects and materials, architectural models, and paintings. Each project begins with extensive research into visionary thinkers and practitioners who went against the grain of their time. Kiaer’s work is suffused with vision—the often spare, ephemeral nature of his objects compels a close viewing and consciousness of one’s own perceptions, and the historical figures and moments he invokes often strongly influenced the ways in which our models of seeing and aesthetic contemplation have been historically constructed.
For Kiaer, the installations are ways of intuitively modeling and testing concepts. Far from didactic, his tableaux create subtly evocative relationships between objects, allowing viewers to reconstruct their own narrative from the fragments. The striking poetic economy of his work, whereby the artist achieves great perceptual and conceptual effect through the simplest of means, and the collisions of scale and perspective evident in his installations further open the associative potential of the work for viewers. Kiaer’s exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, his first one-person presentation in the United States, is borne out of his extensive research into the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett.