20 September – 26 October, 2002

Exhibition

Opening Reception: Friday, September 20th 6-8pm

• Mathieu Mercier's work is many-sided and questions the language of aesthetics within design, architecture and interior design.
• Mathieu Mercier takes inspiration from the 20th Century European avant-garde utopias which projected the desire for a total art. His work is nourished from those aesthetic references which he deconstructs or enhances in sculptural installations.
• The artist is interested in questioning the position of the object in our society through the prism of the categories that design and architecture have built and by extension the broader social systems of production subjugated to consumer-demand.
• By creating a dialogue between the early 20th century art and design icons and the contemporary mass-produced objects, Mercier reveals the shift between the symbol of modernity and the standardized object pointing out the ambivalence between symbolic value, pragmatism and abstraction.
• This idea is also revealed in his abstract work (Wall-plug Wall piece, … ), where a relationship is created between abstraction and architecture. Abstraction finally finds a function by joining the decorative.
• Through this analysis settled in various time ranges, MM highlights the evolution of the meaning of modernity from a social project to a capital gain.
• Mr. Mercier lives and works in Paris, France. He has also been spending a lot of time in Berlin over the past 7 years.
• This will be his first solo show in New York.

Artist Bio

Born in 1970, Mercier has exhibited at many major museums and art centers around the world: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Artsonje Museum, Seoul, Korea; FRAC Bourgogne, France; Kunsthalle Nürmberg; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; Fri-Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, Centre d'Art de Castres, France and Berlin Biennale amongst others. He will also participate in the Project Munsterland Biennial in Munster, Germany in 2003 and has a solo show scheduled for September 2003 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Absolute Vodka has commissioned an Absolute-Mercier bottle, and Mercier will be part of the Absolute Pavillion in Venice during the Venice Biennale next year.