Between Painting and Politics: The Art of Jenny Holzer

Overview

TEFAF’s Meet the Experts programs celebrate the expertise of our world-renowned exhibitors, spotlighting exceptional objects and the stories they tell. Explore the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in the work of Jenny Holzer in this Meet the Experts talk with Andreas Gegner of Sprüth Magers.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) has been probing the aesthetic and political intersection of language, installation, and painting since the late 1970s. Holzer displays her own and other texts in a variety of media, confronting current events and topics such as war and sexual violence in a way that defies didacticism and challenges the viewer’s passivity. TOP SECRET 3 (2012) stems from her celebrated series of Redaction Paintings.

Since the early 2000s, Holzer has culled through US government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, particularly related to US military actions in the Middle East, the so-called “War on Terror,” and cyber counterintelligence. Holzer reproduces these declassified documents, enlarging them and adding color or metal leafing but always faithfully maintaining both their textual and redacted passages. By emphasizing the redactions, she makes visible the hidden power structures and dynamics supposedly keeping Americans safe, while also echoing various histories of 20^th-century abstract painting, among others the Constructivist work by Kasimir Malevich and the Color Field paintings by Mark Rothko.

Biography

Andreas Gegner is Senior Director at Sprüth Magers, having played a central role in establishing its London branch in the early 2000s. Mr. Gegner oversees the gallery’s activities globally, working closely with artists and estates, including Jenny Holzer, George Condo, Gary Hume, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker, among others; guiding a program of exhibitions, events and art world participations, and fostering relationships with public institutions and collectors.