Fall/winter program 2022
Pippa Garner
Act Like You Know Me
September 24–November 13, 2022
The first full solo exhibition of Pippa Garner’s work to be held in Europe, Act Like You Know Me, provides a necessary glimpse into a remarkably broad body of work that spans more than 50 years. The artist and writer formerly known as Philip Garner was born in a Chicago suburb in 1942. He is fighting against consumerism, marketing, and waste systems and has produced a substantial body of work that includes drawing, performance, sculpture, video, and installation. She has been able to mingle with the illustration, editorial, television, and art sectors without ever really getting enslaved to them thanks to her rigorous way of living and working.
Garner restarted her studies in the esteemed Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, after serving as a conscripted US Army Combat Artist in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Her goal was to become a car stylist. Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, and the avant-garde art and design company Ant Farm were all part of her circle in the 1970s and 1980s. Garner was further introduced to contemporary art organizations and communities as well as the notion that she might identify as an artist by the painter Nancy Reese, who was also her romantic girlfriend and creative partner. Garner attracted notice for her performance, design, and video work at galleries and museums as well as for the editorials and illustrations she published in books and periodicals. This led to appearances on talk shows. At the time, Garner was known and identified as Philip.
Garner started her decade-long feminization procedure in the middle of the 1980s, which eventually involved sex reassignment surgery and hormone replacement medication. Garner’s approach to gender change displayed her experimental mindset, transpersonal identity, and way of queering common goods as a continuation of her practice of modifying materials used in mass production. Garner first started taking hormone therapy at a time when the idea of gender fluidity was not well understood. As the author and co-curator of the exhibition at Kunstverein München, Fiona Alison Duncan, says: “Her work is about gender expansiveness and gender as a commodity, you can customize your body, inside and out, so long as you can afford to do so.”
Act Like You Know Me is an examination of Garner’s irrational, massive images, which serve as both documentation of her practice and autonomous pieces. Since she was an anti-materialist, the majority of her artworks were discarded, given away, or lost, leaving only these images as the essential components.
The exhibition will go to Kunsthalle Zürich where it will run from February through May of the following year.
Between
Bruce Gilbert: The Secret of Futility
November 18–19, 2022
A 24-hour music-inspired program called Between runs in the gallery rooms of the Kunstverein in the intervals between shows. The fourth conference in the series, which is organized by Stanislav Iordanov and Moritz Nebenführ, is centered on the musician and artist Bruce Gilbert. The event will include a concert, a panel discussion, and a screening of some of Gilbert’s musical works for ballet and film, which represent highlights of a remarkable career spanning five decades. The scope will be expanded throughout the course of the evening by live performances by AJ Pain, Vera, and Nikhil Vettukattil.
On and Off the Grid
through December 2022
On and Off the Grid, a schedule of talks and activities focused on diverse publishing forms, is visible in the window display next to the Kunstverein that faces the park. The series offers a forum for the introduction, investigation, and (re)negotiation of the materials and procedures associated with publishing. It conceptualizes “publication” in a larger sense beyond and between conventional types of media. The contributions of Tabloid Press and Will Holder are recent and upcoming.
Director: Maurin Dietrich
Curator: Gloria Hasnay
Assistant Curator: Gina Merz
Kunstverein München e.V.
Galeriestr. 4
80539 Munich
Germany
T +49 89 20001133
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