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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > December > 17 > Entry
Review: Noriko Ambe: Artist Books, Linear-Action Cutting Project’
There’s a kind of irreverence to Noriko Ambe’s cut paper artworks now on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery. Slicing up artists’ catalogs - no matter that the end result makes for delicate art objects - bears an impiousness, however impish, that can’t be ignored.
Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons and Hiroshi Sugimoto are among the all-male roster of superstar artists that Ambe chose, selecting a catalog or monograph by each. She then embarked on her labor-intensive process, delicately altering each page of each book with a series of cuts so that every volume is transformed into a kind of elaborate excavated version of its original form.
As critic Lilly Wei outlines in an essay that accompanies this exhibit, the Tokyo-born New York-based Ambe intended for her actions to be a collaboration of a sorts with each artist. Ambe studied each volume intensely, we’re told, to work `with them through the assimilation of their art, without the need to be personal.’
Yes, there is a certain collaborative reverence here on Ambe’s part as well as a certain cool detachment. But Ambe’s subtractions also ironically add up - however unintentionally - to a delicate riff on 20 art-world heavyweights.
In`Dot on Dots and Layers: Roy Lichtenstein,’ the seminal Pop artist gets his Ben-Day dotted cartoon-like images punctured even more by Ambe’s drilled holes. Ambe adds more sprawl to Twombly’s random sprawling scrawls with random incisions of her own.
The pages of Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ are mined to the core as if to reach some ultimate source behind the work of the enigmatic German artist. And with ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever: Damien Hirst,’ the British prankster known for sticking a dead shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde, will find his monograph volume chopped and stuffed into a short grey filing cabinet.
The current exhibit is curated by New York-based collector Glenn Fuhrman. (Fuhrman is the co-founder of MSD Capital, Michael Dell’s investment fund. Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation in New York presents exhibits of contemporary art and co-produced the catalog to the current show which will go on exhibit there in 2010.)
Ambe certainly performs a collaboration with her honored roster. But in a brilliant stroke, she slices into something deeper as well.
‘Noriko Ambe: Artist Books, Linear-Action Cutting Project’
11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Dec. 31, Lora Reynolds Gallery, 360 Nueces St. www.lorareynolds.com
Image: Noriko Ambe, ‘Diamond Dust Shoes: Andy Warhol, 2009.’ Courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery.
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