Press Release

shooting Gallery

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present “shooting Gallery” an installation by Jean-Michel Othoniel. The exhibition will be on view from January 9 through February 6, 1993. A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery January 9, from 6 to 8 pm.

Those circumstances involving the skills of a “sharp-shooter”, (the one with the well0guided hand0 are cited out by an agreement: from the desire to apprehend the available target, and the acceptance of a certain distance required to treat one’s abilities. However, in the case of Jean-Michel Othoniel, contact is already in progress, as what was once distant is now meshed-in. His targets more than just lure, they carry what they have captured.

Othoniel’s installation entitled, “Shooting Gallery” presents a select arrangement of objects, accentuated by a curious mixture of sculptural elements solidified into an aberrant, bodily tonality. Othoniel’s Les Leurres, a lined-up series of molds made of the artist’s hand, cast in pure sulphur, surround and fondle lumps of wax which, in their stage of creation, begin to invoke forms. For example, the vibrant yellow hand, which in its own pose allows tits grasp to narrate a fleshy clump from which either a feather is planted, an eye-last rests, or the middle dinner laid into the beginning sculpture of an orifice. The work also includes variously placed mounds upon the wall as objects of excretion, where unlike the hand enclosed around its object, fragments of the body and the hand itself fall within the centre of the protuberant bulge, which is precisely where the envelopment begins. These bodily fragments follow through to a luring character, hung high by a rope above the floor and toward the centre of the space. This is the figure which more immediately pictorializes the occupancy for a complete body, but as more than a poltergeist, it becomes scribed into its own mass, composed of sulphur poured heavily over the robe of a priest.

The curiosity of the “Shooting Gallery“ here takes form of the riddle. There is the suggestion that once the targets have been apprehended, the deviant nature of the riddle beings to generate itself, lying somewhere between excavation and fabrication: bewildered inn the objects’ offering of the hand it is simultaneously trying to grasp.

Recent participation of Jean-Michel Othoniel’s work include Documenta IX, Kassel Germany and the Istanbul Biennale of Turkey. His work has also been exhibited in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City.