HANS HAACKE at Paula Cooper Gallery, NY

NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Hans Haacke. The show, on view from October 25 to November 22 at 521 West 21st Street, will include installation, sculpture, and photography from various periods of Haacke’s fifty-year career.

Hans Haacke, Circulation, 1969; water, air bubbles, circulating pump, plastic tubing and connectors, dimensions variable

The most recent work on view will be the maquette for Gift Horse, 2013, Haacke’s winning proposal for the Fourth Plinth at London’s Trafalgar Square. The bronze sculpture depicts the skeleton of a horse, derived from an engraving by George Stubbs, whose equine portraits reflected the equestrian culture of the British upper class. An electronic ticker tape—tied to the horse’s foreleg like a bow on a gift—displays the live feed of the London Stock Exchange. Here, the artist makes an oblique nod to Adam Smith whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations marked the birth of modern capitalism and introduced the commonly cited yet often misunderstood idea of “the invisible hand of the market” as the source of common welfare. According to the artist, “Some 250 years later, followers of Smith’s ‘mythical hand’ flock to the City of London, to Wall Street and other market places around the world, while the less fortunate look to the bare bones of the horseplay of today’s gentry.” The final sculpture, which will measure over 13 feet in height, will be unveiled in Trafalgar Square on March 5, 2015 and on view for eighteen months.

In Together, 2013, Haacke revisits his seminal 1969 installation, Circulation, examples of which are now in the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Generali Foundation in Austria. In this work, water is pumped from two sources through a continuous and interconnected network of transparent tubing. Haacke’s interest in the circuitous flow of elements laid the groundwork for his other systems, which explore interaction and interdependence within physical, biological and social structures.

Condensation Floor is one of the original works of Haacke’s canonical Condensation series, which he initiated in 1963. Water evaporates and condenses in a sealed Plexiglas box responding to changes of light and temperature in its environment. In this floor-bound work from that period, the reflective properties of light and water are dramatically displayed along a six-foot-square surface.

The show will also include a selection of new photographs by the artist.

Haacke has lived and worked in New York since 1965. He was born in Cologne, Germany in 1936 and attended the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel from 1956 to 1960. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1961 to study at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. From 1967 to 2002 he taught at the Cooper Union in New York City. He has been given many one-person exhibitions at museums including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, the Tate Gallery, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou.  His work was exhibited at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, four times at documenta (1972, 1982, 1987, 1997) in Kassel and at biennales in Gwangju, Sharjah, Johannesburg, São Paolo, Sydney and Tokyo. Haacke was awarded the Golden Lion with Nam June Paik for their German Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 2000, Haacke’s permanent installation DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To The Population) was inaugurated at the Reichstag, the German Parliament building in Berlin, and in 2006, he completed another public commission in Berlin, this one on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, commemorating the famous philosopher and activist for whom the square was named.