Ethan Cohen Gallery is delighted to announce its participation in Frieze Art Fair New York 2018 with a solo exhibition of Hans Breder (1935 - 2017) – a renowned and significant artist who shaped the visual vocabulary of contemporary art by experimenting with video art, conceptual collage, performance, optical paintings and minimal sculptures. For Frieze’s spotlight section the gallery focuses on the body of work developed by Breder from 1967-1988, when he explored and collided new forms existing in the threshold between land art, performance, video, and photography.

 

Mind’s Mirror: Reflecting the Limits of Human Perception is on view from May 2nd to May 6th 2018 at Frieze New York.

 

One of the first video artists whose work has been included in three Whitney Biennials in 1987, 1989 and 1991, Hans Breder founded the Intermedia Program in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa and directed it until his retirement as a Distinguished Professor in 2000. The internationally regarded program was built on Breder’s interdisciplinary inclination for conceptual and aesthetic collision and produced artists such as Ana Mendieta and Charles Ray. Breder’s teaching and practice left an indelible mark on contemporary art. The gallery thanks the Frieze Art Fair’s selection committee for providing the platform to share Hans Breder’s work and legacy with a larger audience.

 

For Hans Breder the task of art was spiritual. His work sought to articulate and evoke an ineffable power beyond reason and unreason.  Against the monumental materialism of Western culture, over the last six decades, Breder’s intermedial sensibility has been expressed in and between painting, sculpture, photography, music, installation, video and film - each expression an invitation to subversive liminality and momentary transcendence. Ethan Cohen Gallery will exhibit a retrospective of Hans Breder’s work made before 1999, from his iconic experiments with cubic forms to his lesser-known video art pieces made during 60s-80s as well as never seen before prints.

 

Through Breder’s teaching and practice he has left an indelible mark on contemporary art as we know it. We would like to celebrate Hans Breder’s life, his creativity, and his living legacy through his art. Breder’s work dissolves boundaries and manipulates perception, sometimes enticing, sometimes shocking the observer to an experience of liminality from which a realm of pure possibility may emerge.

 

 

The gallery would like to thank Crosby Studios for its involvement and assistance in developing the booth concept as well as Jee Won Architectural Bureau for their support, vision and the guidance.