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Gerard Byrne: more archetypal forms

London, 11 February – 21 March 2009

Gerard Byrne: more archetypal forms

Lisson Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent film and photographic works by Gerard Byrne. This will be Byrne’s first solo show in the UK for two years and will present new works, previously unseen in this country.

Gerard Byrne exploits the ambiguities inherent in historicising the legacy of representational forms to address broader critical questions. Referencing diverse sources from Modernist theatre to Playboy magazine articles, Byrne questions the history of cultural consensus that grows around these subjects. Through selection and carefully nuanced reproduction, Byrne’s work exposes the anomalies that affect the materiality of a picture, object or fact when transposed from its original historical context to the present time. With a keen awareness of how representation fundamentally alters the subject observed, this exhibition proposes a loose correspondence among historical materials, obliquely assembling a class of ‘more archetypal forms’.

Works on show will include video installation Untitled Acting Exercise (in the Third Person). First shown at the 2008 Sydney Biennial, Byrne records the efforts of two actors and a director to understand a script through dramatisation. The script uses passages taken from published accounts of interviews conducted by US military psychiatrists in 1946 with P.O.W.s awaiting trial at Nuremberg, depicting the act of dramatisation as a fractured attempt to understand history through a coherent narrative.

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Works on view

More information

Location

52 Bell Street
London

Opening Times:
Monday – Friday: 10:00am – 6:00pm
Saturday: 11:00am – 5:00pm

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