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| Michael Waugh, Detail of The Accumulation of Capital (from Luxemburg to Robinson), 2010 You need to go and see this masterpieces drawings in person. They are beautiful, labor intensive and a total feast to the eye. See you there! Here is more info about Michael Waugh: Decline and Fall features large-scale drawings, video documentation of performance works and a new installation that exposes the act of reading as an act of accumulation-as old-fashioned and melancholy in a world dominated by sound-bytes and disposability. As with Waugh's previous multi-disciplinary shows, these disparate forms dovetail with each other through their use of language, text and prodigious amounts of labor. In each of the works on view, the hand of the artist and the personal time it records stands in absurd contrast to the vast ideas explored in the texts, namely the various iterations of cultural collapse. Central to the exhibition are Waugh's intricate drawings based on his exploration of micrography, a 9th century Jewish calligraphic technique where tiny handwritten words coalesce into representational images-images which in Waugh's case range from portraits of turn of the century rowers, dogs of various breeds, and grand dynamic landscapes. Originally used to illuminate religious works, here Waugh uses secular texts such as Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg to draw attention to how written language itself has become aestheticized and separated from everyday life. Waugh makes no attempt to summarize or interpret his source texts. By copying them word for word, or reading them verbatim in his performance works, he creates unashamedly monumental works grappling with large, sustained ideas, and his marathon-like labor can barely contain them.  531 West 26th Street New York, NY |
For more information please contact the gallery at 212-630-0722
or info@srandsgallery.com.
Thank you, Ruben!
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