This year, there has been a laundry list of artist curated group shows, from David Salle’s exhibition, Your History is not our History, at Haunch of Venison, to Jeff Koon’s Skin Fruit at the New Museum and the upcoming Walead Beshty curated show, Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), at Regen Projects. Each exhibition has its hits and misses in terms of content, style and arrangement, but what is more interesting out of this trend is how each of these exhibitions question of the role of the artist versus that of the curator. The art world has consistently defined and broken the roles held within it, yet each time one of these artists assumes the role of curator, one can’t help but to take the opportunity to compare their decisions as an artist to their decisions as a curator. Riding on the heels of this trend, four San Francisco galleries — John Berggruen Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Ratio 3 and Altman Siegel Gallery — turn over their spaces to four of their represented artists to mine their backrooms to create a collaborative exhibition. Titled They Knew What They Wanted, this exhibition is comprised of four separate group exhibitions out of the same collection. In a similar spirit, DailyServing has invited four of our San Francisco writers to use their perspectives to discuss each of the exhibitions.
Robert Bechtle at John Bergguren Gallery written by Seth Curcio
Predominantly a photo-realist artist, Robert Bechtle took the role of curator to participate in the exhibition They Knew What They Wanted at John Berggruen Gallery. Clearly approaching the role of curator as an artist, Bechtle selected a collection of works that operate as an extension of his own artistic practice. The most obvious unifying concept within the exhibition is form in space, manifest mostly as object in landscape. However, Bechtle has stated that the main instinct driving his selections are an exploration of the mundane in everyday life, or what the press release states as the “formality of the ordinary.” Straight photographic works by artists Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander and Richard Misrach sit in proximity to the constructed images of artist Gregory Crewdson and Miriam Bohm. Prints of non-descriptive figures sitting by a suburban pool by artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders fall into a rather easy dialogue with Paul Wonner’s acrylic paintings of figures in a park.
The exhibition exists without many surprises or profound connections, but is interestingly interrupted through the work of sculptor Mitzi Perterson and the painter Garth Weiser. The inclusion of Peterson and Weiser complicates the exhibition through abstraction. These two artists’ work are reductive and formal, but continue to engage the greater exhibition in terms of both landscape and the mundane, adding new dimension to the exhibition and requiring the viewer to actually work to extract content through context.
