Simon StarlingPictures for an Exhibition

The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to announce a newly commissioned work by Turner Prize–winning artist Simon Starling. One of the leading artists of his generation, Starling is noted for his attentive treatment of objects and their stories. Often taking up key moments in the history of modernism, Starling generates elegant installations, films, photographs, or sculptures that unearth unacknowledged connections or migrations within the art world. The sculptor Constantin Brancusi was the subject of a breakthrough project by Starling in 2004, when he shipped a two-ton slab of steel from Romania across the Atlantic, echoing the movement of Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space, which became the subject of a lawsuit between the artist and the United States Customs Office.

Returning to Brancusi for his Arts Club exhibition, Starling has addressed a pair of vintage installation photographs that depict the 1927 Arts Club exhibition Sculpture and Drawings by Constantin Brancusi, which was organized by Marcel Duchamp. Starling tracked down the current locations of the 18 Brancusi sculptures visible in these photographs and traveled across the United States, as well as to Basel, Switzerland, and Toronto, Canada, to find them. Using two 8×10 cameras produced in Chicago by the Deardorff Company, the same brand employed for the original exhibition views, Starling has retraced and recorded the moves these sculptures made over the last 87 years. Along the way, he collected anecdotes of provenance that intersect with the diamond trade, Nazi appropriation of cultural goods, prohibition, and other incidents that point toward interconnections between art, economics, society, and history.

This exhibition coincides with a display of Starling’s earlier works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Dieter Roelstraete, and features a joint catalogue published by the MCA.

Catalogues from the exhibition can be purchased in the Arts Club of Chicago online shop.

Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, UK, and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. He won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was shortlisted for the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize. Starling was Professor of Fine Arts at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt from 2003 to 2013. He has exhibited widely, including the Bienal de Sao Paulo (2004) and the Busan Biennal (2006), and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2003. In the past five years Starling has also made solo exhibitions at Villa Arson, Nice; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; The Power Plant, Toronto; The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Tate Britain, London; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; and MUMA, Melbourne. Starling lives and works in Copenhagen.