OSMOS is pleased to present Sam Falls: Cross Country (driving, flying, listening), a multi-media video installation work. This new work by Sam Falls, a self-described itinerant American artist who passed through New York last Spring to speak about Robert Irwin at Dia Center for the Arts and sign books at Printed Matter in Chelsea, returns this Fall to install his exhibition at OSMOS in the East Village, as well as a gallery show at Eva Presenhuber in NoHo. Both open Friday, September 8, 2017.  

Composed of 3 video projections, Cross Country (driving, flying, listening), recreates the experience of recollection, a cogent narrative that refuses to be a story, instead allowing us to liberate the simulations. Certainly what we see and what we hear is real –- it’s all real, as it was recorded, but what it says is another matter. The matter of a meaningful experience is what we bring to it.

In the artist’s words: When I was five in 1989 my mom packed up our red Subaru wagon and we drove across the country, from California to Vermont. I don’t remember much: I remember waving goodbye to my dad and everybody crying but me, I remember seeing snow for the first time, probably as we passed through the Rockies. I remember noticing bats at dusk and thinking they were all bloodsuckers. I remember hearing an owl’s “who-who” like a ghost in the woods, unsuspecting how permanent my shift from urban life to rural was about to become. Most of all though I remember laying in the back seat watching the telephone and power lines run like two jump ropes as they swung pole to pole parallel to the road. Watching the lines move was mesmerizing and consistent - it was comforting - it unified the vast country I was traversing for the first time like a string tied to my finger to lead me back home. The literal metaphor of phone lines connecting people is true, but just the physical presence of the lines all the way in Vermont, where everything looked and felt different, was strangely important - that I at least recognized something - I wasn’t totally lost.

This exhibition is the last in a year-long series that looks back to the 20 years OSMOS has been in existence. It also marks a new chapter for OSMOS as Sam Falls was the first artist-in-residence at OSMOS Station, a new extension of OSMOS in the Catskills.  

OSMOS is honored to present a new body of work by the renowned American artist Duane Michals. This series includes Michals’ “Anti-Trump, Agitprop” sculptures and videos – work in media the artist has never shown before.

Since the 1970s Duane Michals has been best known for his photographic narratives mixing autobiography with history. His portrayals are as intimate as they are hyperbolic, especially when the artist assumes character roles for the camera. Provoking political change by way of total theater, Michals’ productions enact truth in an age of fake-news.

Over the last half-century, Michals has resisted the notion that photography is limited to the act of reproduction. Through “intrusions” on the image, whether in the form of text, multiple exposures, or paint, Michals has consistently reminded his viewers to not accept things as they appear. The resulting discursive image does not only show, but more importantly ask the viewer to question what is not shown.

While Duane Michals has previously stated that an artist’s political aspirations are “impotent,” this new body of work suggests a reconsideration of the artist’s role in speaking truth to power. Taking inspiration from Vladmir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-1920) and employing the vocabulary of El Lissitzky's agitprop signs and Mikhail Plaksin's sculptures, Michals parodies the idiotic and absurd truisms pronounced by president Donald Trump to remind his audience to look a little deeper and to resist easy compliance

In 1981 gelbe MUSIK opened its doors at Schaperstr. 11 in Wilmersdorf, West-Berlin, with a show dedicated to graphic scores by contemporary avant-garde artists from Europe and the United States. Until 2014 Ursula Block programed gelbe MUSIK as a record store and gallery. It now lives on as the Broken Music Archive.

Ursula Block has hosted more than ninety shows featuring artists and composers such as Maryanne Amacher, John Cage, Henning Christiansen, Milan Knížák, Christina Kubisch, Nam June Paik, and Akio Suzuki. Throughout the 1980s she co-curated several influential exhibitions dedicated to artist’s records, among them Broken Music, with Michael Glasmeier, and Extended Play, with Christian Marclay. This exhibition at OSMOS entitled, Ursula Block’s gelbe MUSIK – 33 Years in Review, focuses on objects, records, and scores that are significant to Block and played a major role in the development of gelbe MUSIK. Last year an edition of this exhibition was installed at Mathew Gallery in Berlin, which is located down the street from gelbe MUSIK.

For more than 30 years gelbe MUSIK existed as a unique place for the intersection of art and music -- a record store and gallery where musicians, composers, visual artists and choreographers from all over the world could gather. Ideas were exchanged and friendships nurtured. Emphasizing the way small and independent art projects can evolve to support an international community, this project comes out of local and international alliances. Creating a musical loop, the exhibition was initiated by Fiona McGovern from Berlin, where OSMOS was founded 20 years ago, in collaboration with our neighbor, Justin Luke from Audio Visual Arts located down the street from OSMOS. In addition to the exhibition, there will be a listening session with Ursula Block and a special film screening on experimental music at the Goethe-Institut New York.

This exhibition is part of a year-long series that reflects on the 20 years OSMOS has been in existence since its founding in Berlin in 1997. OSMOS Address in New York is a project space for art gatherings and exhibitions in the East Village storefront that was once a saloon frequented by Emma Goldman and other radicals. In the 19th Century, the space in back was the printing office for their German language newspaper; it is now the editorial office for OSMOS Magazine and OSMOS Books.

Mathieu Mercier: Neither / Nor is a survey of work by the French artist Mathieu Mercier (born 1970) curated by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. It will be on view until March 7, 2017 at OSMOS Address, 50 East First Street in Manhattan.

Mathieu Mercier’s work operates somewhat whimsically between Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary exegesis and Duchampian transubstantiation. His art maneuvers to question a common object’s potential for authenticity in times of evident over-production while contrarily conferring value back onto such objects. This juxtaposition of multiple systems of representation is repeated throughout Mercier’s work, fluidly incorporating and opposing visual frameworks from art history, design, and architecture.

For his Pantone series (2011) Mercier scanned flowers from parks he frequents throughout his travels arranged next to Pantone color cards of a comparable palette. Foliage references the long history of the still life genre while the color card wryly points to an aspirational impotency in the aggressively marketed Color Matching System.  

In a previous work, Sublimation (candle/chromatic circle J. Itten) (2011), for example, a store-bought candle contends with a sublimation print of the Itten color wheel. Presented reverentially on a pristine pedestal in the gallery, the abstract device cannot help but fall flat in comparison to a romantic flickering flame, yet it surreptitiously gains esoteric aura from the candle’s implied memento mori.

This is the first in a year-long series of projects that reflect on the 20 years OSMOS has been in existence. Mathieu Mercier was introduced to OSMOS by his professor, Anne-Marie Jugnet, who was one of the first artists to install her work (a projection entitled oh, oh, oh, 1997) in the industrial space that Berlin co-founders, Joachim Abrell and Christian Rattemeyer, claimed for OSMOS in 1997.

All Fine Figures is an exhibition featuring the work of young artists familiar with a world in which meaning is arbitrary and signifiers can be employed to almost any means. In a “Ce n'est pas une pipe” moment, the figure becomes not an indexical representation of something, but rather invariably fetishistic or familiar -  an empty glyph ready to be imbued with meaning or a blank wall to be projected upon.

In a “If you think this world is bad, you should see some of the other ones" kind of way, this relativism can at times beget optimism. If the superhero found in Peter Mix’s paintings is recognized to be the inadequate man that he is, or if Claire Christerson’s freakish dolls are the norm, then perhaps the ideological structures that institute so much oppression might be malleable after all. Not to say a post-anything world is better off, but perhaps it gives us room to grow.

Michael Bailey-Gates responds by developing a language of his own, while Logan Jackson and Payton Barronian appropriate the tropes and slickness of commercial photography and video production. There seems to be recognition among these artists that truth is always up for revision. But should we exploit this slippage and project ourselves into hegemony -- wealth, power, desirability, or whatever else is deemed aspirational? Or should we abandon language all together? Is silence golden or merely gilded? Ser Serpas’ anthropomorphic assemblages and Momo Gordon’s phantasmagorical landscapes suture the gap between representation and reality with inchoate and unencumbered beauty. Here we find the figure flirting with abstraction, reveling in its newfound sensuousness.

This exhibition has been organized by Kenta Murakami in collaboration with Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz as part of a special anniversary year of programming looking forward and back with OSMOS. Twenty years ago Joachim Abrell and Christian Rattemeyer initiated OSMOS in Berlin. OSMOS was ambulant for more than a decade until Cay Sophie Rabinowitz moved OSMOS into a former anarchist tavern in New York where exhibitions and gatherings happen in the storefront; editorial work is done on OSMOS Books and OSMOS Magazine in the back office, and on the corner in First Street Green park we all get to share in the realization of public art projects. OSMOS continues to evolve independently but with a fully integrated program of curated and edited content created by the talented and the generous.