james benning, danh vo - jb & dv

In the organizer's words:

The long-time friendship between James Benning and Danh Vo, cultivated around a mutual exploration of histories through
details and relics, physically manifests, for the first time, in jb & dv at neugerriemschneider. Found, collected and
reproduced objects, depicted or re-presented in matter-of-fact stagings, stand at the core of the artists' methodologies.
Their approaches see immediate surroundings appropriated and transformed, as political and personal significances are
extracted from divergent geographical and cultural origins as subtle narratives. This two-artist exhibition highlights their
shared tactics through a selection of recent filmic, sculptural and photographic works, each dissecting portraiture, tributes,
memory and ecology as tenets that define their practices as they cross, entangle with and negotiate one another.

The deconstructed portrait is critical to both, functioning as a means of examining its subjects through their effects,
distilling personas in actions that reimagine the process of identification. Physical traits are isolated, highlighted or done
away with entirely, with what remains functioning to define figures anew. Benning's clothes (2024) comprises garments
worn by eight figures formative to the artist's conception of the iconoclastic radical - Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Elizabeth
Eckford, Rick St. Germaine, Father James Groppi, Patty Hearst, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John Lennon - their
sweaters, jackets, dresses and shirts accompanied by the widely disseminated photographs from which they are
excerpted. A passage from Benning's upcoming memoir too expands the bounds of portrayal. In the 1972 diary entry on
display, he touchingly recounts an exchange with his father, concisely elucidating his character and his impact on the
artist's personal and creative growth. Benning, in each work, collapses time on itself, questioning archival, likeness and
embodiment. In Vo's untitled (2021), a first-century Roman head hewn from marble, its features worn, rounded and
shallowed by time, sits on a wooden structure atop a refrigeration unit. A pair of bronze legs modeled on those of artist
Heinz Peter Knes hang in the cube's center, framed by glass-and-steel, their feet crossed and toenails polished. It's not
enough to bronze Knes' feet, Vo also keeps them cool. Witty and sexy, this may also be a portrait of the act of
preservation.

For Benning and Vo, the natural world is a bearer of and conduit for memory, the environmental necessarily entwined with
the human in an infinite exchange. In his three-channel film Poppy Fields near Gorman (2019), Benning pictures fields of
poppies amid a superbloom. Following months of heavy rainfall upon the dry desert, hillsides become blanketed in yellows,
oranges and purples during this rare event, transforming the arid Southern Californian landscape into one awash with color.
The projections' flowers sway in the wind, slowed by Benning as to allow each frame to dissolve into the next. Reduced to
just a fifth of their natural speed, the images, accompanied by an ambience of birdsong and gently rushing wind, take on a
painterly softness that belies the threat inherent in natural wonders, and the devastating periods of drought that yielded this
spectacle. Vo's 2.2.1861 (2009 - ongoing), written in his father's calligraphic hand, reproduces a letter from Catholic
missionary Théophane Vénard (1829 - 1861) who likens himself to a flower cut down by a gardener as he bids farewell to
his own father before being put to death in Vietnam. When Vo moved to Güldenhof, a farm north of Berlin, he made lush
candid photographs of the flowers growing there. Vo's images were generic enough to give the prints an encyclopedic
aura, something he accentuated by having his father write out the two Latin names of each flower in pencil. For the body of
work on view here, Vo returned to Berlin and documented a local flower store. He had his father write just the intimate first
half of each photographed flower's Latin name (Rosa, Chrysanthemum). Shown are cut flowers, made for commercial
distribution into the human sacraments of life, love and death. The city flowers, like the images, are implicated: they can't
shake society, but still carry an earthy mystique.

James Benning (b. 1942) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including
FAHRBEREITSCHAFT, Berlin (2024); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2015); Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (2014); VOX, center
de l'image contemporaine, Montréal (2014); Natural History Museum, Vienna (2014); and Argos, Centre for Art and Media,
Brussels (2012). Notable group exhibitions presenting work by James Benning include the Whitney Biennial, New York
(1979, 1981, 1983, 1987, 2006, 2014); documenta 12, Kassel (2007); and documenta 6, Kassel (1977). Screenings and
retrospectives of James Benning's film have been held at numerous institutions worldwide, including at Film Society of
Lincoln Center, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum of the
Moving Image, New York; and Arsenal, Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin. Benning lives and works in Val Verde,
California.

Danh Vo (b. 1975) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Secession,
Vienna (2021); Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2021); The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2020);
South London Gallery, London (2019); M+, Hong Kong (2018); CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux
(2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2016); Museum
Ludwig, Cologne (2015); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014); Villa Medici, Rome (2013); Museion, Bolzano (2013); Musée
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2012); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2012);
Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2011); Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2010); Kadist, Paris (2009); Kunsthalle
Basel, Basel (2009); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008). Vo lives and works in Berlin, Güldenhof and Mexico City.

For further information, please contact: mail@neugerriemschneider.com.