William Anastasi

Art Agents Gallery Wilstorfer Straße 71, Fabrikhallen Phoenix 21073 Hamburg Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49-(0)40-899 75 51 www.artagents.de

William Anastasi (b. 1933) was born and grew up in Philadelphia, the same city which is home to the Arensberger Duchamp Collection. At the beginning of the 1960´s Anastasi moved to New York where he soon became an instrumental member of the art movement known today as Conceptual Art.

If one were to briefly sketch William Anastasi´s artistic process, one might write: In his work Anastasi delicately dissects the differences between seeing and perceiving. He confronts the issue of presentation and exhibition itself and explores the question of "self-sameness" of objects - with tautological truths and perceptions.

For his second solo show at our gallery, Anastasi will have painters cover the entire main space, the walls, the pipes, the fixtures, everything with American military camouflage design. Inside the space camouflaged objects such as a camera will be placed.

"To camouflage the inside of something is a blatant inversion. Camouflage by any definition is for the outside of things. In the usual way of looking at it camouflaging the inside of something is an absurdity that makes the invisible more visible," says Anastasi.
"Blind" is Anastasi's reference to the current situation in Iraq and to the foreign politics of the US.
Originally the idea is back from 1966 and was then his comment to the Us intervention.

The major focus of the back part of the show will be on Anastasi's drawings and some of the prints made in collaboration with Danish Printer Niels Borch Jensen. Anastasi' s drawing practice embraces drawing as performance, the incorporation of chance, rigorous focus on the present and the body's relationship to the drawing's execution. For example: Anastasi drew his small "pocket drawings" with his hand in his trouser pockets, and his "blind drawings" were created with closed eyes during rides on the New York subway. Even though his works are philosophical and political and very much, in a classical sense, conceptual, they nonetheless are imbued with subtle humour.

art agents gallery has worked with William Anastasi for five years. We are especially pleased to present this exhibition at a stage in the artist's career when international recognition is growing exponentially. His work is represented in the permanent collections of every major American museum. He is also generously represented in the most important private collection of contemporary drawings in the world. Currently two of his 1969 Pocket Drawings are on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of their exhibit "Drawings From The Modern, Part II, 1945-1975". These two works were acquired by the museum in 2004 at the same time that they acquired two larger conceptual pencil and ink drawings from 1989. The two Pocket Drawings from 1969 are reproduced in the book on MOMA's collection titled "Drawings From The Modern, 1945-1975" just published.

"William Anastasi: Blind" at art agent gallery is the third in a series of three sequential solo European exhibitions. The series started with: "William Anastasi: Works on Paper" at Stalke Gallery, April 15th to May 19th , 2005. "Ohne Titel" at Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne, April 30th to June 21st is with early works from the '60's and '70's.