303 Gallery is pleased to present Sunday Afternoon, a group exhibition curated by Patricia Martín, curator of La Colección Jumex in Mexico City. The exhibition includes work by: Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Bruce Conner, Charles Crumb, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ceal Floyer, Michel François, Tom Friedman, Felix Gonzalez- Torres, Lucy Gunning, Louise Hopkins, On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, and Bruce Nauman.
Sunday Afternoon is a selection of works that highlights how the minimization of means and gestures through repetition can yield works of extreme visual, physical and conceptual density. The works selected belong to two different generations of artists: Yayoi Kusama, Bruce Nauman, Bruce Conner, Felix Gonzalez- Torres, Hans-Peter Feldmann and On Kawara, who have been pivotal to the discourse of art since the inception of conceptual art practices at the end of the 60’s, and simultaneously but in another sphere, the work of Charles Crumb. These artists will be shown along side the works of Tom Friedman, Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Ceal Floyer, Michel François, Lucy Gunning and Louise Hopkins, who belong to a younger generation. The relative closeness in sensitivity and approach across both generations reflects not only the influence of earlier artists on younger ones but a particular set of preoccupations and factors that are still relevant to contemporary art practice.
The idea of repetition is essential to the exhibition, and it could also be seen as the line connecting all of the works. In these works there is no climax. Repeating an action allows for a certain “flatness” and the losing of the intelligibility of signs that come from an estrangement due to reiteration. This action of bringing the work to its barest minimum has indeed a political dimension, where the negation to produce “meaning” is in fact laden with a profound critique of the state of things.