THE CLUB is pleased to present Uri Aran Eggs For Breakfast and Bird In A Blanket.
Born in Jerusalem, Aran currently lives and works in New York. His works have been exhibited internationally including at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; and South London Gallery; London.
Uri Aran’s practice encompasses a wide range of media and subject matter, including video, sculpture, painting, drawing, and assemblage. Throughout his practice, Aran constructs a language of indeterminate signifiers in an ongoing pursuit of graphic and linguistic systems – challenging these systems to both the point of disintegration and allusion to an implicit, if indefinable logic.
Aran’s work often includes ephemera assembled from everyday life and art historical sources, interwoven with note like intimations and intuitive markings. His approach is inquisitive, playing with both material and abstract elements to conjure visual dialogue, to reveal covert semiotics at play in the production of meaning and the elasticity of narrative. “The discord of meaning in language is something I’m interested in”, he has explained. “I don’t know if it’s because English is not my mother tongue; I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated—almost everything is quoted.”
The body of work in this exhibition, comprises a group of drawings and paintings, that develop upon Aran’s ongoing exploration of image making. Diverse materials are applied with homogeneity, resulting in richly textured graphic cohesion of form and content. Variously combining oil pastel, graphite, coloured pencil, acrylic, digital transfer and bronze, the works’ formal elements invoke an intriguing array of scenographies. In each, fragments of abstract motifs, natural and anthropomorphic forms, handwritten notations and readymade imagery, suggest a broader narrative impulse.
Aran has compared the works to single letters, that together might be arranged, re-arranged and separated to create new words or stanzas. Or, the experience of reading a comic strip, with each bearing a self-contained expression of meaning, and collectively forming a narrative rhythm. The drawings are populated by protagonists that slip in and out of view, invoking impish tensions and exchanges. Animal-like and human motifs inhabit the spaces, alternately as caricatures recalling student textbook sketches, or as indeterminate dream-like creatures of automatist drawings. Elsewhere, geometric structures evoke thresholds or theatrical settings, staging a scene-within-a-scene. Throughout, the process of image making is articulated and laid bare – in places forms are crossed out – describing a shifting topography of signifiers; drawing into question modes of seeing and interpretation.
For your safety this exhibition will be open for reservation only, after taking sufficient measures against COVID-19.
Online contents will be posted on our website and Instagram, so please enjoy the exhibition at your home as well.
If there are changes in the content of the state of emergency by the Japanese government, we will inform you on our website and instagram（@theclub.tokyo）
For your gallery visit, please make your reservation from HERE by 18:00 one day in advance.
Uri Aran(1977)
lives and works in New York, and studied Design at the Bezalel Academy Jerusalem (2004), before graduating with an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York (2007). He has exhibited internationally with solo presentations including Oranges vs Them, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); Tenants Like These , Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019); Uri Aran: Time for an Early Mark, curated by Moritz Wesseler as part of curated by vienna 2017, Christine König Galerie, Vienna; Two Things About Suffering, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2016); Mice, Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2016); Puddles, Peep-Hole, Milan (2014); Five Minutes Before, South London Gallery (2013); and here, here and here, Kunsthalle Zürich (2013). Recent group exhibitions include 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); The Annotated Reader, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (touring, 2019); Platforms: Commissions and Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN), USA (2019); 99 Cents or Less, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, USA (2017); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Take Me (I'm Yours), Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); do it, various international venues (2013-15); A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial 2014, Liverpool; the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).
