Rupert Goldsworthy
Jun 26 - Jul 24, 2010
RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY
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RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY

Ritter/Zamet is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist/curator Rupert Goldsworthy. The opening reception for the exhibition on Saturday 26 June will also feature the launch of Goldsworthy's new book “CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof” published by DMV Verlag this year.
 
Rupert Goldsworthy is a British artist, curator and writer who became renowned in the mid-Nineties and early 2000s for running an artist-run gallery project in Berlin and then in New York. Goldsworthy’s own art addresses taboos (political and emotional) using post-Pop Methodology. His concerns include the Cold War, colonial history and the iconography of Seventies radicalism. For his first solo show at Ritter/Zamet, Goldsworthy will present a series of giant new paintings made during the last year in Berlin which draw on themes relating to the city, its intellectual history and the contemporary cultural gestalt.

Art critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes of Goldsworthy's work:
 
“Mr. Goldsworthy has an avid connoisseur's eye for popular culture, particularly youth culture....Most of the references are to the 1960s and 70s. Names of suicidal rock stars, student radicals, celebrity drugs, Black Panthers, gay clubs and aged movie queens with sad, twilight histories bounce off each other and interconnect like fragments of overheard conversations. And while the textual melange -- blasts from the past plus cultural arcana -- makes fun ‘reading’, it also has a distinctive moral texture: sharp, dark, hard to pin down but definitely there.”
 
Mark Stewart writes on the book:

 “CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof” traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) an "urban guerilla cell" active in West Germany in the 1970s-80s and its relations both to the history of Left-wing iconography and the genre of radical chic. The study explores the way in which the RAF, like Che, have seeped into popular culture, fashion, and high art, moving through contexts where they become floating signifiers for rebellion without clear political or historical referent.

“Goldsworthy documents the resistance of the cell. Terror repackaged and on sale again.”