Warren Neidich


In this first solo exhibition in Zurich at Barbara Seiler Gallery, American artist Warren Neidich will present three new bodies of work: the Afterimage Paintings the Void Paintings and the Untitled Mirror + 1 sculptures.



The Afterimage Paintings consists of a diptych composed of a neon text work and an adjacent painting. Like earlier works generated from this series and recently exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Neidich again focuses on the historical injustices of what is referred to as the Second Red Scare. In the early 1950’s Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC directed a witch-hunt against many artists and writers suspected of having affiliations with the Communist Party. In this new rendition he focuses instead on European artist refugees of the second World War, Bertold Brecht, Hans Eisler and Lion Feuchtwanger who were also similarly blacklisted.

Each name is made into bent red neon and is paired with an unfinished painting of empty stars that mimic those five pointed terrazzo stars found on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The neon light induces a palinopsia, or afterimage, in the beholder, who thereafter shifts his/her gaze and to allow the imaginary image to fall inside an empty space of the adjacent painted star. Neidich calls this process “productive relationalism” because the painting is dormant awaiting the imaginary projected phantom of the afterimage to materialize on its surface. Only then is the painting be completed. 

In The Void Paintings Neidich returns to a method he had previously investigated in his Wrong Rainbow Paintings, 2012-2014, in which he had cut a circular hole in a front painted canvas to expose a black velvet under-canvas. What had been previously an auxiliary action in the Wrong Rainbow Paintings becomes foregrounded as an essential ingredient in these new works. As a result of this action these paintings embody different sized holes that metaphorically become similar to different sized pupils.  Pupil size represents different affective and emotional responses constituted by the primitive sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Physical and psychological pleasure causes the pupil to dilate. When someone finds another person attractive the pupils dilate and vice versa. The paintings in the show are in various states of psychological pleasure. 


The Untitled Mirror + 1 series are a series of sculptures which entangle elements of minimalist sculpture made of powdered coated steel and what are referred to as phantom limb mirror boxes and mirror illusion boxes normally used in the treatment of painful phantom limbs. The term phantom limb refers to the imaginary perception of a body part that is no longer there as a result of an amputation.

They reference minimalisms’ close relation to pure phenomena. They will become an apparatus to be used in a series of performances to take part in the gallery in which art students, acting as volunteers, partake in an experiment in which through a series of manipulations they feel their own suppressed phantoms. Previously quasi-experienced phantom limbs are released and emancipated. They are then encouraged to draw these experienced imaginary limbs as they would draw a real arm or leg in their anatomy drawing class. These will be then exhibited. 

The three work series are linked together by their interest in commenting upon and reenacting issues of contemporarity present in California during the 1960 and 1970s that have political relevance today.

California Light and Space movement with its emphasis on pure phenomena and visual and haptic perception becomes a means to look at what Neidich calls “the post-phenomenological condition” in which issues of perception have been replaced by issues of cognition as the fundamental means of understanding the ontology of subjectivity. In this schema the real time politics of what Jacques Ranciere called the “Distribution and Redistributions of Sensibility” in which the senses are the agents of a “politics of being” have been joined by the conditions of a “politics of becoming” in which the brains’ inherent pluripotentionality, as defined by its neural plastic capacity, is at risk of subjugation.

Secondly its connection to expressionism as a means through which to induce patterns of light to emerge from the surface of the canvas or polyurethane resins have mutated as a means to redefine and understand the issues of our affective capacities especially the role of emotions in the subsumption of the somatic rational brain in cognitive capitalism by social media. Finally, its strong connection to Conceptualism with its emphasis on thought experiments, rule based works and immateriality. In his hands immateriality is no longer tethered to the condition of immaterial objects but that of immaterial labor and its precarity, valorization and methods of communication.

Warren Neidich is an internationally recognized artist whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries world wide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS 1 MOMA, The Kunsthaus Zurich, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, The Ludwig Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  He studied photography, video, cognitive neuroscience, medicine and architecture. International awards include the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, Berlin, 2010,The Fulbright Scholarship, 2011 and 2013 and the AHRB/ACE Arts and Research Fellowship, UK, 2004. He is founding director of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art and is Professor Art at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.  Forthcoming exhibitions include AUN 44th Salon Nacional Salon de Artistas, Pareira, Columbia, Miami Practicas Contemporaneas, Bogata,Columbia and   the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Berlin. His monograph The Search Drive: A Hackography has just been published and will launch at Kunstgriff book store Zurich. His books The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 3, Archive Press and Resistance is Fertile, Merve Verlag are forthcoming in 2016.