Minimalism and After
February 2002
New acquisitions
Douwe Jan Bakker
Greg Bogin
Andre Cadere
Martin Gerwers
Gerold Miller
Jan van der Ploeg
Eckhard Schene
John Nixon
b. 1949 in Sydney, AUSBerlin Project Room EPW:O
2001The Berlin Project Room EPW:O was created while John Nixon was spending three days in Berlin. The artist compared the emergence of this space with a concert performance into which he introduced the conceptual and ideal aspects of his methodological practice.
For Nixon, "Radical Modernism (the historical avant-garde) is a never-ending project representing a desire for experiment and the history of this experiment. My interest is not so much in returning to history as developing that history. I see my work as a continuation of the radical Modern project."
Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW:O) is the name he gave to his project initiated in 1968 to investigate non-representational painting. Nixon finds some key reference points in Malevich's "Black Square", which established the notion of painting's self-referential and absolute quality, and Duchamp, whose "readymades" introduced everyday objects into the context of art.
Nixon exploits the possibilities of monochromy and the readymade, usually developing them further in his own work in dialogue with other protagonists of Modernism like El Lissitzky, Piero Manzoni, the Minimalists and Arte Povera. His work with them is similar to a series of experiments in an empirical research project. The Berlin Project Room, presented like a laboratory, reveals the methods Nixon uses for analysing abstract Modern art and provides information about the current position in his continuation of the 'Modern project'.
Guided tours on Wednesdays, 6 p.m., groups book by telephone