Yvon Lambert Paris is pleased to announce The Waste Land, the second exhibition by Kendell Geers at the gallery.

T.S Eliot’s poem The Wasteland ( 1922) has much inspired Kendell Geers. A dark elegy Eliot’s The Wasteland is a revolutionary poem whose very form leaves the reader puzzled by changing register, subject, place and time, pushing further the borders of traditional expression to create a new world of its own. Half-way between satire and prophecy, the poem questions the sources and references of modern society, which is nothing, to Eliot but a Wasteland.

Kendell Geers has adopted the poet’s verses, who abruptly provokes his reader : “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”. Geers explores a world whose foundations, beliefs and ideologies are disintegrating. He attemps to engage a struggle with life, a struggle in which life experiences are taken to the extreme. The violence of Geers’s work, however, is not intended to submit the visitor to his views. On the contrary, the visitor is left free to accept or reject the proposed experience. “I try to create places where visitors must accept the responsability of their presence in the art work. Of course, they are always free to go away or to go on, but if they decide to take part in my work, they become active viewers… Danger is always something present in all my works.”

Images:

No1. Kendell Geers, Jesusfuckingchrist, 2006, spray paint on wood sculpture, 127 x 76 x 23 cm. © Kendell Geers

No2. Kendell Geers, The Devil You Know, 2007, police lights, 550 x 550 cm. © Kendell Geers

11 September – 15 October 2009
Yvon Lambert Paris
108 rue Vieille-du-temple
75003 Paris
France
T: +33 1 42 710 933
E: paris@yvon-lambert.com

Tagged: Kendell Geers, Paris, solo exhibition, T.S. Eliot, The Devil You Know, The Waste Land, The Wasteland, Yvon Lambert