“In painting, everyone 
positions their pawns” Claude Rutault 



Claude Rutault
20 November, 2014 – 3 January, 2015
Galerie Perrotin, New York    

“In painting, everyone positions their pawns” – Claude Rutault 

Galerie Perrotin, New York is pleased to present a collection of works by Claude Rutault, the artist’s first solo exhibition in America following four-decades of prominent and influential practice in France. Rutault’s work, beginning with a 1974 show staged at the office of a Parisian psychoanalyst, has consistently approached painting as a social practice embedded in the living relationships between artwork, artist, gallery, collector, museum and auction house.  The present exhibition features eighteen de-finition/methods, including early works such as “positive/negative 2” 1975 and “formats at the limit 2” 1974 (shown at the artist’s studio during a residency at PS1, New York in 1979), as well as four new pieces: “charity begins with others”, “painting against the wall, front and back”, “the exhibition” and “suicide-painting 11” (all 2014).  Claude Rutault describes himself as a painter; and indeed, viewing any one of his pieces is uncontroversially an encounter with paint on canvas. Rutault, however, does not paint his pieces himself; and neither is he in the business of overseeing their production on the model of a producer, designer, or director running a factory, studio, or workshop. Instead, the mainspring of Rutault’s practice is the writing and issuing of a set of rules, caveats, instructions and procedures called “de-finition/methods,” according to which a gallery, collector, or institution—known as the “charge-taker”—agrees to “actualize” a given work.


photograph Antoine Cadet
more info here..

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