UNTITLED is reincarnated to announce Ian Tweedy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Descent.
In 1944, Joseph Beuys's Stuka plane crashed in Crimea. He survived. Shrouded in doubt, this is where what is definitively factual and what is suspected to be mythological intersect for Beuys. From the propagandic lore purported by each of the opposing sides in the current Ukrainian conflict, to the events surrounding the contentious Malaysian plane crash, Beuys’s crash and mythos operate as a historical parallel to the events which transpired in the area of the initial Stuka crash 70 years prior.
Ian Tweedy uses the moment Beuys’s factual history and mythological genesis collide as the impetus for Descent. Intertwining historical imagery and found objects, Tweedy investigates and extrapolates upon the fall of man and the potential for reinvention.
With the currently and historically contested geography of Crimea and the motif of Beuys as a theatrical framework, Tweedy interjects himself into the nature of both art and political history. Somewhere between participant and spectator, Tweedy’s inclusion of himself into the narrative alludes to his own simultaneity as an artist and citizen within a complex and storied historical narrative while also constructing his own mythology of reinvention.
Through his construction of obstructed narrative imagery, a fragmented history points to the means by which time and information are received and interpreted through their inherently subjective nature. Much like a plane crash, all that remains of a historical event is the dispersed debris. Due to the subjective nature by which we access information and the expanse of time, the event is modified and the pieces are incapable of ever fitting perfectly back together. The paintings, drawings, and artifacts on display in Descent are Tweedy’s attempt to revisit history through investigating the position of the artist within a historical and subjective location.
Ian Tweedy was born in 1982 at Flugplatz, Hahn Air Base in Germany. He spent his childhood and adolescence in military bases around Europe before settling in Italy where he attended art school at NABA in Milan. Recent solo shows include My Neighbors The Von Stauffenbergs, Monitor, Rome, Italy (2013), A Line Describing the Surface, Museion Bolanzo, Italy (2013), N.Dash/Ian Tweedy, The Arts Club, London, UK (2013) and A Long Story, UNTITLED, New York (2012). He was included in Dreams That Money Can’t Buy at Maxxi Museum, Rome, Italy (2014), Le ragioni della pittura. Esti e prospettive di un medium., Caselbasso (Teramo), Italy (2013), and Art Works, Deutsche Bank Collection Group, Frankfurt, Germany (2011).