MEYER*KAINER curated by Liam Gillick & Rachel Harrison
„International Company of Wagons Lit etc. etc.“

Liam Gillick is an artist based in New York. Solo exhibitions include Whitechapel Gallery, London (2002); Palais de Tokyo (2005); retrospectives at Witte de With, Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein München, and the MCA, Chicago, 2008–2010; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn 2010; CCS Bard Hessel Museum 2012. Gillicks writings include Proxemics (Selected writing 1988–2006), 2007; Factories in the Snow, 2007; Meaning Liam Gillick, 2009; Allbooks, 2009. Liam Gillick represented Germany at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.
Rachel Harrison is an artist based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include CCS Bard / Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2009); Portikus, Frankfurt (2009); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2013); and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2013). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam among many others.

International Company of Wagons Lit etc. etc. Liam Gillick and Rachel Harrison Duration of the exhibition: 3.10. – 8.11.2014 At the invitation of Galerie Meyer Kainer Liam Gillick and Rachel Harrison have worked in parallel. There is no traditional curating of work here to support a narrative or thesis. For the artists The Century of the Bed begins with the disappearance of the bed as form. The Murphy Bed is an American invention that coincided with the development of cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century. A bed that folded into the walls of an apartment allowed the new urban dweller to live in a single space with multiple potentials. The Murphy Bed remained a secret presence until the moment it was deployed. It was all frame lodged within varied walls, closets, structures and contexts. For this exhibition Liam Gillick and Rachel Harrison have created new works. Half a Complex (2014), a PowerPoint presentation by Liam Gillick incorporates the architecture of the gallery into the work. Any future deployment of the work would involve reproducing the form of the gallery wall and its deep opening. The PowerPoint presentation includes images of various Murphy Beds overlaid with a text addressing the failure of recent attempts to implicate artists within a misapplication of Operaist theories centred around the improvised sites of cognitive labor. Rachel Harrison’s five Framing Devices are a sequence of stubbornly functional forms that hold down nylon cords stretching to various points on the gallery walls. The works project from their brightly colored anchors and describe the edge of an invisible beam. Harrison’s Framing Devices expose the edge as a zone of support and limitation. They are inscriptions of leverage and trace a geometry of a deployment to come. In addition to these works the artists bought a lamp at Leiner and have created a new work for the stairs on the way to bed. Crow is a compilation of birdcalls intended to be installed on the threshold of the bedroom. The work suggests the search for a roost as a collective site of vigilence. Rather than accepting a place of endless comfort where work, life and leisure are always entangled Crow favors sleep on two feet with at least one eye open.