Talk Program about the exhibition ≪Four Corners of the World≫ of HITE Collection will be held at Arthall, B1, Art Sonje Center. Jonathan Watkins who is a director of Ikon Gallery at Birmingham, UK and curator of ≪Four Corners of the World≫ will introduce this exhibition. Then, a participant-artist Amicam toren will give an hour of Artist talk presenting his world of artwork.

Jonathan Watkins “Four Corners of the World”

This talk corresponds to Four Corners of the World, the exhibition at The Hite Foundation (3 September – 14 December), featuring artists from America, Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. Stylistically diverse, working in a variety of media and drawn from distinctly different aesthetic traditions, they share a commitment to the expression of thoughts and feelings within the assumed rectangular format of painting. It is understood by them to be not a window that opens out onto other worlds with illusionistic effect, but rather a flat delimited plane that is infinitely divisible, a place of infinite possibility – a geometric shape that inspires invention and imaginative projection onto itself. It is an encounter that happens two-dimensionally, within four corners, and internationally as painting happens wherever there is human life on the two hemispheres of this planet.

We take the opportunity to contextualise the work of those exhibiting – Hurvin Anderson (UK), Frederic Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), Marcel Dzama (Canada/USA), Bernard Frize (France), Tim Johnson (Australia), Amikam Toren (Israel/UK) and Zhang Enli (China) – through observations on broader themes and propositions evident in contemporary art. Other artists under consideration include On Kawara, Katharina Grosse, Jurgen Partenheimer, Martin Creed, Carmen Herrera, George Shaw and Clare Rojas.

* Jonathan Watkins(b.1957) has been Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999. Previously he worked for a number of years in London as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery (1995-1997) and Director of Chisenhale Gallery (1990-1995). He has written extensively on contemporary art. Recent essays by him have focused on the work of Giuseppe Penone, Martin Creed, Semyon Faibisovich, Yang Zhenzhong, Noguchi Rika, Caro Niederer and Cornelia Parker. He was the author of the Phaidon monograph on Japanese artist On Kawara.

Amikam Toren

Amikam Toren addresses the basic nature of objects and images. He uses the materiality, function or form of things, re-representing them in a way that is an ‘improvement’ or reinvention of their original state. Language, meaning and interpretation are other central preoccupations in Toren’s work.

* Born in Israel in 1945, Toren has been resident in London since 1968 and has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at The Serpentine Gallery, 1976, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1979, Chisenhale Gallery and Arnolfini, Bristol, 1991. His work has been included in the Paris Biennale of 1967, Venice Biennale, 1982, Tyne International, 1993 and Guangzhou Triennial, 2012. Other recent exhibitions include the John Moores Painting Prize, 2012, Jerwood Drawing Prize, London, 2011, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2010; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, 2009; and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2008. In 2012 he participated in the 4^th Guangzhou Triennial and ‘The London Open’, Whitechapel Gallery. Toren was awarded the Bryan Robertson Trust Award in 2012. Toren will have his first solo exhibiton in the USA at the Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco later this year. He exhibits regularly at the Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv and has been represented by Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London since 1985.