frosch&portmann is pleased to present ― CUT by George Jenne, the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers (―The Wizard of Oz, 1939) meet Texas Chainsaw (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974): George Jenne transforms the gallery into a multi-media ethereal movie set; beautifully crafted film props, film stills with a frightening aesthetic, mysterious plays of light and shadow. Jenne’s environment parallels film and memory. Retrospection tends to be cinematic in the sense that film has the same fragmented logic as memory. Both fade in the same way. Lost films and iconic stolen film props are fundamental in Jenne’s concept — metaphors for faulty memory and lost time. Both are characterized by a great sense of longing for something lost or incomplete which is the emotional core of the exhibition.

The central piece, The Crawling Breasts, is a scale version of Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome movie theater screen that was designed in the 1950’s with the same angle and radius as the human retina. Ink drawings from film stills are made into steel lighting patterns and projected onto the screen.

In Zoetrope from Beyond, some of the same drawings are cut into black plexiglass shapes, consecutively set in a wooden base; the individual pictures (stills from the movies ―The Wizard of Oz and ―The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) blur together to form a drawing of shadow and light. In its simple and elegant appearance as sculpture, the work reminds us of John Cage’s Plexigrams.

Apart from Zoetrope from Beyond, all the images are taken exclusively from ―The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a horror film that had a profound effect on the artist when he was a kid: ―There is something volatile about each frame of this movie. The film gives the sense that its image is disintegrating while it’s being watched.

A strange, synthesized musical score by Mike Westbrook accompanies the work. The sound suggests a sense of longing and thus reinforces the idea of images lost or just out of reach.

Howard Halle, TimeOut New York: Case in point is the upcoming exhibition by George Jenne, whose figurative tableaux have a definite wax-museum/B-horror-movie feel that seems to take inspiration from Duchamp’s Etant Donné, Paul McCarthy’s butt-plug Santas and Hans Bellmer’s perverse poupées in equal measure.

March 10 – May 1, 2011 Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, noon – 6pm