Much of Westphalen’s practice focuses on the fabrication and performance of reality, exemplified in the current exhibition via two tangentially-related groups of work. For “One Day” Westphalen re-drew every photograph featured in a randomly chosen edition of the International Herald Tribune (May 17, 2007). The images are translated into brush-and- ink drawings often executed in one sitting. Resisting any objective documentation, the artist distorts his material through the imprecise nature of his technical means as well as through varying levels of interest and engagement. Some drawings are heavily worked-over, and others looser and more gestural. Westphalen utilizes drawing as a performative tool, allowing him to symbolically take ownership of his source imagery, and as a deadpan form of parody, mimic formulas of knowledge and authority in an incongruous vernacular. Even in their de-contextualized form, the drawings in “One Day,” are clearly recognizable as coded tropes belonging to established genres.

The second series on view, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” combines a group of naively carved sculptures – an international correspondent and a cameraman – with several large-scale drawings depicting fallen monuments. The drawings represent the dissolution of authoritative icons, with examples ranging from tourist photos of fallen Roman columns to a recent news photograph depicting a statue of Columbus being toppled by state-sponsored rioters in Caracas. The images share a romantic valorization of decay and destruction. In “Waiting for the Barbarians” the news team, possessing an everyday banality akin to schoolbook illustrations, ultimately has become the last monument standing.

Olav Westphalen is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York and Stockholm. Recent solo exhibitions include “The Disciplines”at the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein in Potsdam, Germany. In New York, Westphalen participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, has had two projects commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and a solo show at the Sculpture Center in 2003. Westphalen currently holds the position of professor of Performance Studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm. He recently published an artist’s book, titled “Ü,” with the Office of Contemporary Art, Oslo, edited by Marta Kuzma.