Markers
David Zwirner is pleased to present Markers, a group exhibition at the London gallery on 24 Grafton Street featuring work by Matt Connors, Michael Dean, Marlene Dumas, Goutam Ghosh, Josh Kline, Gillian Lowndes, John Outterbridge, Gerhard Richter, Celso Renato, Jason Rhoades, Prem Sahib, and Pádraig Timoney.
Like the exclamation mark, and the multivalent and shifting sentiments it has come to represent, this exhibition will encompass artworks that evoke diffuse and even contradictory meanings within a single visual gesture. The exclamation mark is believed to have originated in the Medieval era, when copyists would append the Latin word io (literally “hooray”) to the end of a sentence in order to indicate joy, and eventually the letters were consolidated into a single character. Over the centuries, its connotations have become corrupted: it is simultaneously warning and exaltation, interjection and admonition, ecstatic and sober. Likewise, this exhibition will include works by both emerging and established artists that elicit such oppositional emotions at once, frequently as a means of negotiating the polarities and vagaries of contemporary society. Mirroring this semiotic shift in particular is the transition from analogue to digital culture, and the shorthand and indeterminate mode of expression it has engendered.