Paul Elliman

Carl Freedman Gallery presents an immersive large-scale video projection of Paul Elliman’s Untitled (September Magazine). The projection, like the publication from which it is derived, repurposes hundreds of photographs of the human body appropriated from the pages of contemporary glossy magazines. Cropped and without text, the images show male and female bodies, clothed and naked, caught in a continuous and explicit act of gestural communication. Through sequences of abstracted limbs and bodies, a typography begins to emerge in the accumulative assembly of letter and glyph-like shapes.

Elliman, a London-based artist with interests in the acquisition of language, conceived the published version of the work (a hefty 600 page book in the format of a high-end fashion magazine, published by The Vanity Press, London and Roma Publications, Amsterdam in 2013) as a way to explore the connection between language and gesture. Elliman’s sources are rigorously generic and anonymous, drawn from magazines devoted to fashion and sport as well as porn, which means, as Vince Aletti says about Elliman’s work in W Magazine, “language can also get raunchy—and intriguingly allusive.” Some images suggest the work of influential photographers: a mesh of arms and legs becomes a found Edward Weston, or a Man Ray in the detail of a pornographic image. There is also a more personal and engaging impulse at work. “I was looking to salvage something human from the autonomous realm of media images,” Elliman says, “establishing moments of intimacy in the detail of an elbow or a back or a shoulder, finding something sensual in otherwise cold or preposterous depictions of sex.”

In its book form, Untitled (September Magazine) was awarded the prestigious Stiftung Buchkunst ‘Best Book Design in the World 2015’. Elliman has exhibited widely including prestigious shows at MoMA and the New Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London) and Kunsthalle Basel. He has contributed essays to many international journals and magazines, and in 1997 he was appointed to the Yale faculty where he is currently a visiting critic in the School of Art.

Paul Elliman (b. 1961, London, UK) lives and works in London. Selected recent exhibitions
include: ‘Pieces’, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 2015; ‘Interregnum’, Rob Tufnell, London, 2015; ‘Hermes The Thief’, Wallspace, New York, 2013; ‘While walking on secret paths or while
walking on salads’, Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia, 2013; ‘The Social Life of the Record’, Castillo/Coralles, Paris, 2013; ‘Deep Cuts’, Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, Nl, 2012-13; ‘Now Here is Also Nowhere’, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2012-13; ‘Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language’, Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 2012.