Months of the Year

Philip Coyne

20th November - 12th December

Opening: 20th November, 12:00-16:00

Months of the Year is an exhibition of new works by Philip Coyne about collective labour and social life, which were prompted by a chance encounter with Gustav Klimt’s formally-remarkable yet deeply-reactionary Beethoven Frieze (1902). The exhibition poses “the collective” as a creative modality that finds itself far in excess of the individualism that’s advocated for in Klimt’s work. With these problematics in mind, Coyne questions the ambivalent relationship between an artwork’s formal qualities and its politics, and more specifically the relationship between the  flatness of Klimt’s work and modernity’s more violent forms of regulation.

An ethical question about art making as an extractive process sits at the heart of the work; as a potential answer, Coyne has opted to turn to an expanded notion of communality and collaboration in his work processes—by directly acknowledging the impact that those who are close to him have on the work. One such expanded understanding of community suggests that communality is not simply phenomena engaged with by individuals, nor something confined to dual authorship or ownership, but rather something more akin to a general condition. With this in mind, Months of the Year touches on the asymmetry of struggle; monuments and the monumental; cryptid gifting practices and opacity; the mural as a historically embedded and situated collective form; non-liberal notions of time and space; and representations of escape from normative notions of “the good life.”

This exhibition would have neither been possible, nor this exhibition, without Kristoffer Zeiner, Kim Wawer, Dune Wawer, Anouk Asselineau, Tom Kemp, Alice dos Reis, Jo Kali, Mathew Wayne Parkin, Azul De Monte, Aidan Wall, Holly Childs, Timo Demollin, and countless others.

Months of the Year has been kindly supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Fonds Kwadraat.

On 3 December there will be an accompanying screening of films by Mathew Wayne Parkin, Holly Childs, and Shinsuke Ogawa (Ogawa Productions). There will also be a forthcoming textual response with Azul De Monte published after the exhibition. Poster images by Anouk Asselineau.