Sam Lewitt: BMW Open Work 2018
October 4–7, 2018
Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work is a major artistic initiative which brings together art, design and technology in pioneering multi-platform formats. The New York-based artist Sam Lewitt is the second artist chosen to create the BMW Open Work by Frieze. Lewitt will debut his ambitious new installation and soundscape at Frieze London, October 4–7, 2018.
Lewitt’s practice investigates the circulation of information and matter, opening up operatively closed systems and institutional structures in the process.
Entitled CORE (the “Work”), Lewitt’s new commission for BMW Open Work focuses on motor engineering and technology, to conceptually and physically explore the production cycle of a BMW engine. Spurred by the artist’s dialogue with BMW engine specialists, CORE uses physical materials and manufacturing techniques from engineering, to re-imagine the engine manufacturing cycle as an engine in itself. In the process CORE engages with the structure of the commissioning system itself, by addressing relations of symbolic and material exchange within the work’s form.
Lewitt’s new commission will unfold as an installation in the BMW Lounge at Frieze London 2018, a soundscape in the Courtesy Car Service at the fair, and online at http://closed-core.com/.
For further information please visit frieze.com/bmw-open-work.
BMW Open Work: Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work annually invites an artist to develop an ambitious project. Drawing on dialogue with BMW designers, engineers and technological experts, artists will be able to consider current and future technologies as tools for innovation and artistic experimentation, creating artworks with the potential to unfold across a range of media and exhibiting platforms.
Sam Lewitt is the second recipient of BMW Open Work, launched in 2017. Lewitt lives and works in New York. Selected institutional solo exhibitions include: Swiss Institute, New York (2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2016) and The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Other Mechanisms, Secession, Vienna (2018), Crash Test, La Panacée, Montpellier (2018), the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017), A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2016), Nature after Nature at Fridericianum, Kassel (2014), and Materials and Money and Crisis, MUMOK, Vienna (2013) and the Whitney Biennial (2012).
Attilia Fattori Franchini is an independent curator and writer based in London. She is co-founder of the not for profit platforms bubblebyte.org and Opening Times and contributes critical essays and reviews to international publications. Fattori Franchini is currently working on Curva Blu, a residency project in Favignana, Sicily; the curated_by Festival in Vienna, 2018 and will direct the next edition of the Termoli Art Prize, Italy. Recent projects include: Red Lake at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, (CY), 2018; the Emergent section of miart, 2018; ARS17+ at Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 2017; Céu Torto, BFA, São Paulo, BR, 2017; Dawning, Mexico City, MX, 2017; Europa and the Bull, LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina, KO, 2016; Oa4s, Temra and David in 4 parts, Sorbus, Helsinki, 2016; Yves Scherer, Snow White and The Huntsman, Mexico City, 2016; Bold Tendencies 2015, London.