askevoldmemo
David Askevold 1940 - 2008
til minningar um David Askevold / In memory of David Askevold
23. 01. 2008 - 23. 01. 2008
 
David Askevold past away last 23rd of January in Halifax, Canada. David was to us in Kling & Bang a great friend and a great artist. We are forever grateful for having worked with him and to get to know him. David Askevold exhibited in Iceland 1997 at Reykjavik Municipal Museum, Kjarvalsstadir and at Kling & Bang gallery, spring 2004, exhibition called Two Hanks that impressed largely the Icelandic art scene.

Thank you David, we will miss you and will never forget you !!
Kling & Bang


During his term as an instructor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 1968 through 1974, David Askevold initiated the now infamous Projects Class. Within this course Askevold invited artists Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, James Lee Bayers, Mel Bochner, N.E. Thing Company, Jan Dibbets, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner to send written ideas for collaborative works with the students. This highly unorthodox class became a platform which expanded into a program that saw some of these and other individuals visit the school in Halifax, and moreover, firmly established Askevold himself as a pioneering figure within the formative days of conceptualism.

Recognition, in part, during this period led to Askevold's inclusion in Lucy Lippard's seminal text Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, illustrated coverage in Rosalind Krauss' article "Notes on the Index, Seventies Art in America" published in the journal October in 1976, the devotion of the entire April 1975 edition of the German publication Extra to his work, and a spot in the seventh edition of Documenta at Kassel, Germany. More recent exhibitions, such as Reconsidering the Art Object 1965 1975 at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1995 and Seventies: Art in Question at Musee dé art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2002, continue to situate his practice as emblematic of seventies artmaking.

For over three decades David Askevold has exhibited consistently in solo and group settings throughout North America, South America, Asia and Europe. His latest exhibitions include, but are not limited to, New Pictures and Older Videos, Los Angles Contemporary Exhibitions (2001), 7th Lyon Bienalle of Contemporary Art (2003), and the touring exhibition 100 Artists See God (2004), co curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston.

While it may be fair to say that David Askevold's work remains rooted within the traditions of conceptualism, wherein artists looked to dispose of materialism and imposed order, over the years he has critically resisted the trappings of dry, simplistic and purely formulaic strategies of production. Rather than answer to the currents of art historical discourse, his past and present interests transcend conformity. In earlier work he found himself preoccupied with the likes of Johannes Keppler, Franz Anton Mezmer, Levi Straus and Colin Wilson, among others. In more recent investigations, references to Sharon Tate, Hank Snow and Hank Williams, for example, further locate his practice within a space of extravagant quotation and self direction.
 
 
 
 
 
Grandagarđur 20 - 101 Reykjavík kob@this.is