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DAVID MEDALLA
With work ranging from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance, David Medalla constantly shifts between situationist, surrealist and conceptualist tactics. Admitted to Columbia University at the age of 12, he studied and performed alongside some of the most preeminent scholars, artists and critics of the twentieth century, including Marcel Duchamp, who once honored him with a “medallic” object. Medalla’s work has been included in such exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Weiss auf Weiss (1966) and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), as well as 1972’s DOCUMENTA 5. Medalla has a longstanding history as a founder and director of various projects, ranging from the Signals Gallery in London in 1964, which exhibited international kinetic art, to the Exploding Gallery in 1967, an international group of multi-media artists highly influential in counterculture circles. While much of his work is deeply rooted in the underground, avant-garde scene in London, he became increasingly known for his series “Cloud Canyons”: thick bubbles that form random shapes and patterns against the light.
Medalla additionally founded the Mondrian Fan Club in New York in 1994 with Adam Nankervis, co-curator for MOMENTUM’s joint exhibition A Wake, and founded and directed the London Biennale in 1998, a makeshift free arts festival concocted through word-of-mouth invitation.
Medalla has lectured at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, MoMA, the University of the Philippines, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick and Southampton and the Slade School of Fine Art, St. Martin’s. In 1997 he was awarded the DAAD artist grant to work in Berlin, and he has recently exhibited at the New Museum in New York, where the curator hailed his “Cloud Canyons No. 14” as an iconic sculpture of contemporary art. He lives and works in New York, London, and Paris.
THE GHOST OF ISAAC NEWTON IN ANOTHER VACANT PLACE
2011, Video, 3 min 56 sec
Commissioned for MOMENTUM’s joint exhibition A Wake (2011), “The Ghost of Isaac Newton in Another Vacant Place” features Einstein walking on Biesentalerstrasse in Berlin at the moment he encounters the ghost of Isaac Newton, eating an apple and addressing an empty room in another vacant space.
Somewhat ironically, the ghost story’s audio file was lost following its inclusion in a program at Tate Britain, rendering the sound as ephemeral as the content.
Medalla labeled this piece one of his numerous impromptus, low key and spontaneous performances that often engage random audiences in public spaces.