Mary Poppins Is A Junkie
Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, Matthieu Messagier & Jeannie Weissglass

June 3rd till June 21st

In collaboration with Show Room 170 NYC
www.showroom170.com/


“Mary Poppins Is A Junkie”, a phrase ostensibly coined by a California disc jockey in the mid-1960s, became one of the first widely distributed bumper stickers. This sophistic expression was later revived; students of
the cantankerous P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series, reused the phrase and wore it as a lapel pin in purposeless protest.

The first exhibition under this title happened in New York in 2011, and as an ongoing conversation, Mary Poppins Is A Junkie will be brought to Vienna with a new suite of works and will incorporate French artist and poet Matthieu Messagier.

As an oblique starting point, this exhibition looks at this form of dissemination, favoring happenstance over logic—at the information that travelled on the volunteer heels and wheels of popular culture. Here Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, and Jeannie Weissglass resuscitate the idiom and bring Matthieu Messagier into the fray. Special forms of illogic ricochet between their works as their tête-à-tête-à-tête speaks a pig Latin about ritual, sexuality, the occult
.
Featuring women and skeletons, the small paintings of Jeannie Weissglass channel the borderline between
fantasy and the erotic.

Anne Deleporte’s video Princess Y shows a potter trying to make a vessel ; in his hands the spinning clay
incidentally evokes genitals, forming an homage to Brancusi's sculpture Princess X.

Stephen Dean presents a punctured object that conjures a color-saturated voodoo amulet .

The skeleton friends of Matthieu Messagier resemble kings, or queens with exaggerated breasts and makeup,
posing as icons in a grand masquerade.

Artists BIO

Stephen Dean lives and works in New York. Notable exhibitions include The Shock of the News, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (2012), Masters of Chaos, Musee du Quai Branly, Paris; Tinguely Museum, Basel (2011), Moscow Biennial (2009), SFMOMA (2008), SITE Santa Fe (2006), Venice Biennale (2005), Istanbul Biennial (2003) and Whitney Biennial (2002). Upcoming exhibitions include: Paul Kasmin, NY and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen.

Anne Deleporte lives in New York and Paris. Her work has been shown at the New Museum, New York; the Dallas Contemporary Museum; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Paco Imperial, Rio de Janiero; the Hayward Gallery, London; PS1, New York; Shanghai Art Museum, le Musée de L'Elysée, Lausanne. Other recent exhibitions include Prospect.1, New Orleans; and Derriere le Rideau at the Botanic Brussels and the Kunst Haus Wien. She currently has a solo show at la Galerie RueVisconti, Paris.

Jeannie Weissglass lives and works in New York as a painter and the director of SHOW ROOM gallery. She studied at L’ecole des Art Decoratifs in Nice, France; the New York Studio School; and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Notable exhibitions include Contemporary Art Centre, Sète, France (2012); White Box, New York (2006); Gasser & Grunert (2005).

Matthieu Messagier, son of a painter and ceramicist, was born in Doubs, France, and first moved to Paris and dedicated himself to poetry in 1966. He relocated to Doubs after a sojourn through Europe in the 1970s. He is the author of numerous collections and subject of several critical studies. He has also worked in film. In 2000, Flammarion published a collection of his verse. In the spring of 2013, Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris, presented Messagier’s drawings suite of soldiers, saints, and royalty titled Mystic & Smart.