Born in 1953 in (United States) Lives and works in (United States ) | Biographie |
Born in 1942 Boston, Massachusetts, Jonathan Borofsky was graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then studied at the École de Fontainebleau in France. On his return to the United States, he completed a Masters at the Yale University Institute of Art and Architecture in 1966.
Gary Glassman is a graduate of the UCLA Film School. During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked extensively in the area of film and developed his activity as a director. In 1996 he founded Providence Pictures, a production company for scientific and other documentary films.
After Yale, Borofsky went to live in New York and spent a great deal of time writing a series of texts which he never published but later brought together for an exhibition entitled “Thought Books”. While he was in New York, at the end of the 1960s, he began spending several hours a day counting and meticulously noting the numbers. These calculations, from one to infinity, led him to an unexpected development: while he was counting, he started drawing the things that came to mind alongside the numbers. After several years, he decided to paint one of these sketches, but instead of signing his name, he used the number he had reached the day he finished the painting. From that time on, all the titles of his works took the name “Counting” followed by a number going from 1 to 2,346,502. Calculation became a conceptual link throughout his work, which he pursued with large frescoes on which he spelled out in binary numbers words such as “God” or “Bad”.
Borofsky's first solo exhibit took place in New York in 1975, by which time he was known for his installations combining a plethora of materials and subjects which were energetically and intelligently associated in the space. In this way, he became famous for a multifaceted style. At that point, most of his work was associated with dreams: about stars like Elizabeth Taylor, for example, but also about historical figures such as Hitler or artists like Dali or Picasso.
Through self-portraits coming from these dreams, small black-and white scribbled drawings or lithographs and imprints of texts and words, he presented a large number of provocatively surprising exhibits in New York, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Tokyo. A number of these exhibits were ephemeral installations; by his estimate, he painted more than 200 gallery and museum walls which were subsequently covered over with a new layer of white paint.
In the early 1980s he made several films and video installations with Gary Glassman, including Man in Space and Prisoners. The latter is the product of 48 hours of interviews with men and women in California penitentiaries, through which Borofsky and Glassman sought to study the impact of physical confinement on the mind.
In parallel, Borofsky took his gallery work outdoors, making monumental sculptures for private collectors or companies such as General Mills in Minneapolis. He continued this aspect of his activity with large-scale public commissions. His best-known sculpture series is the Hammering Man, a steel silhouette more than 20 metres high which rises over the crowd in centre-city Seoul, South Korea, and near the Messeturm tower in Frankfort, Germany. Hammering away while the crowd lives, works and plays, the figure provides a constant reminder of workers, silently marking the beat, measuring time blow after blow.
New commissions have given Borofsky the opportunity to develop other outdoor figures, including the Running Men, Dancers, Molecule Men and Men with Briefcases. One of his most recent installations in a commission for Rockerfeller Center in New York: Walking Up to the Sky (2004). This piece reactivates a work made in 1992 for Documenta IX in Kassel and two years later for Strasbourg. While the figure walking towards the sky in Kassel is a man, for Strasbourg, Borofsky made a woman, similarly mounting a pole pointed towards the sky. The New York version is more complex; it shows several figures on a giant steel pole, men and women of different ages and colours walking together towards the sky. The figures on the ground are at once observers and observed. They look at the ones walking towards the sky and also participate in the general movement of the group.
Laetitia Rouiller
Translation and adaptation: Miriam Rosen