Carl Johan De Geer - American/Swedish Friendship (KUKEN!)

Carl Johan De Geer - American/Swedish Friendship (KUKEN!)

Saturday, Jul 07, 2018 - Friday, Jul 20, 2018

Location:
Boo-Hooray Summer Rental
 649 Montauk Highway
Montauk, NY 11954

Carl Johan De Geer is arguably Boo-Hooray’s favorite artist. To celebrate his 80th birthday we are staging an exhibition of his drawings, photographs and silkscreened posters. 

The roots of Carl Johan’s work lie in the aggressively original underground culture of the Swedish 1960’s, where artists created grassroots work inspired by the international upheaval that seemed to be everywhere, creating ‘zines, silkscreened agit-prop posters of masterful graphic wildness, alongside photography, film and paintings. Carl Johan De Geer, as a masterful Leica M4 snapshot giant a la Van Der Elsken or Moriyama, had the sacred ability to capture the monotone grit of everyday life during these heady times in photography as well as visual art. The silk-screened posters were topical, made for demonstrations and city walls, not for galleries. It was art for everyman/woman, cheap and mass-produced for mass-usage. In 1967, Marie Louise De Geer and husband Carl Johan De Geer first exhibited a triptych of Carl Johan’s political posters.  The day following the opening, these were confiscated and destroyed by the Swedish police. Carl Johan is just as rad these days. We are proud to present his work celebrating his 80th birthday. Come have some cake and raise a toast!

 

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.