GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE 620 Greenwich Street, New York, New York, 10014.

- curated by Matthew Higgs.

May 21 — July 1, 2004

Gavin Brown's Enterprise is pleased to announce Christopher Knowles' first solo exhibition in over fifteen years. Curated by Matthew Higgs the exhibition will bring together drawings, paintings, sculptures and 'typings' produced over the past thirty years.

   'Typings' consists of Knowles' typewritten works produced between 1974 and 1977 when he was a teenager: 'poems' that resemble scrambled pop lyrics; lists; letters to friends and relatives; pictograms; and sections of his text for Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's 1976 opera 'Einstein On The Beach'. My initial response to 'Typings' echoed Robert Wilson's 1989 observation that "Everything Christopher Knowles does makes sense but not in the way we are accustomed to." In the early 1990s I visited Holly Solomon's gallery in New York to inquire about Christopher Knowles. Summoned immediately into Holly's office, I would emerge several hours later somewhat the wiser.

Contracting a rare blood disease in utero, Christopher was born in 1959 with some neurological damage. As a child, he independently developed a complex relationship with both written and spoken language which took the form of texts, drawings and sound recordings.  In 1973, at fourteen, Christopher met the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson who had been introduced to Christopher's sound recordings by former Pratt Institute professor George Klauber, an early Wilson supporter and an old friend of the Knowles family. This meeting would set in motion a collaborative dialog between Knowles and Wilson that persists to this day.

   In 1978 John Ashbery, writing in New York magazine on the eve of a show of Christopher's work at the Holly Solomon Gallery, suggested that "Christopher [Knowles] seems to be providing the world with a much needed object lesson: that it is possible, in art, to be both careless and rigorous at the same time." Working intuitively Knowles' works - 'typings', drawings, paintings, sculptures, performances, and sound recordings - take the form of an ongoing investigation into the possibilities and potential of language (both spoken and written), narrative, (auto)biography, spatial order, temporal precision and repetition.

   Christopher's works embrace everything I hope for in art: they are simultaneously funny, joyous, intelligent, beautiful, touching, obsessive, sincere, direct, and puzzling. Christopher continues to live and work in Brooklyn. His more recent works have embraced the social (and emotional) landscapes of a post 9/11 America, and make evident his obvious displeasure with the current Bush administration."

-Matthew Higgs, April 2004.

Christopher Knowles (b. 1959) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include : Galerie Dorrie & Priess, Hamburg (1988); Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1985); and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York (1979, and 1978). Recent group exhibitions include  'To Whom It May Concern', CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2002); and 'Open House: Working in Brooklyn', Booklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2004). His 'typings' have been published in journals and magazines such as Semiotext(e), The Village Voice, Andy Warhol's Interview, and The New Yorker. His books 'Typings' (Vehicle Editions, New York, 1979) and 'Drawings' (House Bébert, Rotterdam, 1985) are currently out-of-print.  Christopher's extensive collaborations with Robert Wilson  - as both performer and co-author - include: 'The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin' (1973); 'A Letter For Queen Victoria' (1974); 'Einstein On The Beach' (1976); and 'Parzival' (1987.)

Matthew Higgs is an artist, curator and writer. A former Associate Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, he is currently the Curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. His writings have been published in Artforum, Frieze, and Art Monthly, and in numerous exhibition catalogs and books.

Matthew Higgs and Gavin Brown would like to thank Christopher Knowles, Barbara and Edward Knowles, and Janine St. Germain for their extraordinary  assistance with this exhibition.