Wild Strawberries - Inaugural Exhibition
125 Newbury, New York
September 30 – November 19, 2022
Untitled (Hand with Ring), 1967
Photo: Richard Gary
© The Estate of George Paul Thek
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York
Portal, 2017
Courtesy of the artist,
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York,
and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Untitled, 1964
© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery
Virgin Mary, 1992
© Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery
125 Newbury, the new project space spearheaded by Arne Glimcher, opens to the public with Wild Strawberries, an intergenerational show featuring 17 artists whose work traffics in the dreamlike exchange between threat and seduction. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 cinematic masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, photography, and film by a wide range of artists, including Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Julie Curtiss, Alex Da Corte, Doreen Lynette Garner, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Shahryar Nashat, Brandon Ndife, Kathleen Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke, and Zhang Huan. The exhibition also includes excerpts from narrative and experimental films that reflect a similar sensibility, which have been selected in collaboration with filmmaker and scholar Vito Adriaensens.
Wild Strawberries cultivates a garden of widely divergent practices, which germinate and transform the body. Probing the power of sensation, the works investigate art’s capacity to stimulate pleasure and incite horror in the same gesture. The exhibition is grounded in the work of key figures of the post- 1960s generation who mobilized the aesthetics of bodily abjection toward fascinating, disturbing, and political ends. The nightmarish forms of Bontecou are juxtaposed with the exquisite formlessness of Benglis, and the corporeal poetry of Wilke contrasts with the cruel delights of Samaras and Thek. Engaging the viewer on a visceral level, these works are brought into dialogue with sculpture and photography from the 1980s and ’90s by Hammons, Smith, Gober, and Zhang in which the language of abjection has become infused with struggles of power, politics, race, and gender.
Oscillating between feelings of repulsion and attraction, Wild Strawberries traces this dialogue further in the work of an emerging cohort of contemporary artists, including Da Corte, Curtiss, Garner, Nashat, Ndife, Ryan, and Schneider. Their practices draw on earlier precedents while forging new cross-pollination between painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation.
Wild Strawberries Artist List:
Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)
Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)
Julie Curtiss (b. 1982)
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980)
Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986)
Robert Gober (b. 1954)
David Hammons (b. 1943)
Deana Lawson (b. 1979)
Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975)
Brandon Ndife (b. 1991)
Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984)
Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)
Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982)
Kiki Smith (b. 1954)
Paul Thek (1933 – 1988)
Hannah Wilke (1940 – 1993)
Zhang Huan (b. 1966)
Gallery 125 Newbury, New York. A Project Space Helmed by Arne Glimcher
125 NEWBURY
395 Broadway at Walker Street, New York City (Tribeca)
