Anna Zemankova @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s

Anna Zemánková 

Gladstone Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 14, 2025

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s. This exhibition emphasizes the remarkable foresight of Zemánková’s work through an art historical lens, reflecting her trailblazing influence in abstraction and seeks to expand the psychological and spiritual realms of the form. The works in the show comprise rarely seen incandescent botanical drawings and pastel works on paper.

To engage with Zemánková’s art is to enter a realm of fluid metamorphosis. Her compositions pulse with biological urgency, as if each line were a living organism. Untitled (1970s), reminiscent of the zither her father once played at weddings, radiates effervescent yellows laced with electrifying blues, its thorns piercing velvety curves. Fibrous strings extend like tentacles or arpeggios of color. Here, sound becomes substance in a stunning manifestation of synesthesia: a shimmering grid of magnified cork-cells vibrate with Charles Lloyd’s spatial melisma. Zemánková’s visual language thrives on the duality of microscopic precision and cosmic abstraction, a tension mirroring her process—trance-like improvisation guided by innate musicality.

A dentist, mother, and grandmother, Anna Zemánková channeled life’s multiplicities into creations that defy simple categorization. While often compared to mediumistic artists such as Kunz or Klint, Zemánková’s work rarely touches on spirituality directly, instead rooting itself in the subconscious—what the Surrealists termed “pure psychic automatism.” In her quotidian back-and-forth between labor and leisure, Anna Zemánková found a way to forge her cellular patterns into networks of visual information and stimulation, liberating herself from the physical confinement imposed by her diabetes. Her refusal to title works, another deliberate act of liberation, invites viewers to project their own narratives onto her wildly imaginative botany. Cleaving open otherworldly spaces with her art, Zemánková’s legacy lies in her fantastical elsewhere.

Born in Moravia, Anna Zemánková came of age during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918. This era fostered a fervent patriotism, marked by a devotion to preserving cultural traditions such as folk costumes, songs, fairy tales, and ornamental drawings. These influences ignited Zemánková’s early passion for painting. Though gifted in depicting colorful, realistic landscapes, her parents discouraged her from attending art school, redirecting her toward dentistry. Amid the turmoil of political and social upheaval, Anna Zemánková followed a conventional path: marriage, motherhood, and grandmotherhood—roles that temporarily eclipsed her artistic ambitions.

Zemánková’s artistic rebirth began serendipitously. In the late 1950s, her sons Slavomír and Bohumil discovered a forgotten suitcase filled with her early paintings in the family basement. Recognizing the vitality of these works, they encouraged her to resume painting—a therapeutic act that blossomed into an astonishing late-career surge. Though self-taught, Anna Zemánková was no recluse. Her son Bohumil and daughter-in-law Markét a, both trained sculptors, admired her intuitive genius, as did a circle of cultural figures including artist Jan Reich, filmmaker Vlastimil Venclík, and even First Lady of the Czech Republic, Olga Havlová. Zemánková actively courted public recognition, hosting an open house several times over the years (1964, 1967, 1968 and 1970). Her work was exhibited at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade in 1966 and later shown at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979. 

In the quiet hours before dawn, she would rise in her Prague apartment, surrounded by real and artificial flowers, and surrender to the classical music of Beethoven and Janáček or the Jazzy Blues of Charles Lloyd. These solitary sessions, lit by the soft glow of imagination, became her sanctuary. With paper as her stage, she conjured a universe of pulsating tendrils, succulent petals, and coiled organic forms—a paradise of biomorphic flowers that blurred the boundaries of reality. Born from the shadows of personal suffering, her work invites the viewer into a kaleidoscopic garden where beauty and the grotesque intertwine, where music morphs into matter, and where creation itself becomes transcendence.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Anna Zemánková and Cavin-Morris Gallery.

“Sure, I’ll draw you something, I’ll draw you one of my fantasies.”

—Anna Zemánková 

ANNA ZEMANKOVA is one of the great artists of the twentieth century and a pivotal figure in the Art Brut pantheon, alongside Jeanne Tripier, Madge Gill, Aloise Corbaz, and Emma Kunz. Her work has been featured in international solo and group exhibitions since 1971, preceding appearances at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2024). Among her most significant exhibitions are Outsiders at London’s Hayward Gallery (1980) and the São Paulo Art Biennial (1981). Posthumous retrospectives include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1997); Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (2007); Museum Montanelli, Prague (2011); Saarland Gallery and European Art Forum, Berlin (2011); Museum of Art, Kobe, and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2012); and Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (2017). Her work resides in public collections such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden, Austria; and private collections including the abcd collection, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; LAM, Musée d’art Moderne, d’art Contemporain et d’art Brut de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve-d'Ascq; Boston Fine Arts, Boston,and The Museum of Everything, London. 

GLADSTONE GALLERY 

130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.gladstonegallery.com

Robert Rauschenberg: Sympathy for Abandoned Objects @ Gladstone Gallery, New York - Survey exhibition of Rauschenberg sculptural practice

Robert Rauschenberg 

Sympathy for Abandoned Objects 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

May 1 - June 14, 2025 

Presented in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on the occasion of the artist’s Centennial, Gladstone presents the first survey of Rauschenberg’s sculptural practice in thirty years, spanning his production from the 1950s through the late 1990s.

Examining Rauschenberg’s sculptures through the lens of scale, the exhibition showcases over 30 sculptures that relate in size to the human body, whether floor-, pedestal-, or wall-based. Drawing from myriad media and disrupting the distinction between abstraction and empirical representation, Rauschenberg's sculptures are rooted in his career-long dedication to artistic experimentation.

Robert Rauschenberg is renowned for blurring the line between artistic genres, painterly gesture, and three-dimensionality. The artist maintained a robust sculptural practice throughout his long and prodigious career. Underscoring the artist’s remarkable use of found and readymade materials, the works on view are assembled from industrial detritus, everyday objects, decorative items, and organic forms. They are the result of improvisatory gestures—gathering, twisting, combining, adhering, tying—that Rauschenberg described as responses to items found in his environment, “treasures” that he would bring back to his studio, seeing in them a potential for new form. Claiming a “sympathy for abandoned objects,” he created a body of strictly sculptural work that is rarely presented as such.

For this exhibition, Gladstone presents key works from various series, including the Scatole Personali (1952–53), Elemental Sculptures (1953/59), Combines (1954-64), Kabal American Zephyrs (1981– 83/1985/1987–88), Gluts (1986–89/1991–94), and the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI; 1984–91) in an installation designed by Selldorf Architects to reveal the continuity of his unique vocabulary within an expansive set of sculptural positions. Given Rauschenberg’s protean imagination, this exhibition also features a number of his sculptures that were not aligned with specific series and exist on their own formal terms. Key loans from institutional and private collections augment the selection of work from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to further argue for the artist’s keen sculptural sensibility, even if he resisted aligning himself with one medium. This exhibition traces the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s creative output as a whole, with the three-dimensional objects serving as key touchpoints in an expansive and almost uncategorizable oeuvre. The last survey of Rauschenberg’s purely sculptural output prior to this show was in 1995 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by Chris Svensson with an essay by sculpture expert, Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, entries on each of the individual sculptural series represented, and detailed exhibition histories.

In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation commemorates Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of the artist’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Born on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg worked in what he called the gap between art and life. Over the course of his sixty-year career, Rauschenberg’s art embodied a spirit of experimentation with new materials and techniques. Dubbed an enfant terrible for his assemblages of urban detritus (the Combines of 1954-64), Robert Rauschenberg continued exploring many different mediums and technological advancements in the years following his 1970 decampment to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast.

Although he demurred from affiliations with any particular movement, he has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar artistic development since Abstract Expressionism.

In addition to his own artmaking practice, Robert Rauschenberg became an advocate for artists and the creative community at large. In September 1970, he founded Change, Inc., a non-profit organization that helped artists with emergency expenses. From 1984-91, he personally funded the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), traveling to ten countries outside of the United States to spark cross-cultural dialogue through art.

Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in his Captiva studio. His artistic legacy and his lifelong commitment to collaboration with artists, performers, writers, artisans, and engineers worldwide was recognized long before his death. His expansive artistic philosophy lives on through his highly innovative and influential work to the present day.

About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation builds on the legacy of artist Robert Rauschenberg, emphasizing his belief that artists can drive social change. Robert Rauschenberg sought to act in the “gap” between art and life, valuing chance and collaboration across disciplines. As such, the Foundation celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

530 West 21st Street, New York City

www.gladstonegallery.com

Jaider Esbell @ Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

Jaider Esbell

Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

April 1 – May 17, 2025

Gladstone presents the first solo exhibition in South Korea of indigenous artist, activist, and curator JAIDER ESBELL (b. 1979, Normandia—d. 2021, São Sebastião, Brazil). Comprising paintings on canvas and works on paper, spanning the artist’s later years, the show highlights his distinctive visual language of vibrant contrasting patterns across saturated black backgrounds. Esbell’s deep connection with nature, rooted in ecological activism and Macuxi cosmology, permeates every aspect of his work—from the use of plant-based dyes to the depiction of myths and environmental elements such as birds, trees, and cacti. Underscored by his belief in the interconnectedness of all living and natural forms, and the presence of mythological beings and spirits within our complex ecosystem, Esbell’s artistic legacy mobilizes narratives of resistances and champions indigenous epistemologies. 

Esbell challenged the boundaries between art and activism in a practice he named “artivism.” As a key figure in Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art), he used his platform to advocate for the recognition of indigenous rights and territories and to create spaces that highlight myriad decolonial perspectives that transcend Western art historical traditions. Driven by his activist efforts, this social movement uplifted artistic production by Afro-Brazilian communities, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized populations. As Esbell’s prominence in the art world grew, he became a critical voice and contributed to the larger community through the establishment of a gallery that served as an artistic and intellectual laboratory, prioritizing institutional collaborations, and curating exhibitions that center indigenous art. 

Esbell’s artistic practice weaves together activism and ecology to affirm Indigenous relationships with the land and urge environmental consciousness. This exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper that forefront narratives highlighting the relationship between living and non-living entities in the natural world through the lens of Macuxi cosmology. Esbell asserts indigenous worldviews and aesthetics through depictions of mythological beings and spirits including Makunaimî, the Macuxi creator of all nature. Works such as Os cactos e jardins de Makunaimí 2 (2021) render vibrant gardens created by Makunaimî, while A festa da chegada das chuvas (2020) celebrates the arrival of rain, capturing the dynamic interplay of nature’s rhythmic cycles. Recurring motifs such as serpents, birds, and cosmic elements function as both cultural signifiers and political metaphors, reflecting concerns towards the exploitative process of extractivism in the Amazon region. Forged through the intersectional dialogue between art, ancestry, and ecology, Esbell’s “artivism” stands as an enduring testament to the importance of creating pathways for indigenous expression within contemporary art frameworks.

JAIDER ESBELL (1979-2021)

Jaider Esbell was born in Normandia, Roraima, Brazil, known today as the indigenous territory, Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. Jaider Esbell was a member of the Macuxi group and a central figure in the indigenous art movement in Brazil through his work as an artist, educator, writer, curator, and activist. The artist’s multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, writing, drawing, installation and performance, engaging his artistic production as a means of ecological and political activism.

Originally trained as a geographer, Jaider Esbell turned fully to art in 2016 after several years of establishing himself as an educator and advocate for indigenous art and social movements through various curatorial projects and founding the Jaider Esbell Contemporary Indigenous Art Gallery in 2013. In 2021, Esbell's work was shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo titled Though it’s dark, still I sing. That same year, he participated as both an artist and guest curator of the exhibition, Moquém_Surarî : Contemporary Indigenous Art, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM São Paulo). In 2022, Jaider Esbell was highlighted prominently in the Arsenal of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including: Gladstone Gallery, New York (2025); Apresentação: Ruku, Millan, São Paulo (2021); Piatai Datai, Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea e Sesc Centro, Boa Vista, Brazil (2019); and Transmakunaima: o buraco émais embaixo, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas, Brasília, Brazil (2018). Jaider Esbell has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro; Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e da Ecologia (MuBE), São Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy; Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy; and Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, among others. Esbell was the recipient of the 2016 PIPA prize, one of Brazil’s most esteemed contemporary art awards, and the Prêmio Funarte de Criação Literária in 2010. Esbell’s works are held in the institutional collections of the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and Pinacoteca do Estado. 

GLADSTONE SEOUL

760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06070

www.gladstonegallery.com

David Salle Exhibition @ Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

David Salle

Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

June 10 – July 15, 2022 

Artist David Salle always finds his way back to the fundamental building blocks of painting: line, shape, color, texture, and most importantly, composition. An imagist at heart, Did avSalle has spent much of his career exploring how images can be constructed from those basic elements. His work demonstrates the essential, even inescapable reciprocity of image and pure painting. In his first exhibition with Gladstone, David Salle presents a new series of paintings that each tell their own story through a pictorial language merged with the materiality – the facticity – of paint.

In the current body of work, David Salle revisits his past to tell new stories. For this exhibition, the artist has repurposed previous works by enlarging, cropping, re-printing, and then painting over existing images to create brand new ones. This amalgamation of past, present, and future compounds the narrative potential of his figures, producing a complex yet legible mode of storytelling. Male and female figures, some nude and others clothed, a few with heads and many without, bisect the picture plane. Floating in space like flying maquettes, the bodies are tangled and overlaid by various motifs that Salle regularly employs in his work such as trees or ladders, or simple geometric forms. Indeed, the depiction of simplified forms as stand-ins for the human body, as 'bodies-in-the-making' is a leitmotif of these works. These forms take on various identities - sometimes a torso, other times a mattress, or a box, or a dented hourglass; the work seems to say, 'Look at what we are made of.'

As an artist who has made extensive use of photography, David Salle’s work highlights the importance of perspective and superimposition, as well as strong contrasts of light and shadow to create dynamic relationships between figures that float, fly, and ooze throughout the picture. Built-up in stages, the works combine seemingly unrelated images in diverse and disjunctive representational styles. Salle's images may seem unrelated at first glance, but in fact, exist in carefully calibrated image harmonies. Neither meaningless nor random, the relationships between images are abstract, as in music; the image clusters make precise chords of associations and resonances. As in all art, the how is as important as the what. Some figures seem embedded in passages of swirling paint; others are painted in slashing black outlines, while still others are achieved with delicate brushstrokes of yellow-ochre or Venetian red. In some of the works, David Salle's color is naturalistic; in others decidedly not. In one piece, a detached red nose is suspended against an oozing pink background while an outstretched hand is painted in blue, while faces and mannequins weave and twist in and out of the scene. Painted atop magazine covers and ads, the works pile up, each one bolder than the next. One element leads to another, which leads to another, and on and on, ending in a state of expectant animation.

DAVID SALLE (b. 1952, Norman, OK) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 1970, at the age of 17, David Salle joined the legendary foundational class of the California Institute of the Arts, where his mentor was the Conceptual artist, John Baldessari. At Cal Arts, David Salle developed an affinity for the cinematic language of montage, as reflected in his early works of the 1970s. In the early 1980s, David Salle came to prominence as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, artists who questioned the status of the image through appropriation and by confronting mass media on its own terms. Distinct from others in his generation, David Salle's work has always been rooted in the complexities and demands of painting. 

Since the 1980s, David Salle has received international recognition, with solo exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Spiral Hall Museum, Tokyo; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His 1999 retrospective was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and traveled to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. His work has also been shown at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. In 2016, a solo exhibition was held at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. His most recent survey exhibition was held at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich. David Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, and as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His collection of critical essays, How To See, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.

GADSTONE GALLERY

12 Rue du Grand Cerf, 1000 Brussels 

www.gladstonegallery.com

James Ensor @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC - An Intimate Portrait - Exhibition + Catalogue

James Ensor. An Intimate Portrait 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

Through January 15, 2022 

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of historic works by Belgian artist James Ensor, a monumental figure in the late 19th-century Belgian avant-garde and a singular influence in the development of Expressionism. Curated by Sabine Taevernier, this show brings together paintings, drawings, and etchings, made between 1888 and 1896, alongside one of the most prolific and significant periods of creation during James Ensor’s lifetime. Spanning a diverse collection of subjects and figures, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the artist’s perceptive eye in capturing both his internal strife and the external variables that impacted him and the artists, friends, and family he was surrounded by.

Born in 1860 in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, James Ensor would spend time between his hometown and Brussels, which offered him a diversity of experiences and friendships with significant figures who deeply influenced Ensor throughout his lifetime. He had a challenging childhood in Ostend with his merchant parents, as he and family members dealt with depression, anxiety, and alcoholism that eventually led to his father’s death and caused great internal strife for the artist. His main refuge was his attic studio, where James Ensor surrounded himself with his paintings, drawings, and collection of found masks that inspired his realistic and imaginary narratives. In Brussels, where James Ensor spent most of his winters, he found companionship with the Rousseau family, who housed him during his excursions away from the beachfront. Comprised of academics, artists, and doctors, the Rousseau family would discuss science and politics, but also music, literature, and visual art, opening him up to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and multifaceted modes of thinking. Primarily perceived as a reclusive thinker and worker, James Ensor’s interpersonal relationships were essential forms of communication and understanding of the political, cultural, and fantastical world around him that greatly influenced the nature of and approach to his practice.

A comprehensive exhibition catalogue published by the gallery with essays by Susan M. Canning, Sabine Taevernier, Herwig Todts, and Xavier Tricot accompanies the show, and includes a series of essays that further explore the themes presented in this presentation.

JAMES ENSOR

Published by Gladstone Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition James Ensor. An Intimate Portrait, Curated by Sabine Taevernier, at Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, November 2021 - January 2022

GLADSTONE GALLERY

130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.gladstonegallery.com

Jim Hodges @ Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

Jim Hodges 

Gladstone Gallery, Brussels 

Through June 18, 2021 

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by JIM HODGES. 

The artist’s latest presentation, Between the flowers and the birds (2020-2021), is comprised of ten works on paper that function both as a unified series and as discrete art objects unto themselves. Rendered in gold leaf and individuated by way of gestural marks, folds, and delicate lengths of gold chain, each example serves as both a record of itself, and a reminder that the fragment always remembers the whole. 

Adhering to Jim Hodges’ signature visual vocabulary, the abstract surfaces of these compositions celebrate the poetry of the familiar: natural sylvan silhouettes comingle with man-made camouflage; creases and pencil markings suggest rays of light breaking through clouds; incised surfaces indicate separation while simultaneously defying loss. Replete with the emotional narratives and diaristic qualities that have long served as the cornerstone of Jim Hodges’ practice, the drawings that comprise Between the flowers and the birds offer themselves as quiet sites of contemplation in which we might consider absence and presence, moments of pause that remind us that lines of kinship remain stalwart even in the face of distance and time. 

JIM HODGES was born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Camden Art Centre, London; the Aspen Art Museum; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Most recently a major traveling retrospective of Hodges’s work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The artist recently unveiled the work I dreamed a world and called it love, a monumentally scaled installation commissioned by the MTA and permanently installed in New York’s iconic Grand Central Station. Jim Hodges has received multiple awards and grants including the Association International des Critiques d’art, the Albert Ucross Prize, Washington State Arts Commission, and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels

www.gladstonegallery.com

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Shirin Neshat: Land of Dreams @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC

Shirin Neshat: Land of Dreams 

Gladstone Gallery, New York

Through February 27, 2021

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition by SHIRIN NESHAT and the New York premiere of the artist’s latest body of work, Land of Dreams. Comprised of more than 100 photographs and a two-channel film installation, Land of Dreams marks a significant visual and conceptual shift for the artist, who has turned her lens to the landscape and people of the American West. For this exhibition, Shirin Neshat presents the entire collection of photographs from this series as well as both films, which is complemented by an online viewing room and virtual screenings throughout the show’s run. Combining Shirin Neshat’s singular artistic language with her intuitive approach to documenting the subjects she photographs, Land of Dreams presents multifaceted, surreal views into contemporary American culture during the Trump era.

Created in 2019 in New Mexico, Land of Dreams is a multidisciplinary project, both fictitious and documentary in nature, that captures the state’s diverse American population. The first film on the two-channel video installation follows a young Iranian art student named Simin, who travels around suburban and rural areas of New Mexico photographing local residents in their homes. As part of the protagonist’s assignment, Simin asks her subjects about their most recent dreams. As the people she encounters vividly detail their dreams, the viewer is transported into these imagined narratives alongside Simin, who wanders inside each participant’s subconscious mind. Shirin Neshat infuses the film with cinematic views of New Mexico’s sublime landscape alongside the everyday streets and neighborhoods where Simin travels. The second film reveals a sinister twist to the protagonist’s seemingly innocuous assignment: Simin is uncovered as an Iranian spy tasked with archiving the dreams and portraits she captures, which are recorded and analyzed in a bunker set within the mountains of New Mexico. Unlike the dozens of dream scientists who quietly work and diligently follow orders in the factory-like facility, Simin is noticeably perplexed by one of her subjects, leading her on a path to try and find their subliminal connection. Through her incisive ability to allude to the absurdities and similarities between the United States and Iran, Shirin Neshat astutely explores the complexities between the ephemeral nature of dreams and the dangerous impact of oppressive political ideologies and policies to reveal a shared humanity.

Alongside the film, the photographic installation Land of Dreams comprises 111 photographs of New Mexico residents who Neshat captured throughout filming. Similarly to Simin, Shirin Neshat asked her subjects about their dreams, which she recorded in Farsi on many of the portraits, along with the sitters’ names and dates and places of birth. The artist’s practice of applying calligraphy to portraits recurs throughout her oeuvre, and in many of these new photographs, Neshat additionally included technically intricate, ornate drawings that depict fantastical elements of the dreams. The artist notes, “We drove across the country to search for a landscape that at once looked like Iran and America’s Southwest. We settled on New Mexico not only for its spectacular nature but also for its demographically diverse communities of Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic, and Anglos.” Through making these complex and interwoven works, Neshat formed a deep interpersonal connection with each person she met, resulting in a powerful and encompassing portrait of America.

SHIRIN NESHAT is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. In 2019, Shirin Neshat was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again” at The Broad, Los Angeles, which will travel to The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on February 19 and remain on view through May 16, 2021. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Copenhagen; Musée de l'Eysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Shirin Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and the Praemium Imperiale Prize (2017). In 2009, Shirin Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.

Shirin Neshat is currently completing her third feature-length film, entitled Land of Dreams, marking the first time she has created a body of work that incorporates photography, video, and a feature film. Land of Dreams will be released in 2021 and features actors such as Matt Dillon, Sheila Vand, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher McDonald, and Anna Gunn.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

515 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.gladstonegallery.com

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T. J. Wilcox: Spectrum @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC

T. J. Wilcox: Spectrum
Gladstone Gallery, New York
January 18 – February 22, 2020

Gladstone Gallery presents Spectrum, an exhibition of new works by T. J. Wilcox. For this show, Wilcox debuts a six-part silent film based on different colors of the rainbow. In its installation, each hue blends together and elaborates a figure or event that has been seminal to the artist’s experience in becoming an artist and as a gay man. The works in this show explore the artist’s maturation and identity in ways that are both deeply personal and universal. Alongside the film, T. J. Wilcox presents a series of new photocollages on silk based on the video works that comprise Spectrum, adding this new material to his expanding practice. 

The elliptical narratives from Spectrum transform a series of visual fragments into dissected fractions of light that delve into a variety of topics significant to T. J. Wilcox’s identity and research interests. Drawing from a range of cultural sources, from documentary to mythic, the single projection film investigates T. J. Wilcox’s cathexis towards objects of popular fixation and their significance in the formation of the artist’s queer identity. With Hyacinth and Apollo and Taglioni’s Dance, T. J. Wilcox references figures engaged in the act of preservation, of cultivating their own legends. Both Apollo’s invention of the hyacinth to memorialize his lover and prima ballerina La Taglioni’s habitual reenactment of her starlit dance over the snow parallel Wilcox’s process of reconstructing a memory through the use of emblematic imagery. In the works that derive from documentary sources, Garden in Hell, Grapefruit, and Green Carnation, T. J. Wilcox similarly manipulates significant anecdotes—gathering archival footage of Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland’s red living room, meditating on green carnations as a stand-in for Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant persona and as a reference to his prosecution for gross indecency, or Yoko Ono’s book of life instructions—in order to deconstruct the process by which history is distilled from embodied living experiences. Often, T. J. Wilcox’s evocative images hold queer double-meanings, and the same holds true in Monarch Butterfly which follows the eponymous creature, commonly associated with gay men and thought of as delicate and frivolous, as it completes one of the most complex migratory events in the natural world, traveling over 8,000 miles on its paper-thin wings. Exhibited simultaneously as looped videos that are projected onto a long, narrow screen, each film has differing durations. The resulting projection creates a seemingly never-ending viewing experience within the structurally complex exhibition space T. J. Wilcox has constructed. The narratives and colors bleed into one another, creating an optically compelling story that can be read or experienced as six different films or a single image. This complexity and careful attention to creating an immersive environment is further demonstrated through the monumental scale of the single screen and the cascading rainbow that appears beneath the projection, continuing to envelop the viewer into a space that is both vibrant and contemplative.

Alongside each film, T. J. Wilcox has made a series of multi-ply silk hangings, printed with a photo-collaged images that references the source materials from each new video work. The collages borrow from documentary sources, Wilcox’s own photography, illustrations, and found imagery to construct portraits of the historical subjects or natural world. Recalling both the omnipresent flag of queer liberation and the importance of the color spectrum in the optics of film and photography, Wilcox’s hanging photographs explore both process and history with a subtle biographical edge. 

T. J. Wilcox was born in 1965 in Seattle, Washington, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan; Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Ireland; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Kunstverein Munich, Munich. T. J. Wilcox has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva; Centro Galego De Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London, and he participated in the 2015 Biennale de Lyon and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

GLADSTONE GALLERY
515 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
gladstonegallery.com

Anicka Yi @ Gladstone Gallery, Brussels - "We Have Never Been Individual" Exhibition

Anicka Yi

We Have Never Been Individual

Gladstone Gallery, Brussels

April 23 – June 15, 2019

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by ANICKA YI entitled We Have Never Been Individual, her first with the gallery. Through her work, Anicka Yi directs us to the dissolving boundaries between the human, animal, and vegetable and emphasizes that the question of who and what we are – what animals and bacteria and plants and machines are – is an open and urgent question. By way of her technosensual explorations of hybridization and contamination, Yi repositions the human in terms of vulnerable co-subjectivity, interdependency, and agitated symbiosis with other lively entities.

As discoveries are made in the fields of microbiome research, artificial intelligence, and animal and plant cognition, traditional ideas of individual autonomy and human exceptionalism appear wholly inadequate. Fluid entanglements between lively and intelligent entities at both the micro and macro scale reveal to us that there is no defined center, no single inner voice or single self at the helm. Neat and tidy categories no longer serve as our current models struggle to keep pace with the rapid mutations of our bodies, technologies, and environments.

In We Have Never Been Individual, Anicka Yi explores the potency and precariousness of entangled life in multiple spatial and temporal scales. Suspended throughout the gallery, Anicka Yi’s series of glowing spherical sculptures are upholstered with a stretched leather-like kelp, calling attention to the ecological history and exciting potential uses of algae, a powerful and shapeshifting entity comprising the largest biomass on the planet. As green and gold light shines through the variated kelp surfaces, the texture of scratches and scars on the “skin” of each sculpture suggest embattled aquatic life and remind us of our primordial crawl from the sea. Shadows of small animatronic insects flicker inside the sculpture walls, offering a humorous nod toward notions of autonomy and artificial intelligence, while also suggesting the presence of parasites, symbionts, or hive colonizers.

In a second series, Anicka Yi creates minimalist microalgae and cyanobacteria aquascapes, focusing on the symbiotic partnership between these microorganisms – the basis of all terrestrial life on earth. Drawing inspiration from algae-exploiting, solar-powered sea slugs and contemporary aquaculture practices, Anicka Yi’s aquascapes are staged as mini-bioreactors, suggesting the human capacity to harness algae as a food and energy source, and hinting towards a more intimate symbiosis in the future. Within these living paintings are nested glass incubation chambers and fabricated insect eggs, evoking associations with bodily fluids, gestation, and disease. In contrast to these minimalist scapes, Anicka Yi includes a set of intricate and richly colored bacterial light panels. Bacterial cultures are UV-printed on the surface of the panels, interweaving with an abstracted architectural pattern that references computer networks and urban infrastructural grids.

Central to the exhibition are the hypertextural and tactile Techno-Geo sculptures, which muddy the imperfect categorizations of natural, synthetic and trans-natural through a collage of organic, geological, and industrial elements. Fossilized remnants of animals and plants emphasize blurred ecological boundaries as evolutionary trajectories are compressed, accelerated, and expanded through time. Delicate, connection points between the sculptural components underscore the unhinged, teetering balance between living species and the damaged and hazardous terrain of manufactured environments. The uncertain distinction between natural elements and synthetic intervention suggests that the status of “natural” is always changeable. Whether through simulation, biomorphism, or mimicry – nature is a concept that is constantly in drag as itself. In We Have Never Been Individual, assemblages masquerade as wholes, robots pose as insects, plant flesh mimics animal flesh, life resembles death and vice versa. Within this matrix of shifting impersonations, the modern mythology of the human proves to be an outdated disguise for something at once smaller, greater, and more complex than we had imagined.

ANICKA YI was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1971, and currently lives and works in New York City. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Group exhibition venue highlights include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Massachusetts; New Museum, New York; Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France; the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong;  the 12th Biennale de Lyon; Studiolo, Zurich; MoCA, North Miami; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; White Flag Projects, Saint Louis; SculptureCenter, New York and White Columns, New York, amongst others. In 2016, Anicka Yi was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in recognition of the power and singularity of the experimental body of work she has produced over the past decade. This May, her work will be featured in Venice at the 58th International Art Exhibition, titled May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff, on view from May 11 until November 24, 2019.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels

www.gladstonegallery.com

Amy Sillman @ Gladstone 64, New York - "Mostly Drawing" Exhibition

Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawing
Gladstone 64, New York
January 26 – March 3, 2018

Gladstone 64 presents Mostly Drawing, an exhibition of new works by AMY SILLMAN. This show marks the artist’s first exhibition with Gladstone Gallery.

As the show’s title self-referentially indicates, this exhibition is comprised primarily of works on paper incorporating silkscreened, painted, and drawn elements that continue Amy Sillman’s decades-long examination into the ideological underpinnings of the term Drawing itself. In each work, the artist employs formal dualities from the art historical canon – namely, narration versus abstraction, color versus line, flat versus recessive space, and painting versus drawing – not as a means to a conceptual end, but rather as a method to push these painterly concerns to their extremes. The works on view therefore defy easy categorization, as each one appears to vacillate between overt abstraction and coded figuration, between traditional painting and comic illustration. Yet this simultaneous presentation of dissimilar components does not imply incompatibility. The heterogeneity evident in every composition invites the viewer to resist the pictorial resolutions that one seeks in finished artworks, and instead revel in the liminal space that Sillman creates using her own visual language.

This indulgence in multeity evolves from the artist’s process. Refuting the classic dichotomy of fast drawings and slow paintings, Amy Sillman’s works do not exist within a fixed chronology of creation. Some compositions are made in a day, others in a week, and some over the course of months. What is of primary concern to Sillman is the examination of the hierarchy between media that seemingly exists in artmaking. By refusing to acknowledge any media-specific pecking order within each picture – Are these drawings? Prints? Paintings? Or none of the above? – the artist generates works that encourage an interrogation of art production that is both ethical in nature and engaging in situ.

In relation to their installation at Gladstone 64, Sillman’s excited, overflowing compositions also play with the comfort connoted by the townhouse setting of the gallery. The dialogue between work and location, while seemingly jarring, invites a sense of unease to coexist with the traditional prettiness of modernist architecture. Through this gesture, the artist creates a setting wherein the sensation of comfortlessness is inverted to seem not only allowable, but also desirable.

Two events celebrating the recent publication of Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER (Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse and Portikus; 2017) will be held in conjunction with Mostly Drawing: the first, a book signing at Gladstone 64, on January 27 from 3-5pm; the second, a film screening and signing at Metrograph on March 4.

Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER

Edited by Karen Kelly, Fabian Schöneich, and Barbara Schroeder

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois and Manuela Ammer, interview by Fabian Schöneich

Design by Ronnie Fueglister

164 pages, 95 illustrations

Copublished by Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse Publishing, Portikus

Amy Sillman was born in 1955 in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives and works in New York. Since 2015, she has been professor of painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Sillman’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Beginning at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2014, Sillman’s solo exhibition, "one lump or two," traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her works are held in the public collections of such prominent institutions as Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Gladstone 64
130 East 64 Street, New York, NY 10065
www.gladstone64.com

Alfredo Volpi @ Gladstone Gallery, New York

Alfredo Volpi
Gladstone Gallery, New York
Through December 22, 2017

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of historic works by Brazilian painter Alfredo Volpi (1896 – 1988), the first solo presentation of his work in the United States. Alfredo Volpi is regarded as one of the most influential and celebrated Brazilian painters, who the preeminent public intellectual Mario Pedrosa called “the master of his time.” Honing his craft during the rise of modernism in Brazil, Volpi has made a lasting impact on the history of art through his signature approach to depicting the forms of everyday experiences—from festival banners to common row houses—in vibrantly chromatic abstraction.

Tangentially connected with Concretism, the mid-century Brazilian artistic movement that included Tarsila do Amaral, Waldemar Cordeiro and others, Alfredo Volpi occupied a liminal space between naïve and fine art, as a selftaught artist with a distinct aesthetic style that distinguished his work from the academic painters of his time. Alfredo Volpi emigrated from Lucca, Italy to São Paulo, Brazil as a child, spending the remainder of his life in Cambuci, which inspired the city and seascapes that filled his oeuvre. Volpi first explored the medium of paint as an apprentice to a wall decorator, where he not only perfected a craftsman’s ability to prepare surfaces and mix pigments, but also became interested in architecture and urban space. In the 1930s, Volpi began to paint in his free time, turning to subjects that were immediately at hand—namely Cambuci and the surrounding area. However, it was not until the end of that decade when he began to fully develop a signature style of painting. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Volpi began to depict building façades and rudimentary flags in his paintings using a parti-colored array of tempera paints. Volpi’s evocative and thoughtfully considered color palettes transformed these everyday scenes and subjects into abstract patterned landscapes, connecting his fine art practice with his early work as a designer. This initial impulse to deconstruct and reshow elements of everyday life through his unique style of painting also demonstrated his early attempts at pushing the boundaries of early modern art practices.

This exhibition focuses on the different aspects of his practice during his most engaging phase between the late 1950s and mid 1970s. Gathering major works, many of which have never been exhibited outside of Brazil, the paintings on view survey the façade, banner, and nautical paintings with which he is most associated. On this occasion, the first major monograph in English of Volpi’s work has been published which includes a new essay on his work by scholar Rodrigo Moura and historical writings on the artists by Aracy de Amaral, Willys de Castro, and Mario Pedrosa, translated into English for the first time.

ALFREDO VOLPI

Alfredo Volpi was born in 1896 in Lucca, Italy, and died in 1988 in São Paulo. Throughout his lifetime, Volpi had solo exhibitions at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Campinas, Brazil; Biblioteca Municipal Mario de Andrade, São Paulo; Companhia do Metropolitano de São Paulo - Metrô; and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. Subsequent to his death in 1988, many institutions have shown Volpi’s work, including Paulo Kuczynski Escritório de Arte, São Paulo; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Belgium; Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro; Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo; Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Espaço Cultural Banco Central, São Paulo; Museu de Valores do Banco Central, Brasília, Brazil; Centro Cultural São Paulo; Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes, Rio de Janeiro; Centro Cultural Laurinda Santos Lobo, Rio de Janeiro; and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. In 1953, Volpi won the prestigious Grand Prix for Brazilian painting at the second São Paulo Art Biennial. Volpi was also included in the Venice Biennale in 1950, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1964.

GLADSTONE GALLERY
130 East 64th Street
New York, NY 10065 USA
www.gladstonegallery.com

Jim Hodges @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC

Jim Hodges: I dreamed a world and called it Love.
Gladstone Gallery, New York
November 11 - December 21, 2016

Gladstone Gallery presents I dreamed a world and called it Love., an exhibition of new works by Jim Hodges.

Jim Hodges’ engagement with mirrored glass as a material originated in the mid 1990’s, with a single cracked panel mounted on raw canvas. So began a progression that has seen its employ through hand-cut mosaic series to milled camouflage motifs as stand-alone structural forms. An invested concentration in surface reflectivity as its own medium is present in much of Hodges’ work–glass, gold and polished stainless steel–and allows for multiple readings, broadening experiential possibilities and disrupting notions of a fixed site.  I dreamed a world and called it Love. materializes simultaneously as a single panorama, made up of numerous individual monochromes as well as multi-colored patterned panels.  Unprecedented in size, the installation offers an immersive inversion of the painting experience, along with an opportunity for reflection–literal and philosophical–in an exhilarating and undetermined environment.

JIM HODGES was born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington, and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Camden Art Centre, London; the Aspen Art Museum; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Most recently a major traveling retrospective of Hodges’s work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Hodges has received multiple awards and grants including the Association International des Critiques d’art, the Albert Ucross Prize, Washington State Arts Commission, and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant.

GLADSTONE GALLERY
New York | 21st Street
www.gladstonegallery.com

Mario Merz @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC

Mario Merz
Early Works
Gladstone Gallery, New York
November 10 - December 17, 2016

Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, presents an exhibition of historic early works by Mario Merz. A leading member of Italy’s Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, Mario Merz created paintings, sculptures, and installations with an aim to oppose a monolithic culture and to celebrate perplexity. This goal manifested itself in the artist’s deviation from the mass-media iconography popularized by Pop Art, the mythic emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, and the machismo detachment of Minimalism. Instead, Merz and his Arte Povera contemporaries – such as Alighiero e Boetti, Luciano Fabro, and Jannis Kounellis, among others – employed simple, everyday materials and perceptive references to nature in order to ground their art in a relatable existential ambiguity.

The three seminal works on view in this exhibition exemplify this stratagem. Giap Igloo – If the Enemy Masses His Forces, He Looses Ground: If He Scatters, He Loses Strength (1968) represents a body of work that became an enduring motif throughout Mario Merz’s career, since he began making igloo sculptures in 1967. Using the exterior world to create an interior space, igloos encapsulate Mario Merz’s drive to utilize social tradition as a means for individual reflection. At once a freestanding structure, this hemisphere is rendered meaningless without an inhabitant to provide utilitarian import. The instillation of subjective weight onto the objective form of the igloo is underscored by the neon words circumscribing the dome. A quotation from General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front describing the double-bind of combat strategy, the glowing letters provide a visual tension to the cracking clay exterior, while highlighting the artist’s fascination with social mores – in this case, military and political custom.

Further showcasing Mario Merz’s interest in exploring a collective conscience through prosaic media is his boxlike sculpture, Sitin (1968). The title of the work invokes the physical act of using one’s body to occupy space – a fact emphasized by the position of the sculpture on the gallery’s floor – and also points to the global escalation of political protests in 1968, of which the sit-in was an often-used technique. Through this gesture, Merz emphasizes the social significance of sitting as individual stance and collective action.

The large-scale installation, La bottiglia di Leyda (Leyden Jar), provides a visual culmination of Mario Merz’s Arte Povera endeavors: physical space is redefined as both deeply personal and simultaneously universal through the use of common materials. With wire mesh covering every wall of the gallery, Merz invites viewers into a communal environment that proudly incorporates the natural world, all while neon lights spell out the Fibonacci sequence. A remarkable numeric sequence that seems to exist throughout nature (from pinecones to snail shells), the Fibonacci numbers in this work stress a belief that, even though the world around us is sometimes inexplicable and chaotic, there is an order uniting us all.

Mario Merz was born in 1925 and died in 2003 in Milan, Italy. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; and the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel. Merz was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Welhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is included in many prominent public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.

Gladstone Gallery
www.gladstonegallery.com

Cyprien Gaillard, Gladstone Gallery, New York

Cyprien Gaillard: Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens 
Gladstone Gallery, New York 
Through January 30, 2014 

Gladstone Gallery presents their first exhibition with CYPRIEN GAILLARD, “Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens.” For this ambitious and complex presentation, Gaillard has created two complementary bodies of sculptural works that explore notions of regeneration, ruination, and decay, turning his eye to the relationship between evolution and erosion – a thread that weaves through much of his work. Navigating the concept of the altered readymade through an anthropological lens, Gaillard has incorporated processed natural and industrial materials to achieve an equilibrium that reflects the way in which our society simultaneously progresses and reverts in the realm of the bleak.

Inspiration for the exhibition title came from a series of mural slogans used to conceal a raw building site, home of the future performing arts center in Beverly Hills. Intended as a playful tag suggesting the inconvenience caused by ongoing construction as being an experience worth enduring, the slogan struck Cyprien Gaillard as ironic. As a Dickensian universe connotes poverty, hardship, and ruin, Gaillard thought that the message, rather than suggesting progression and growth, hinted at a reversion to darker times. The works that Gaillard has created for the exhibition evoke this contradiction, inviting viewers to consider the ways in which our vision of progress simultaneously leads us back toward a more dismal landscape and unyielding reality.

On the first floor of the exhibition, visitors encounter a series of sculptures ranging from small-scale to monumental. Entering the gallery as if in reverse, viewers are presented with an opposing perspective of the sculptural works – a series of excavator machine parts, removed from their conventional setting. Placed directly on the floor, with the teeth once used for digging now acting as a sculptural anchor, the excavator heads are set with deftly carved pieces of onyx, inserted where the buckets once attached to the machines. Sourced from a variety of locations, the excavator heads have been washed and waxed, their resilience to the outdoors rendered defunct by the process necessary to preserve them as sculptural works. Once part of a machine used as a means for destruction, to encourage rejuvenation through building, these pieces, now preserved, begin a fossilization process of their own. Though the diggers have caused destruction in their lifetime, in their arrested manner Cyprien Gaillard has preserved them, imbuing them with new purpose.

Bringing together a diverse range of material, Cyprien Gaillard suggests a certain geographical mapping within the works. The white and yellow minerals have been sourced from Iran and Utah, respectively, and together with the machinery, found in California and made by Esco, Caterpillar, Bobcat etc. – American companies with international reach – they evoke the global nature of a tendency towards endless progress and the necessary ruination implicit in that process.

The notion of conceptual mapping, as well as more formal decisions, act as points of connection between the two series of works on view.  The color yellow persists as paint residue on the excavator heads and is reflected again in the yellow-hued banded calcite, which, though mined by similar machinery through a process of destruction, now rests in perfect equilibrium in the grip of the sculpture – an essential part of the work.  The color yellow is present in the body of work on view on the gallery's second floor as well, which features a series of sculptural works made out of back issues of National Geographic magazine, whose covers are outlined in yellow. These works are composed of pages from the magazine, cut with one single artistic gesture, and then folded together to hold them in place. Though they evoke a collage-like appearance, the works are held together simply by the tension incurred on the paper during the cutting and folding process – a tension that is echoed in the stress caused to the onyx held in the grip of the excavator heads.

Cyprien Gaillard sifted through copies of the magazine from the past fifty years, selecting individual pages from various issues, and bringing these disparate pages together to create a geographical map within the confines of each folding on view. Each work is created out of five different pages, whose full nature is concealed by virtue of the folding process. Selecting pages of issues from different decades, Gaillard has brought together fragments from distinct historical periods, distilling a particular moment in time. By putting these pages side by side with one another, Gaillard has created a dialogue within each piece, navigating time and space to create one unified present vision. Placed like scientific specimens beneath vitrines, the works are presented as small portals into history – one that is both real and contained on the pages, and one that is fabricated by virtue of the disparate pairings of the pages.

Taken together, these two series of works reflect Cyprien Gaillard's longstanding interest in artifact and preservation. Though the excavator heads and the magazines were both once lively tools used by people for creation and learning, they now stand as objects frozen in time – still relics that reflect a dystopian vision of our society.

Cyprien Gaillard was born in Paris and lives and works in Berlin and New York. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of major institutions, including: MoMA PS1, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland. 

Gladstone Gallery 
21st Street, New York
www.gladstonegallery.com