Jennifer Wen Ma @ Sandra Gering Inc, New York

Jennifer Wen Ma: Eight Views of Paradise Interrupted
Sandra Gering Inc, New York
May 11 - July 28, 2017 

Fusing aspects of traditional Chinese art with a distinctly contemporary approach, Jennifer Wen Ma creates delicate, ephemeral installations out of paper, ink, glass and light. For this exhibition, the artist presents an environment of new works borrowing from the traditional Chinese literati landscape painting trope of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. This contemporary homage meditates on the mental landscape that yielded the artist’s concept for the acclaimed installation opera Paradise Interrupted, exploring the utopian idea of ‘paradise’. Originally presented at the Lincoln Center Festival last summer, the opera was the artist’s directorial debut, and combined Jennifer Wen Ma’s innovative set designs with her co-written libretto and a contemporary composition in the traditional kunqu vocal singing style with western operatic voice. 

Eight Views features some of Jennifer Wen Ma’s best-known iconography: her unconventional use of ink and her multifaceted use of the garden as metaphor. Her incorporation of time as material is also significant, whether expressed through performance, narrative, or the movement of light, air and liquid. Upon entering the low-lit exhibition, the viewer is enveloped by the show’s two signature works. One is a multi-layered 43-foot long scroll-like landscape painting on translucent acrylic, which is set off from the wall to create shadows from light projections across its surface. Composed of many individual panels that surround three walls, it is designed to flow together to offer a panoramic view. The nuanced painting, as subtle and mystical as its predecessors, speaks of the artist’s contribution to both Eastern and Western artistic discourse. In the center of the room, a striking large-scale floor sculpture of a black paper garden folds out accordion-style from nothingness to a fully realized garden, tight and controlled in places and wild and unruly in others. Based the opera set design, the garden also references the live gardens and plants worldwide that the artist has painted with Chinese ink. 

Jennifer Wen Ma is also known for her extensive multimedia endeavors, from the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony to the permanent interactive artwork on the “Water Cube” in Beijing that reflects the resident’s daily emotions through abstract light, color and movement. Earlier pieces also on view include Brain Storm, 2009, the first of several videos using ink on glass as a medium, and the mirror-surfaced Dodo with 100 Meeps Walking in the Desert in Five Movements, 2011.

Eight Views of Paradise Interrupted brings these elements together in a formally beautiful, conceptually complex and historically rich installation. 

Concurrently, the artist will be exhibiting a related project at Van Doren Waxter, 23 East 73rd Street, NY.

Jennifer Wen Ma has exhibited widely since 1993. In addition to Lincoln Center, solo projects, installations and exhibitions include the Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, England, The Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan, Performa 13, NY, the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Market Square Public Art Program, Pittsburgh, PA, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC and the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, Niigata, Japan, the Singapore Biennial and the Sydney Biennale, among others. Jennifer Wen Ma’s work on the opening & closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics earned the artist an Emmy in 2008. Jennifer Wen Ma lives in New York & Beijing.

SANDRA GERING INC.
14 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065
www.sandrageringinc.com

Michael Scott @ Sandra Gering Inc, New York

Michael Scott: Recent Painting and Sculpture 
Sandra Gering Inc, New York

February 15 - April 21, 2017

Michael Scott: Recent Painting and Sculpture 

Installation view

Photo Courtesy Sandra Gering Inc, New York

SANDRA GERING INC presents MICHAEL SCOTT: Recent Painting and Sculpture. This is Michael Scott’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

For this exhibition, Michael Scott pairs new free standing sculpture with paintings, both of which continue to explore the conceptual aspect of optics the artist has worked with since the mid 1980s.

Michael Scott’s interest in the sculptural nature of his work is brought to the foreground in this exhibition. Highly sensitive to materiality, Scott has always seen his paintings for their three-dimensional qualities. The enamel works in particular have, for the most part, been painted on aluminum grounds and projected off the wall on metal brackets, heightening their objectness. Adding to that, the striped surfaces have had multiple treatments, from matte to glossy and washy to textured. The pillar-like aluminum sculptures on view continue the stripe series, their verticality echoing the line work in a fully three-dimensional object.

Michael Scott’s history with linear abstraction dates back to contemporary art’s Neo-Geo movement. Using mathematics to build specific parameters for each work, he creates frisson by painting surfaces that can be difficult to look at. Color, contrast and scale all contribute to the overall optical effect. Michael Scott’s work is meticulous by nature. Fractions and progressions are highly meaningful, as are any diversions into expressionism or gestural mark-making. Taken as a whole, Scott’s stripe works show a sensitivity to nuance that can be likened to the work of Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd, On Kawara and Josef Albers, as well as any number of Op-Art practitioners. 

Michael Scott has exhibited internationally since 1989. Venues have included Le Consortium, Dijon & Le FRAC, Nord-Pas de Calais, France; the Grand Palais National Galleries, Paris; Musée des Beaux Arts, La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland; PS1, New York; Centre National d'art Contemporain de Grenoble, France; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art, Geneva, MAMCO, Geneva, and the Kunsthalle Bern, in Switzerland. A recent overview of Scott’s work was presented at the Centre d’art contemporain, Lausanne, Switzerland. Michael Scott lives and works in New York City.

SANDRA GERING INC 
14 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065
www.sandrageringinc.com

William Anastasi: Puzzle, Sandra Gering Inc, New York

William Anastasi: Puzzle
Sandra Gering Inc, New York
November 17, 2015 - January 9, 2016

SANDRA GERING INC. presents Puzzle, WILLIAM ANASTASI’s sixth one-person exhibition with the gallery. 

Throughout William Anastasi’s career as a seminal figure in the field of Conceptual Art, semantics and tautology have long played significant roles. The subject of pairing in particular has been a recurring theme since as early as 1967, when William Anastasi’s Six Sites exhibition at the Virginia Dwan Gallery featured the gallery’s walls photographically rendered on canvas, then hung on the same walls. Repetition has also been embraced in William Anastasi’s well-known subway drawings, a continuing series of unsighted works on paper the artist creates while drawing blind on the train, letting the motion of the car dictate the chance markings on paper as pure gesture. Circular reasoning informs William Anastasi’s puzzle works. Aside from the obvious playfulness of the subject (humor being one of the least talked-about aspects of this artist’s oeuvre), the puzzle as metaphor first appeared in 1975, when the Museum of Modern Art commissioned William Anastasi to design a jigsaw puzzle for their store. The result was iconic, as his design was to create a puzzle-themed puzzle, similar in concept to his wall-on-a-wall works. It was popular enough to re-issue in a second color version, of which the current exhibition’s shaped paintings are based. Hung in pairs, the exhibition room itself becomes a sort of game, unresolvable in this instance as the room only holds a fraction of the series. Upon seeing the first enlarged piece in William Anastasi’s studio, John Cage inquired how many pieces were in the puzzle’s box. When William Anastasi replied with the number, John Cage’s response was ‘Well then you’ve made 513 masterpieces!’ Puzzle also poetically references Anastasi and Cage’s many hours spent over a chessboard, silently engaged in a game of a different sort.

WILLIAM ANASTASI was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1933. The recipient of the 2010 John Cage Award, Anastasi is in nearly every major permanent collection, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Ludwig Museum, Germany; Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden; The Jewish Museum, NY; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many others. He has had solo exhibitions at The Neuberger Museum of Art, NY; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and The Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf. His work was recently featured in William Anastasi: Sound Works 1963-2013, at the Hunter College Art Galleries, NY in October 2013. A comprehensive monograph on the artist, William Anastasi: Paintings, Small Works, Drawings has been published by Emilio Mazzoli, Modena, Italy. William Anastasi lives and works in New York, NY.

SANDRA GERING INC.
14 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065
www.sandrageringinc.com