Exhibitions at the New Museum

"Brian Bress: Status Report" Jan 18, 2012–Mar 25, 2012

NewMuseum.org — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:30:19 -0600

This exhibition, the latest presentation in the New Museum's ‘Stowaways’ series, will be the New York premier of Brian Bress’s Status Report (2009). In Bress’s low-tech video, humorous characters, all played by the artist, struggle with interpersonal relationships, the pursuit of intended goals, and the desire to communicate. Manipulating pictorial and sculptural conventions through fantastically hand-crafted sets and costumes that combine drawing, painting, and collage, Bress creates a disjunctive world where spaces of imagination and representation compete for equal footing. Brian Bress (b. 1975) lives and works in Los Angeles. His videos have been shown at ICA, Philadelphia; LAX Art, Los Angeles; Diverse Works, Houston; University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; and Parrish Art Museum, South Hampton. His work was included in the comprehensive survey exhibition “California Video: Artists and Histories” presented at the Getty Museum in 2008. This is Bress’s first New York museum presentation.

“Brian Bress: Status Report” is organized by Jenny Moore, Assistant Curator.

This installation is part of the on-going “Stowaways” series—a constellation of episodic projects and spontaneous interventions in spaces throughout the New Museum.

Dates and times subject to change

Banner Image:
Brian Bress, Still from Status Report, 2009. Single-channel video, color, sound. 18 minutes, 40 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 | 12:00 AM

"Enrico David: Head Gas" Jan 18, 2012–Apr 22, 2012

NewMuseum.org — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:21:25 -0600

“Head Gas” is the first New York exhibition by Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Enrico David. Over the past twenty years, David has produced a body of work encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage that draws upon a rich variety of sources and expresses a range of complex emotional states. Although his work is highly celebrated throughout Europe—the artist was among the nominees for the 2009 Turner Prize, for example—David’s work has rarely been exhibited in the United States.

The figures populating David's work convey the struggle of adaptation, both physical and psychological, of the self and of the image. In his art, we see haunting, incomplete, and sometimes grotesque characters fighting against and merging into backgrounds comprising a personal lexicon of forms. These patterns are derived from craft, folk art, and twentieth-century design, as well as advertising, techniques of display, fashion, and art historical moments. Previously, David choreographed his figurative works to imply dramatic narratives, at times using the exhibition space as a stage. His exhibitions function as performances of self-analysis constructed and theatricalized specifically for public display. Through David’s highly personalized iconography, the works act as mirrors, reflecting viewers’ desires, fears, and vulnerabilities. In David’s more recent work, the implications and strands of psychological tension are enacted within a more formalized, image-based corporeality.

For his ‘Studio 231’ exhibition, David has created an entirely new body of work. The paintings and works on paper are part of a series of portraits rendered delicately in pencil and luminescent fields of acrylic paint applied with a sponge or caressing brush. David’s imagery suggests bodies at the point of apparition or dissolution—beings that cannot be contained or consumed, perhaps only passed through, and reluctantly present.

“I imagine these images as the product of a conscious, physiological act of will. To exist despite the alienating and antagonizing nature of their surrounding environment—as if a precarious and utterly temporary agreement was struck between them and the molecular components of paint and canvas, lines and colors, even the space itself, threaten to engulf them,” says David. “These conditions, as ridiculous and unlikely as they may sound, represent for me an experience that feels real, necessary to embrace, even optimistic.”

“Head Gas” also features a new series of hand-painted paravents. These folding screens, originally conceived by the artist for his own apartment, create an architectural intervention within the exhibition space, simultaneously connecting to the images occupying the gallery.

Enrico David is the second artist featured in the New Museum’s new ‘Studio 231’ series. The Museum inaugurated the series in October 2011, with a new installation and performances by London-based artist Spartacus Chetwynd. ‘Studio 231’ is a series of commissioned projects in the museum’s adjacent, ground-floor space at 231 Bowery. This new initiative will give international, emerging artists the opportunity to realize ambitious new works conceived especially for the space. These projects at 231 Bowery also seek to foster a new relationship between the artists and the public by allowing artists to create work outside the confines of the main museum building and in closer proximity to the energy of the street and to the creative space of the artist's studio.

Enrico David was born in Ancona, Italy, in 1966. He studied fine art at Central Saint Martin’s in London. Recent solo exhibitions include “Repertorio ornamentale,” Fondazione Beviliacqua La Masa, Venice (2011); “How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?,” Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2009); “Bulbous Marauder,” Seattle Art Museum (2008); and “Ultra Paste,” ICA London (2007). The artist’s most recent group exhibitions include “Secret Societies,” presented at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and CAPC Bordeaux, and “A Different Person,” Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (both 2011). Enrico David was nominated for the Tate’s Turner Prize in 2009. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

“Enrico David: Head Gas” is organized by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Curator.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2012 | 12:00 AM

"The Ungovernables" Feb 15, 2012–Apr 22, 2012

NewMuseum.org — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:09:16 -0500

Ungovernables

The 2012 New Museum Triennial will feature thirty-four artists, artist groups, and temporary collectives—totaling over fifty participants—born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, many of whom have never before exhibited in the US.

The exhibition title, “The Ungovernables,” takes its inspiration from the concept of “ungovernability” and its transformation from a pejorative term used to describe unruly “natives” to a strategy of civil disobedience and self-determination. “The Ungovernables” is meant to suggest both anarchic and organized resistance and a dark humor about the limitations and potentials of this generation.

“The Ungovernables” is an exhibition about the urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Through both materials and form, works included in “The Ungovernables” explore impermanence and an engagement with the present and future. Many of the works are provisional, site-specific, and performative reflecting an attitude of possibility and resourcefulness. In the sculpture of Adrián Villar Rojas, monumentality is juxtaposed with transience. Rendered in clay, the works depend on cracks on their surfaces—the inevitable failure of the object, of meaning, and the guaranteed transformation of all ideas and objects back to dust. But it is dust that is then repurposed, reimagined, and re-formed. When Danh Võ learned that the Statue of Liberty is simply a steel armature covered by a copper skin the thickness of two pennies, he researched the hammering process that gave her shape, then employed craftsmen to replicate the statue’s skin for his work WE THE PEOPLE. Julia Dault manipulates materials of modernity such as Formica and Plexiglas in temporal arrangements that can never be repeated. In her works, the artist’s labor is dependent on the conditions of a certain space, her strength to execute a work at a particular time, and the uncontrollable accidents her materials determine. House of Natural Fiber, a new media collective and alternative space, has recently combined microbiology and art to teach locals about safe ways to brew homemade fruit wine while amplifying and sampling the sounds of the distillation process to make electronic music. Jonathas de Andrade’s Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover) is an installation of over one hundred photographs linked to pages of a romantic diary found in the trash. In isolation, the components of Ressaca are historical documents. However, pieced together, they comprise a larger fiction of what a city is and can be—how the past can remain alive, not through conservation, but instead through the invisible energy of living.

The New Museum has initiated a series of residencies and public programs to support the production of new works for the Triennial to foster artistic investigation, experimentation, and exchange. Residencies began in February 2011, with Public Movement and Adrián Villar Rojas focusing on research for Triennial projects. In June and July, the New Museum embarked on a concentrated period of activities with Wu Tsang as well as Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran of CAMP. On November 4 and 6, Public Movement presented Positions, a choreographed protest in which political and philosophical positions manifest into physical positions. Wu Tsang continued to develop his work Full Body Quotation with a performance on November 19, which will be the foundation of his installation in “The Ungovernables” exhibition.

The Triennial is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.

Artists and Collectives in “The Ungovernables”

Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Beirut. Lives and works in Beirut and Amsterdam)
Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982, Maceió, Brazil. Lives and works in Recife)
Minam Apang (b. 1980, Naharlagun, India. Lives and works in Mumbai)
CAMP (Founded 2007, Mumbai)
Shaina Anand (b. 1975, Bombay. Lives and works in Mumbai)
Ashok Sukumaran (b. 1974, Sapporo, Japan. Lives and works in Mumbai)
Julia Dault (b. 1977, Toronto. Lives and works in New York)
Abigail DeVille (b. 1981, New York. Lives and works in New York)
House of Natural Fiber (Founded 1999, Yogyakarta)
Venzha Christ (b. 1973, Banyuwangi, Indonesia. Lives and works in Yogyakarta); Tommy
Suryo (b. 1976, Bojonegoro, Indonesia. Lives and works in Yogyakarta); Irene Agrivina
(b. 1976, Yogyakarta. Lives and works in Yogyakarta)
Hu Xiaoyuan (b. 1977, Haerbin, China. Lives and works in Beijing)
Invisible Borders (Founded 2009, Lagos)
Nike Adesuyi-Ojeikere, Kemi Akin-Nibosun, Lucy Azubuike, Unoma Giese, Emmanuel Iduma, Uche James-Iroha, Ala Khier, Chidinma Nnorom, Chriss Aghana Nwobu, Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke, Charles Okereke, Ray-Daniels Okeugo, Uche Okpa-Iroha, Tom Saater, and Jumoke Sanwo
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo. Lives and works in Cairo and New York)
Hassan Khan (b. 1975, London. Lives and works in Cairo)
Lee Kit (b. 1978, Hong Kong. Lives and works in Hong Kong)
Cinthia Marcelle (b. 1974, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lives and works in Belo Horizonte)
Dave McKenzie (b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica. Lives and works in New York)
Nicolás Paris (b. 1977, Bogotá. Lives and works in Bogotá)
Bona Park (b. 1977, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul)
Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Quezon City. Lives and works in Manila)
Pratchaya Phinthong (b. 1974, Ubonratchathani, Thailand. Lives and works in Bangkok)
Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Neuquén Capital, Argentina. Lives and works in London)
Rita Ponce de León (b. 1982, Lima. Lives and works in México City)
The Propeller Group (Founded 2006, Ho Chi Minh City)
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Sài Gòn. Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City and
Los Angeles); Matthew Lucero (b. 1976, Upland, California. Lives and works in Los
Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City); Phunam Thúc Hà (b. 1974, Sài Gòn. Lives and works
in Ho Chi Minh City)
Public Movement (Founded 2006, Tel Aviv)
Dana Yahalomi (b. 1982, Tel Aviv. Lives and works in Tel Aviv), group leader
Gabriel Sierra (b. 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia. Lives and works in Bogotá)
Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983, Ashqout, Lebanon. Lives and works in Beirut and San Diego)
Slavs and Tatars (Founded 2006, Eurasia)
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981, Helsinki. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul)
Mariana Telleria (b. 1979, Rufino, Argentina. Lives and works in Rosario)
Wu Tsang (b. 1982, Worcester, MA. Lives and works in Los Angeles)
José Antonio Vega Macotela (b. 1980, México City. Lives and works in Amsterdam and México City)
Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina. Lives and works in Rosario)
Danh Võ (b. 1975, Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu, Vietnam. Lives and works in Berlin)
Kemang Wa Lehulere (b. 1984 Cape Town. Lives and works in Johannesburg)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977 London. Lives and works in London)
Ala Younis (b. 1974 Kuwait City. Lives and works in Amman)

Publications
Building on the Museum as Hub model, “The Ungovernables” incorporated lengthy consultation with a network of curators, organizations, and artists from around the world, including Museum as Hub partners. Their contributions have inspired the Art Spaces Directory, a resource guide to over 400 independent art spaces around the world, co-published by ArtAsiaPacific magazine and featuring essays by Víctor Albarracín, Reem Fadda and Christine Tohme, Stefan Kalmár, Naiza H. Khan, Catalina Lozano, Elaine W. Ng, and tranzit.org. “The Ungovernables” will also be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue designed by Santiago Piedrafita, Head of Graphic Design, North Carolina State University, and published by Rizzoli. The catalogue will include full color, four-page spreads on each of the thirty-four artists and groups; as well as essays and fiction by several participating artists, writer/curator Miguel A. López, curator Gabi Ngcobo, and Triennial curator, Eungie Joo.

About the New Museum Triennial
The Generational Triennial is a signature initiative of the New Museum. It is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to emerging artists from around the world, providing an important platform for a new generation of artists who are shaping the current discourse of contemporary art and the future of culture. The first edition in 2009, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” featured fifty artists, from twenty-five countries, born after 1976.

Banner image:
Abigail DeVille, What Happens to a Dream Deferred...Supernova, 2009. Cardboard, paint, paper, and plastic, 20 x 12 sq. ft (6 x 3.6 sq. m). Installation view: Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY. Courtesy the artist. Photo: LaToya Ruby Frazier

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 | 12:00 AM

"Isa Genzken" Nov 13, 2010–Jul 31, 2012

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:45:20 -0600

Standing twenty-eight feet tall, acclaimed German artist Isa Genzken’s Rose II (2007) is the second sculpture to be presented as part of the New Museum’s ongoing Façade Sculpture Program since the building’s completion in December 2007. This is Isa Genzken’s first public artwork in the United States. A crucial figure in Post-war contemporary art, Genzken is a sculptor whose work re-imagines architecture, assemblage, and installation, giving form to new plastic environments and precarious structures. The artist represented Germany at the 2007 Venice Biennale and has shown her work in leading museums across Europe. She was among a group of prominent international artists featured in the exhibition “Unmonumental,” the survey that inaugurated the New Museum’s SANAA building.

Rose II was originally created in 1993 and reprised in 2007. It is the culmination of a practice that explores the way we perceive objects and images through our senses; the implications of scale; and the integration of architecture, nature, and mass culture. Although Genzken is a longtime resident of Berlin, she has had a forty-year love affair with New York City, which began when she first visited as a student. Looking back on that experience, she has commented, “To me, New York had a direct link with sculpture… (It) is a city of incredible stability and solidity.” The installation of Rose II can be seen as a tribute to a place Genzken continues to love.

Saturday, November 13, 2010 | 12:00 AM