NYAB Event - Thomas Hirschhorn “Concordia, Concordia”

Thomas Hirschhorn “Concordia, Concordia”

Gladstone Gallery (Chelsea 21th Street)

This event has ended.

Gladstone Gallery presents “Concordia, Concordia” by Thomas Hirschhorn, an exhibition inspired by the sinking of the cruise ship Costa Concordia in January 2012 off the coast of Italy.

"I want to do something Big. To do something Big does not mean to do something monumental or gigantic. If something is Big, it is because it needs to be Big. That need—one must understand it as such—or within its own logic. That’s why, when I make things Big, I do it with my own hands, with my own materials, with my own visual vocabulary, and with my own work. I do it in order to avoid the "Blow-Up" effect and I do it to avoid falling in the trap of "Pumping the Size." I want to do a Big work to show that the saying "Too Big to Fail" no longer makes any sense. On the contrary, when something is Too Big, it must Fail—I want to give Form to this. I want to understand it as logic and this is the Form! It is what I want to explore, it is the grounding for the set-up of my new work "Concordia, Concordia." "Concordia, Concordia" remembers the disastrous wreck of the cruise-ship Costa Concordia. This event and the images of the immersed ship in its confusing architecture, as a flooded casino of consumption, stands for an evidence: The evidence of a coming disaster and the evidence of an announced failure. This is "Concordia, Concordia."

–Thomas Hirschhorn, June 2012

Hirschhorn's work will be presented concurrently by the Dia Art Foundation in “Timeline: Work in Public Space,” from September 15 – November 3, 2012 at 541 West 22nd Street, the site of the future Dia:Chelsea project space. The exhibition will feature a new large-scale collage of images, written statements, and text excerpts chronicling the artist’s interventions at urban and rural sites and will be presented in anticipation of Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, the fourth and final project of Hirschhorn's Monument series, that Dia will present in summer 2013 in the Bronx or at another location in New York City.