NYAB Event - "World in a Box" Exhibition

"World in a Box" Exhibition

Allan Stone Projects

This event has ended.

Allan Stone Gallery presents "World in a Box", an eclectic exhibition of “box art,” , the second in a series of exhibitions selected from the Allan Stone collection at the gallery’s new location, 5 East 82nd Street, New York, NY.

Like the previous exhibition of folk art objects and paintings Remarkable Treasures, Folk Art from the Allan Stone Collection, this exhibition of box art further reflects the late Allan Stone’s wide range of interests both as a dealer and as a collector.

While Stone was long associated with Abstract Expressionism, his attention was also captured by other forms of art-making as well, including folk art, tribal art, decorative art and a myriad of styles and techniques associated with contemporary and modern sculpture. Many of these techniques are represented by the several artists featured in World in a Box.

World in a Box illustrates Stone’s passionate interest in a very personal form of expression. Each artist explores through his or her own inventive narrative a quality of imagined spaces and places that are at once small, intimate and somewhat portable. As a point of departure, each artist builds around a microcosm of reality, exploring with whatever tools are necessary to produce a very special, highly personalized and specific moment or event.

From Joseph Cornell’s poetic reveries on the universe to the illusionistic tableaus of William Beckman’s painted world; from the folk art inspired figures of Barry Cohen’s constructions to the vivid and detailed underground tableaux of Alan Wolfson, Arman’s boxes of assembled materials measure the world through things that are tossed aside or easily forgotten. The same kind of found aesthetic is at the heart of Dan Basen’s boxes, whether his mini panorama of a city composed of sticks of colored chalk or his arrangement of paint tubes. Other artists in this exhibition, including James Grashow, Richard Haden, Wayne Nowack and the team of Serge Clément and Marina Kamena, all endeavor to propagate their particular scenarios with familiar elements that echo the world around us with a rich sense of discovery and wonder.