NYAB Event - "Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday" Exhibition

"Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday" Exhibition

James Cohan Gallery

This event has ended.

James Cohan Gallery presents "Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday", an exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs.

In a statement about the exhibition Higgs has written:

"Four years ago I was invited to Berlin to present a proposal for what would have been the 6th Berlin Biennale. (My proposal wasn’t accepted - the honors went to curator Kathrin Rhomberg, whose exhibition, “what is waiting out there”, eventually opened in June 2010.) The project I proposed had the working title Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday and sought, in its most fundamental sense, to consider the complex entanglements between non-representational art and everyday life.

This exhibition at James Cohan Gallery seeks to develop these earlier ideas around what I termed “vernacular” or “everyday” abstraction: that is artistic practices that actively privilege and operate in the grey area between an essentially non-representational image/object and the use of quotidian materials and processes.

Collectively the works in Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday seem most interested in the point at which the self-contained rationality of earlier modernist abstraction is ruptured. This sense of “rupture” – both physically and psychologically - is perhaps the prevailing aesthetic attitude that unites the otherwise highly idiosyncratic artists – and art works – brought together in Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday. In the work of all these artists’ traces of our material culture are transformed, or perhaps more accurately, re-purposed into something that is simultaneously familiar and strange."

[Image: Hannah Wilke "S.O.S. Starification Object Series #2" (1975) Chewing gum on rice paper, mounted on rag board, 33 3/4 X 25 1/2 X 2 1/2 in.]

Media

• Media Arts

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