Cyprien Gaillard “Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens”
Gladstone Gallery (Chelsea 21th Street)
This event has ended.
Gladstone Gallery presents its first exhibition with Cyprien Gaillard, “Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens.” For this ambitious and complex presentation, Gaillard has created two complementary bodies of sculptural works that explore notions of regeneration, ruination, and decay, turning his eye to the relationship between evolution and erosion – a thread that weaves through much of his work. Navigating the concept of the altered readymade through an anthropological lens, Gaillard has incorporated processed natural and industrial materials into these two series of sculptures to achieve an equilibrium that reflects the way in which our society simultaneously progresses and reverts in the realm of the bleak.
Inspiration for the exhibition title came from a series of mural slogans used to conceal a raw building site, home of the future performing arts center in Beverly Hills. Intended as a playful tag suggesting the inconvenience caused by ongoing construction as being an experience worth enduring, the slogan struck Gaillard as ironic. As a Dickensian universe connotes poverty, hardship, and ruin, Gaillard thought that the message, rather than suggesting progression and growth, hinted at a reversion to darker times. The works that Gaillard has created for the exhibition evoke this contradiction, often employing literary and journalistic references and inviting viewers to consider the ways in which our vision of progress simultaneously leads us back toward a more dismal landscape and unyielding reality.
Gaillard was born in Paris and lives and works in Berlin and New York. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of major institutions, including: MoMA PS1, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
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Schedule
from November 09, 2013 to February 01, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-11-08 from 18:00 to 20:00