Sharon Hayes, Tony Lewis and Adam Pendleton Exhibition
Andrea Rosen Gallery (544 W 24th St)
This event has ended.
Andrea Rosen Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Sharon Hayes, Tony Lewis, and Adam Pendleton at Gallery 2. The exhibition explores the relationship between the use of language and the formal and social implications of abstraction.
In this exhibition Sharon Hayes presents two works, each a fragment from a banner carried in the Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26th, 1970, that said “WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!”. The works approximate the scale of the original banner, but the material transformation and presentation of selected letters from the word WOMEN alter the original’s legibility and seemingly straightforward declaration of meaning.
Tony Lewis presents a large graphite work on paper diptych featuring a symbol based on Gregg shorthand. These works continue Lewis’s interrogation of language systems. Using the shorthand symbols, these works are at once technically more specific while becoming increasingly gestural and abstract.
Presenting a painting from his well-known body of work “Black Dada” as well as a work from a series layering text and images on mirrored stainless steel, Adam Pendleton’s works in this exhibition give material form to the artist’s engagement with a dynamic idea of history; one that is ever mutable and reflective of subjective and infinite narrative potentials.
Instrumental in the thinking about this exhibition is a 2006 essay about Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work by Miwon Kwon. In it she argues: “the radicality of FGT’s work lies in the insinuation of the particular in the place of abstraction, while simultaneously destabilizing the particular as a fixed positivity. And with this complex move, the artist accomplishes a remarkable reversal: everyone becomes a particularly marked subject, making it impossible for there to be an unmarked, invisible, hierarchy-determining point of reference. Which means that no one is less than public either.” Kwon’s text provides a useful lens for reading these works as well, offering a possible way for abstraction to engage with specific histories, politics, and identities.
Media
Schedule
from March 06, 2015 to April 25, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-03-05 from 18:00 to 20:00