Jorge Macchi, Rita McBride, Paul Thek, and Jonathas de Andrade Exhibitions

Jorge Macchi, Rita McBride, Paul Thek, and Jonathas de Andrade Exhibitions

Alexander and Bonin

This event has ended.

Jorge Macchi: Threshold
Rita McBride: Premium New Markers
Paul Thek: Eye of the Beholder
Jonathas de Andrade: O Caseiro

Alexander and Bonin presents its second installation of exhibitions at the gallery’s new space at 47 Walker Street in TriBeCa, opening on Thursday, January 12, 2017. Four exhibitions of work by Jorge Macchi, Rita McBride, Paul Thek, and Jonathas de Andrade, will occupy the galleries’ two floors.

Jorge Macchi is considered one of Argentina’s leading artists. Although Macchi has worked in a wide range of mediums from installation, sculpture, and works on paper to video and performance art, he has recently directed his efforts to painting, the discipline in which he was initially trained. The exhibition at Alexander and Bonin includes ten oil paintings made over the past three years. Departing from the ordinary and coincidental, his paintings alter scale and context, employing a system of layered visual complications and interruptions that offers a sensorial, disconcerting, and contemplative experience. Macchi’s paintings have been termed “anti-iconic”[1] by curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina, in that they seek to escape an overcoded, predictable interpretation of the medium and move toward an understanding of painting tied to individual experience and ambiguity.

Premium New Markers, a series of sculptures by Rita McBride will be shown in the entrance gallery. The works are inspired by Joseph Beuys’ 7,000 Oaks project, inaugurated in 1982 at Documenta 7. Beuys’ plan called for the planting of 7,000 trees, each paired with a basalt marker. Sixteen of these tree/ marker pairs can be found on West 22nd Street, close to DIA Chelsea. Deriving their shape from those basalt totems, McBride’s Premium New Markers are clad in Abet laminate, a material emblematic of post-modern architecture and design of the 1980s. With an eye trained on modern objects and architecture, McBride’s sculptures toy with the formalism and functionalism of public structures and their oft-overlooked role as mainstays in public space.

Eye of the Beholder, an exhibition of works on paper and small paintings by Paul Thek includes a pencil triptych executed in 1970 while he was living and working in Amsterdam. The three pages are filled with rows of vertical marks with a tender drawing of a lamb in the center, which points to Thek’s continued engagement with Christian iconography and Dutch Baroque painting. The exhibition title is taken from a turquoise watercolor which was included in Thek’s final lifetime installation Selected Works 1987-1988 at Brooke Alexander, New York.

In the video gallery is Jonathas de Andrade’s O Caseiro/ The Housekeeper (2016), a work constructed symmetrically in two narratives with synchronized shots. On the left, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s 1959 film, O Mestre de Apipucos shows the daily life of Gilberto Freyre in his home in Recife. Freyre is the historicist who wrote the remarkable 1933 book Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves). On the right, Jonathas de Andrade constructs a mirroring of Pedro de Andrade’s film, substituting Freyre with a fictional caretaker of the aristocratic residence. The parallel between the two characters establishes a tension that underlines aspects of class and race, two of the main subjects that Freyre dealt with in his work.

Jorge Macchi was born in 1963 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work. Since the mid-1980s, his work has been shown throughout the Americas and Europe. In 2001, Macchi was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2003, Macchi’s work was included in both the 4ª Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the 8th Istanbul Biennial. In 2011 Macchi was the subject of a survey exhibition Music Stands Still at S.M.A.K., Ghent and in 2012, his work was shown in 18th Biennale of Sydney and 7th Liverpool Biennial. In 2014, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City held a solo exhibition of his paintings, titled Prestidigitador. In 2016, his work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA), in Buenos Aires. The show, titled Perspectiva: Jorge Macchi will be travelling to the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid in early 2017.

Ri­ta McBri­de’s ar­tis­tic prac­tice deals wi­th the particularities and in­ter­sec­tions of in­dus­tri­al de­sign, mi­ni­ma­list sculp­tu­re, mo­der­nist ar­chi­tec­tu­re, pu­blic spaces, and the gaps they ge­ne­ra­te. Everyday urban objects, such as ventilation shafts and electrical boxes, often form the point of departure for her sculptural works. McBride has been a professor of sculpture since 2003 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which she has also headed as its director since 2013. Both scale and material play an important role in her work. McBride has produced several public sculptures including Mae West (2002-2011), a 170 foot high, 57 ton rotational parabola, installed on the Effnerplatz in Munich. Mae West is one the largest sculptures in the world and the first of its kind to be made of carbon fiber. This year, The Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presented Gesellschaft, a major survey exhibition of McBride’s work over the past two decades.

Throughout his career, Paul Thek consistently made drawings in his notebooks, on newspapers, and as letters he sent to friends. Thek’s friends and associates during the 1960 and 1970s included several significant figures in the arts, including the photographer Peter Hujar. Hujar photographed Thek during their visit to the catacombs of Palermo in 1963 and for his first book, “Portraits in Life and Death” (1976). Activist and critic Susan Sontag dedicated her collection of essays, “Against Interpretation” (1966), to Thek and he contributed a stage curtain of an erupting volcano to the set of Robert Wilson’s “Overture for Ka Mountain and GUARDenia Terrace” (1972). Thek is widely known for his sculpture and installations shown in New York and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and the diversity and immediacy of his work has inspired generations of artists including Mike Kelley and Robert Gober. Paul Thek was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and died in 1988. In 2010-2011, Diver, A Retrospective traveled to The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Thek’s work was included in a group exhibition Art is Liturgy – Paul Thek and the Others at the Art Museum of The Archdiocese of Cologne (2012-13). In 2015, Alexander and Bonin presented Ponza and Roma which was the first exhibition to examine the paintings and drawings Thek made in Italy in the 1970s.

Jonathas de Andrade was born in 1982 in Maceió, Brazil; he lives and works in Recife. In 2014, de Andrade had a solo exhibition at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro and was included in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. This year, he participated in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo as well as SITElines.2016 in Santa Fe. From September 2016 to January 2017, Andrade has occupied a new space at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) with a project titled Open Call for Brazilian Furniture. In January 2017, New York’s New Museum will present de Andrade’s film O Peixe / The Fish (2016).

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture
• Installation

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