"Natural Renditions" Exhibition
Marlborough Chelsea
This event has ended.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a number of significant artistic movements found their primary influence in the sublime elements of the natural world. The forty-five works that comprise this exhibition were created by a new generation of young artists who have found beauty and inspiration in the fundamental structures and occurrences that pervade nature. In new works created for the exhibition, David Brooks, Valerie Hegarty and Amit Greenberg construct installation-based reliefs using found natural materials and man-made synthetic objects. Brooks, whose tropical forest encased in concrete is currently featured in P.S.1’s “Greater New York 2010”, fuses an uprooted tree to a rusted cast-iron balcony via twine in Balcony with Landscape, 2010. A natural transformation also seemingly occurs before the viewer in Brooklyn-based Hegarty’s Cathedral, 2010, an homage to Pollock’s painting from 1947 of the same name. California-based artist Amit Greenberg’s installation of manipulated branches will be his New York gallery debut, preceding a similar construction that will appear in a forthcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Appropriation and re-contextualization also play significant roles in many works in the exhibition, including a cocoon-like structure created from shoelaces, rope and a basketball hoop by New York artist Suzanne Broughel, entitled Dream Hoop III (Dreamcatcher Series), 2010, as well as in Jina Valentine’s Poisonous Books, 2009, a monumental construction of handmade paper composed of acrylic and pages torn from old books, delicately cut into organic formations. Vlatka Horvat, also currently exhibiting in “Greater New York 2010”, repeatedly photographs the phrase “Here to Stay” written in leaves in drab urban environments. Will Ryman’s Untitled, 2010, combines the totemic construction and intimidating nature of African art with the artist’s own perspective and distinct style. In Polish artist Aleksandra Mir’s series of “space collages”, entitled The Dream and the Promise, 2008, imagery from religious texts is juxtaposed with garish pictures of spacecraft, creating a contradictory, satirical landscape.
Painted landscapes of a similarly unconventional nature include Iranian-born artist Kamrooz Aram’s monumental From the Smokeless Flame of Fire, 2009, whose work contains “the exuberant depiction of…the enthusiastic sense of life”, as written in Art in America in March of 2009. Kim Dorland’s Woods I, 2009, is a rich example of the artist’s gestural style in which thick layers of oil and acrylic function representationally but also suggest a state of decomposition. Ahmed Alsoudani, whose work can currently be seen in the acclaimed exhibition Until Now: Collecting the New at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, will debut two new paintings that typify the artist’s dense figurative abstractions.
Media
Schedule
from June 03, 2010 to July 09, 2010