Ari Marcopoulos “L1032015”

Marlborough Chelsea

poster for Ari Marcopoulos “L1032015”

This event has ended.

Marlborough Chelsea presents an exhibition of new photographs and video by New York artist Ari Marcopoulos. Entitled L1032015 (after the number and date assigned to a photograph within the artist’s archive) the show addresses interconnected ideas regarding the dynamic density of the city, the uncontrollable power of nature, and the resilience and frailty of the body. In particular, Marcopoulos is interested in how these ideas intersect with art history (both recent and distant) and the ways in which contemporary photographic depictions of these conventions (i.e. portraiture, landscape, gestural and monochromatic abstraction) become a form of elegiac appropriation, or emotionally-charged readymades.

Primarily carbon pigment prints made on conventional and rice papers, the process produces an incredibly lush, painterly effect while maintaining the street-level grit of a Xerox that has been a recurring aesthetic in the artist’s work. Utilizing heavy, utterly opaque black pigments in multiple passes, the landscape photographs, which occupy the largest gallery of the exhibition, range from hazy and indistinct to outright obliterated in layers of ink. There is a funereal stillness to the surfaces that plays against the gale-force winds, crashing waves and alien vistas of the coastal settings depicted there.

In the relative order of New York City, symbols of control and rebellion are always held in delicate balance. Images of undercover police-issued Chevy Impalas hang beside twisted metal abstractions of crashed civilian vehicles. However, as always, there are more hopeful images of personal resistance to metropolitan strictures and institutional power that are Marcopoulos’s thematic mainstays: family members, books, counterculture ‘zines and scrawled graffiti.

Ari Marcopoulous (b. 1957 in Amsterdam) received his BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984 and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1988. Recent solo exhibitions include L103015 (2015) at Marlborough Chelsea, New York; Midway (2012) at Kavi Gupta, Chicago; Here and Now (2012) at V1 Gallery, Denmark. Recent group exhibitions include Le Futur Commence Ici (2013) at FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France; EAGLES (2012) at Marlborough Madrid, Spain; Street and Studio: From Basquiat to Seripop (2010) at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Whitney Biennial (2010) at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Marcopoulos currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Media

Schedule

from April 04, 2015 to May 09, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-04-04 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Ari Marcopoulos

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