Alina Grasmann “Sculpting in Time”

Fridman Gallery

[Image: Alina Grasmann "Sculpting in Time 1" (2020), Oil on canvas, 51 x 70 in.]

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Fridman Gallery presents Alina Grasmann’s second exhibition with the gallery, featuring two new series of large-scale paintings combining imaginary, real, and emotional places. The paintings reflect the artist’s fascination with American architecture, landscape, mythology, cinema, literature, and illusion. Sculpting in Time is the name of the creative manifesto written by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose visual language shares an enigmatic quality with Grasmann’s work. The compositions unfold in time, yet every scene appears frozen in the minds of the viewers.

The Montauk Project is inspired by literary and historical references to the Eastern-most beach community of Long Island, New York. A conspiracy theory of the same name alleges that secret government experiments were conducted there, to develop psychological warfare techniques and esoteric research including time travel, teleportation, mind control, contact with alien life, and staged Moon landings. Grasmann depicts hauntingly deserted restaurants, hotels, and vantage points in and around the town.

In Sculpting in Time, the second series featured in the exhibition, bizarre dreams are set against the backdrop of the experimental desert town of Arcosanti, Arizona, a site of visionary utopia, a relic that embodies its future as well as its past. Inside its rooms, Grasmann leads the viewer through an imaginarium of items and objects arranged as a cabinet of curiosities that reject clear symbolism, lending the scenes to be explored and to be filled with subjective meaning.