Aria Dean “Show Your Work Little Temple”

Greene Naftali Gallery

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8th Floor

In her upcoming solo exhibition, her first with Greene Naftali, Aria Dean extends her “fixation on the subject and its borders” into new formal territory. Show Your Work Little Temple will feature recent work across media: a pair of sculptures in pigmented silicone, laser-cut engravings in sheets of rubber, and an architectural intervention bearing the face of a Gorgon, a Classical figure of transformation and vision’s destructive power. Highly attuned to the histories of avant-garde movements and their inherent blind spots, Dean’s work channels certain legacies of Minimal art while forgoing its reductive austerity. As she writes in the exhibition’s accompanying text, “insofar as minimalism evades the representational sphere almost entirely—pure play of forms and volumes and densities—it’s like having an amusement park all to myself, with the lights out.”

Aria Dean (b. 1993) lives and works in New York. Her upcoming solo exhibition at REDCAT, Los Angeles (opening June 2021) will travel to the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva in 2022. Recent solo and group exhibitions and performances include the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2020: a version (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2020); Artists Space, New York (2020); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2019); Centre d’Art Contemporaine Genève, Geneva (2019); The MAC, Belfast (2019); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2019); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2018); Swiss Institute, New York (2018); and the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2017). Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, e-flux, The New Inquiry, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Spike Quarterly, Kaleidoscope Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, and CURA Magazine. Dean’s work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Aria Dean, Show Your Work Little Temple, exhibition poster, 2021. Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.