David Zwirner is pleased to present the world debut of a new series of sculptures in the gallery’s West 19th Street spaces.
 
One of the most prominent artists working today, Jeff Koons is well known for his bold paintings and sculptures. Typically working in series, his art holds up a mirror to contemporary consumer culture, using the photorealistic, commercial aesthetic familiar from an earlier generation of Pop artists to generate his own unique and universally recognizable style. His subjects range from toys to inflatables to household items to luxury goods and sexualized imagery. His references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures often involve smooth, glistening surfaces while his paintings employ bright and saturated colors.
 
Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976.
 
Beginning with his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons has exhibited steadily in the United States and abroad. His work was the subject of four major solo presentations in 2008, including a large survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Celebration sculptures shown on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; and an exhibition at the Château de Versailles, which opened its doors to a living artist for the first time with Jeff Koons: Versailles. He presented the Popeye series at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2009, and Artist Rooms, a collection of contemporary art jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, toured until 2011. In 2012, the artist had his first solo show in a Swiss museum at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel as well as concurrent shows in Frankfurt at Schirn Kunsthalle, with an exhibition of paintings, and at Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, where his sculptures were shown alongside permanent collection works.
 
A major retrospective is being organized by Scott Rothkopf, Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Opening in January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, it then goes to the Whitney in June, and travels to Centre Georges Pompidou in December, with possible additional venues in Europe. This will be the first ever one-person show to occupy all five floors of the Whitney. It will mark the final exhibition at the Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue, before the Whitney moves into its new building in downtown Manhattan, near Chelsea and the High Line.
 
Koons earned renown for his public sculptures, such as the monumental floral sculpture Puppy (1992), shown at New York’s Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Another floral sculpture, Split-Rocker (2000), was installed at the Palais des Papes in Avignon and at the Château de Versailles.
 
Koons has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his cultural achievements. In 2012, he was recognized by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for his participation in the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. Created to promote deeper cultural understanding through sharing art, the program — which marked its 50th anniversary in 2012 — selects and displays artwork purchased or borrowed for embassies, consulates, and ambassadors’ residences. In 2009, he received the John Singleton Copley Award from the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust and the Governor’s Awards for the Arts (from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts), where he was given the Distinguished Arts Award. In 2007, former French President Jacques Chirac promoted Koons to Officier de la Légion d’honneur.
 
Work by the artist is in numerous public collections, including The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Maria E. Piñeres
PLAYLAND
May 17 – July 7, 2013
 
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6-8pm
 
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present PLAYLAND, MARIA E. PIÑERES’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. PIÑERES’s signature medium of stitched needlepoint places the nude figure in an optical duel with the eye-catching graphics of the pinball machine playfields and backglasses of her adolescence.
 
PLAYLAND, a now defunct 1980s’ Times Square gaming arcade, stood as a shiny, visually stimulating beacon to youth, nestled in perverse contrast with the then ubiquitous porn palaces, peep shows and sex shops. PIÑERES’s works set youthful rent boys and pin-up girls into the contextual backdrop of pinball, where their sexuality can be seen in a playful and sentimental light void of shame and smut. Preserving the common pinball themes of luck and chance, the Latin phrases that appear as machine names lend airs of levity and existentialism, alluding more to the real game of life than one of fantasy.
 
Hic et Nunc (Here and Now), Ex Malo Bonum (Good out of Evil) and Caveat (Beware) are among PIÑERES’s largest works to date and their heroic nude figures enliven more narrative landscape scenes. Varied stitching patterns and angles create a mixture of textures and added shading, allowing for the expansion of the image graphics while referencing historic Bargello needlework. The Latin phrases recontextualize the imagery and mask the actual pinball game names, which are often double entendres.
 
PIÑERES lives and works in Los Angeles. Other solo exhibitions include Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles). Group exhibitions include Stitched at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design (New York) and Celebrity at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ). She has been included in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, Time, The Village Voice and V.
 
The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 21 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester).
Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon -6pm.
For further information, please contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.

For Immediate Release
April 30, 2013
 
Dia Art Foundation presents Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument from
July 1–September 15, 2013
 
Thomas Hirschhorn’s first Monument in the United States and Dia’s first public commission since Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks in 1996
 
(New York, NY) – Dia Art Foundation will present Gramsci Monument, a new artwork by Thomas Hirschhorn, on the grounds of Forest Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx, New York. Gramsci Monument will be open to the public from July 1–September 15, 2013.
 
MONUMENT
“My decision to do Gramsci Monument does not come from an understanding of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci, rather it comes from my understanding of art and my belief that art can transform.” — Thomas Hirschhorn
 
Gramsci Monument is the fourth and last in Thomas Hirschhorn’s series of “monuments” dedicated to major writers and thinkers, which he initiated in 1999 with Spinoza Monument (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), followed by Deleuze Monument (Avignon, France, 2000) and Bataille Monument (Kassel, Germany, 2002). This fourth monument pays tribute to the Italian political theorist and Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), famous for his Letters and Prison Notebooks (1926–1937). Gramsci Monument is based on Hirschhorn‘s will “to establish a definition of monument,’ to provoke encounters, to create an event, and to think Gramsci today. My love for Antonio Gramsci is the love of philosophy, the love of the infinitude of thought. It is a question of sharing this, affirming it, defending it, and giving it form.”
 
NON-EXCLUSIVE AUDIENCE
Over the years, Hirschhorn has maintained a commitment to presenting his work in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries, but also in “public space”: urban settings, sidewalks, vacant lots, and communal grounds of public housing projects. Every work of Hirschhorn’s aims to include the Other, and address what he calls a “non-exclusive audience.” “The Gramsci Monument will remain an affirmation of an autonomous art work that is made as a gesture of love. This gesture doesn’t necessarily call for an answer; it’s both utopian and concrete. I want to create a new form, based on my love for a “non-exclusive audience.”
 
“Gramsci Monument is a defining project for Dia, and working with Thomas is both a privilege and a learning experience. Every day we learn from his uncompromising commitment to art and audiences,” says Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Gramsci Monument reinforces Dia’s commitment to off-site commissions, which is at the center of our mission. I am confident that through this project Dia will become a different, stronger institution — one that is even more engaged with the reality of art today.”
 
PRESENCE AND PRODUCTION
With Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn will apply his guidelines for “Presence and Production” by being present and producing on location during the full course of the project. “To be ‘present’ and to ‘produce’ means to make a physical statement, here and now. I believe that only through presence—my presence —and only through production —my production— can my work have an impact in Public Space or at a public location.”
 
Hirschhorn’s ambition is to create through his work, a form of “co-existence,” where questions of autonomy, authorship, and energy are addressed, challenged, and ultimately reinvented.
 
FORM/PROJECT
Gramsci Monument will take the form of an outdoor pavilion constructed with easily available, “unintimidating,” everyday materials. The structure will be built—and later dismantled—by local residents of Forest Houses, coordinated by Hirschhorn and Erik Farmer, Forest Houses Resident Association President and long-time resident. As was the case in his previous monuments, it is the artist’s intention that Gramsci Monument be built and run with the help of local residents, employed temporarily and involved at every stage of the project.
 
The structure will include an exhibition space with a selection of archives and a library with books by (and about) Antonio Gramsci, borrowed from the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome, Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci in Ghilarza, Italy, and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York, a theater platform, a workshop area, a lounge, an internet corner, and the Gramsci Bar, which will be run by local residents. The Gramsci Monument will be open daily, offering a daily program of lectures by philosopher Marcus Steinweg, a children’s workshop run by Lex Brown, a play titled the Gramsci Theater, a radio station, and a daily newspaper. Weekly programs will include Gramsci Seminars led by eleven scholars, Poetry Lectures and Workshops led by eleven writers, Art Workshops led by Hirschhorn, open microphone events coordinated by the community, and field trips organized by the project’s “ambassador,” Dia curator, Yasmil Raymond.
 
In order to be continuously present on location throughout the production of his artwork, Hirschhorn will temporarily reside in the South Bronx (from July 1 - September 15) with Lex Brown, Marcus Steinweg, and Dia’s curator, Yasmil Raymond.
 
“It has been a privilege to work alongside Thomas as he puts forth a new idea of the monument and creates an active space of exchange between people, ideas and communities. The depth of his engagement is exceptional. Thomas has the absolute will to include others, and wants to put the whole world in his work,” said Raymond,. “We are deeply grateful to NYCHA Chairman John Rhea and the hardworking team at NYCHA for embracing this project. Above all, our most profound gratitude goes out to the residents of Forest Houses —in particular Erik Farmer, Clyde Thompson, and Diane Herbert —for joining us in this beautiful effort and offering a firm handshake from day one.”
 
Hirschhorn has also created a website as part of the Gramsci Monument. It is an informative platform offering texts, notes, pictures and videos documenting the process of the artwork, from its earliest sketches. The website will be updated daily with the productions, philosophy lectures, newspaper and radio streaming that have taken place. It will also offer a “press-kit” with pictures and texts available for publication (free of rights). The website, following the monument’s guideline, is meant to be temporary, and will end on December 31, 2013. For additional information, visit www.gramsci-monument.com.
 
LOCATION
To realize this project, Dia and the artist are collaborating with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Hirschhorn began “field work” two years ago, visiting forty-six Public Housing sites all around New York City, and meeting with residents in three boroughs, before focusing on seven locations in the Bronx: Castle Hill, Soundview, Monroe Houses, Patterson, Bronx River, Claremont and Butler Houses and Forest Houses. The “encounters” at Forest Houses with Diane Herbert, Clyde Thompson and Erik Farmer were decisive for Hirschhorn: “I was challenged and taken seriously. These were the real encounters between me and the Other—and one can easily understand that without these encounters, no decision regarding a possible location can be taken. This is why the Gramsci Monument will take place at Forest Houses.”
 
“The New York City Housing Authority is very much looking forward to our residents engaging in this very special endeavor,” said NYCHA Chairman John Rhea. “We especially thank artist Thomas Hirschhorn for bringing his unique vision to public housing, and totally involving Forest Houses residents. And we thank Dia Art Foundation for its generosity in making this artistic effort possible.”
 
Gramsci Monument will be Dia’s first public commission in New York City since 1996, when Dia extended Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks on West 22nd Street from 10th to 11th Avenues. The opportunity to work with Hirschhorn represents a new manifestation of Dia’s commitment to enabling artists to achieve ambitious projects that cannot be realized within the museum context. In anticipation of the Gramsci Monument, from September 15–November 3, 2012, in New York City, Dia presented Timeline: Work in Public Space, which comprised a 30-foot linear layout of images, written statements, and text excerpts chronicling Hirschhorn’s interventions in “public spaces” in urban and rural sites from 1989 to 2011.
 
Dia Art Foundation offers special thanks to the New York City Housing Authority. Major support for Gramsci Monument has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Maja Oeri and Hans U. Bodenmann. Generous support has been provided by Dia’s Commissioning Committee: Jill and Peter Kraus, Leslie and Mac McQuown, Genny and Selmo Nissenbaum, and Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk August Radke; public funds from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council; and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida, Stéphane Samuel and Robert Melvin Rubin, Lenore and Adam Sender, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
 
RELATED PROGRAM
Conversations and Lectures
Thomas Hirschhorn in conversation with Yasmil Raymond
 
Saturday, May 11, 2013, 6 pm
545 West 22nd Street, NYC
 
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1957. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich from 1978 to 1983. Over the past thirty years, Hirschhorn has become internationally renowned for his critically engaged and humanistic aesthetic. He has created over sixty works in public space that pair everyday materials with a universalizing approach that proposes that both the work of art and the process of artistic creation are collaborative and accessible to a broad ranging audience. Since his first solo show in 1986 (Bar Floréal, Paris), Hirschhorn has garnered much critical attention and has had solo exhibitions at international venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago (1998); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2001); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2008); and Secession, Vienna (2008). In 2009, he completed a new homage to Spinoza entitled “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival,” in Amsterdam, and he has most recently held solo exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2010); Les Ateliers de Rennes, France (2010); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2011) and Gladstone Gallery, New York (2012). Among many group exhibitions, he has participated in Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1997); the Venice Biennal (1999 and 2011); Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002); São Paulo Bienal (2006); the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Brighton Photo Biennal (2008); Tirana International Art Biannual (2009); the 8th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); Moma PS1 (2011) and, most recently, at the 9th Shanghai Biennale; La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012) and Kunsthalle Mannheim (2013). Hirschhorn has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Preis für Junge Schweizer Kunst (1999), Marcel Duchamp Prize (2000), Rolandpreis für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (2003), Joseph Beuys Prize (2004), and Kurt Schwitters Prize (2011). He has been living and working in Paris since 1984.
 
Forest Houses
Forest Houses
Bronx, NY
Gramsci Monument is located on the grounds of Forest Houses, off Tinton Avenue between 163rd and 165th Streets.
 
Directions
Subway: 2, 5 at Prospect Avenue
Head north on Prospect Avenue
Turn left onto 163rd Street
Pass Union Avenue
Turn right onto Tinton Avenue
Take first left onto pedestrian pathway leading into Forest Houses
 
New York Housing Authority
NYCHA is committed to increasing opportunities for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers by providing safe, affordable housing and facilitating access to social and community services. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in NYCHA‘s 334 public housing developments around the five boroughs, and another 235,000 receive subsidized rental assistance in private homes through the NYCHA-administered Section 8 Leased Housing Program.
 
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974, is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany, and The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico; and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Dia also commissions original artists’ projects produced for the web and produces scholarly publications.
 
Dia currently presents temporary installations, artist lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.
 
For more information please visit www.diaart.org.

This exhibition marks the first survey of drawings by Ken Price, an artist best known for his sculptural work. A selection of 68 works on paper will track Price’s pursuit of drawing over 48 years and will demonstrate a wide range of characters and techniques. This exhibition will be concurrent with the traveling retrospective of Price’s work organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
 
Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Ken Price, Works on Paper, 1962-2010 will travel to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, from September–November 2013 and the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico from February 22–May 4, 2014.
 
Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

For Immediate Release
 
Season Review Group Show
June 13 - July 31, 2013
 
Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce Season Review a group exhibit comprising of works from gallery artists and a selection of works from artists who participated in the gallery’s 2012 - 2013 season. This overview will reflect a diversity of approaches in a wide variety of mediums from ink on paper to mixed media multi-panel works, large scale paintings on canvas to steel and tin sculpture.
Artists to be included:
 
Andrea Belag
Matthew Blackwell
Cora Cohen Neil Farber
Sarah Gamble
Clare Grill
June Leaf
Rachel Malin
Henri Michaux
Judith Simonian
Andrew Spence
Gary Stephan

THE PARK: PAINTINGS BY ERIK BENSON
ON VIEW IN THE ARSENAL GALLERY
May 2 – June 20, 2013
 
The City of New York Parks & Recreation, in partnership with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, is pleased to announce the exhibition, The Park, by Erik Benson. This new series of paintings, created with thousands of shapes hand-cut from dried sheets of acrylic paint, depict colorful but eerily abandoned playgrounds in stark urban landscapes. Drawings from this series, as well as a stop-motion video documenting Benson’s unique painting method are also on view. These exquisite compositions of urban landscape will be exhibited in the Arsenal Gallery from May 2 through June 20.
 
Benson, known for his austere cityscapes, uses his intensive compositional technique to capture the interplay of construction and creative destruction, urban density, abandonment and open space in images that that have elements of decay and hope. The Park focuses on his interest in playgrounds, which are void of inhabitants but enticingly geometric and colorful. He first began to study these spaces in early graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was particularly interested in the play structures’ boldly unnatural and manmade coloring. The jungle gyms appear to sit on top of the surface rather than integrating with the landscape—a metaphor for his own painting techniques.
 
“Originally I was interested in creating a painting vocabulary that depicted the plasticity and temporality of unexamined things such as playgrounds and construction sites,” says Benson. “These interests have been growing into ideas and concerns that deal with the urban landscape, such as how cities grow and shrink, and what these issues mean to the inhabitants.” In these new paintings, Benson considers how playgrounds and parks play a role in the community and surrounding neighborhoods that are oftentimes blighted. These oases of saturated color and abstraction provide a much needed escape from the daily grind. These playgrounds are strikingly familiar, and while they are inspired by the play spaces around Benson’s neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, they are not exact representations. In fact their archetypal structure can be found in neighborhoods throughout the country.
 
Benson’s paintings are in equal measure foreboding and optimistic and cause us to question the nature of urban development. Gallery owner Edward Tyler Nahem was impressed by “Erik’s clear-eyed view of the intersections of the urban environment and nature - the winners and the losers of this quotidian struggle between “development” and nature, “progress” and tradition.”
 
Benson has a laborious appliqué technique that is more akin to the construction of the buildings on his canvases than to traditional methods of painting. First, he pours acrylic paint on large panes of glass and lets them dry into extremely thin sheets. Once they have dried, he uses an X-Acto knife to cut shapes from the sheet and then layers them atop each other, like a collage or the memorable children’s toy Colorforms. Appropriately, Benson’s meticulous method of constructing his paintings literally brick by brick has also been likened to modular and pre-fabrication designs in architecture.
 
During the reform era of the early 20th century the New York City Parks Department was a pioneer in recreational space, and in 1903 opened the country’s first municipal playground at Seward Park on Manhattan’s the Lower East Side. Under Commissioner Robert Moses, who served from 1934 to 1960, the Parks Department increased the number of playgrounds in the city from 119 to 777, most were based on a standard model that was quick and cheap to build and easy to maintain. In the 1960s and 70s Parks experimented with adventure playgrounds, which used natural materials to integrate the play area into the land itself. The playgrounds were muted in tone and blended structural building materials such as cast concrete with natural materials such as ropes and large–size timbers. By the 1980s, with increasing safety standards many playgrounds were retrofitted to eliminate hazardous conditions. Critics also found the aesthetic to be brutal, harsh, and un–park–like. Newer playgrounds relied on more colorful catalog of model equipment, similar to those in Benson’s paintings. Ushering in a new era of playground design recent models, such as Imagination Playground in Lower Manhattan rely on children having the ability to manipulate their environment. Today the Parks Department maintains nearly 1,000 playgrounds throughout the city.
 
Born in Detroit, MI, Benson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Benson is represented by Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art and his most recent exhibition in 2010 Detouring, opened to critical acclaim after popular showings of his work at the Armory show and Art Basel Miami Beach. Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art also organized the popular pop-up gallery show, Erik Benson: All City in Madrid, Spain February 2- March 1, 2012. He has had solo exhibitions at the former Roebling Hall, Brooklyn and included in group exhibitions at Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University; Salon 94, New York; Flag Art Foundation, New York; and the Newberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Benson was part of the Bronx Museum of Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, and in 2008 he awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship. He recently completed a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. In addition to the exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery, Erik Benson will be featured in an exhibition at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art September 26 – October 25, 2013.
 
The Arsenal Gallery is dedicated to examining themes of nature, urban space, wildlife, New York City parks, and park history. It is located on the third floor of the NYC Parks & Recreation headquarters, in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for holidays. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/art or call 212-360-8163.

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by French artist Anne-Lise Coste, on view from June 20 – through August 9, 2013 at our 195 Chrystie Street location. The artist has shown extensively in Europe for almost 15 years and this is her first with Eleven Rivington.
 
The exhibition will feature new paintings executed primarily in spray-painted acrylic. In the main gallery, an immersive series of 12 black and white canvases based on details of Picasso’s Guernica breaks down the highly complex and visually dense painting into singular appropriated and abstracted scenes. In the smaller second space of the gallery is a display of a new series of text-based works and abstract paintings. All share a unique balance of severity and airiness, in addition to sharp wit. Impulsiveness is characteristic for her work—often painting over previous attempts with gesso until satisfied. Treating letters as units of words allow her to bypass the strict rules of language and convention. With her decisive use of a spray gun to articulate with pigment, she fuses the vitality of expressionism (direct and intuitive mark-making) with the aloofness of Pop (mechanized paint application). Coste frequently raises existential questions - the social and political content of Picasso's regarded masterpiece is undeniable - articulating them by cropping details, re-articulating or subverting specifics, or executing gestures or texts in the form of direct statements / re-statements that expose every single pore. The tangled whole of her practice is a many-voiced inner monologue, a maze whose paths seem to know only two ways out: either an implosion of meaning via repetition, or an explosion through pure overload.
 
Anne-Lise Coste was born 1973 in Marseille, France and currently lives and works in New York. She studied in Marseille at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and in Zurich at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst. Recent and upcoming shows include Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, Germany; Fundacio Caixa Madrid, Spain; Esslinger Kunstverein, Esslingen, Germany; Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Santander, Spain. This exhibition is presented in association with Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona.
 
Eleven Rivington’s two locations are at 11 Rivington St and at 195 Chrystie St, NY, NY 1002, USA. Summer Hours are Tues – Fri 11 AM – 5:30 PM. The gallery is closed July 4 and 5 for Independence Day Holiday. Please contact gallery@elevenrivington.com or 212-982-1930 for more info.