David Zwirner is pleased to present People Who Work Here, an exhibition in the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space. Comprising, as its title suggests, a group of artists who work at the gallery, the show is complementary to David Zwirner’s main program, which features forty internationally acclaimed artists. Curated by Brooklyn-based Rawson Projects, whose co-directors James Morrill and Chris Rawson also work at David Zwirner, the show bridges the emerging and established gallery scenes, two sides of the art world that a... Read more

David Zwirner is pleased to present People Who Work Here, an
exhibition in the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space. Comprising, as
its title suggests, a group of artists who work at the gallery, the show
is complementary to David Zwirner’s main program, which features
forty internationally acclaimed artists.

Curated by Brooklyn-based Rawson Projects, whose co-directors
James Morrill and Chris Rawson also work at David Zwirner, the show
bridges the emerging and established gallery scenes, two sides of
the art world that are commonly thought of as isolated from one
another. In turn, it plays on notions of inside and outside, art and
work, center and periphery, while at the same time testifying to the
interconnectedness of the New York art world and the relationships
that exist between new and established artists and galleries in
Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Participating artists present work across a broad spectrum of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. They include Cy Amundson, Justin Davis Anderson, Ben Berlow, Josh Brown, Aidan Sofia Earle, Joel Fennell, Brent Harada, Sam Martineau, Chris Medina, Dave Miko, Clive Murphy, Liz Nielsen, David Ording, Justin Phillipson, Ramon Silva, and Aengus Woods with John Holten.

Many of the works on view engage with issues of abstraction, such as Justin Davis Anderson’s hand-painted Polaroids; Ben Berlow’s gestural works on found paper; Brent Harada’s hybrid works on paper; Sam Martineau’s paintings that evoke the aesthetic sensibilities of mid-century American graphic design; Chris Medina’s works that employ ink-jet techniques on canvas; Dave Miko’s painterly architectural interventions; and Ramon Silva’s installations of multiple abstract canvases. Other works explicitly draw upon art history, such as Cy Amundson’s paintings that ironically reference the history of figurative painting, and David Ording’s oil paintings that reinterpret canonical portraiture.

Some artists consider photography and video as unreliable and unstable media: Josh Brown’s images of racecars point to the imperfect nature of both the photographic medium and the spectator’s vision, and Justin Phillipson employs video compression to distort his source material to varying degrees, thereby disengaging the images
from their original source. Liz Nielsen’s photographs reflect the artist’s interest in color and the physics of light. Aengus Woods, in collaboration with John Holten, presents a video installation that examines the history of a purportedly little-known Eastern European avant-garde art group.

The exhibition also includes sculptural work by Clive Murphy, who manipulates the prescribed utility of found objects, and Aidan Sofia Earle, who constructs affective collages that reference memory and the body. Joel Fennell will present a new sculptural work that places physical and aural perception at the center of aesthetic experience.