The Directors of Marlborough are pleased to announce the group exhibition natural renditions, curated by Diana Campbell and Eric Gleason, will open at Marlborough Chelsea on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010. The show is comprised of twenty-two
artists who use a number of disparate materials, processes and techniques to create work that evokes organic forms and phenomena.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a number of significant artistic movements found their primary influence in the sublime elements of the natural world. The forty-five works that comprise this exhibition were created by a new generation of young artists who have found beauty and inspiration in the fundamental structures and occurrences that pervade nature.
In new works created for the exhibition, David Brooks, Valerie Hegarty and Amit Greenberg construct installation-based reliefs using found natural materials and man-made synthetic objects. Brooks, whose tropical forest encased in concrete is
currently featured in P.S.1’s “Greater New York 2010”, fuses an uprooted tree to a rusted cast-iron balcony via twine in “Balcony with Landscape,” 2010. A natural transformation also seemingly occurs before the viewer in Brooklyn-based Hegarty’s
“Cathedral,” 2010, an homage to Pollock’s painting from 1947 of the same name. California-based artist Amit Greenberg’s installation of manipulated branches will be his New York gallery debut, preceding a similar construction that will appear in
a forthcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Appropriation and re-contextualization also play significant roles in many works in the exhibition, including a cocoon-like structure created from shoelaces, rope and a basketball hoop by New York artist Suzanne Broughel, entitled “Dream Hoop III
(Dreamcatcher Series),” 2010, as well as in Jina Valentine’s “Poisonous Books,” 2009, a monumental construction of handmade paper composed of acrylic and pages torn from old books, delicately cut into organic formations. Vlatka Horvat, also currently exhibiting in “Greater New York 2010”, repeatedly photographs the phrase “Here to Stay” written in leaves in drab urban environments. Will Ryman’s “Untitled, 2010,” combines the totemic construction and intimidating nature of African
art with the artist’s own perspective and distinct style. In Polish artist Aleksandra Mir’s series of “space collages”, entitled “The Dream and the Promise,” 2008, imagery from religious texts is juxtaposed with garish pictures of spacecraft, creating a contradictory, satirical landscape.
Painted landscapes of a similarly unconventional nature include Iranian-born artist Kamrooz Aram’s monumental “Untitled,” 2009, whose work contains “the exuberant depiction of…the enthusiastic sense of life”, as written in Art in America in
March of 2009. Kim Dorland’s “Woods I,” 2009, is a rich example of the artist’s gestural style in which thick layers of oil and acrylic function representationally but also suggest a state of decomposition. Ahmed Alsoudani, whose work can currently
be seen in the acclaimed exhibition “Until Now: Collecting the New at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,” will debut two new paintings that typify the artist’s dense figurative abstractions.
The exhibition will also include work by Jose Alvarez, Steven Charles, Diana Cooper, Ben Degen, Adam Helms, Kent Henricksen, Nir Hod, Shane McAdams, Sean McCarthy, Kon Trubkovich, Phoebe Washburn and Rob Wynne.
Diana Campbell is an independent curator and advisor and has most recently held positions at Sotheby’s and the Neue Galerie, New York, NY. Eric Gleason has been with Marlborough Gallery since 2004 and is a Director at Marlborough Chelsea.
A fully illustrated digital catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition.
For more information please contact Janis Gardner Cecil at 212.541.4900 or jcecil@marlboroughgallery.com
