Simon Preston is pleased to present Michelle Lopez's first solo exhibition at the gallery, The Violent Bear It Away, which opens to the public on Saturday, March 21, and runs until Sunday, May 17, 2009.
This is the artist's first exhibition in New York since her show at Deitch Projects in 2001. I... Read more
Simon Preston is pleased to present Michelle Lopez’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, The Violent Bear It Away, which opens to the public on Saturday, March 21, and runs until Sunday, May 17, 2009.
This is the artist’s first exhibition in New York since her show at Deitch Projects in 2001. It consists of three new sculptures,each masking a subtext of terrorist warfare. The installation explores an abject form of violence and entropy that marks an evolution of themes the artist has continued to investigate: the human condition and how the physical body and physical iconography are transformed through tragedy and human experience. The title of the exhibition, The Violent Bear It Away, references a novel by Flannery O’Connor exploring themes of destiny, destruction and redemption through a symbolic act of baptism, by violent drowning.
Woadsonner (edit), 2009, a leather-covered car originally commissioned by The Public Art Fund in 2000, is re-configured as crushed and gently slouches against the wall. In an attempt to reconcile her artistic past, Lopez employs the gesture of destroying and dismantling her sculpture to respond to the pop perfection of her earlier works. Here the edit is the elimination of all adornment, eschewing conventional beauty and commercial value, in search of a renewed, re-defined present. In this instance, Woadsonner (edit) is raw, unfinished, brutalized and effectively redeemed.
