The ZieherSmith gallery was established in Chelsea in 2003 and explanded into its huge 3500 sq ft space in 2009. Since then, it has been a premiere venue for contemporary art in NYC.
The upcoming exhibit entitled “All a tremulous heart requires” is inspired by The Smiths 1985 song “Rusholme Ruffians,” a “rollicking reminiscence and a lonely, caustic celebration of the revels and bedevilments of Manchester youths’ annual summer fair.” It represents a time of great violence and hate, yet whirlwind romance.
The creators of this exhibit are Marcel Eichner, Ida Ekblad, Ted Gahl, John McAllister, Dana Schutz, Rose Wylie and Franz West. Find below an excerpt from the ZieherSmith Press Release for this exhibition, describing the works of each artist.
“Critic Magdalena Kröner writes that Rose Wylie has “preserved in her work an almost naïve directness. But her precisely formulated interest in art historical and filmic source material faces off against this inscrutable, jumbled and deliberately ‘raw’ style.” The drawings included here (including a self-portrait) focus on characters represented on jagged shards of paper with cursory, concise depictions of delight, capturing wonder with hints of madness.
By contrast (and in reference to his highly charged collage work such as the piece featured here), Franz West stated “my joke is to suggest the erotic in these horrible-looking people. You can either be depressed, or make a joke about it. The second is the better way to go.”
While Dana Schutz’s latest large scale works on paper resonate with all the urgency of social realism, her figures are in fact confined – prone in bed, in back surgery or the deep mental actions of REM sleep. Their cramped, compressed compositions belie a singular fluidity.
Ted Gahl’s canvases, in the words of critic Thomas Micchelli, “function as layered memories, distorted and fading, through a conflation of old-school painting and conceptual mediation- an uneasy balance, but one with a peculiarly satisfying feel,” achieved here by an elemental, large-scale ab-ex formalism inhabited by a ghostly housepainter, swinging his bucket, dragging his brush and smiling as he smokes.
John McAllister’s paintings have been described by Roberta Smith as “made by someone unafraid to embrace the medium or its history, or to toy with the ratios of hedonism and skepticism therein.” Here an electric hued interior is the psychedelic negative to a classically modernist inspired scene.
Ida Ekblad’s three untitled structures first appeared in the Norwegian Consulate and the Venice Biennial (2011). Continuing her investigation of the utilitarian object, the objects act as tables, sculptures and paintings simultaneously. Vigorous color and a vibrant, lyrical line combine, bringing the notion of usefulness one step closer to poetry.
Marcel Eichner, too, is a poet’s painter. According to the artist, “I wake up in a dream and think up the rest” and more succinctly, “Painting is closing the wound.” Here a haunting still life unites his longstanding interest in interiors with a more recent compositional restraint.”
The opening reception for “All a tremulous heart requires” will be held Thursday, June 26, from 6-8pm. The gallery is regularly open Tuesday through Saturday, 11a-6pm. They will be closed on Independence Day.
Who: Marcel Eichner, Ida Ekblad, Ted Gahl, John McAllister, Dana Schutz, Rose Wylie and Franz West
What: All a tremulous heart requires
Where: ZieherSmith Gallery
516 W 20th St
New York, NY 10011
www.ziehersmith.com
When: June 26 – August 15, 2014
