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5/7/2006

Two exhibitions

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tomas Saraceno
Air-port-city

Gallery one

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present Air-port-city, the gallery’s first exhibition with Tomas Saraceno. Following in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Saraceno’s installation, sculpture and photography challenge the conventional restrictions on the human habitat, and suggest new ways of perceiving nature. The possibility of moving cities from the earth’s surface into the air is a central theme in his practice, and his futuristic urban models of floating metropolises are not just fantasy, Saraceno is working towards realizing them as a practical solution to the crowding of the earth’s surface. In depicting these flying communities he points out the narrowness of traditional land-bound perspectives and creates, in Fuller’s words a, 'great and anticipatory vision of the future.'

For Air-port-city Saraceno shows pieces that imagine what it might be like to live in one of his floating utopias. In the two 'Flying Garden' sculptures, balloons floating in netting and laced with air plants hover over the gallery floor, an ecosystem above our heads, demonstrating in Saraceno’s words, 'the sustainable occupation' of the air. In 'Mars on water' drops of water float on a sheet of paper, suggesting the beginnings of life on another planet. 'Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space,' a still life table piece, in which a magnetic lamp pulls a single screw across the table’s surface and into its force field, is a complex composition of elements and natural forces, a model that suggests some dynamic and utopian alternative universe.

Elsewhere, in an otherwise completely blacked out space, a single channel stills projection further investigates these notions of weightlessness and utopian living. Dissolving dream-like images capture the possibilities of life with an infinite horizon, a life in the clouds free from earthly restraints. These expansive and inspiring vistas are captured on the surface of Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia - the world’s largest and highest salt lake, a location that also served as the centre point to Saraceno’s recent commission for The Curve gallery at The Barbican, London.

Born in Argentina and living and working in Frankfurt, Germany, Tomas Saraceno’s recent exhibitions include: Tomas Saraceno, The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2006 (solo); Personal States/Infinite Actives, Portikus, Frankfurt (with Marjetica Potrc), 2006 (solo); Buenos di'as Santiago- an exhibition as expedition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile, 2006 (group); Sao Paolo Biennale, 2006; I still believe in miracles, Muse'e d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2005 (group); Luna Park - Fantastic Art, Villa Manin Center for Contemporary Art, Italy, 2005 (group); Project Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Bueningen, Rotterdam , 2005 (group); In-migration, Universitat Kalserslautern, Germany, 2003 (solo); 612 Planetas, Parque Planetario, Buenos Aires, 2000 (solo); among others.

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Charles Long
Monads, Soul Houses and a Star-Off Machine

Gallery two

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to announce Monads, Soul Houses and a Star-off Machine the gallery's sixth solo exhibition with Charles Long. This focused presentation of ceramic sculptures and drawings on photographs is the result of Long’s recent residency at the Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Colorado. In January of 2007 the gallery will present a major show of Long’s sculpture in gallery one.

Perched alone atop spare wooden supports, each ceramic sculpture exhibits its peculiarly autonomous presence in the group. Long refers to these abstract works as Monads, a term borrowed from the metaphysics of Leibnitz, who defined them as an infinite variety of unique indivisible simple substances 'independent of everything but God.' Long's sculptures have always explored the experience of the autonomous object from a psychological perspective and more recently from a mystical one.

Some of the ceramic sculptures have an organic architecture to them, with openings into empty interiors. Long likens these to the soul houses, crude ceramic model houses dating back as far as 5500 BC. Though made of earth, Egyptians buried them with the dead as dwellings for the spirit.

Long sought the Anderson residency for its remoteness and its serious approach to the basic medium of clay. In his project proposal, he states 'I sought a new direction for my art; something basic in technology but evermore imaginative and rich in elemental connotation. Somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic, between the sacred and the common. Rather than address my culture directly I chose to work from my inner psychic world and its context, directing it into a daily activity of shaping the tangible. I wanted to make each piece as if it were my one and only day to make art so that it was complete in purpose, process and as an object for others, a soul house for this moment.'

While Long's art embraces modernist convention, he also sees it as inseperable from life and as a way of creating pathways between inner and outer realities. In a related project, working with a variety of media (ink, pastel, crayon, marker, sandpaper) Long has made drawings directly on top of photographs he took in the area around his Rocky Mountain studio. On these non-descript but delicate snow-scapes he has overlaid transparent abstract forms, two ostensibly separate worlds, the imagined and the photographic, completing each other without concession.

Long’s recent exhibitions include 100 Pounds of Clay, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, 2006 (solo); The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Contemporary Sculpture, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 2006 (group); Gone Formalism, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2006 (group); More Like a Dream Than a Scheme, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI, traveling to SITE Santa Fe, 2005 (solo); The Shape of Color: Excursions in Color Field Art, AGO/Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005 (group); Atmosphere, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2004 (group); Happiness, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2003 (group); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, 2002 (solo); Lateral Thinking- Art of the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, 2001 (group); Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, 2001 (with Ernesto Neto and Siobhan Hapaska); among others.

Image: Tomas Saraceno from Untitled (projection) 2006. Installation dimensions variable

For further information please contact Claire Pauley at 212 4144144 or Claire@tanyabonakdargallery.com

Opening Thursday, July 6th, 6-8pm

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011

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