Delvoye presents recent laser-cut stainless steel and bronze sculptures. He is tied to a decontextualized symbolic duality that builds on the Belgian Surrealist tradition. In "Murdering the World" are on view the last 7 years of Greenwold's production, smallish labor intensive paintings and drawings.
Wim Delvoye
New York, NY - Sperone Westwater is pleased to present an exhibition of recent laser-cut stainless steel and bronze sculptures by Wim Delvoye. Known and described as a provocative and subversive artist, Delvoye is tied to a decontextualized symbolic duality that builds on the Belgian Surrealist tradition. By quoting and inserting Gothic, Baroque, or Rococo architecture in functional objects and industrial machinery as well as metamorphosizing religious icons and nineteenth-century sculptures, Delvoye recontextualizes these items – aestheticizes in some cases – and takes the creative process to the extreme.
This is the artist's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Last year, Delvoye was invited by the Musée du Louvre in Paris to show his works as a counterpoint to the museum's collection in the Napoleon III apartments as well as under the I.M. Pei pyramid on the Cour Carrée.
Suspended from the gallery's ceiling will be a monumental 6-meter high Gothic tower made of stainless steel, Suppo (scale model 1:2), 2010. Tall, spiraling, and slender, this work combines Delvoye's recent experiments in twisted, anamorphosed ring-like sculptures and his earlier Gothic works. Also to be installed is a large-scale polished bronze sculpture, Dual Möbius Quad Corpus, 2010, which depicts contorted and warped crucifixes in a Möbius band – a single closed continuous curve with a twist. Other sculptures from this Holy Family series, in nickeled bronze, will be featured.
Another suite of nickeled bronze sculptures, including Daphnis & Chloë Rorschach II, 2012, reactivates the mythological figures of nineteenth-century academic sculptures by Mathurin Moreau, among others. Delvoye employs computerized reproduction techniques and then twists and further morphs their Baroque and Rococo forms even further. One half of the sculpture is a mirror image of the other, reiterating the principle of Rorschach plates.
Born in Belgium in 1965, Delvoye currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. The artist had gained international recognition through his participation in major exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1999, Documenta IX in 1992, and particularly, through his presentation of "Cloaca" at the New Museum, New York in 2002. Other recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2009); Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC), Nice, France (2010); Musée Rodin, Paris, France (2010); Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, Belgium (2010-2011); the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart Tasmania, Australia (2012); and the aforementioned Musée du Louvre (2012). Delvoye's work is in public collections worldwide.
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Mark Greenwold
Murdering the World
Paintings and Drawings 2007-2013
New York, NY – Sperone Westwater is pleased to present Mark Greenwold's first exhibition at the gallery. Given the extreme nature of Greenwold's painting process, the slowness and deliberation with which the paintings are made, he shows rarely; his first exhibition in New York in 1979 consisted of a single small painting that took him three years to complete.
On view will be the last seven years of Greenwold's production, smallish labor intensive paintings and drawings that depict couples and individuals in situations of familial and social complexity that has rarely been the subject of painting in the latter part of the twentieth century. The artist claims to be painting "fictions," not what happened, but what might have happened. In today's increasingly literal-minded times, people often conflate this complexity of the real and the imagined. Greenwold seems to revel in misunderstandings: pictorial, spatial, psychological… a blurring and fragmenting that he has characterized recently as an "emotional cubism." The title of the show Murdering the World expresses Greenwold's ambition, like most artists', to remake things. His artistic heroes are visionaries – Andrei Tarkovsky, William Blake, and Bob Dylan – but his sensibility is very much of this moment, highly keyed to the quotidian.
Greenwold was born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Indiana University. Greenwold’s work has been in numerous recent group exhibitions, including SITE Santa Fe's 5th International Biennial, curated by Robert Storr (2004) as well as shows held at the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile (2006); National Academy Museum, New York (2007); and Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2008). He has been the recipient of various awards since 1985; recent ones include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation (2001); the Eric Eisenberger Annual Prize, National Academy of Design, New York (2007), and the Jimmy Ernst Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2008). His work is in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Academy Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City.
A full-color, illustrated, 60-page catalogue, featuring an interview with the artist by Carroll Dunham, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Image: Wim Delvoye, Concrete Mixer Scale Model 1:3, 75, 2009, laser-cut stainless steel, 58 x 57 x 32 cm SW 09214. Private Collection
For more information as well as images, please contact Aurelia Rauch at +1 212 999 7337 or aurelia@speronewestwater.com
There will be a reception for the artist on 10 May from 6 - 8 pm.
Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery New York, NY 10002
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm, Monday by appointment