Venue name:
James Cohan Gallery
James Cohan
is pleased to present Pop, an exhibition of the late Robert Smithson’s works on
paper and select sculpture from 1962-64, on view from November 21 through
January 10, 2016. This exhibition marks
the debut of James Cohan’s second NYC gallery space located on the Lower East
Side.
In 1963, at
the age of twenty-five, Robert Smithson was immersed in the vitality and
experimentation of the burgeoning downtown New York art scene. Smithson fed on
the clashes of style, form and meaning found along his rambles through the
city; from the downtown kiosks hawking porno magazines and comic books, to the
movie houses of Forty-Second Street with their “low budget mysticism of horror
films,” to the mineral displays at the Museum of Natural History, and across
town to the Met’s Byzantine paintings and the “cold glass boxes” along Park
Avenue. From this absorption of thecity, Smithson developed his complex theory
of entropy and the symbolic language he used to explore it. Art critic Carter
Radcliff explained that for Smithson “meaning emerged from the disintegration
of meaning,” and “in 1962, that argument flowed from the restless ironies of
his hand.”
Smithson’s
prolific drawings from this period, including those about language and
Christian iconography, sought out disorder from the hierarchies of social
conventions and popular culture. The series of drawings on view at the gallery
are composed like biblical panel paintings with collaged or drawn elements in
the center of the page surrounded by free-floating figures in nested zigzag
motifs. The erotic imagery includes male and female nudes depicted as American
icons sporting baseball caps and scuba masks, lifting weights, and riding
horses, while others are pin-ups and action figures recast from legend with
wings and thunder bolts. The works in Pop highlight Smithson’s search for what
curator Eugenie Tsai referred to as “comparative mythologies,” or modern-day
equivalents to the archetypal models established throughout the history of
human culture.
Address:
291 Grand St , New York , 10002
Cross
street: between Allen and Eldridge StsEvent phone: (212-714-9500)
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