The Lives of Forms
Curated by Ksenia Nouril
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6-8pm
Lower East Side Printshop; 306 W. 37th St., 6th Floor
On view May 26 - August 26, 2016
This exhibition meditates on the tensions between figurative and abstract forms in the works of ten contemporary printmakers. The artists featured cull their forms from a variety of sources, from newspapers and magazines to high school yearbooks and personal archives. Old and new, popular and erudite, anonymous and recognizable, the multifarious forms that populate these works tell stories that have both local and global reach.
The title of this exhibition is inspired by La vie des forms or The Life of Forms in Art, a 1934 publication by French art historian Henri Focillon, one of the most prolific and poetic writers on the subject. It describes the ways forms make themselves known to us, revealing their meanings while constantly changing with the world around them. "We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above [hu]man[s]. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind."
Featuring work by:
Michael Adno
Silvina Arismendi
Natalie Beall
Alina Bliumis
Andrea Cauthen
Nina Feigin
Cooper Holoweski
Lindsay Packer
Felix Plaza