 Burning Forest, 2002-3 Burnt wood relic, steel, concrete base, with one million seeds, Size varies Sponsored by The Santa Fe Art Institute Alan Sonfist Natural Disasters Paul Rodgers/9W is pleased to present the first gallery exhibition of Alan Sonfist in New York in fourteen years. The exhibition, titled "Natural Disasters", represents a burnt forest in the south-west and has particular currency given the on-going fires in California. Each sculptural relic of this fire is fixed above a concrete pedestal where a million seeds have been encased with the promise of potential new life. The exhibition explores the themes of destruction and renewal. Alan Sonfist is the visionary pioneer of an alternative approach to working with Nature and Culture which parallels the Earth Art movement of the late sixties. Where many of his contemporaries turned their back on the city in order to work in desert environments, Sonfist, beginning his career in the middle of that decade, made a life-long commitment to bringing Nature back into the urban environment. Sonfist has created a rich body of work over four decades. The exhibition will show examples of all the media that the artist has employed. Drawing has offered him the conceptual frame-work to think visually; painting has allowed him to engage tactile matter through the equation of pigment with earth and provides a narrative walk through the landscape; photography offers the capacity to explore nature from a microscopic point of view; and sculpture allows the artist to bring nature directly into art and create cultural simulacra of natural phenomena. Alan Sonfist made his reputation in the late sixties with the celebrated "Time Landscape" situated on Houston and La Guardia Place in Manhattan, since land-marked. The work captured the public imagination by revealing what the natural environment of New York looked like before the city was built. During the 1970's Sonfist realized a number of site specific commissions across the United States which culminated in two retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the National Collection of Fine Art, Washington DC. Since the 1980's Sonfist has been less visible in the United States as he has concentrated on numerous international commissions that have come to him from Japan and Europe. This summer he will inaugurate the "Lost Falcon of Westphalia" project on Richard Prince's estate near Cologne and a hospital in Pistoria, Italy. The exhibition at Paul Rodgers/9W marks a renewed focus on the United States as a theatre for his activity. Alan Sonfist's work is in numerous international public and private collections including the Ludwig Collection in Germany, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, France, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibition will be accompanied by a definitive three hundred page biography and survey of Alan Sonfist's career thus far, published by the Gori Foundation and distributed in this country by Thames & Hudson. The text will include full color illustrations and introductions by Robert Rosenblum and Wolfgang Becker. Exhibition: May 6 - June 19, 2004 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 11 am - 6 pm and by appointment Paul Rodgers / 9W 529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 414.9810 Fax +1 212 414.9844 Email info@paulrodgers9w.com www.paulrodgers9w.com |
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