 Sol LeWitt: wall drawing Symmetries Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, Barry LeVa, Sol LeWitt Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition titled "Symmetries", featuring a selection of sculpture and drawing by Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, Barry LeVa, and Sol Lewitt. Common to these artists is their reworking of idioms and methodologies drawn from architecture, and their questioning of the traditional significance of form, function, material, and context on our perception of reality. In his series of small sculptures, "Dictionary for Building", begun in 1979, Siah Armajani created a visual lexicon of different building forms and spatial conditions which he continues to expand into larger works. By isolating and abstracting the planes, windows, walls, stairs, and floors of vernacular American architecture, the artist composes freestanding constructions, built to actual scale, that become dependent on their placement in the exhibition space to complete their meaning. For Richard Artschwager, architectural elements and domestic objects - mirror, rug, window, chair, table - have inspired sculptures that serve as a means for examining spatial relationships. By altering the forms of familiar objects: giving them illusionistic surfaces, distorting their scale, and rendering them functionless, the artist provokes a redefinition of our relationship to them and the spaces that contain them. In a 1975 interview with the artist, Artschwager states, "In my early sculpture I used plywood and Formica. I was trying to make something that would get confused with the space you yourself occupy". Barry LeVa's early studies in architecture contribute to his sensitivity toward space, presence, volume, form, and tension. LeVa's "Floor Distribution" sculpture, "Sorting, Cataloguing: Head, Limbs, Torsos, Family X", 1998-2004, reveals the artist's interest in placing the viewer within the artwork rather than keeping him or her outside it. Of the primary shapes that compose LeVa's expansive sculptures, Thomas MacEvilley writes, "The universe of ordered construction seems to have been deconstructed or reduced back to its essential geometric underpinnings". By drawing and painting directly on the wall, Sol LeWitt is able to integrate his work with the architecture of a given site. In so doing, the artist not only dramatically advances our definition of what an art object can be, but also our understanding of how intimately and provocatively a space can be transformed. In his new 9 x 15 foot wall drawing, designed for the gallery, two intersecting waves composed of myriad colored elements create a dynamic illusion of three-dimensional space. Uniting the art of Armajani, Artschwager, LeVa, and LeWitt, is the transformative effect their work confers on a particular time and place. Exhibition: April 16 - June 30, 2004 Gallery hours: Wed-Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 6 pm Tuesdays by appointment Senior & Shopmaker Gallery 21 East 26th Street USA-New York, NY 10010 Telephone +1 212 213-6767 Fax +1 212 213-4801 Email gallery@seniorandshopmaker.com www.seniorandshopmaker.com |
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