SERGE SPITZER: ROUND THE CORNER
September 14th - October 14th, 2006
Since the late 1970s, many of Serge Spitzer's most important works have been created as permanent public works or large-scale temporary installations in significant international exhibitions such as Documenta 8 and biennales in Venice, Istanbul, Lyon, and Kwangju. Yet Spitzer has also produced many drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations whose more modest scale belies an equally intensive conceptual and material ambition. Whether he is working with something as dense as a steel I-beam or apparently insubstantial as a piece of thread, his work is activated by a sculptor's sensitivity for precarious balance and draws on a viewer's imaginative complicity and physical movement through a particular space. Even as he uses industrial materials or experimental technologies developed specially to serve the needs of a project, his work retains a quotidian aspect; highly complex development processes usually lead to solutions that are at once deeply familiar, richly evocative, and conceptually allusive.
As with most artists who make installation and site-specific work, it is not only the physical but also the functional, social, and even psychological aspects of a place that interest Spitzer. In a 1995 interview, the artist explained: "Unless I feel a complicity with a place, I do not act." On this occasion, Spitzer's work occupies two former apartments in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York City. The floor plans are mirror images; in each instance, the viewer enters a vestibule or entrance hallway before turning to enter a soaring double-height volume defined on the northern edge by windows and to the south by more low-ceilinged rooms. Where the Nyehaus space on the eighth floor is a pristinely renovated gallery environment, the apartment two floors below, retains the appearance of a disused library or club room.
Installing one thread drawing in each space, Spitzer plays off the inherent qualities particular to each environment and provides a material leitmotif that unites the two spaces. At Nyehaus, Fold (Gramercy) has been installed on a partition wall that extends up to the height of the mezzanine railing. The thread runs up and over this wall, over and over again, slowly and deliberately moving from one edge to the other. The thread falls in barely meandering vertical lines on the face of the wall, looping up again and again from the floor to continue its journey. Occasionally tension in the thread has caused it to twist on itself, producing slight visual incidents that enliven the visual field. The work is mysterious in the sense that you cannot understand how the work is suspended until you walk around the wall, where you can see the thread looping in counterbalance above a stairwell.
In the gallery's downstairs space, Spitzer's installation of Global Culture (2004-2005) beneath the swooping trajectories of Upload (Gramercy) puns on the idea of a "club" room. A leather ball is slowly rolling around on a large, bright red table that is tilting and pivoting, keeping the ball in continuous play. Seeing the soccer ball balancing on the moving table evokes a sense of wonder that comes back to simple human experiences like balancing a ball on one's hand by keeping that hand in steady but constant motion. Yet in spite of the material and technological modernity of the table, Global Culture is essentially a traditional but ironic sculptural proposition where gravity and balance are set in precarious motion.
Spitzer's works employ a startling range of materials and approaches even as they are united in a sense of sculptural irony and a playful materialization of ideas. By evading the prison house of signature style, Spitzer allows the significance of individual works to grow and shift in relation to a constellation of apparently contrasting works. Time and again, however, we find the artist at play with the rules of the game, bending its means to his ends.
Serge Spitzer's work has recently been featured at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland and the Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. "Serge Spitzer: Round the Corner" will be accompanied by a limited-edition artist's book designed by the artist, which will include images of the works on view as well as an essay written by Trevor Smith.
September 14th - October 14th, 2006
Since the late 1970s, many of Serge Spitzer's most important works have been created as permanent public works or large-scale temporary installations in significant international exhibitions such as Documenta 8 and biennales in Venice, Istanbul, Lyon, and Kwangju. Yet Spitzer has also produced many drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations whose more modest scale belies an equally intensive conceptual and material ambition. Whether he is working with something as dense as a steel I-beam or apparently insubstantial as a piece of thread, his work is activated by a sculptor's sensitivity for precarious balance and draws on a viewer's imaginative complicity and physical movement through a particular space. Even as he uses industrial materials or experimental technologies developed specially to serve the needs of a project, his work retains a quotidian aspect; highly complex development processes usually lead to solutions that are at once deeply familiar, richly evocative, and conceptually allusive.
As with most artists who make installation and site-specific work, it is not only the physical but also the functional, social, and even psychological aspects of a place that interest Spitzer. In a 1995 interview, the artist explained: "Unless I feel a complicity with a place, I do not act." On this occasion, Spitzer's work occupies two former apartments in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York City. The floor plans are mirror images; in each instance, the viewer enters a vestibule or entrance hallway before turning to enter a soaring double-height volume defined on the northern edge by windows and to the south by more low-ceilinged rooms. Where the Nyehaus space on the eighth floor is a pristinely renovated gallery environment, the apartment two floors below, retains the appearance of a disused library or club room.
Installing one thread drawing in each space, Spitzer plays off the inherent qualities particular to each environment and provides a material leitmotif that unites the two spaces. At Nyehaus, Fold (Gramercy) has been installed on a partition wall that extends up to the height of the mezzanine railing. The thread runs up and over this wall, over and over again, slowly and deliberately moving from one edge to the other. The thread falls in barely meandering vertical lines on the face of the wall, looping up again and again from the floor to continue its journey. Occasionally tension in the thread has caused it to twist on itself, producing slight visual incidents that enliven the visual field. The work is mysterious in the sense that you cannot understand how the work is suspended until you walk around the wall, where you can see the thread looping in counterbalance above a stairwell.
In the gallery's downstairs space, Spitzer's installation of Global Culture (2004-2005) beneath the swooping trajectories of Upload (Gramercy) puns on the idea of a "club" room. A leather ball is slowly rolling around on a large, bright red table that is tilting and pivoting, keeping the ball in continuous play. Seeing the soccer ball balancing on the moving table evokes a sense of wonder that comes back to simple human experiences like balancing a ball on one's hand by keeping that hand in steady but constant motion. Yet in spite of the material and technological modernity of the table, Global Culture is essentially a traditional but ironic sculptural proposition where gravity and balance are set in precarious motion.
Spitzer's works employ a startling range of materials and approaches even as they are united in a sense of sculptural irony and a playful materialization of ideas. By evading the prison house of signature style, Spitzer allows the significance of individual works to grow and shift in relation to a constellation of apparently contrasting works. Time and again, however, we find the artist at play with the rules of the game, bending its means to his ends.
Serge Spitzer's work has recently been featured at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland and the Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. "Serge Spitzer: Round the Corner" will be accompanied by a limited-edition artist's book designed by the artist, which will include images of the works on view as well as an essay written by Trevor Smith.
