NEW YORK, NY.- Andrew Edlin Gallery is presenting a new project, Et Tu, Art Brute?, which is on view in the gallery's underground space.
What defines being an artist today? How does it feel to make art? Who is allowed to participate, and on what terms?
These are some of the questions that Et Tu, Art Brute? explores. This show has a very simple premise; the gallery invited everyone—no matter their background, ability, level of success or anonymity—to contribute an original work of art.
The response to the Open Call has been extraordinary. Over 700 artists from over 250 cities from around the globe have submitted. The gallery is rotating artworks throughout the exhibition to show as many as possible. The exhibition setting has been conceived by artist, Quintessa Matragna.
Jamie Sterns is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is currently the Curatorial Director of Interstate Projects and works in the Art Department at NYU. She holds a Masters degree from Goldsmiths University.
Andrew Edlin Gallery is also presenting a solo exhibition for Vahakn Arslanian, his fourth with the gallery. The show features recent works and includes a variety of pieces made over the last fifteen years.
At 42, his distinctive vision has remained largely in tact – an outsider peering at fliers – physical, possibly spiritual: among them birds, planes, candles newly smoking. More recently, he has included human figures in some of his works and has also begun to paint with nail polish.
Arslanian is, by now, a familiar figure in New York art world circles. His art has been exhibited extensively since he was a child. At the age of five, he was smashing clay pots in Julian Schnabel’s studio, which Schnabel wrote about in the forward to his 1987 book C.V.J. Self-taught, Arslanian has been deaf since birth and does not speak either. He has always been drawn to explosions and the shattering of glass. He houses his drawings and paintings in discarded windows that are often atypical in some way – he buys spare windows from airplanes on eBay – and then cuts the glass to delineate graphite-drawn from painted sections with borders using a stained-glass leading technique.
Vahakn Arslanian’s art has been exhibited in many venues in New York including Maccarone Gallery (2009) and the Outsider Art Fair (2013). In addition, his work has been shown at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore (2009) and at Marc Jancou Gallery, Geneva and New York (2013, 2015). His work was included in The Brucennial, presented by the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Vito Schnabel (2010, 2012). His collaboration with Julian Schnabel, The Ones You Didn’t Write—The Maybach Car, was displayed on the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale in 2011.
