NEW YORK, NY.- Luhring Augustine is presenting an exhibition of sculptural works that celebrates a selection of highlights from the gallery’s history, while introducing perspectives by artists new to the program. Displayed across the gallery’s Chelsea and Bushwick locations, the exhibition includes works by Janine Antoni, Tom Friedman, Roger Hiorns, Phillip King, Martin Kippenberger, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Jeremy Moon, Reinhard Mucha, Cady Noland, Pipilotti Rist, Oscar Tuazon, Tunga, Rachel Whiteread, Steve Wolfe, Christopher Wool, and Zarina. Presented together, the works generate dialogues amongst the objects as well as between the individual artists, expanding upon the vocabulary and legacy of contemporary sculpture.
Sculpture’s longstanding ties with the figurative are reflected through the works of Janine Antoni and Simone Leigh, both of whose practices regularly center on the female form. While the body appears in a literal sense in Antoni’s works, most notably as a vehicle for creation, Leigh contemplates its representation through investigations into black female subjectivity and constructed archetypes. For both artists, the body is a site in which labor is generated as well as focused, functioning ultimately as a locus for performance.
Phillip King and Jeremy Moon’s vibrant geometries set rhythms and patterns into motion, creating a sense of dynamism that defies sculpture’s static associations. Color functions primarily as a structuralizing principle, delineating compositions where content and form seamlessly converge. While Moon’s objects straddle a territory between sculpture and painting, experimenting with planarity, King’s works are imbued with a subtle sensuality that pulls them towards the anthropomorphic.
At the center of Oscar Tuazon and Roger Hiorns’ practices are objects and materials that shape the built environment. Elements of architecture, municipal infrastructures, and large-scale machinery are recontextualized in exhibition spaces where their status and utility are renegotiated. While Hiorns zeroes in on the object proper, exploring its transformative potential through cycles of growth, chance, and decay, Tuazon extends the definition of sculpture to include the surrounding space as a product of its own construction.
Reinhard Mucha and Rachel Whiteread, whose works involve architectural spaces and objects embedded with personal histories, examine narratives that shape individual as well as collective identities. While Mucha showcases objects of personal and cultural significance within stylized vitrines, Whiteread draws attention to an object’s absence and memory by casting the negative space within or adjoining it.
