NEW YORK, NY.- Peter Blum Gallery opened 20/20, a group exhibition that brings together individual works by 12 artists working in painting and video, spanning from 1969-2019. The show is on view at 176 Grand Street, New York. The exhibition runs through July 31.

In a time of political and social turmoil, where personal views are heightened and put in opposition to one another, and the meaning of truth itself is being fractured, it seems a poignant coincidence that the upcoming year has certain associations to clarity of vision, a news TV program, and is itself a numerical reflection.

2020 sounds like science fiction. Past works of literature, film, and art that envision the future are valuable in that they express the perspective people at the time had about where the world was heading. We are now living after the projected future’s of Orwell’s 1984 or Kubrick’s 2001. To experience these works today is to conflate the past in which they were created and the frozen futures that they represent with the present that they have contributed in shaping. Any work of art can be considered in this way.

The works in this exhibition all incorporate the body in different ways and the pairings of particular videos and paintings will develop dialogues about the body as a tuning fork for time and technology. The body is distorted, magnified, multiplied, fractured, channeled, transformed, dematerialized, animated, perverted, enhanced.

…what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it…the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. - T.S. Eliot, from “Tradition and Individual Talent”, 1919