Simplifying contemporary art galleries in New York City

Gallery Tour

This weekend I took Therese (co-worker/friend) and Dan (her brother visiting from China) to a few shows in Chelsea. We explored the idea of “collage” - from cut and assembled pieces of paper to the city-sized sculptural installation at Madison Square Park (pictured above). We saw:

Elliott Hundley & Andrea Rosen Gallery
Janet Cardiff George Bures Miller @ Luhring Augustine Gallery
Barbara Kruger @ Mary Boone Gallery
Antony Gormley @ Sean Kelly Gallery
Daniel Rozin @ Bitforms
And finally, Antony Gormley’s “Event Horizon” at Madison Square Park.

I have invited them to give their thoughts in the comments below.

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Comments

I have to note the disorienting experience of being in the dark in Gormley's "Breathing Room II," primarily because of the elderly man in the exhibit flailing and yelling "I'm LOST!" and Jane and I repeatedly offering our arms to him, which he ignored. Impromptu performance art!

The most striking thing of the day was definitely the same artist's "Event Horizon" at Madison Square Park - the strange experience of slowly discovering each life sized man on the buildings surrounding the park created this visceral sense that I was being watched - surrounded, and in NYC, in a public park I'm usually aware of just the opposite - my anonymity. Funny too that I immediately imbue these metal statues with human qualities, and that being surrounded by inanimate objects would change my sense of orientation so wholly.

Without a doubt my favorite exhibit was "Event Horizon" in Madison Square Park. I love the idea of being immersed in the art, discovering it as you pass through. The Park exhibit was the exclamation point at the end of an amazing tour through the galleries. We kept coming back to the "collage" theme of the tour in different ways, collages of pins and paper by Hundley, and collages of sight and sound by Kruger, even collages of objects in space!