between father and mother
May 9–August 12, 2024
May 9, 2024–March 24, 2025
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Long Island City, NY 11101
United States
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Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother
With Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Kirsty Bell, Katinka Bock, Dylan Peirce, and James Richards
May 7–August 12, 2024
Opening reception: May 7, 6–8pm
Tolia Astakhishvili and Kirsty Bell: May 11, 2–3:30pm
Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards: July 18, 6:30–8pm
Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother is the artist’s first exhibition in the United States. For more than two decades, Tolia Astakhishvili has worked across sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. At scales that both augment and seemingly disappear into gallery spaces, Tolia’s environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming entity shaped by those who live through it. At the same time, her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay. At SculptureCenter, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother considers sculpture as a form of sorting, and, by extension, choosing and dividing. In service of this idea, Tolia recasts SculptureCenter’s ground floor gallery spaces as a channeling machine, rigging up two large debris chutes that suggest the mechanism of judgment realized through Tolia’s monumental, assemblage-laden installations. Self-effacing yet large-scale and accumulative, between father and mother performs a problem of discernment familiar to art and life: how to compare unlike things, and how to reconcile incomparable experiences as they play out in the present and return from the past. The exhibition includes a new work co-commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York and Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam.
In Practice 2024
May 2024–March 2025
Opening reception with Covey Gong: May 7, 6–8pm
Opening reception with Phoebe Collings-James: June 27, 6–8pm
SculptureCenter is pleased to announce the artists selected from our 2024 In Practice Open Call. Each exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York City institution, and each artist will present new work commissioned by SculptureCenter. Since 2003, SculptureCenter’s In Practice Open Call program has supported the production of new work by over 260 artists.
Covey Gong: May 9–June 17, 2024
Phoebe Collings-James: June 27–August 12, 2024
Bastien Gachet: September 2024
Tony Chrenka: October 2024
Anita Esfandiari: January 2025
Zishi Han and Wei Yang: March 2025
Struggle With Art
May 2024–ongoing
FOR THOSE WHO STRUGGLE WITH ART: You love it. You give your life to it. You submit to its idealism. You make meaning through it. You participate in its social scenes. You build communities around it. You are empowered by it. It gives you recurring pleasure. It expands the horizon of your imaginary. You believe in its autonomy, even if burdened by the obligations it invites. You are disturbed by it. You are averse to its various cliques. You find its institutional forms questionable. You find its funding structures problematic. You find its cozy relationship with power and capital painful. You are sick of its winner-take-all economy. You are weary of its lack of transparency. You are contemptuous of its star system and how it replicates the dynamics that it feigns to question. You feel complicit in its fragmented social hierarchies. You love it. It motivates you to get out of bed. You are committed to its logical irrationalism. Struggle With Art is a series of meetings at SculptureCenter that aim to address issues facing the arts community in New York. For more information, visit our website in May 2024.
Support
Tolia Astakhishvili’s newly-commissioned chute sculpture is made possible by Valeria Napoleone XX SculptureCenter (VNXXSC).
Major support for Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother is provided by The Deborah Buck Foundation. Generous support is provided by the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, Tamara Chubinidze, and the Henry Moore Foundation. Additional support is provided by David Maclean.
Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother is supported by the Eva Hesse Initiative for New Sculpture. Support for all of SculptureCenter’s work with artists from abroad is provided by the International Council.
In Practice is made possible by the Elaine Graham Weitzen Commissioning Fund for Emerging Artists.
Major support for the In Practice program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The In Practice program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Generous support for Struggle with Art is provided by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation and the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation.
Leadership support for SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and Teiger Foundation. Major support is provided by Richard Chang, the Marguerite Steed Hoffman Donor Advised Fund at The Dallas Foundation, Karyn Kohl, Jill and Peter Kraus, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, David Maclean, Eleanor Heyman Propp, Jacques Louis Vidal, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by the May and Samuel Rudin Foundation, Inc., Candy and Michael Barasch, Libby and Adrian Ellis, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, Amy and Sean Lyons, and Fred Wilson.
