Laurent Grasso

Laurent Grasso

Artist reception:
Friday, November 4th, 2011
7pm–9pm

2100 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, Florida 33139

www.bassmuseum.org

The Bass Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of works by Paris-based artist Laurent Grasso. The exhibition, titled Portrait of a Young Man, builds on Grasso’s reflections on the Renaissance, a time when the fields of science and the arts actively informed one another. In order to explore this theme within his oeuvre, Grasso carefully selected historic works from the Renaissance and Baroque collection of the Bass Museum of Art to create a dialogue with his own works from a wide range of media, all of which investigate a notion of history that is neither linear nor cyclical.

For example, the exhibition includes a series of intricate paintings titled Studies into the past. These paintings were produced in collaboration with professional art restorers and incorporate select imagery meticulously reproduced from historic paintings while simultaneously integrating depictions of miraculous phenomena such as eclipses, floating rocks and the northern lights. Other works central to the exhibition include a series of neons inspired by Grasso’s interest in Galileo Galilei; one of these works, 1610 (2011), was made especially for the exhibition and transforms one of Galileo’s original sketches of a star constellation into neon. Through placing these works alongside paintings from the 15th century, Grasso provocatively alludes to literal and figurative connections between the past and present.

The exhibition runs through February 12, 2012 and is on view during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011.

The exhibition is organized by the artist and the Bass Museum of Art. Support for the exhibition was made possible by Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art.

About the Artist
Laurent Grasso was born in 1972 in Mulhouse, France and currently lives and works between New York and Paris. He studied at the Ensba, Paris, the Cooper Union School, New York and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London with residencies at the Villa Médicis, Rome and ISCP, New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He has exhibited extensively in group shows and biennials across Europe, Asia and the Americas including Manifesta 8, the Third Moscow Biennale and Sharjah Biennial. His work is the subject of a major monograph, Laurent Grasso: The Black-Body Radiation (Les Presses du Reel, 2009). As the 2008 Laureate of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Grasso presented a special exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2009). Grasso’s work is currently on view at La Maison Rouge in Paris in an exhibition of the Olbricht Collection; forthcoming are solo exhibitions at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2012 and at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada in 2013.

About the Bass Museum of Art
Located in Miami Beach, the Bass Museum of Art offers a dynamic year-round calendar of exhibitions exploring the connections between contemporary art and works of art from its permanent collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture and textiles and the newly opened Egyptian Gallery. Artist’s projects, educational programs, lectures, concerts and free family days complement the works on view.

The Bass Museum of Art is generously funded by the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and the Friends of the Bass Museum.

*Image above:
Private collection, New York.
Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.