Fall 2024 exhibitions

Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT
September 19, 2024–March 24, 2025
Álvaro Urbano’s work has engaged in conversation with various entities across different times and places, including artists, writers, and architects; plants, animals, and buildings. At SculptureCenter, Urbano focuses on a potential ruin, or a ruin in progress—a public artwork by the American sculptor Scott Burton (1939–89) that was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future. The work was originally installed in the lobby of the Equitable Center building in midtown Manhattan in 1986 until it was dismantled in 2020, victim to a renovation. Atrium Furnishment consisted of a semi-circular marble seating area, onyx lamps, a marble centerpiece, plants, and a polished bronze circle delimiting the sculptural plane, all set into a floor inlaid with red granite tiles. Urbano re-organizes roughly half of the disassembled parts of Atrium Furnishment across SculptureCenter’s gallery, positioning them under an illuminated drop ceiling and alongside botanical sculptures in painted metal that reference the spring flora of Central Park in their blooming and decay. Given the lack of conditions to fully reassemble Burton’s work in any new context, Urbano underlines the precarious status of works like Atrium Furnishment regardless of the fortitude of their material composition. While Burton’s work will never be the same again, Urbano’s exhibition asks what new beginnings this assembly of the austere matter of his art engenders, and how its monumentality and fragility might revive its latent ideas. Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment is presented in collaboration with Darling Green and the Equitable Art Collection. Special thanks to Soft Network.

In Practice: Bastien Gachet
September 19–October 21, 2024
Bastien Gachet’s work uses new approaches to fabrication and installation to draw out the immanent, emergent, and durational qualities of art. Gachet meticulously hand-produces objects and installation elements across media, subtly elaborating on and bending parallel categories that have been used consistently, if inadequately, to define recent art: the “pre-intentional” and intentional; the found and the made; the real and the fake, expanding into notions of the “fake-real” and the “fake-fake” (in the artist’s terminology). In his forthcoming exhibition at SculptureCenter, Gachet collects and organizes these contrasting modes into what he has called an “object-based dramaturgy,” a structure of meaning opening itself across unsettlingly constructed and resonant environments.

ASMA: Ideal Space for Music
October 31, 2024–February 3, 2025
SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first institutional exhibition in the United States of artist duo ASMA. Their sculpturally-rooted works stretch the possibilities of materials such as silicon, resin, bronze, steel, or glass, often blending artisan craft techniques with synthetic and industrial processes. Their research methodology integrates intuitive responsiveness to a site with conceptual explorations found within the arenas of mythology, psychology, and posthumanism, viewed through a metamodern lens. For their SculptureCenter commission, ASMA presents Ideal Space for Music, a shattered narrative tapestry with sculptural characters whose presence evokes theatricality. Drawing on the metaphorical capacity of SculptureCenter’s lower level as a place of subconscious nature, works in the exhibition will open a conversation around desire and fragmentation. Through their surreal and dreamlike approach, which draws inspiration from elements such as the ornate motifs and embellishments typical of movements like art nouveau and romanticism as well as artifacts of digital civilization, ASMA’s projects increasingly border on total environments. Their SculptureCenter exhibition expands on this interest by fully engaging with the labyrinthine and obscure corridors of the lower level and the architectural character of the building.

In Practice: Tony Chrenka
October 31–December 22, 2024
Tony Chrenka’s studio practice pursues questions of work and perceptions of the progression of time through photography, drawing, and installation. At SculptureCenter, Chrenka will present a series of wooden relief sculptures and a related wall treatment in a work that posits sculpture as an ongoing manipulation of presence and absence in space over bounded intervals of time.

Support
Generous support for Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT is provided by Collection Silvia Fiorucci, Monaco; Elisa Nuyten; Will Palley; Eleanor Cayre; and the Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection.

This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), a state agency. Special thanks to ChertLüdde, Berlin, and Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Guadalajara, and Mexico City.

In Practice is made possible by the Elaine Graham Weitzen Commissioning Fund for Emerging Artists, which supports the production of new work by artists selected from SculptureCenter’s annual open call. Major support for the In Practice program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In Practice is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Support for all of SculptureCenter’s work with artists from abroad is provided by the International Council: Anonymous, Stephen Cheng, Micki Meng, Yan Du, Antonio Murzi, Thomas Berger, and Füsun Eczacıbaşı—SAHA.

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.