Join SculptureCenter on Thursday, July 18 from 6:30-8PM for a public program bringing together longtime collaborators Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards. The two will speak about their joint practices on occasion of ‘Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother’, now on view at SculptureCenter.
RSVP at the link in bio.
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Image: Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards, Our Friends In The Audience, 2024, detail. Courtesy the artists
Alexa West On view Jul 5 - Aug 12, 2024
From July to mid-August, artist, dancer, and choreographer Alexa West shifts the static nature of the exhibition space into an active area—an open creative process that the public is invited to observe and engage with. Trained in the Martha Graham technique and sculpture, both areas influence her practice, which is currently centered on performance and choreography. Smoothly merging her interests in movement and three-dimensional forms, at SculptureCenter she focuses on creating a new work. At various moments during the week, West prepares costumes, drafts a score, builds props, and rehearses with dancers.
West’s work in production reinterprets choreographer George Balanchine’s ballet rendition of Orpheus (premiered in 1948), itself an adaptation of the Greek myth of the musician-poet and his struggle to rescue his wife Eurydice from Hades. Drawing inspiration from the 1940s production, West shifts the perspective to Eurydice and elements of the production’s set design as envisioned by Isamu Noguchi.
This performance study explores the site of SculptureCenter’s lower level in collaboration with the dancers. Together, they build movement sequences and character arcs with source materials interlaced with originally created phrases, informing the creation of the new work.
West rehearses with dancers on Thursdays, Fridays, and weekends from 12-4pm.
“Open Rehearsals” will be held on August 2, 4, 5, and 8 from 4-6pm, when West and the collaborating dancers will present a sketch of the new work.
Read more about the exhibit and find the running schedule for “Open Rehearsals” at the link in our bio.
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Image: Alexa West, J, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
The 2025 In Practice Open Call for Artist Proposals is now open. 📣
Learn more about the annual open call and apply on Submittable at the link in our bio 🔗
Proposal deadline: Aug 4, 2024 at 11:59pm EST
SculptureCenter is pleased to announce that our annual open call for artists is now open. In Practice 2025 will generate a yearlong series of solo presentations.
We invite artists who have not yet had an institutional solo exhibition in New York City to submit proposals for solo exhibitions in designated gallery spaces at SculptureCenter. Artists are also invited to propose off-site projects, publishing initiatives, performances, and nontraditional formats, which will be considered based on feasibility. Up to seven artists will be selected to participate in the program from spring 2025 to winter 2026. Each exhibition will be on view for approximately four to six weeks.
SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution that takes the history and legacy of sculpture as a framework from which to consider the diverse activity taking place in the field of contemporary art. SculptureCenter’s program encourages artists and audiences to explore the possibilities of sculpture and the multifarious ways in which sculpture is developing and connecting to other forms of expression, including installation, video, performance, architecture, and other media.
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Image: Installation view, In Practice: Isabel Mallet, SculptureCenter, New York, 2023. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Charles Benton
It is the final week to catch In Practice: Covey Gong, which closes Mon, Jun 17, 2024. Don’t miss your chance to view the show this weekend! SculptureCenter is open Thurs-Mon, 12-6PM.
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Image: Installation view, In Practice: Covey Gong, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024. Commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York. Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York. Photo: Charles Benton
“Gong’s third work on view at SculptureCenter is a fan-shaped sculpture in the round titled TRD-FN-052403. As one might expect, hand fans are used as props in Turandot, but Gong’s is made of metal and linen. Placed on top of a vertical truss, it echoes the form of Princess Turandot’s crown; encountering it is like standing in the presence of a tall and commanding sovereign. Hidden behind the fan, three small video monitors play looped footage of contemporary actors preparing backstage—their faces thickly powdered and brilliantly rouged—to perform Turandot in Beijing, Buenos Aires, Houston, and Sydney, as well as workers building stage sets who could be mistaken for characters reenacting the construction of dynastic palaces and statuary.” - Jenny Wu on In Practice: Covey Gong in @brooklynrail 🪭
Read more of Jenny’s review at the link in bio. In Practice: Covey Gong is on view at SculptureCenter, open Thurs-Mon, 12-6PM.
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Image:
Covey Gong, TRD-FN-052403, 2024, detail, In Practice: Covey Gong, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024. Commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York. Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York
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, a major new commission made possible by Valeria Napoleone XX SculptureCenter (VNXXSC), that suggest the mechanism of judgment realized through Tolia’s monumental, assemblage-laden installations.
“Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother” is now on view at SculptureCenter. We are open Thurs-Mon from 12-6PM. Learn more about the exhibit at the link in bio 🔗
Join us for the opening reception of In Practice: Phoebe Collings-James (@phoebethegorgon ) on Thursday, June 27th from 6-9PM. The evening will feature music by Takiaya Reed (@divideanddissolve ) with poet Heather Lynn Johnson (@theheatherlynnjohnson ).
6pm
Opening Reception for In Practice: Phoebe Collings-James
Ground Floor
8pm
Music by Takiaya Reed (Divide and Dissolve) with poet Heather Lynn Johnson
Lower Level
In Practice: Phoebe Collings-James
Phoebe Collings-James’ works across media function as the debris of knowledge, feeling, violence, language, and desire that result from living and surviving with-in hostile environments. At SculptureCenter, Collings-James will exhibit a new series of ceramic sculptures that explore relationships between heresy, faith, and orthodoxies of church, state, and society. Intensely colored by iron-rich glazes, slips and various firing techniques, and imprinted with fragments of texts, each of Collings-James’ sculptures elaborates on the position of the heretic as a transmitter of incendiary speech, opposition from within, and ostracisation.
For more details on the opening head to the link in bio! 🔗
Now On View | In Practice: Covey Gong
We are thrilled to kick off our In Practice 2024 program with a show from New York-based artist Covey Gong (@cvygng ). Covey Gong’s work is attuned to “fluctuating relationships between material goods, passing from novelty to familiarity,” in the artist’s words. His recent sculpture has intricately taken stock of such transformations of the everyday via abstract metal armatures, disused fabrics, and extra lengths of thread. Building on an artistic interest in the life cycles of objects, Gong’s work at SculptureCenter expands to a broader perspective on global cultural artifacts and the transpositions of difference achieved through scenography, architecture, decoration, and the costumed body. His new sculptures take as their subject the 1924-26 Giacomo Puccini opera Turandot and the worldwide manifestations of its ornamented, imaginary imperial China over the last century.
Plan your visit to SculptureCenter today! We are open Thurs - Mon, 12-6PM.
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Image: Installation view, In Practice: Covey Gong, SculptureCenter, New York, 2024. Commissioned by SculptureCenter, New York. Courtesy the artist and Derosia, New York. Photo: Charles Benton
Now On View | Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother + In Practice: Covey Gong
Join SculptureCenter for the opening weekend of our Spring Exhibitions! To celebrate, we will be hosting a talk between writer Kirsty Bell and artist Tolia Astakhishvili on Sat, May 11 from 2-3:30 PM. You can learn more about the exhibits and RSVP for the event at the link in our bio.
TOLIA ASTAKHISHVILI: BETWEEN FATHER AND MOTHER
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. In the artist’s first exhibition in the United States, her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay.
IN PRACTICE: COVEY GONG
Covey Gong’s work is attuned to “fluctuating relationships between material goods, passing from novelty to familiarity,” in the artist’s words. His recent sculpture has intricately taken stock of such transformations of the everyday via abstract metal armatures, disused fabrics, and extra lengths of thread. Building on an artistic interest in the life cycles of objects, Gong’s work at SculptureCenter expands to a broader perspective on global cultural artifacts and the transpositions of difference achieved through scenography, architecture, decoration, and the costumed body. His new sculptures take as their subject the 1924-26 Giacomo Puccini opera Turandot and the worldwide manifestations of its ornamented, imaginary imperial China over the last century.
SculptureCenter is open 12-6PM, Thu-Mon.
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Image: Courtesy of @ser_sera .
Join us this Saturday, May 11 from 2-3:30PM for a conversation between Tolia Astakhishvili and Kirsty Bell to kick off the opening weekend of ‘Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother’.
In recent years, Kirsty Bell has been an observer of and participant in Tolia’s work. Her texts have appeared alongside or within Tolia’s recent exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.
Bell’s recent book projects include the indispensable The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork (Sternberg Press, 2013), a wide-ranging inquiry into interrelations of living- and working-spaces that have inflected art practices as diverse as those of Gregor Schneider, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and Alice Neel, among many others; and Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (Other Press, 2022), a geographical, political, cultural, and personal history of the city that unfolds across passages of localized attention and elastic historical breadth, told in parallel to Bell’s coming and going from her own home on the Landwehr Canal.
This meeting dips into Tolia’s and Bell’s shared attunement to the resonance (the “shadow existence,” as Bell has written of Tolia’s work) of buildings, homes, and cities.
RSVP at the link in bio.
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Image: Excerpt of text by Kirsty Bell
Opening May 7 | Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother & In Practice: Covey Gong
We are looking forward to welcoming you back into our space next week for the opening reception of our Spring Exhibitions. Join us Tue, May 7 from 6-8PM to view “Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother” and “In Practice: Covey Gong”.
SculptureCenter will resume our normal operating hours beginning Thurs, May 9. Learn more about the opening reception at the link in bio.
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Image:
Tolia Astakhishvili, neighbours places, 2023. Archival ink on paper. 8.3 x 11.6 inches (21 x 29.5 cm). Courtesy the artist and LC Queisser, Tbilisi
