The exhibition will open Nov. 29 and remain on view through Dec. 22, 2011.

NYU Steinhardt’s 80WSE Galleries to Present An Invitational Exhibition of Seven Artists
Max Gimblett, Exodus Kimono. (Photo by Tom Warren, Courtesy of Gary Snyder Gallery, New York.)

NYU Steinhardt’s 80WSE Galleries has announced its second exhibition of the season will be an invitational exhibition of seven artists chosen by the staff of 80WSE.  The exhibition curators—Peter Campus, Michael Cohen, Edward Holland, and Hugh O’Rourke—have chosen a diverse group of artists in ages as well as stylistic media.  The artists are: Paul Carney, Max Gimblett, Sebastian Martorana, Matt Quinn, Viktoria Sorochinski, Dan Torop, and Ivette Zighelboim.

 

Entitled 80WSE Presents, the exhibition will open Nov. 29 and remain on view through Dec. 22, 2011.  The curators note that as an invitational, the exhibition has no over-arching concept, however the viewer may discern a subtle connection of a post-millennial take on the sublime among these artists.

 

80WSE Galleries is located at 80 Washington Square East (between W. 4th and Washington Place).  Subway: N&R, (8th Street Broadway).  Gallery hours: Tues. to Sat. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  The exhibition is free and open to the public.  For further information, call 212.998.5747 or email 80wse@nyu.edu.

 

Chosen by Peter Campus:

Viktoria Sorochinski’s Moments of Revelation (2009-2011), is an ongoing series of portraits that captures people in moments of a psychological encounter with themselves or those close to them; one where a brief or cosmological truth may begin to appear.  The photographs occupy an ambiguous space between stagy-ness and veracity which creates a second, more mundane yet complex mystery. All the photographs are shot in the subject’s intimate environment, and utilize only lighting available there.   

Ms. Sorochinski was born in Ukraine in 1979 and received her M.A from NYU in 2008. Since 2001, she has been participating in group and solo exhibitions and international photography festivals in Canada, USA, France, Italy, China, and post-Soviet Georgia. She is also a finalist and winner of several international photography competitions and awards such as Magenta Flash Forward (2011, 2010 and 2009), PDN Photo Annual (2011 and 2010) and the J.M.Cameron Award 2010.   Her work is published in magazines such as EYEMAZING, New York Times, PDN, British Journal of Photography, Geo, Le Monde, Le Temps Magazine, and TELERAMA.

 

Chosen by Michael Cohen:

Living and working in New York City, Max Gimblett investigates the purity of material and form in his work, focusing primarily on shaped and square canvas, works on paper, and wood panels with gold leaf gilding. A native of New Zealand, Gimblett's oeuvre displays a Pacific Rim influence, marrying 60’s post-minimalist and late period abstract expressionist methods to the techniques of Asian art, particularly ink painting and calligraphy.  Gimblett paints quatrefoil, square, and circle shaped canvasses utilizing high-pitched colors that activate their audience’s bodily awareness so that the paintings can be read as altars or doors of perception.

Gimblett exhibits in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan, among others places. His work is in the collection of many international museums including MoMA, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Research Institute in LA, and San Francisco MoMA.   He is represented by Gary Snyder Gallery in New York and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland.  Gimblett’s The Sound of One Hand, solo exhibition, recently opened at the Warhol Museum on September 17, 2011.

 

Dan Torop‘s Tahoe Passage (2011) is based on Chapters 22 and 23 of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, which describes a journey to a mountain lake and ensuing adventures by boat. Originally commissioned for Triple Canopy magazine, Tahoe Passage intersperses excerpts of Twain’s text with photographs made by Torop. Rather than working in the story’s Sierra Nevada locale, Torop used ringers from more mundane rings such as New Jersey’s highest lake, a pond in northwestern Connecticut, Brooklyn’s coast, and other generally northeastern locales. A cutout of the head of Alexander the Great takes the place of Twain’s companion. To approach the project’s original online presentation, the resulting project is realized at 80WSE as four wall-length horizontal scrolls.

Torop’s projects often deal with a subjective relationship to the land and its inhabitants. He has exhibited digital and photographic work nationally since the mid-90s, including quite a few solo shows at Derek Eller Gallery. His digital Ocean has been installed at institutions such as the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Exploratorium, and 80WSE Galleries. Torop studied at Harvard College and received an MFA from Yale School of Art. He currently teaches at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

 

Ivette Zighelboim’s paintings explore the way nature enchants and menaces through imagistic moments of innocence and darkness.  In these paintings, lushly textured day and night scenes mask themes of magic, decay, time, and mortality.

The exhibition groups together several important projects of Zighelboim’s that have not been shown before in New York City.  Zighelboim recently had solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky, New York and Patrick Painter, Los Angeles.  She has exhibited in group shows at the Portsmouth Museum, New Hampshire; the 2008 Busan Biennial, Busan -- South Korea; and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.  She is a native of Caracas, Venezuela and currently lives in Manhattan and maintains her studio practice in Brooklyn, NY.   She holds a BS and MFA from NYU’s Steinhardt Art Department.

 

 

 Chosen by Edward Holland:

As an artist that chooses to make stone his primary medium, Sebastian Martorana’s pop-oriented sculptures and abstract wall works can bring to mind images of great monoliths, monumental arches, vaulted ceilings, Neolithic totems, and tombstones.  The works are neither classical, post-minimal nor post-modern in their usage of the sculptural materials of antiquity. Martorana chooses instead to be self-reflexive in his choice of subject matter, looking to the objects and actions of his everyday life for inspiration.  The blank wall reliefs and pop-ish everyday objects, rendered in stone, are un-commissioned memorials to the artist’s experiences, loves, and phobias, and celebrate the vagaries of daily existence.

Martorana received his BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, where he also studied sculpture.  After graduating he became a fulltime apprentice in a stone shop outside of Washington, DC before coming to Baltimore to earn his MFA in sculpture at MICA.  His current studio is part of the stone shop of Hilgartner Natural Stone, Co. in downtown Baltimore.  Martorana’s work was recently featured in 40 Under 40, the 40th anniversary exhibition of Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The artist lives and works in Baltimore, MD.

 

Chosen By Hugh O’Rourke:

In his recent work, Matt Quinn has been collecting wooden household artifacts that  have been discarded curbside. Quinn deconstructs the found objects without tools, and reuses them completely, using all of their inherent parts for non-utilitarian drawings in space. In turn, the sculptures are disassembled and reassembled again for their gallery installation, an ongoing and regenerating urban environment on a small scale. The artist imagines the resulting components as objects in a surrealist dollhouse or Giacometti's Palace at 4 am, each object compounding itself like coral or a favela’s structuration, each object regenerating within and outside of itself.  The process utilizes sculptures traditional additive and subtractive capabilities, but turned inside out so that the ensuing objects appear to have been birthed in a warped fun-house mirror.

Quinn holds a MFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute.  He lives and works in Brooklyn.  He exhibits regularly in New York and New England.  He has recently been awarded residencies at Chashama Studios at the Brooklyn Army Terminal and the Vermont Studio Center.

 

Paul Carney’s lush Moreau-esque paintings and wall-diagrams in this exhibition refer to Tir Na Nog, a mythical Irish otherworld translated from the Celtic as  “land of the Young.”  Made famous by Yeats’ The Wanderings Of Oisin. It is a Peter Pan-like island where immortals rule and whose pleasures humans rarely get to experience.   The images are purposely obscured and abstracted to allow for an interpretive experience on the part of the viewer; in contrast the work’s framing devices, are literal displays of the windows and lenses used to view the image creating a scientific break from the images romantic view-point.  Through these optical portholes and potholes, Carney seeks to elicit a Valhalla-esque poetics that can exist inconsequentially to his own authorship. 

Carney was born in Quincy, MA and earned his BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art.  He also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.  He now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

 

For further information, contact: 80WSE Galleries via 212.998.5747 or 80wse@nyu.edu; or NYU public affairs oficer Richard Pierce, 212.998.6796, or richard.pierce@nyu.edu.

 

 

Press Contact

Richard Pierce
Richard Pierce
(212) 998-6796