The ambitious intergenerational exhibition that will occupy the halls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni will offer the public the works of twenty-five New York artists, both emerging and established, each of whom will be presented in depth also thanks to the presence of unpublished works, exhibited here for the first time .
The exhibition itinerary will suggest the different ways in which artists can re-imagine the relationship between their community and the city, focusing attention on the heterogeneous networks of power that condition their lives. Through painting, sculpture, photography, video and installations, the artists of "Empire State" examine the role of New York in the global context, in a moment in which urban life is everywhere the subject of an ever faster redefinition .
Conceived by Alex Gardenfeld, independent curator, writer and editor based in New York, this year appointed curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Miami, and by the British curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, “Empire State” will remain open to the public until July 21, 2013.
This is the list of artists featured in the exhibition: Michele Abeles, Uri Aran, Darren Bader, Antoine Catala, Moyra Davey, Keith Edmier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Wade Guyton, Shadi Habib Allah, Jeff Koons, Nate Lowman, Daniel McDonald, Bjarne Melgaard, John Miller, Takeshi Murata, Virginia Overton, Joyce Pensato, Adrian Piper, Rob Pruitt, RH Quaytman, Tabor Robak, Julian Schnabel and Ryan Sullivan. The works on display are mostly the result of new commissions, supplemented by the most significant works carried out in recent years.
“Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen,” wrote the celebrated architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas. Regarding New York, the most widespread legend of a possible disaster is that of its eclipse. Yet, in the era of globalization, while experts regularly announce its decline, the Big Apple remains a hegemonic force in the visual arts, in constant dialogue and interaction with the most heterogeneous concentration of artists, museums, organisations, galleries and public spaces. From within this social and creative structure, the artists of "Empire State" open spaces of power and bring to light some of the channels through which the tide of communication, imagination and persuasion flows within their community and then flows into the outside world.
The title of the exhibition refers on the one hand to the hip-hop anthem created in 2009 by the king of rap Jay-Z with the musician Alicia Keys and on the other to Empire, a treatise on US-led global capitalism, published in 2000 by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Furthermore, "Empire State" can in some ways be considered the 1833st century answer to the famous pictorial cycle "The Course of Empire" by Thomas Cole, an American artist born in England. Made in New York between 1836 and 2013, Cole's massive canvases depict the rise and fall of an imaginary city located, just like Manhattan, at the mouth of a river basin. In XNUMX, in Rome, "Empire State" uses similar allegories to illustrate the socio-economic transformations of the United States and their repercussions on the role, self-confidence and distribution of power in the nation. The Empire State Building, once the tallest skyscraper in the world, is still a tourist attraction, but today its bulk seems small compared to the mega-buildings being built in rapidly expanding urban centers in remote corners of the world.
The artists of "Empire State" are familiar with institutional criticism and studies on media and economics, adopt hybrid and interdisciplinary techniques and use technology and abstraction to offer new expressive and interpretative models. The mirrored pavilions of Dan Graham, for example, bridge minimalist art and architecture to reflect and multiply the human form. In the thirteen new paintings of the “Antiquity” series, Jeff Koons he uses the technique with incredible mastery to express his interest in classicism and Greek and Roman mythology. The new photographs of Michael Abeles include his views of installations, in a constant process of revision and adaptation to the context of his autobiography.
For a new and unique commissioned work, Keith Edmier reinvents the monumental baroque canopy of St. Peter's Basilica following the vernacular language of the ancient Pennsylvania Station, a cornerstone of New York mythology. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and built in 1910, at the height of the American industrial revolution, "Penn Station" was an extraordinary masterpiece of Roman-style neoclassical architecture that attested to New York's role as the cultural and commercial capital of the New World. It was ignominiously demolished in 1963, at the height of New York's craze for "modernity." Replaced by an anonymous and decomposed construction that has the effect of a punch in the eye, Penn Station survives in the collective imagination as the lost testimony of a past and future empire.
But perhaps the most important aspect of “Empire State” lies in the emergence of a genealogy of artists. Having to deal with an art world that increasingly takes on an entrepreneurial dimension and expands globally like a new Byzantium, artists are activating a series of networks in constant flux: relationships, collaborations and exchanges that go beyond barriers imposed by generation, gender, individual vision or technique. As, RH Quaytman offers a new selection of his portraits of New York artists, a visual expression of the act of working on the net and of the invisible design traced by power and exchange. The exhibition also presents – for the first time in an international context – the work of Tabor Robak, whose art mainly circulates online and raises fundamental questions about how we define the international art community and its privileges. New York artists are not new to the manipulation of authorship through collectives, and a significant number of those featured in the Empire State have been involved in such groups. Among the latter, Orchard, Reena Spaulings, 179 Canal and Art Club 2000.
"Empire State" will be accompanied by a catalogue, published by Skira, which includes extensive contributions by the curators and by Tom McDonough, John Miller and Eileen Myles, a visual essay by Matt Keegan and original texts on each artist by prominent critics and curators such as Vinzenz Brinkmann, Bonnie Clearwater, Kim Conaty, Bruce Hainley, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tina Kukielski and others.
The editors
Independent curator Alex Gartenfeld is based in New York and is Senior Online Editor for the magazines “Art in America” and “Interview”. Co-founder of two independent exhibition spaces in New York, he has organized numerous exhibitions, including those staged at the Zabludowicz Collection, Team Gallery and Harris Lieberman. In February 2013 he was appointed curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), North Miami.
Norman Rosenthal is a celebrated art critic and independent curator based in London. In charge of exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1977 to 2008, he organized dozens of critically acclaimed exhibition events, including some momentous reviews such as "A New Spirit of Painting" (1981) and "Sensation" (1997).
