NEW YORK: GALLERY LABORATORY AT ALEXANDER AND BONIN
Simultaneous with its participation in Condo New York hosting Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon, Alexander and Bonin will use its ground floor space to present Gallery Laboratory, which has been conceived of as both an exhibition and as a working environment to consider artworks in new configurations and installations. The selection of works displayed in Gallery Laboratory will change over the course of the exhibition. The first iteration will include works by Willie Cole and Jonathas de Andrade. The exhibition opens tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. and lasts until August 27.
Willie Cole’s International Balls 2000, a room sized site-specific installation, is comprised of 138 bowling balls each painted with the design of a national flag. First exhibited at the Miami Art Museum in 2000, Cole scattered the balls throughout the space to suggest the movement and change inherent to world politics. “It was a new millennium…. The installation is also about universality and sameness, separate worlds, the formation of the new world order, and
political games.” For its second installation at the Bronx Museum of Art in 2001, Cole ‘racked’ the bowling balls into triangular configurations, suspending them in an ambiguous state of play.
Willie Cole has long used everyday domestic objects and discarded materials to reference historical events and people. He was born in Somerville, New Jersey, and studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League in New York. His work has been the subject of several one-person museum exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Tampa Museum of Art (2004), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006), Montclair Art Museum (2006). His sculptures and works on paper are included in numerous permanent museum collections.
Jonathas de Andrade’s Eu, mestiço (Me, mestizo/ 2017) has been exhibited as a room-sized installation at the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Galeria Continua in San Gimignano and most recently at Alexander and Bonin. When shown as a single work, a selection from the more than 700 words generated by Andrade’s reboot of a 1950s anthropologic study are shown in a single line. Alternatively, any one of Andrade’s groupings of photographic portraits can be shown with a specific selection of words, the texts and images comingled. That alternative installation gives a greater focus to the sculptural aspects of this work and provides an alternative point of entry.
Jonathas de Andrade lives and works in Recife. The artist uses photography, installation and video to traverse collective memory and history, making use of strategies that shuffle fiction and reality. In 2017, Andrade had one person museum exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto, New Museum, New York and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. In 2019, a solo exhibition of Jonathas de Andrade’s work will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Significant installations by Andrade are in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Future iterations of Gallery Laboratory will include large-scale sculptures by Mona Hatoum, Rita McBride, and other gallery artists. For details on the work currently installed, please visit Alexander and Bonin’s website.
