Shana Nys DambrotNew York gallery Fort Gansevoort recently opened a beautiful L.A. location on Fountain Ave., but just two shows into it and after years at their Meat Packing District flagship, like everyone else they’ve had to engineer an adaptation to the new pandemic circumstances. So with the online presence being what we’ve all got to work with these days, the gallery has launched a fresh initiative, hybridizing curatorial topicality with internet-based content.
SEEING THROUGH YOU is an online weekly exhibition presented at Fort Gansevoort’s website and featuring rotating assemblies by guest curators and critics. The title is a reference to a famous work by Barbara Kruger, and its central pun is quite salient — hovering between challenging one’s transparency and the promise of a shared or surrogate vision.
Vincent Matte (courtesy of Fort Gansevoort)
The first exhibition, “A cloud in a box” is curated by critic Terry R. Myers and dropped on Thursday, March 26. The show includes artists from Los Angeles, Berlin, Santiago, Tel Aviv, and Stockholm, through works that offer frenetically drawn, chromatically charged, emotionally punchy imagery, Fauvist, folkloric, and cartographic aesthetics, and what Myers expresses as an almost alchemical connection to secret magic.
As Myers explains in the exhibition statement, he’s named his show for a Pet Shop Boys song about a shy magician, feeling that the layers of metaphor extend through what, in a way, all artists do, and now, to what each of us is doing in our solitude. “Collectively, the artists’ work displays an abundance of imagery in a vibrant and material spectrum that contains agile bands of alienation, contentment, devotion, infatuation, joy, tragedy, and magic,” he writes. “Magic is last in this list because it mixes with the others the best. Magic is a secret, but a secret made to be shown to others.”
The artists included in the exhibition are Milly Barzellai, Chinatsu Ikeda, Peter Köhler, Vicente Matte, Jeni Spota C., Keith Tolch, and Pilar Trujillo.
Check fortgansevoort.com for new presentations weekly.
Peter Kohler (courtesy of Fort Gansevoort)
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