Exhibitions at the New Museum

"Nikhil Chopra: Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX" Oct 28, 2009–Feb 14, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:41:03 -0500

Nikhil Chopra combines approaches associated with theater, portraiture, landscape drawing, photography, art actions, and installation to chronicle the world through live performance. As the Victorian draughtsman Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra haunts bustling market squares, forgotten old buildings, city streets, and museum galleries to make large-scale drawings. Within the performances, daily actions—washing, eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, shaving, and observing—are transformed into ritualistic spectacle. While an ambiguous past collides with an unstable present, Yog Raj Chitrakar reveals the process of documenting what he sees while exploring self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality.

“Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX” is inspired by the 1920s and New York City’s role in that defining moment in the history of the world – a time of deep physical, imagined, and sociological changes impacted by immigration, architecture, and labor, caught between two world wars. As the character Yog Raj Chitrakar, the artist activates the gallery, transformed into a turn-of the-century tableau vivant, for five days (November 4–8). Searching at the edge of the Atlantic, the wanderer/draughtsman/mapmaker also travels through Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, imagining America, and eventually chronicling New York City from the vantage point of Ellis Island. During the performance at the New Museum, the exhibition is in perpetual transformation. At its conclusion, remnants of Chopra’s occupation of the space remain on display as an installation. Documentation from three previous performances also on view in this exhibition—Memory Drawing II (Mumbai, 2007), Yog Raj Chitrakar visits Lal Chowk (Srinagar, 2007), and Memory Drawing VI (London, 2008)—suggests the many ways in which the history and reality of a location impact the artist’s execution of characters though costuming, gesture, and action.

“Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX” is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs

Costume design by Loise Braganza

Special thanks to Housing Works

Special thanks to

Download brochure

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM

"Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context" Aug 08, 2009–Jun 30, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:11:40 -0500

“Museum as Hub: In and Out Of Context” marks a new development in the activity of the Museum as Hub. It reveals a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York. Major considerations of “In and Out of Context” are the challenges of producing and exhibiting work in differing international contexts.

“In and Out of Context” is conceived as an evolving exhibition that incorporates works commissioned by Museum as Hub partners as well as works by an extended network of artists and organizations from around the world. Central to this presentation is the design of the Museum as Hub space by Choi Jeong Hwa that serves as an “envelope” for the coming year—a flexible, playful, yet functional space that is an active zone for viewing, discussion, and activity. The Museum as Hub space will be activated by public programs such as a seminar series, Propositions, and other informal open discussions. Additional works, projects, and discussions will be introduced to “In and Out of Context” as the project develops to offer new perspectives and demonstrate the evolution of ideas.

Click here for a PDF version of the brochure for “In and Out of Context.”

“Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context” is organized by Annie Fletcher, Van Abbemuseum; Eungie Joo, New Museum; Heejin Kim, Insa Art Space/Arko Art Center; Tobias Ostrander, Museo Tamayo; and William Wells, Townhouse Gallery.

Saturday, August 8, 2009 | 12:00 AM

"Urs Fischer:
Marguerite de Ponty" Oct 21, 2009–Feb 07, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:40:17 -0500

Purchase exhibition catalogue

For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Urs Fischer has taken over all three of the New Museum’s gallery floors to create a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments.

The exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, the exhibition features new productions and iconic works combined to compose a series of gigantic still lifes and walk-in tableaux. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition is a descent into Fischer’s universe, revealing the world of an artist who has emerged as one of the most exceptional talents working today.

On the second floor, illusion and reality trade place in a game of multiple reflections. The installation Service à la française (2009)—Fischer’s most ambitious work to date—is a technical tour de force that required more than 25,000 photographs and over twelve tons of steel. More than fifty chrome boxes occupy the gallery, composing a grid of monoliths—a cityscape of mirrored cubes onto which the artist has silkscreened a dizzying array of images. Like a collage unraveling before the viewer’s eyes, the surfaces of the boxes create an optical maze that renders everything simultaneously immaterial and hyperreal.

On the third floor, Fischer presents an installation that turns the Museum’s architecture into an image of itself—a site-specific trompe l’oeil environment. Each square inch of the Museum architecture has been photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers the very same walls and ceiling, in a maddening exercise in simulation. A piano occupies the space, appearing to melt under the pressure of some invisible force. Simultaneously solid and soft, like a Salvador Dalí painting in three dimensions, this sculpture, like many other works by Fischer, seems to succumb to a dramatic process of metamorphosis.

On the fourth floor, Fischer presents five new aluminum sculptures cast from small clays, hand-molded by the artist. Hanging from the ceiling or balancing awkwardly in space, these massive abstractions resemble strange cocoons or a gathering of enigmatic monuments.

An engineer of imaginary worlds, in the past Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them. In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space.
Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd.

This exhibition is organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions.

Please note that for the duration of the exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” strollers will not be allowed in the galleries. Please check them at coat check.

Download brochure

Download press release

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 | 12:00 AM

"Ugo Rondinone" Dec 01, 2007–Jul 19, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:34:18 -0600

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, Rondinone’s work explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life. For the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, Rondinone will reprise his 2001 work Hell, Yes! The installation encapsulates the philosophy of openness, fearlessness, and optimism that surrounds the New Museum’s reemergence in the contemporary art community, as well as its history as the home of socially committed contemporary art.

Hell, Yes! is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Saturday, December 1, 2007 | 12:00 AM

"Jeffrey Inaba" Dec 01, 2007–Dec 31, 2009

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:42:55 -0600

Purchase book

Jeffrey Inaba uses a radical approach to research and design to make opaque information come alive. Inaba has created Donor Hall for the New Museum’s lower-level hallway, a bold, immersive graphic environment that identifies and quantifies public and private philanthropy around the world. The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture.

INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.

Banner image:
Jeffrey Inaba / INABA / C-Lab, Donor Hall (detail), 2007
Digital print on vinyl
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist