Press release
Baldwin Gallery is pleased to announce a second show with artist Sanford Biggers. Biggers is an essentially American artist, and his work: performance, sculpture, installation, mixed media, textiles, are rich storyboards of the co-mingling contemporary mythos, encompassing history, mythology, and race. Biggers’ federal-style referenced cultural reimaginings are steeped in visual canon, the synthesis that is the authentically American inception. Biggers’ work produces artifacts of the alloyed framework of America: a taijitu (yin/yang symbol) with no border but a seeping grayscale in the ‘interrelatedness of all communities’. Often working with antique quilt fragments, a meditation on the rigor of points and time marked, three dimensional and multi layered, and the making-do in a collaborative timeline of the object, mending connections, repairs, threads gathered and continued, the changes that project the object forward in time. The quilt additionally performs metonymy for what isn’t there- the body that is missing, all of the individuals comforted and lost to the past. In the current show Chimeras, Biggers has sculpted Greco-Roman style marble busts merged in their forms with African masks, metamorphic grafts in mid- synthesis, culture and admixture, united, as in botany, by growth. In the striking visual combinations, Biggers creates dialogues of meaning- sumptuous, visceral and elegant, the union of the disparate concealing, elucidating, and ultimately revealing foundational truths of the intertwined world.
Sanford Biggers’ works and performances have been featured in many public and private institutions, selections include: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Bass Museum, Miami, FL; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; MOMA, New York, NY; Perez Art Museum, Mimi, FL; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY: Whitney Museum, New York, NY. Biggers is additionally a professor at Colombia University in New York.
Artist Taryn Simon returns to Baldwin Gallery for her third show. Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital begins with ‘found’ images of recently-past 20th century statecraft. Simon sourced and collected documentary diplomatic photographs, produced in the events of historically significant treaties and international pacts. In every one, a flower arrangement adorns the conference room- blandly warm, pompous and benign. Recreated and photographed in Simon’s studio, the series is an anthropology of mid-century conventional respect: the still lives garnish the context of the original event. In Simon’s rarefied views of political fencing, the motions are hollow and compulsory: a tableau of rules followed, the jarring monotony of conference room color schemes, and the performances of civility (at coolly dignified remove from the sweat and death of geopolitical landslides). They tell evocative, human stories: testimonies to force and acquiescence, histories constructed, brutalities papered over, violences overlooked.
Simon’s photographs and writing have been featured at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; MOMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York). Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2011 her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale.
Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.