A typical gallerist moving to TriBeCa spends a small fortune to make their new space look like an abandoned former warehouse that originally attracted artists downtown because it was cheap. It makes the art world something of a contradiction, an over-the-top luxury business with a disingenuous dedication to minimalism. But it can feel a little jarring at times, which is why I'm excited about Jack Shainman Gallery's new Tribeca flagship store at 46 Lafayette Street and its complementary opening show, “Nick Cave: Amalgam and I was very pleased with the frank display of the graft.
Rather than simply looking back to the 1960s, Scheinman went back to the less affluent Beaux-Arts of the 1890s with a new flagship store in the landmark Clock Tower building. Formerly known as the New York Life Insurance Building, this block-shaped building was designed by architect Stephen D. Hatch and completed by McKim, Mead & White after Hatch's death in 1897. Scheinman's new main exhibition space is the building's grand “Banking Hall,” featuring massive white marble columns, a sweeping staircase, and an intricately molded coffered ceiling 7 meters high.
Additional exhibition space within the building will be fully renovated in collaboration with architect Gloria Vega Martin and preservationists Higgins Quasevers & Partners, under the direction of Sheinman's husband, painter Carlos Vega. Contains a former conference room that has been renovated to have rounded corners and edges. It is a secondary street-level gallery on Broadway with a unique curving wall. Scheinman occupies more than 20,000 square feet in total, complete with offices, reading rooms, and many dramatic views of the courthouse and City Hall surrounding Foley Square.
Rising in the center of the hall is Nick Cave's new bronze sculpture, “Amalgam (Origin),'' a barefoot statue covered in flowers and leaves that almost scrapes the ceiling. Instead of a head, a cluster of twigs and limbs grows from the shoulders. Majestic birds perch on many of these branches. The piece was digitally modeled using a combination of scans of the artist's 65-year-old body and scans of found scyroscope ornaments and bird carvings, then printed in wax and cast in bronze. It's Cave's biggest yet. The highly detailed hands and feet were cast directly from his own.
Cave began creating “sound suits,” similar to the costumes recently seen in a major show at the Guggenheim Museum, as a response to the 1991 Rodney King assault. And he has undertaken a career-long project of using his body to explore black expression. male identity. And there is an undeniable guilt in such a dramatic expansion, placing this 8-foot-tall black man in the middle of a major museum as a vast, poetic monument.
At the same time, unless aesthetics were taken into account as well, the conceptual premise would have limited effect, and I was not convinced that Amalgam (Origin) as a sculpture would be sufficient in its materials and scale. . It might have been a stronger statement if Cave had built everything by hand, or if he had just pasted real-life found ornaments and branches onto 3D-printed figures instead of scanning them.
Meanwhile, in Amalgam (Plot), two small figures lie on the floor nearby, as if reeling from a violent attack, each surrounded by metal flowers and leaves of varying textures and colors. Bright clusters of flowers are growing. Among them are the shocking and attention-grabbing ones. And 2021's “Amalgam” is a bronze statue on the other side of the building with a collection of branches like “Amalgam (Origin)”, which is actually all the more impressive because it's small. The almost life-size figure and the lifelike quality of the frozen funerary metal in which it is cast are very evocative.
As I wandered through the halls and secondary galleries on the second floor, admiring door-sized collages of found tin plates and Thor's serving trays, which Cave calls “grafts,” I too was completely entranced. Ta. These are everything a big bronze promises, offering easily accessible pleasure and won't evaporate even when you look at them for long periods of time. The work includes a large needle-drawn portrait of Cave's own face, the first time he has ever depicted himself so clearly, according to a news release. There are also several bouquets made from found decorative flowers and leaves.
The graph contains nods, if you will, to questions of underlying political or conceptual meaning: service, class, race. By transforming a serving tray decorated by a long-lost anonymous artisan into a fine work of art, Cave highlights the arbitrary ways in which we assign value to artifacts. The inclusion of his own face is a reminder that those arbitrary values extend to people as well. But he orchestrates the greens, blacks, and pinks of his grafts with such confidence and generosity, combining so many different kinds of flowers with so many precise three-dimensional accents that his sheer visual complexity is the most important content.
The luxurious finish of this building also sets it apart from other expensive additions and renovations in the art world. Like the sculptural elements of the Cave, the extravagant visual details of the Clock Tower Building acquire a fresh new life and even aesthetic purity when decontextualized and remixed. Rather than tearing it apart and putting it back together, as Cave does with his own materials, the rosettes, balustrades, and Corinthian capitals were re-plastered, touched up, and reinforced. Business that takes up space has been updated. But the effect is the same. You can just casually enjoy how great everything looks.
Nick Cave: Amalgam and grafts
Through March 15, Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, Lower Manhattan. jackshineman.com.
