Perrotin is pleased to present Dwellers, a dual exhibition curated by Lucien Terras across our New York and Paris galleries that brings together the work of nine artists who explore how place impacts the making of an artwork. In the ontological sense, to dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it spatially, rather it is to belong there, to have a familiar place.
Participating artists — Liam Allan, Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Leslie Hewitt, Denise Kupferschmidt, Fared Manzur, Joseph Montgomery, Ann Pibal, Julia von Eichel, and Carrie Yamaoka — each explore the notion of dwelling through three distinct practices: work created in the studio, through digital space, and on site.
In the Studio
The title of the show stems from an artwork by Fared Manzur, a Miami based artist who will make his New York debut in Dwellers. Manzur’s studio is located in the Rice Hotel, a historically significant structure built in 1916 in downtown Miami that was left vacant for decades. The clean, minimalist lines of Manzur’s paintings and sculptures are in direct contrast with the hotel. The exhibition’s namesake work, Dweller, is a horizontal monochromatic yellow painting that lies flat on the floor, adorned with a clay sculpture of an insect resting on its surface, symbolizing a species endemic to the space.
Fared Manzur’s site-specific monument for Spring Hill comprises an object (during.)—a flag pole with custom banners—and print (on ground.) installed to what was previously a bare wall used for film screenings. Manzur starts with a deconstructed flag divided into four sections, reminiscent of the nautical flag system in which each flag carries a unique significance, and when combined, expresses a deeper message. Here, three monochromatic flags (white, yellow, magenta) point to a site, time, and action. One bicolor (white and yellow) flag defines the cumulative “Moment,” a recurring motif in the artist’s work.
For SHAG, the artist has imagined a ceremony reminiscent of ritualistic sport: when the Festival opens, the four flags are lowered, clipped together, and raised again as a single flag with the four layers of fabric fused. Site, action, and time, thus creating the Moment, unite together. Similarly ritualistic, when the four surfaces are layered, activated by the breeze, a spontaneous and abstract flow is created much like a reverent flame.
The print is an enlarged, digitally printed photographic detail of the flying flag, with the overlay of the yellow horizontal stripe, the Moment, represented in the lower panel.
Ann Pibal, working form Vermont and Brooklyn, will contribute a new series of near-monochrome paintings, which over the span of the group evoke an evolving, fading depiction of glowing light. The use of metallic and iridescent paint, (silvers, golds, and bronzes) adds a sensual element which directly interacts with the exhibition space, reflecting both the ambient light of the gallery, and the movement of viewers through the evolution of color across the panels. The central motif of these works is a rectangle which in its proportion echoes the format of the painting overall. Diagrammatic representations of books or volumes in each image extend the reference to time – allowing an apparently neutral shape to evoke not just the phenomenon of fleeting, transitory, light, but the mutability of understanding.
Working from a residential home in Brooklyn, Julia von Eichel crafts large-scale organic forms that evoke the studio space itself. Stained with splashes of acidic colors, Eichel’s works on view in New York stretch beyond the canvas, spilling out into the surrounding space. Constructed from a variety of materials — including a complex armature with wood dowels, wiffle balls, string, and thread covered in silk — each wall relief is a controlled force, imbued with a sense of struggle and imbalance. The pastels on paper and mylar exhibited in Paris evoke a similar vital growth with repeated gestures and layering filling the surface.
Emphasizing the high ceilings of Perrotin New York’s gallery spaces, Carrie Yamaoka will present disarmingly obtuse reflective surfaces. Yamaoka is interested in the tactility of that which is barely visible, as well as the very real chain of incidents that determine an object. Her process consists of rubbing the wall with mylar and pouring resin, which creates a mirror surface that records the artwork’s journey, from an industrial loft in New York to its final gallery space. The viewer’s blurred reflection becomes part of the work. In Paris she will present a series of five
Denise Kupferschmidt will present a series of new paintings that include repeated figures or graphic architectural motifs, created from her Queens studio. The motif of the sun, seen in Day Night Repeat as well as other works, reference the comfort of a repeated daily routine and the stability of a normalized existence — offering a counterpoint to our ongoing collective feeling of sadness and loss. As the artist says, her paintings “watch the earthly elements of home morph into something that feels remote, while we stay put.”
"Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth"
Digital spaces
Scottish born, Brooklyn based Liam Allan will debut his practice for the first time in the United States, presenting work that moves between digital and physical environments. His drawings, carefully rendered in pencil on paper, begin with digitally reconstructed contemporary artifacts, which he then edits and distorts in an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the depicted object. Their forensic acuity suggest an exploration of the real mediated by the digital.
Using a simple unit, wood shim, as a form of ready-made material, New York-based Joseph Montgomery generates wall paintings that are at once rhythmic and architectural. His abstract, digital sceneries are occupied by schematic dolls, acting both as animation and physical sculptures that create anthropomorphic compositions. The artist will concurrently present a new video and several large-scale doll sculptures that will revert the grand scale of the exhibition space into an architectural model.
On Site
As a painter of the real, Paris and New York-based Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s practice revolves around being present in a place, working directly from his eye and never from photography. In Paris, Delhomme will debut a new series of paintings that depict the interior of a large studio he occupied in Asnieres for a period of time. Scattered around the empty space, pedestals, speakers, a motorbike and other objects evoke a sculptural installation.
Leslie Hewitt will introduce in New York a new series of diptych photosculptures. Realized in Marfa, Texas, the works take the sky and light reflections emitted from Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa project), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation, executed by Flavin in 1996. This presentation of works offers a prelude to a project Leslie Hewitt is developing for Dia next Summer at the Dan Flavin Institute in Bridgehampton. Both lyrical and controlled, they extend, as Hewitt says, her work’s “relationship to the entanglements of optics, physical space and light.” In Paris, one of her signature leaning photographs will be presented along other wall works.
