The Garden

21 Apr-27 May 2023

PV 21 Apr 2023

WHEN, 1983, Watercolor, colored pencil, and pencil on paper. Credit: Courtesy the Estate of Rosemary Mayer

Overview

Accompanying Lace Interlace in the Annexe will be The Garden, a group show organised by Sara VanDerBeek, featuring Sarah Charlesworth, Shigeko Kubota, Rosemary Mayer and new archival influenced photographic assemblages by VanDerBeek.

All the work within this show connects to the complex nuances of the garden as a space for both reflection and action, whilst also considering the significance of the garden to the featured artists’ relationships to time, creativity, loss and community.

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Sarah Charlesworth (b. 1947 East Orange, New Jersey; d. 1966 Hartford, Conneticut) known for her conceptually-driven and visually alluring photo-based works, was considered a key member of The Pictures Generation. Through her exacting forms, assiduous process, and subjective interventions, Charlesworth aimed to subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. Charlesworth’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the major survey, Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, at the New Museum, New York (2015), which travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998); the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1998); and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). Her work is in important public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Shigeko Kubota (b. 1937 Niigata, Japan; d. 2015 New York, NY) moved to New York in 1964. An active participant in the international Fluxus art movement in the 1960s, Kubota forged a lyrical union of the personal and the technological, often merging vibrant electronic processing techniques with images and objects of nature, art and everyday life. Kubota merges her signature electronic processing with art historical and cultural references and a strong sense of female identity. The later installments of her video diary often focused on her relationship with her late husband, artist Nam June Paik. From 1974 to 1982 Kubota was the video curator at Anthology Film Archives. Kubota was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in Berlin, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an NEA/Visual Arts grant. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Toyama Museum of Art, Japan. Kubota’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documentas 6 and 8, Kassel, Germany; Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Kulturhuset, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She participated in the 1990 Venice Biennale and the 1990 Sydney Biennale. A retrospective of her work was presented at the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York in 1991. In 1996, she was the subject of a one person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Rosemary Mayer (b. 1943 Ridgewood, NY; d. 2014, New York, NY) and lived in New York City all her life. She was fascinated by history and her work often references historical artworks and writing, from Greek mythology to medieval literature and Mannerist painting. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gallery for women in the U.S launched in 1972, and had one of the earliest shows there. During the 1970s and 1980s, Mayer’s work was shown at many New York alternative art spaces, including The Clocktower, Sculpture Center, and Franklin Furnace, and in university galleries throughout the USA. Mayer was a critic and writer, contributing essays to various journals of artists writings, including White Walls and Heresies and produced an issue of the avant-garde magazine Art Rite in 1977. In 2016, Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn exhibited a selection of Mayer’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first major exhibit of her work in over thirty years, it was reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, and Artforum. A version of this show was exhibited at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2017. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions in New York including at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery, and Bridget Donahue. Recent publications include Temporary Monuments, focused on her ephemeral installations, published by Sobercove Press and the second edition of Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer, also by Soberscove. In 2020, her work was introduced to European audiences through Nick Mauss’s exhibition, Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc., at Kunsthalle Basel and Rods Bent Into Bows, at ChertLüdde in Berlin. Ways of Attaching, the first institutional survey of Mayer’s work was exhibited at The Swiss Institute, New York in 2021. Mayer’s work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Lenbachhaus, Munich, and numerous private collections.

Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976, Baltimore, MD) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. VanDerBeek’s work investigates our collective and evolving relationship with photography and the photographic image. VanDerBeek’s recent work has focused on contemporary museological practices of collection and display. Within this context VanDerBeek highlights women’s ongoing contributions to the larger material and visual cultures upon which institutional collections and art historical narratives are built. Her photographic works and inter-media installations address the complex nature of contemporary female existence in which reproduction in all its forms – from the physiological to the photographic – becomes a creative act of reclamation and inter-generational dialogue. Recent solo exhibitions include Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA (2021); Metro Pictures, New York, NY; Black Mountain College Museum, Asheville, NC; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (all 2019); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Approach, London, UK (all 2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2014); Foundazione Memmo, Rome, Italy (2012); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011); and Whitney Museum of Art, New York NY (2010). VanDerBeek’s work is in art collections worldwide including Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Los Angeles, ICA, Boston, MoCA, Los Angeles, MoMA, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Artists