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Serra, one of the great artists of our time who recently passed, is known for his monumental site-specific sculptures. Here we included his famous Equals series, two-dimensional wall works with the gravitational weight of three-dimensional sculptures. Sublime.

Equal IV

Equal II

Horizontal Reversal VIII

Horizontal Reversal IX

RICHARD SERRA:

Ruby, a prolific contemporary artist based out of Los Angeles, works across many mediums. Ruby considers collage transgressive, referring to it as an “illicit merger.” These electrifying works combine imagery speaking to both human and societal decay layered against a violent brushwork.

DRFTRS (7253)

DRFTRS (6261)

DRFTRS (7788)

STERLING RUBY:

Emilio Terry is one of our favorite architects of the 20th century. He designed houses, interiors, furniture, textiles, and gardens, and is probably best known for his follies both real and imagined. For us, he is one of the few people to actually realize Surrealist architecture. A project of Terry’s we especially love is the interior of the modernist penthouse of Charles de Beistegui with architecture by Le Corbusier. Terry furnished it with pieces of his own design in a style he named Louis XVII for the king that never reigned. This drawing of an imaginary topiary folly, from the estate of his sister Princess de La Tour, is a really beautiful example of the distinctive and highly inventive way he reinterpreted classical forms.

Topiary in the Shape of an Arched Monument

EMILIO TERRY:

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This staggeringly tall print of Trajan’s column by Piranesi—an extremely rare 1965 photogravure reproduction of the artist's original etching—depicts the victories of the Emperor against the Dacians and is an impressive feat of print-making. We were blown away by the sight of one of these in John Richardson’s house in Connecticut and have been scouring for it ever since. We are extremely excited to be able to show this monumental print.

Trajan's Column

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI:

Miroslav Tichy was a Czech photographer who covertly took thousands of photographs of women as they moved through urban spaces and parks using cameras he constructed out of cardboard tubes and other household materials that he tied or taped together. Uncomfortably voyeuristic but also highly artistic, the photographs are a document of a solitary practice that seems to exist somewhere between perversion and admiration… infused with an almost mystical sense of awe. Some of the images have hand-drawn borders that feel especially personal and reveal the degree of care and sensitivity with which he made this work.

Untitled

MIROSLAV TICHY:

Carlo Mollino was an extraordinary architect in Turin best known for designing several incredible public buildings, some ski resorts in Northern Italy, various residential interiors, and much sought-after furniture. He, along with Terry (though, in a very different way), is one of the only architects we could really call a Surrealist. One of his most striking projects was his own highly personal and haunted-feeling apartment, apparently made as a place for him to die—a pharaoh's tomb of sorts. In these interiors we encounter Mollino’s fascination with the occult and the afterlife. He never lived there full-time (he lived with his mother in another house), but he visited the apartment to take intensely beautiful erotic photographs of models posing amongst the decor.

CARLO MOLLINO:

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This rare vintage vessel by Enzo Mari, one of the great design minds of our time, is cast from the crux of a bent I-beam. To create it, an entire I-beam was forcibly bent and the center cut out. To us, it's an incredible gesture, taking this symbol of western might, of man’s striving to build ever higher structures, and of industrial strength, and crumpling it, cutting the heart out of its core and rendering that fault an odd little fruit bowl for the counter in your kitchen. It has all the characteristics of Mari’s brilliance: essential, brutal, a little bit funny, a little bit perverse. Beautiful.

Putrella Tray

ENZO MARI:

Alessandro Sanquirico was a Milanese set designer who achieved great fame in his time for utilizing gas lamps in his set designs. Pioneering the switch from candlelight to gas, he was able to create highly evocative spaces on the stage that changed the experience of theater for the performers and the audience forever. These are old prints of his wonderful designs that are rendered with a fantastic exaggerated perspective.

Interno del Palazzo

Atrio di Note

Luogo Interno nel Quartiere

ALESSANDRO SANQUIRICO:

The artist-turned-architect and the firm he co founded, SITE, create buildings, public spaces, parks, interiors, and product design that all seem to hover between “construction” and “demolition,” often making architectural gestures that suggest decay. They are widely known for their post-capitalist work with capitalist companies, such as the BEST department stores, whose facades variously appeared crumbling, peeling, or being overtaken by nature. The mindblowing little invitation we have included in our show was for the opening of the Ghost Parking Lot and exemplifies this kind of tension. Upon opening the case, one finds a small architectural model of the installation in which parked cars at a suburban shopping mall in Connecticut were covered with asphalt, permanently trapping a carbon emitter underneath a carbon by-product. We have also included some amazing drawings for proposed structures.

GHOST PARKING LOT INVITATION MODEL

GLEN-GERY SHOWROOM NEW YORK

ALLSTEEL SHOWROOM - ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF ALLSTEEL PRODUCTS IDCNY

JAMES WINES:

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The works we are including here by the contemporary artist Seth Cameron—from his series, The Stranger (chrysanthemums)—pay homage to Manet’s somber paintings of flowers done in his final years, as well as to Mondrian’s surprising paintings of chrysanthemums, a body of work he kept secret while he championed pure abstraction in public discourse. Cameron, who was one of the founders of the iconoclastic artist collective, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, has an expansive practice and these sensitively crafted works are a testament to his rigor.

The Stranger (chrysanthemums)

The Tourist

Landscape

SETH CAMERON:

This 1924 gilt and gesso panel depicts a motif Chanler returned to several times, a stag being attacked by dogs (he saw himself as the stag). Chanler created incredible paintings in low-relief, like this, in several important American houses, as well as screens and furniture. He also sculpted the jaw-dropping fireplace and ceiling at the studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, where a selection of works from this exhibition are being shown. Chanler had a truly bizarre life, growing up as one of the 'Astor Orphans,' ten children who had an almost feral existence in a big house in Westchester at the end of the 19th century. He is one of the great American decorative artists, and the lineage of artists and designers to come in his wake is long and impressive.

CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO

CURATED WITH:

CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO