Spring Openings 2024

Join us for an opening reception celebrating Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother and In Practice: Covey Gong.

Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother
May 9–Aug 12, 2024

For more than two decades, Tolia Astakhishvili has worked across sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. At scales that both augment and seemingly disappear into gallery spaces, Tolia’s environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming entity shaped by those who live through it. At the same time, her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay.

At SculptureCenter, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother considers sculpture as a form of sorting, and, by extension, choosing and dividing. In service of this idea, Tolia recasts SculptureCenter’s ground floor gallery spaces as a channeling machine, rigging up two large debris chutes, a major new commission made possible by Valeria Napoleone XX SculptureCenter (VNXXSC), that suggest the mechanism of judgment realized through Tolia’s monumental, assemblage-laden installations. Throughout the exhibition, Tolia integrates works from different disciplines by collaborators Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Kirsty Bell, Katinka Bock, Dylan Peirce, and James Richards. Read as singular artworks, these contributions stand in contrast to the piles of secondhand items, industrial parts, refuse, and construction materials that Tolia meanwhile transforms into representations of found situations: partial recreations of spatial, psychological, and object conditions that might exist both here and elsewhere.

In Practice: Covey Gong
May 9–Jun 17, 2024

Covey Gong’s work is attuned to “fluctuating relationships between material goods, passing from novelty to familiarity,” in the artist’s words. His recent sculpture has intricately taken stock of such transformations of the everyday via abstract metal armatures, disused fabrics, and extra lengths of thread. Building on an artistic interest in the life cycles of objects, Gong’s work at SculptureCenter expands to a broader perspective on global cultural artifacts and the transpositions of difference achieved through scenography, architecture, decoration, and the costumed body. His new sculptures take as their subject the 1924-26 Giacomo Puccini opera Turandot and the worldwide manifestations of its ornamented, imaginary imperial China over the last century.