Fall 2024 Openings

Join us for an opening reception celebrating Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT and In Practice: Bastien Gachet.

Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT

Álvaro Urbano has been engaged in conversation and collaboration with various entities across different times and places, including artists, writers, and architects; plants and animals; buildings, ruins and other human and other-than-human beings. For his project at SculptureCenter, Urbano focuses on a potential ruin, or a ruin in progress – a public artwork by the American sculptor Scott Burton (1939–1989) that was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future. The work was originally installed in the lobby of the Equitable Center building in midtown Manhattan in 1986 until it was dismantled in 2020, victim to a renovation.

The work, titled Atrium Furnishment was one of many works for public or semi-public space that Burton – a sculptor, performance artist, and writer critical to New York scenes in the 1970s and ’80s – realized throughout his life before he died of HIV-related illness in 1989. Though elements of related exterior works for Equitable Center remain in place, roughly half of his site-specific projects have been removed or modified since initially completed.

At SculptureCenter, Urbano will display roughly half of the original elements of Burton’s Atrium Furnishment. Referencing the work’s original orientation, Urbano’s new disposition will radiate across SculptureCenter’s ground floor space, altering the entire gallery and producing a topographic landscape. Burton’s public art projects always appeared as chimeras that mixed aspects of sculpture and furniture. By re-segmenting and re-organizing the work’s elements across a new site, Urbano directs attention towards Burton’s chosen materials and other inner physical dynamics and histories embedded in the artwork.

In Practice: Bastien Gachet

Bastien Gachet’s work uses new approaches to fabrication and installation to draw out the immanent, emergent, and durational qualities of art. Gachet meticulously hand-produces objects and installation elements across media, subtly elaborating on and bending parallel categories that have been used consistently, if inadequately, to define recent art: the “pre-intentional” and intentional; the found and the made; the real and the fake, expanding into notions of the “fake-real” and the “fake-fake” (in the artist’s terminology). In his forthcoming exhibition at SculptureCenter, Gachet collects and organizes these contrasting modes into what he has called an “object-based dramaturgy,” a structure of meaning opening itself across unsettlingly constructed and resonant environments.