(FRENCHTOWN, NJ) -- ArtYard presents Landscape and Hierarchies, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Alexandre Arrechea on view from September 17, 2022 to January 22, 2023. Arrechea is internationally renowned as one of the founding members of the Cuban collective, Los Carpinteros, and has earned acclaim as an artist whose work interrogates such issues as history, memory, politics, and the power relations of the urban space. This exhibition marks 20 years of Arrechea’s solo career.
Landscape and Hierarchies explores the connections between the individual and the collective and the power small actions have on society and the environment. Curated by Elsa Mora, the exhibition was produced in collaboration with ArtYard and includes monumental watercolor drawings, sculptures, and multimedia installations. On view through January 22, 2023, it is presented in ArtYard’s first-floor River Gallery and second-floor John & Lynn Kearney Gallery.
The exhibit will open with a reception on Saturday, September 17 at 6:00pm in Frenchtown, NJ.
On Sunday, September 18, ArtYard will host an Artist Talk and Gallery Tour with Alexandre Arrechea. The talk is moderated by Cuban-born American writer, curator, and art conservator Rosa Lowinger and features never-before-seen footage of the early stages of Arrechea’s career, an audience Q&A, and a tour of the exhibition. More information about this ticketed event is here.
For Landscape and Hierarchies, Arrechea draws inspiration from sports and nature for his continued investigation into the power dynamics and structures of our everyday lives. He presents objects commonplace to golf, soccer fields, and playgrounds juxtaposed or infused with natural elements such as glass trees, river water, and morning dew in surprising ways. The works offer multiple viewpoints into the artist’s creative process, blurring the distinction between personal and public. And the scale of the pieces, ranging from videos meant to be seen through tiny peepholes and the largest watercolor ever created, invite contemplation about magnitude.
“In Landscape and Hierarchies, sports is a reflection of humanity,” says Mora, ArtYard Artistic Director and Curator. “Arrechea interrupts the dynamics those at the top of social hierarchies have enacted over generations — competition over cooperation, winners and losers, rules and penalties, the separation of humans from nature. Through his work and creative process, the artist invites us into a collaborative space to co-create a future where people and the planet thrive.”
The eight works include River and Ripples, a monumental 71-foot-long watercolor painting depicting twisted stadium bleachers intersecting in a convoluted map. Arrechea created the piece during a summer residency at ArtYard using pigments mixed with Delaware River water. On a nearby wall are Polaroids documenting the artist’s process as well as his bucket on a journey throughout the Frenchtown community.
Landscape & Hierarchies is an installation of a circular putting green inlaid with a track for a golf ball amid a forest of glass-blown sculptures of trees. The piece is flanked by video projections that offer alternative views of the imagined landscape. In ArtYard’s VSG, or Very Small Gallery, are White Corner 2, 3, and 4, a series of three videos meant to be viewed through an intimate aperture showing two identical figures approaching a blind corner with raised weapons, unable to grasp the mutuality of their projected fears. Another highlight is Shared Words, five black and white portraits printed on an aluminum sheet mounted above a depiction of a scoreboard covering the subject’s mouths. Viewers are invited to spell out words by sliding sticks of white chalk into the acrylic grid.
Arrechea, 52, who has roots in Havana, New York, and Madrid, is widely recognized for Nolimits (2013), a monumental project composed of 10 sculptures inspired by iconic buildings in New York City and erected along Park Avenue, and Katrina Chairs (2016), erected at the Coachella Music Festival, Palm Springs, California. Last December, he created Dreaming with Lions, an immersive rotunda resembling an enormous forum-like library installed at Faena Miami Beach. This June, Arrechea’s Orange Functional, a sculpture with orange branches 20 feet high that seems to blossom into 25 functional basketball hoops, opened at Art Omi, which commissioned the work.
ArtYard is located at 13 Front Street in Frenchtown, New Jersey. ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. They are an interdisciplinary alternative contemporary art center comprised of an exhibition space, theater, and residency program, dedicated to presenting transformative artwork, fostering unexpected collaborations, and incubating original new work.
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