AL SVOBODA | VERSUS | SHELF

February 11 - March 15, 2024

VIEW EXHIBITION

“Through this gate duality arises out of unity. The primal moment in which two things are first distinguished (like the separation of heaven and earth in traditional cosmogonic myth) is, according to Parmenides, the birth of language. From an original or first moment of ‘naming’ two things rather than one only, the world of the Many flows out as a complexly ramified mistake. This mistake is enshrined in, and subsequently maintained in place by, linguistic reification. Parmenides refers to the differences people see between things as ‘only names’ (fr. 8.38-39, 53). The original distinction, also, was only a matter of ‘naming.’ The world of everyday human experience, in other words, is created by a mental error, constituted enduringly by belief in that error, and maintained in place by language-based ways of thinking.”
-Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, 2002

Al Svoboda (*1991) is an artist based in NYC. Recent exhibitions include Meeting with Ben K. Voss at Weatherproof, Chicago, IL (2023); a solo presentation at NADA NY with april april (2023); group shows at Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY (2023); 57W57 Arts, New York, NY (2021, 2023); and Wieoftnoch, Karlsruhe, Germany (2022). He received a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University followed by two summers at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

WAITING ROOM

AL SVOBODA | Landings

On view: September 9 - October 22, 2021

View Exhibition

‘Landings’ at 57W57 Arts, is a presentation of works made in 2020 and 2021 by Al Svoboda. They are paintings floating through the studio to find a place to stick, some with aggressive personalities and others with light tenuity, becoming members of a larger constellation. There is a malleable and shifting, secret distance between painting and stapling, removing and moving, fixing and seeing; as if a conversation could be edited again and again, ultimately left inconclusive and open ended. There is a dot and a marking, crushed rubbing, in a field, soundtrack of place, soundtrack of time, think you are seeing something, center of your stomach or center of a pit, transformation, passive prediction, friction and force, patina and scrap.

Al Svoboda (*1991) lives and works in New York City.