Opening November 3, 2017
On view through December 15th
Main Gallery | GUY C. CORRIERO Backward Thinking
Waiting Room | JOHAN DECKMANN First Editions
Project Space | BRIGITTE CORNAND Me & You
Back Room | ROBERT GUILLOT … over and all about
NEW YORK – 57W57ARTS is pleased to announce four concurrent solo exhibitions featuring the work of Guy C. Corriero, Johan Deckmann, Brigitte Cornand, and Robert Guillot. There will be an opening reception for the artists on November 3rd, from 6-9pm, and the exhibitions will be on view through December 15.
In the Main Gallery, Guy C. Corriero will present Backward Thinking, a group of paintings made of hand-built panels constructed so as to reveal both front and back views simultaneously. Corriero’s irregular shapes are almost always built in reference to the head and torso, suggesting block-shaped bodies standing upright. Outlining each panel is a skeletal support structure cobbled together with small blocks, implying precarious little bones and in some cases a central spinal column. Each panel has an extended edge that forms a shallow frame, giving the panels a tray-like quality. Corriero applies layer upon layer of heated chalk gesso, usually building up the surface with 10 or more coats. With each application there are slight color variations allowing for interesting, skin-like impressions to emerge.
Guy C. Corriero was born in New York in 1960. He received his BFA (’85) and MFA (’89) from the School of the Visual Arts. Since the 1990’s, Corriero’s work has been exhibited in solo & group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including: Junior Projects (New York); Mitart Gallery (Basel, Switzerland); frosch&portmann (New York); Galerie Thomas von Lintel (Munich, Germany); and Stux Gallery (New York). Corriero was awarded an Edward F. Albee Summer Residency in 1994, and his work has been reviewed in Art News Magazine. Corriero lives in Manhattan and works in Brooklyn.
In the Waiting Room, Johan Deckmann’s exhibition First Editions will feature a collection of the artist’s hand-painted books, selected from his ongoing series that began in 2014. Sourced from thrift stores and antique shops, Deckmann takes vintage books and re-directs their supposed content by gluing the pages shut and painting the covers with thoughtfully irreverent titles in black lettering and silhouettes. These spare and poignant phrases perfectly distill life’s grand existential quandaries into quiet moments of self-awareness and reflection. At once bitingly humorous and tenderly introspective, Deckmann’s pithy titles tap into the many facets of the human condition: the beauty, the folly, and everything in between.
Johan Deckmann was born in Denmark in 1976. As a practicing psychotherapist, Deckmann divides his time between his private practice and his adjacent art studio located in central Copenhagen. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Kunsthal Charlottenborg and Gallery Christoffer Egelund (Copenhagen), White Noise Gallery (Rome) and Unspeakable Projects (New York), opening in early 2018. Deckmann’s work has been featured in print and online publications, including; Harper’s Bazaar, La Vanguardia, The Guardian, Vice, Colección SOLO, Thisiscolossal.com and coolhunting.com. “First Editions” at 57W57Arts marks the artist’s debut exhibition in the United States.
In the Project Space, Brigitte Cornand will present Me & You, a selection of photographs culled from her new project “Sand Writings”. For Cornand, taking photographs is like writing in a diary, so she finds herself carrying a camera at all times, ready to record her daily experience should something interesting arise. While walking along the shore at Lambert’s Cove Beach in Martha’s Vineyard last year, the artist happened upon a sand castle being slowly devoured by the ocean’s waves. Absorbed by the poetics of this ephemeral destruction, Cornand began writing words and popular love quotes in the sand, then photographing their partial erasure from the incoming tide. As the phrase “I am in love with You” transforms into “I am”, and “Think of me” gently shifts to “Think”, one’s perspective is opened up to new stories.
Brigitte Cornand is a French filmmaker and photographer. Throughout her prolific career, Cornand has produced several documentary films, including a series of intimate portraits of her renowned artist friends and contemporaries. Cornand currently lives and works between Paris and West Tisbury, MA.
Installed in the gallery’s Back Room viewing space, Robert Guillot will present … over and all about, a multi-part arrangement of the artist’s small-scale sculptural objects. Guillot’s enchantingly odd shapes and forms are enigmatic, enveloping a figurative, bodily essence while drifting into curious abstraction. The collective placement and presentation of these objects creates a specific terrain, a nimbly morphing landscape of accumulated parts. In speaking of his process, Guillot states: “Things arranged, again and again, over and under and in between. Together they create a visual rhythm, and this rhythm is EVERYTHING.”
Robert Guillot was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1953. He studied at the Memphis College of Art and received his MFA at Yale University. Guillot’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn); Jack Shainman Gallery (New York); Magasin 3 (Stockholm, Sweden); and The Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands). Guillot is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1981) and a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship (1992). Past residencies included Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Guillot’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artforum, The Yale Architecture Journal, The New York Times and The Village Voice.