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Email PageHanson & Sonnenberg
September 8, 2005- October 15, 2005
Chris Hanson, Hendrika Sonneberg
Cohan and Leslie
138 10th AveWe are pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by New York based artists Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg.
Since their last exhibition in this space in early 2004, Hanson & Sonnenberg have continued to develop a series of sculptures made of pale blue and green polystyrene that faithfully reproduce a compendium of objects as diverse as press conference microphones, loud speakers, a broom, and a crashed hockey scoreboard.
This exhibition will include an installation of new polystyrene sculptures ghosting seemingly less spectacular objects: chain link fences, a vandalized bike, a locked shopping cart, a garbage can and a scattering of Zamboni tires (lifted from a recent piece of theirs: a full scale Zamboni, apparently parked in the wrong neighborhood, on view in an exhibition at NyeHaus, 15 Gramercy Park South). The show will also include several street signs, stolen and painted to efface their original directive, and photography, similarly opaque, in it’s attempt to construct a situatedness of sculptural experience.
The vulnerability of the artist’s chosen media, polystyrene, by definition parallels the violation each subject has withstood prior to appropriation by Hanson & Sonnenberg: the bicycle, titled Bully, has been vandalized and stripped, the shopping cart has been immobilized with a locked chain. Each object is stripped of its nature and purpose, rendered even more powerless in a flimsy material.
Integral to the artists’ work is a questioning of their own work’s efficacy, their own history, and the ability of art in general to tackle social and cultural topics. Deepening this contradiction, a spectre of violence that hangs over the show is constantly held in check by each object’s visual and formal elegance.
The brilliance of this sustained futility is Hanson & Sonnenberg’s ability to seduce viewers with extremely satisfying objects, simultaneously denying them, and elevating their work beyond the limitations of spectacular technique, to an engagement with conceptual and philosophical traditions.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Cohan and Leslie was last updated: 2009-01-09
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