Magdalena Sawon
presents
Chop Shop by GREG ALLEN at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
March 1 - 7, 2016
For this years SPRING/BREAK Art Show centering around the theme of "⌘COPY⌘PASTE,"
Magdalena Sawon presents a solo exhibition by Greg Allen titled Chop Shop.
March 1 - 7, 2016
Best examples of undisputed masters of contemporary art are rarely available to "regular"
collectors due to their extraordinary price or scale, or often both. Greg Allen is remedying this.
Now, you too, can have a piece of Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter or Andreas Gursky. Come
to the Chop Shop, located in the cavernous vault of the former Post Office. (room #3124). We
have the scissors.
Working with appropriated imagery and lost or unobtainable artworks, Greg Allen offers up the
products of creative destruction. Through repetitions and fragmentations of works by influential
contemporary artists, he creates specious objects from suspicious images, presented for sale, all
questions asked. Products of reproduction and subsequent dismemberment, these pictures are
tangible evidence of the scheme that implicates us all, artist, dealer, viewer, and collector alike.
It's not the first time.
British aristocrats broke apart Renaissance altarpieces for souvenirs of the Grand Tour. 19th
century dealers doubled their Dutch Masters inventories by sawing double-sided panels in two.
Manet's heirs cut his politically incendiary painting of the assassination of Emperor Maximilian
into smaller, more benign-and salable-portraits. As even emerging artists like Amalia Ulman and
Ibrahim Mahama have their large-scale works dubiously divided, should we look at centuries of
chopping up artworks and feeding scraps to the market as a cautionary tale or a tutorial?
In serving up fragment-friendly embodiments of great artworks, Chop Shop operates from the
presumption that Capitalism treats unsalability as damage and routes around it. It doesn't matter
if an artwork was designed to drape an entire pavilion in Venice, or if a painting was originally
meant to be seen from an escalator in a 20-story geodesic dome. It's not a problem if it's already
in a museum's collection. Or even if it was destroyed, surviving only as a negative in an archive,
or a small plate in a catalogue. No matter their past fate, Chop Shop reanimates these artworks
for a fleeting present, and offers the chance, however uncertain, of a new future. Will they be
treasured and displayed? Dispersed and forgotten? Five centuries from now, will the surviving
fragments be reunited in 's-Hertogenbosch like Hieronymous Bosch's altarpiece, to become the
toast of the Noordbrabants Museum's 2516 exhibition calendar?
Barnett Newman's 18 x 8-foot painting Voice of Fire was created for Buckminster Fuller's US
Pavilion at the Expo67 World's Fair in Montreal. Because of its site-specificity and massive scale,
curator Alan Solomon deemed it unshowable almost anywhere else, and "virtually unsalable."
The National Gallery of Canada proved Solomon wrong in 1989 when it bought the painting from
Annalee Newman. But the $1.5 million price sparked a conservative outcry over public arts
funding, and amateur replicas of Voice of Fire were painted, waved, and destroyed in protests
across the country. Allen's meticulous, full-scale repetition, Chop Shop Newman Painting No. 1
(2016), will meet a more genteel fate: it will be be transformed on-site into Chop Shop Newman
Paintings No. 2 - ? (all 2016). These new, domestically scaled works will be custom cut and
stretched to order, optimized to fit any collector's space. While supplies last.
Allen's Destroyed Richter Paintings (2012 - ) are real world incarnations of archival photos of
early paintings by Gerhard Richter, which the artist photographed before destroying in the 1960s.
These full-scale pictures made in Chinese painting factories approximate the long-lost physical
encounter with Richter's works, while simultaneously refusing the market fetishism that has
developed around them.
Meanwhile, Destroyed Richter Grids (2015 - ) resurrects the experience of more recent work by
reproducing lost or destroyed squeegee paintings as a full-scale grid of digital photographs,
printed from reference images on the artist's website. These inkjet simulacra mirror Richter's own
recent practice of producing "facsimile objects," photo editions of abstract paintings. The
paradigmatic example is Cage Grid (2011), an edition in which the artist mounted a photo of one
of Tate Modern's iconic squeegee paintings onto 16 aluminum panels. The grids were broken up
and sold separately in the museum's gift shop. They have since reappeared frequently at auction.
A similar fate is anticipated here.
Three large-format images of Andreas Gursky will also be split in the interest of accessibility and
convenience. Adapting the Chinese concept of resourceful, unabashed counterfeiting, Allen's
Shanzhai Gursky series (2015 - ) begin as original-scale prints made from the highest-
resolution jpeg files circulating online at the time of their production. These indexical, pixellated
prints are split, like an expensive stock, into new, more manageable-and affordable-minor
masterpieces. The Shanzhai Gurskys of an urban Hong Kong landscape and a towering
composition depicting a Madonna concert come pre-sliced. But a 10-foot long image of the Rhine,
which looks a lot like the most expensive photograph in the world, will be cropped and mounted to
order, enabling collectors to take home as much or as little of the Rhine as they can handle.
Magdalena Sawon is a founder/director of Postmasters Gallery in New York est. 1984.
Greg Allen is an artist, writer and the artworld's best detective.
Skylight at Moynihan Station (Main Post Office Entrance)
421 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
http://www.springbreakartshow.com.
VIP Preview Day, March 1
Collector's Preview (12 Noon - 4 PM)
VIP Vernissage (5 PM - 9 PM)
Regular Show Hours:
Wednesday, March 2 - Sunday, March 6, 12 PM - 8 PM
Monday, March 7, 12 PM - 6 PM
For more information to purchase tickets, please visit SPRING/BREAK.
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1 first section 4 x 3 feet |
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Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016 Installation View |
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Gregg Allen Destroyed Richter Grid No. A-L (12) 2016 UV pigment on aluminum 80 x 72 inches (to be split into 12 parts, 20 x 24 inches) |
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Gregg Allen Destroyed Richter Grid No. A-D (4) 2016 UV pigment on aluminum 40 x 36 inches (to be split into 4 parts, 20 x 18 inches) |
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Gregg Allen Destroyed Richter Painting No. 4 2012 oil on canvas 44 x 44 inches |
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Gregg Allen Destroyed Richter Painting No. 8 2016 oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches |
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Gregg Allen Shanzhai Gursky No. 5 2016 c-print 72 x 140 inches (to be destroyed to make Shanzhai Gurskys No. 6...facemounted on acrylic) |
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Gregg Allen Shanzhai Gursky No. 1 A-D(4) 2016 inkjet on paper 111 x 81 inches (to be split into 4 parts, 55 x 40 inches, inkjet on paper, facemounted on acrylic) |