The Armory Show

Galerie Lelong is pleased to participate in The Armory Show 2017 with a presentation of works by McArthur Binion, Petah Coyne, Andy Goldsworthy, Jane Hammond, Alfredo Jaar, Samuel Levi Jones, Rosemary Laing, Jaume Plensa, and Nancy Spero.

At The Armory Show 2017, Galerie Lelong will introduce work from McArthur Binion’s newest series, DNA: Sepia. Binion layers personal documents under grids of oil paint stick, reimagining a minimalist aesthetic through the use of innovative visual language and explorations of color, texture, and composition. His work will be included in the upcoming 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel. Samuel Levi Jones examines and subverts the grid pattern in his own work by tearing covers from hardbound books and washing them clean of text or images to expose the gaps in narrative history. Gris (2017), a new work composed of Ohio state law book covers, examines human subjectivity within interpretations of the law.

Alfredo Jaar’s works borrow from political, philosophical, and literary sources to emphasize the continuation of history and the corresponding consequences. The neon sculpture, Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness (1995), quotes the Japanese author and Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe’s 1977 novel of the same name. Jaar’s This is what happened, Miss Simone (2015) quotes the song “Mississippi Goddam” by the iconic American singer Nina Simone, which was written in response to the 1960s hate crimes targeting African Americans in the South. Viewers are invited to take a piece of the work with them and contemplate what might fill in the blank of the phrase “____ GODDAM” for our current era.

Andy Goldsworthy and Rosemary Laing both engage with landscape and the body’s relationship to space and the environment. Recent photographs and moving images by Goldsworthy, which document the artist’s process and experimentation, will be on view. As with his renowned permanent works, Goldsworthy has continued his investigation of understanding the landscape around him through actions like crawling through a rooted hedge or spitting leaves and flowers from his mouth. Laing’s photographic series, The Paper, presents a landscape where decomposing newspapers carpet the forest floor. Through analogue photography without digital manipulation, Laing captures the tension between natural and unnatural disturbances as the newspaper’s written content is allowed to deteriorate with time and natural erosion.