Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to host an evening with Gabriela Rangel and Carolee Schneemann. Rangel will lead a walkthrough of the gallery's current exhibition, Of the Self and of the Other, featuring works by Etel Adnan, Ione Saldanha, and Carolee Schneemann. A conversation between Rangel and Schneemann will follow.
Gabriela Rangel is a Venezuelan-born writer and curator based in New York. She is director of visual arts and chief curator at Americas Society. She has curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions on modern and contemporary art at institutions such as Museo de Arte de Lima, Yerba Buena Center-Americas Society, Museo Amparo-Americas Society, and Centro CCK, Buenos Aires. She was co-editor of A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society (2007) and has contributed to catalogues for numerous exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Centro Cultural Recoleta, and Musee de Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Her articles have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, Trans>, Atlantica, ARTnews, Art in America, El Nacional, and El Universal.
A pioneer of feminist performance art, Carolee Schneemann began her career as a painter, a medium which the multidisciplinary artist continues to incorporate in her photographs, film, mixed media, and installations. The earliest traces of Schneemann’s kinetic painting can be seen in her landscape paintings from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. Winter Fuel’s I (1956), Winter’s Fuel II (1959), and Early Landscape (1959) demonstrate a desire to, in the artist’s words, “bring the canvas to life with dynamic brushwork, investing it with both substance and motion.” These gestures eventually transferred beyond the canvas and onto painting constructions consisting of painted assemblages and boxes, which in some cases incorporate the element of chance through the use of fire in the creative process. Prior to their inclusion in the retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting—organized by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015) and most recently exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York (2017)—these paintings, which play a crucial role in her oeuvre, had rarely been seen.