From our man in New York, George Shaw…
Ai Weiwei, Installation view of the series Rebar Caskets I-VIII, 2014.
This new installation at Chambers Fine Art is the latest addition to Ai WeiWei’s body of work about the 2008 earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province, which killed thousands of students in shoddily built schools. Ai purchased 200 tonnes of reinforced steel bars salvaged from the rubble, which he has used in various related works in the last few years. Now the steel rebars are more directly laden with funereal meaning by being represented as objects carved out of marble and housed in abstracted wooden caskets.
John Stezaker, Shadow 5, 2014
Alongside his exploration of the uncanny through small-scale portraiture and landscape collages that re-contextualise postcards, as well as film and publicity stills, John Stezaker has also focused on shadows and silhouettes taken from films, as enduring motifs since the 1970s. At Petzel, Stezaker is showing his large-scale Shadow series of silkscreens on canvas which appropriate B-movie film stills of the 1940s and 50s, and condense their film-noir personae into images that define and reflect their cinematic genre.
Marcel Dzama, Installation view of Une Danse des Bouffons (A Jester’s Dance), 2012-2014
Commanding adjacent Zwirner galleries in Chelsea, Canadian artist Marcel Dzama presents an extensive, multimedia exhibition featuring sculptures, video, works on paper, and dioramas that radiate aesthetically and conceptually from the show’s centrepiece, the highly theatrical film Une Dans de Bouffons. Described as a “Dadaist love story,” the film is a fictionalised account of Marcel Duchamp’s affair with the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. Red and blue are colours thematically reflected in all works in corresponding galleries including two projected versions of the film. Watch the trailer at youtube.com/zwirner
