The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce
that an exhibition of work by the American artist Stephen Talasnik
will open on March 25, 2010 at Marlborough Chelsea at
545 West 25th Street. The exhibition will run concurrently with
an exhibition of work by Magdalena Abakanowicz. This show
is Talasnik’s first at Marlborough Gallery since April 2008 and
will present a new body of work including paintings, drawings
and sculpture, as well as several works that blur and blend those
distinctions. It follows recent exhibitions of the artist’s work at
the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Kido Press Tokyo; Japan
Society, New York; Ohio University Art Gallery, Athens; Galerie
Bailly, Paris and a recent exhibition and Purchase Prize Award by
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.
Inspired from an early age by the fantastic engineering and architectural
designs of a wide variety of sources from Giovanni Battista
Piranesi to Hugh Ferris, the American artist Stephen Talasnik has
become renown for his prints, drawings, paintings and sculpture.
By applying his encyclopedic knowledge of art, architecture, engineering
and design, he creates what Nancy Princenthal notes is “a
wealth – a surfeit – of convincing information. Worlds abounding
spin through his work, believably built and overbuilt, their
stresses and loads accommodated as gracefully and heroically, and
as redundantly, as by the Brooklyn Bridge… An avid scholar of
work ranging from Futurist architecture to Impressionist drawing
to taxonomic photographic projects… Talasnik is most interested
in the places where physical observation comes up short.”
In this new body of work Talasnik often pushes the boundaries
of these disparate media, even combining them into what he describes
as “a series of color works that give a visual presence to the
conceptual process of invention of structure” and sculptures that
“depict the anatomy of linear constructed form.”
The drawings in this exhibition such as Time Traveler and Curious
Flight recall Hilarie M. Sheets’ description of his drawings in
ArtNews as “exquisite,” writing that they “brought to mind both
the Russian Constructivists and movies of children at an amusement
park.” As Princenthal has elsewhere pointed out, Talasnik
is “a consummate technician” and his drawings, “which have the
shifting foci and narrative complexity of moving pictures, depict
architectural fantasies indebted to the grand 19th-century structures
made possible by steel-framed construction: glass palaces,
train stations, suspension bridges.”
The new sculpture is either work in basswood or bamboo such
as Odalisque and Naked or the combinations of metallic powders
and various polymers as in Extension and Spine. In these latter
two works we see that even in sculpture Talasnik’s formal vision
is informed by a fundamental fascination with drawing in general
and the element of graphite specifically. But on a narrative level,
as Talasnik notes, “the sculpture alludes to the study of the human
form, all skeletal structures.”
The paintings in this new body of work such as Endless Invention,
Hyroglyphs and Misfit represent a further development of the
wide variety of media and imagery of his earlier drawings, prints
and sculpture. They include paper cut stenciling, printmaking
processes, various collage elements, low level bas relief, and architectonic
framing devices. As he points out, the paintings are
inspired by the history of printed and drawn diagrams, charts and
typography. The color is closer to the aesthetics of print than it
is to traditional painting with most color actually rolled or transferred
on to the surface rather than applied by brush. In his words,
“they function as invented documents that incorporate fictional
architectural drawing, engineering as well as a history of botanical
and anatomical illustrations and typography.” The largest of these
paintings are constructed as sectional combinations, alluding to
the construction of “legends” or “instructional” code making, best
exemplified by the tour-de-force painting Codex.
In each of these areas – drawing, painting, and sculpture – Talasnik’s
work explores the constant tension between our equally
human desire to construct a logical world and to fantasize about
the world beyond the laws of physics. As Princenthal wrote about
Talasnik’s work in Art in America, “As carefully articulated as they
are spacially illogical, they could be residue from the dream lives
of structural engineers.”
Concurrent with Thought Pattern at Marlborough Chelsea, Talasnik’s
work will also be exhibited at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, DC in Graphic Masters III: Highlights
from the Smithsonian American Art Museum through 2010. Also,
opening on June 5, 2010 and running through the 2010 season,
his large installation Stream: A Folded Drawing, will be exhibited
at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY. The piece is an
infrastructural grid and pattern work which in its stadium-like
design references “organic growth, variable repetition, and mathematically
based structural configuration.”
Talasnik’s work may also be found in many public collections
including Albertina, Vienna; Architecture Archives of Art Institute
of Chicago; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum of
Art; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Cleveland Museum
of Art; Detroit Institute of Art; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
University, Cambridge; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; High
Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich; Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Kupferstichkabinett,
Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna; National Gallery of Art,
Washington; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian,
Washington; New York City Public Library; New York Historical
Society; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia;
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam
An illustrated catalogue with an essay by the noted writer on visionary
architecture, Lebbeus Woods, will accompany the exhibition.