New York, NY: 29 January 2013 – Sperone Westwater is pleased to present messages.calendar.camera.jpg, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Andrew Sendor. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Sendor’s paintings document future museum installations that we are tempted to think are fictional or imagined. At the same time though, art history is full of examples of historical works that turn out, in hindsight, to have been prescient. Romantics tell us that this is what artists do. But just as we can look at works of art from the past that from a future perspective turn out to have been ‘true’, we can look at Sendor’s works and imagine ourselves in his future time and place that these ‘documents’ are evidence of. If prescience can be applied retroactively to images from the past, why can’t we also apply prescience proactively to present-day images of a future history? If, as good post-modernists, we hold that history is relational and relative, then why should it matter whether the documentation of an event was executed before or after the event itself?
Site specific installation with “Pixelated Portrait of Hugo L. Hugo”, Artist Unknown, 2031, oil on canvas, 38 X 22 inches is a painting of a painting leaning against a tree. This painting is of a future installation that is site specific. But while the notion of ‘site specificity’ is, itself a conceit of contemporary art, the painting techniques that Sendor employs signals a deep affinity to Renaissance masters through to the early moderns. The future installation includes a painting of digital information, pixilated in such a way that its essential ‘digitalness’ renders it opaque. An analog image of a future painting (also analog) of digital information whose very code, whose binary DNA, has transformed into pixilated abstraction. In an inversion of the Paleolithic, Sendor brings together in each, discrete painting or drawing the evidence of historical change and sequence that makes his works function in much the same way as the figures at Lascaux. The result, in each case a paradox, is the same. Lascaux does not document a single place or time – it documents a period of thousands of years and a ‘place’ that is thousands of miles in size. Sendor’s works documents neither the past nor the future but both -- paintings that are not about any time or place, but are about many times and places all at once.
- Steven A. Holmes
Born in 1977, Sendor lives and works in New York. His works have been shown recently in solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen. Recent museum group exhibitions at have been held at the ARKEN Museum of Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2007); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2007); Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee (2008); Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York (2010); and Funen Art Museum, Odense, Denmark (2011). Sendor’s works are in private and public collections worldwide.
For more information and images, please contact Aurelia Rauch at +1 212 999 7337 or aurelia@speronewestwater.com.