In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence
Beginning February 25, 2016, Luxembourg & Dayan will present In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence, a group exhibition that surveys the field of artistic production through a series of juxtapositions that reveal discrete dialogues between artists and their assistants both current and former.
The exhibition will unfold like a wide-reaching family tree, pairing works by artists who have shared studio space at some point and engaged in working relationships. By bringing together new art with rarely seen historical works from artists’ studios and estates, In the Making suggests the social and intellectual interactions that fuel the production of art – interactions that take place behind the scenes and exert remarkable influence.
In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence will remain on view through April 16. Artists with works on view include: Ross Bleckner – Ryan Sullivan Urs Fischer – Darren Bader Robert Gober – Banks Violette Edward Kienholz – Jack Goldstein – Ashley Bickerton Donald Moffett – Julia Rommel Richard Prince – Eric Brown Robert Rauschenberg – Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne – Carroll Dunham Joel Shapiro – Christopher Wool – Dan Crews, Alex Hubbard Cindy Sherman – Margaret Lee Andy Warhol – George Condo
In the Making is rooted in an interest in the changing conditions of artistic production since the breakdown of modernist tropes, and in particular the displacement of the artist as a sole individual creator. Culminating in the decade of the 1950s and embodied in the public image of such Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, the art studio was romanticized as a mythical place for solitary contemplation where the genius artist – typically male – is able to express himself. But as art historian Caroline A. Jones states in Machine in the Studio, starting in the 1960s in the United States there is a palpable shift “from the isolate studio (with its hushed privacy and creator-genius) to the expanded workshop (with its busy machinery and executive boss).” It is in the context of this newly established mechanical and social system of production that the figure of the artist assistant reap- pears in the discourse of art, having been largely absent from it since the days of the Renaissance workshop.
Among other highlights of In the Making is a photograph from Cindy Sherman’s Disasters and Fairytales series, featuring an inflated doll as an object hovering between the animate and the inanimate. This little known work inspired a new sculpture with surrealist underpinning by artist Margaret Lee, who has served as Sherman’s longtime assistant.
In the Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence February 25 - April 15, 2016 Opening Reception: Thursday, February 25, 6-8 PM Luxembourg & Dayan 64 East 77th Street, New York City
