Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its first group exhibition in its new space at Bergamot Station, B2. Titled Inside/Outside, the exhibition brings together three artists that exemplify the gallery’s program: Joachim Brohm, Shirley Irons, and Catherine Wagner. The works explore the construction of physical space and the boundaries between the exterior and interior. The show is motivated by the gallery’s transition into its new home and the exploration of the idea of a building as a work in progress, and the traces of that process that remain just under the surface once it is completed.
The first project in the show is Joachim Brohm’s series Mies Model Study from 2015. It serves as a trace of a temporary full-scale model of a previously unbuilt golf clubhouse of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design from 1930. Situated on a hill on the outskirts of Krefeld, Germany, the model was realized for the first time in May of 2013 and was dismantled in December of the same year. Brohm’s mixture of black and white and color photographs produces a hauntingly complete sense of the fragmented building, a work of modernist genius, but only made of plywood and steel posts.
Archæology in Reverse, a series by San Francisco-artist Catherine Wagner deconstructs and reconfigures the interior spaces of the Mills College Art Museum, constructed in 1925. The white cube of the gallery space is carved into and exposed as a construction of human invention. The various wooden supports are given prominence in the images as making the pristine white gallery walls stable and functional. In the roof structure of the museum, Wagner has inserted panes of colored acrylic in the three primary colors—red, green and blue—in order to see the structure beyond in a new light.
Shirley Irons’s paintings add texture to the exhibition by way of her paintings of interior, varyingly mundane waiting spaces. The baggage claim area of an airport and a hospital waiting room are reanimated with delocalized and improvisational color. A pavilion for art is rendered in dark tones, while the natural setting just outside takes on the appearance of a modernist abstract painting with broad-brush strokes of green, black and brown. A magnificent large-scale photo-collage reveals the messiness that underlies the built environment. Made in the basement of the Manhattan Mall, a suburban concept transplanted to the center of the city, the photographs give an aesthetic feel to the nondescript supports of commerce above.
The three artists’ works provide an array of entry points to a deeper understanding of the nature of the structures around us and indicate the layers that exist even within a space of apparent blankness.