- Lekha Jandhyala
Artists: Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, Ghislaine Leung
CONCRETE derives its form from the structural conditions that often compose standard exhibitions: walls, light, and space. Three artists, Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung, take the exhibition as a site to expose the unseen and indeterminate systems that, too, shape a viewing experience. Carefully balanced between order and ambiguity, their works complicate distinctions between the existing and the presumed. Together, the works suggest mutable contingencies—some gestures remain legible, while others resist clear and immediate interpretation.
Protruding walls, extended metal tubing, and a single text-based painting are the only objects populating the exhibition. Intentionally restrained, CONCRETE disrupts expectations of an open, neutral space. A side-step is required to navigate walls that cut into the room. Across the gallery, electrical conduit extends from the plenum of the Hessel Museum. Within a painting, words are isolated on a single wall. The works emphasize the usually hidden infrastructures that construct and sustain an artwork.
Instead of a straightforward encounter with art, the exhibition draws attention to its institutional framework and the viewer’s relationship to both. Visible material is to be reconsidered, inviting cognitive construction so that the unapparent appears. Departing from the expectation of an exhibition as a finite presentation, CONCRETE proposes a way to see anew.
Related Programming:
Making a Painting that Isn’t a Painting
Please join Robert Barry and Lekha Jandhyala on Friday, April 18 at 2:00 PM in Gallery 3 at the Hessel Museum of Art, for a conversation set within the CCS Bard thesis exhibition CONCRETE. The discussion will center on Barry’s painting practice, exploring how language and art serve as vehicles for learning while examining dynamics between artist, viewer, and institutions.
Robert Barry (New York, b. 1936) has consistently pushed the boundaries of the art object, replacing an artwork’s physical presence with conceptual engagement as its material. One of the first practitioners of what we now call Conceptual Art, Barry’s multifaceted practice spans over six decades. From using invisible materials such as inert gas, radioactive substances, and telepathy to producing word-lists and closing galleries, he continues to challenge and redefine the knowledge system of art. Today, Barry paints, maintaining his focus on the nature of perception.
