NEW YORK, NY.- Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is exhibiting Breaking Ground, a series of photo-based works and sculpture by Allan Wexler, an artist whose practice integrates the spheres of fine art and architecture. Comprised of intricately layered, handmade works, the exhibition continues to build on fundamental exploratory principles, which have engaged Wexler for over forty-five years: the forms, functions, and meanings of what we build. With his newest works on view, Wexler combines photography, sculpture, and drawing in order to explore certain deep-seated rituals that form the basis for civilization and habitation: our relationship to the natural world, our first marks on the primal landscape as builders, the shovel plunged into the earth and lifting earth skyward.
Featured in the exhibition is a series of hand-worked, photo-based digital prints of landscapes that depict basic building shapes and landscape interventions, isolated within a monochromatic background. The images hover between the real and poetic and are constructed through an elaborate process that questions the realities of photography and drawing. Wexler begins by sculpting a small scenario which is photographed, then digitally manipulated, and printed in sections which are placed together onto a wood panel. He highlights and re-shades the images with graphite and applies matte and wax finishes, sensualizing the photographic surface. The series was inspired by Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books, a 15th century treatise that Wexler researched while a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2005.
Two sculptures, Adam’s House in Paradise and Shelter, explore how trees become architecture. Starting with actual trees about six foot tall, Wexler fills in the planes of the negative space of their branches through a complicated process of cutting and gluing. Playing with the relationship of natural and architectural forms, the organic tree branches create a flowing beauty that recalls the groin-vaulted ceilings of Gothic cathedrals.
Tree Branch Transformations, from 1975 but never before exhibited, is a collection of tree twigs catalogued and showcased in boxes the way a child might organize a rock collection. One selection of twigs slowly morph from natural to their painted representation. Others show the transformations from the branch to the I-beam or to standardized lumber.
Wexler has been represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts since 1985. Recent solo exhibitions include La Musée Des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, France, and the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Recent group shows have included Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design, The Jewish Museum, NY, Birch Forest Project Part II: Stirrings Still, Whitebox Art Center, NY, and New Prints 2008/Autumn, International Print Center, NY. Custom Built: A Twenty-Year Survey of Work by Allan Wexler, 1999, organized by the Atlanta College of Art Gallery travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis. Wexler teaches at Parsons the New School for Design, NY, and lectures on his work in the fields of art and architecture nationally and internationally. Allan Wexler: Early Works on Paper will be exhibited at Schema Projects, Bushwick, Brooklyn, May 9 - June 8, 2014. For a complete list of exhibitions, see NEWS on www.feldmangallery.com.
In collaboration with Ellen Wexler, Wexler has received numerous public art commissions, including two permanent installations on view in New York City: The Atlantic Terminal Overlook at the Atlantic Terminal and Two Too Large Tables at the Hudson River Park at 29th Street.
