GLENS FALLS, NY.- The Hyde Collection announces its summer exhibitions for 2014. In the Wood Gallery, Larry Kagan: Lying Shadows features twenty-eight wall-mounted steel sculptures, illustrating the development of a conceptual idea, by the contemporary artist Larry Kagan. An exhibiting artist whose work has been collected and shown by museums and galleries worldwide, Kagan is currently a faculty member of the art department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York.
For the past twenty years, Kagan has been engaged with the process of creating a hybrid form of sculpture that combines the solid component of a steel wire sculpture and the specific shadow it casts on the wall in a way that challenges expectations. The form of the shadow suggests the presence of a material object that should be casting it, but in fact does not exist. The objects in Kagan’s repertoire of shadow images include a chair, book, bald eagle, stiletto, and a portrait of George Washington. The perceptual dualism of the three-dimensional abstract object casting an entirely figurative but dissimilar shadow when illuminated is at the heart of Kagan’s work. By disturbing the relationship between objects and shadows in this exhibition, the artist demonstrates how shadows can be transformed from a secondary supporting role in an artwork to the main creative attraction.
A version of this exhibition will be at Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, New York from September 11 through October 11, 2014.
Larry Kagan: Lying Shadows is organized by The Hyde Collection. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay on the artist’s work by Dr. Roberto Casati, author of The Shadow Club published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York (2003). Support for this publication is sponsored, in part, by Mr. Jerry I. Speyer & Ms. Katherine Farley; Mr. and Mrs. Bernard R. Brown; Ms. Marijo Dougherty and Mr. Norman Bauman; Mr. and Mrs. Stephen J. Garchik; and Michael J. Gardner, MD.
This exhibition is sponsored, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Warren County, New York, VisitLakeGeorge.com. Hirschl & Adler Modern is a participant in the exhibition and catalogue. Media sponsors for this exhibition are The Lake George Mirror and Metroland.
Paired with the Kagan exhibition in the Hoopes Gallery is Emerging from the Shadows: Edward Hopper and His Contemporaries. Shadows are a recurrent motif for the artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and part of its power to enthrall viewers, emphasizing the sense of alienation, anonymity, and isolation of the human condition. While we are only peripherally conscious of shadows in nature, in the work of Hopper and his contemporaries, including Armin Landeck, Martin Lewis, Louis Lozowick, George Bellows, Isabel Bishop, Howard Cook, and Stow Wengenroth, the shadow assumes a narrative and metaphoric dimension. Emerging from the Shadows will feature three watercolors and two etchings by Hopper, and twenty additional works by ten of his fellow artists, primarily etchings and lithographs on loan from museums, private collections, and selected from The Hyde’s permanent collection. Curated by Erin B. Coe, Chief Curator, The Hyde Collection.
