Wild Strawberries

Gallery 125 Newbury is pleased to announce the opening of its new project space in New York helmed by Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery, located at the corner of Broadway and Walker Street in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. The new space will open to the public on September 30, 2022 with Wild Strawberries, an intergenerational group show of 17 artists whose works traffic in the dreamlike exchange between threat and seduction.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 cinematic masterpiece, Wild Strawberries brings together sculpture, painting, photography, and film by a wide range of artists, including Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Julie Curtiss, Alex Da Corte, Doreen Lynette Garner, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Deana Lawson, Shahryar Nashat, Brandon Ndife, Kathleen Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Max Hooper Schneider, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke, and Zhang Huan. The exhibition will span the 3,900 square-foot space, which features 17-foot ceilings and has been fully renovated by architects Enrico Bonetti and Dominic Kozerski of Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture.

In the extended dream sequence that opens Bergman’s film, a hand reaches out to make contact with the shoulder of a faceless figure, whose body is suddenly reduced to an empty pile of clothing from which liquid oozes over the sidewalk. Such surreal transformations recur throughout the works in Wild Strawberries, implicating the body as a fragile and contingent thing, a locus for anxiety and pleasure. In addition to works of painting, sculpture, and photography, the exhibition will also include excerpts from narrative and experimental films that share a similar sensibility, which have been selected in collaboration with filmmaker and scholar Vito Adriaensens.

Wild Strawberries cultivates a garden of widely divergent practices, which shape and reshape the body. Probing the powers of sensation, the works in the exhibition investigate art’s capacity to produce pleasure in the same gesture that it excites horror.

The exhibition is grounded in the work of key figures of the post-1960s generation who mobilized the aesthetics of bodily abjection toward fascinating, disturbing, and political ends. The nightmarish forms of Bontecou are juxtaposed with the exquisite formlessness of Benglis, the corporeal poetry of Wilke with the cruel delights of Samaras and Thek. Involving the viewer on a visceral level, these works are brought into dialogue with sculpture and photography from the 1980s and ‘90s by Hammons, Smith, Gober, and Zhang. The language of abjection becomes haunted by struggles of power, politics, race, and gender, which lie embedded in the formal presence of the work.

Oscillating between feelings of repulsion and attraction, Wild Strawberries traces this dialogue further in the work of an emerging cohort of contemporary artists, including Da Corte, Curtiss, Garner, Nashat, Ndife, Ryan, and Schneider. Their practices draw on earlier precedents while forging new cross-pollinations between the worlds of painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation.

Gallery 125 Newbury will function as an expanded platform for Arne Glimcher’s curatorial vision Gallery 125 Newbury will maintain an independent program, but will operate in association with Pace. The space will eschew the traditional gallery model by presenting up to five exhibitions per year with a focus on thematic group shows of work by established and emerging artists both within and beyond Pace’s program. Kathleen McDonnell, Talia Rosen, and Oliver Shultz will serve alongside Glimcher as directors of the new space.

Wild Strawberries Artist List

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)
Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)
Julie Curtiss (b. 1982)
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980)
Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986)
Robert Gober (b. 1954)
David Hammons (b. 1943)
Deana Lawson (b. 1979)
Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975)
Brandon Ndife (b. 1991)
Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984)
Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)
Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982)
Kiki Smith (b. 1954)
Paul Thek (1933 – 1988)
Hannah Wilke (1940 – 1993)
Zhang Huan (b. 1966)

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