CURRENT EXHIBITION

Nikhil Chopra: Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX

28 October 2009 - 14 February 2010

Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing VI, Kunstenfestivaldearts 09, Brussels. Photo credit: Shivani Gupta

Nikhil Chopra combines approaches associated with theater, portraiture, landscape drawing, photography, art actions, and installation to chronicle the world through live performance. As the Victorian draughtsman Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra haunts bustling market squares, forgotten old buildings, city streets, and museum galleries to make large-scale drawings. Within the performances, daily actions-washing, eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, shaving, and observing-are transformed into ritualistic spectacle. While an ambiguous past collides with an unstable present, Yog Raj Chitrakar reveals the process of documenting what he sees while exploring self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality.
"Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX" is inspired by the 1920s and New York City's role in that defining moment in the history of the world - a time of deep physical, imagined, and sociological changes impacted by immigration, architecture, and labor, caught between two world wars. As the character Yog Raj Chitrakar, the artist activates the gallery, transformed into a turn-of the-century tableau vivant, for five days (November 4-8). Searching at the edge of the Atlantic, the wanderer/draughtsman/mapmaker also travels through Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, imagining America, and eventually chronicling New York City from the vantage point of Ellis Island. During the performance at the New Museum, the exhibition is in perpetual transformation. At its conclusion, remnants of Chopra's occupation of the space remain on display as an installation. Documentation from three previous performances also on view in this exhibition-Memory Drawing II (Mumbai, 2007), Yog Raj Chitrakar visits Lal Chowk (Srinagar, 2007), and Memory Drawing VI (London, 2008)-suggests the many ways in which the history and reality of a location impact the artist's execution of characters though costuming, gesture, and action.

"Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX" is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs
Costume design by Loise Braganza
Special thanks to Housing Works

Enquiries:

New Museum

235 Bowery

New York, NY 10002

212.219.1222

info@newmuseum.org

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/

CURRENT EXHIBITION

Urs Fischer

October 28, 2009–January 24, 2010

Noisette (2009), Mixed mediums, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich;and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

This exhibition will be the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, but rather an “introspective,” as organizing curator Massimiliano Gioni calls it, the show will combine new productions and iconic artworks, allowing for an in-depth look at Fischer’s practice. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition will offer viewers the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in Fischer's universe, which is both spectacular and fragile.

An engineer of possible worlds, Urs Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including glass, wood, and aluminum, which he combines with much more unstable substances such as clay, melting wax, and rotting vegetables. In his continuous search for new, plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses made of bread and constructed gigantic teddy bears. He has given life to robots and animated puppets, and dissected objects to reveal the secret mechanisms of perception. Digging up gallery floors and carving massive holes in their walls, Fischer has established himself as one of today’s most radical artists, combining the immediacy of pop art with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd.

Fischer was included in “Unmonumental,” the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition for the opening of the SANAA-designed building on the Bowery in 2007. He has had a succession of one-man shows in European museums including Kunsthaus in Zurich; the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He was also featured prominently in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a full-color catalogue will be co-published by the New Museum and JRP Ringier. It will include the most complete selection of artist’s works to date as well as texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum, Jessica Morgan, Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Modern, and Bice Curiger, Curator at Kunsthaus Zurich.

Enquiries:

New Museum

235 Bowery

New York, NY 10002

212.219.1222

info@newmuseum.org

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/