For Immediate Release:

2 x 4

Sculptural works by: Janine Antoni, Georg Herold,
Reinhard Mucha and Rachel Whiteread

May 5 - June 16, 2007

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present an exhibition of four sculptors each showing two works. The selection of works for this exhibition was intended to focus on two different moments in the artist's practice and reflect on them out of the context of the bodies of work in which they were originally conceived. These artists are contemporaries that have contributed to the evolution of a sculptural dialogue in the age of "post-modernism" and each in their own right have expanded our capacity to accept the use of new materials and forms into the definition of sculpture. Each artist's sculptural practice utilizes elements of the every day and reworks them to evoke a recognition and understanding of important social, artistic and formal issues.

Janine Antoni (Freeport, Bahamas, 1964) received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989; she has been exhibiting internationally since 1992. Antoni's work brings together performance and sculpture; by using her own body and sourcing everyday activities such as eating, bathing and sleeping, she has developed a practice that is simultaneously classical in execution yet unorthodox. By her employment of all types of materials, from fabrics and rope to chocolate and even her own hair, her work is visually rich and resonant in personal and political meaning.

The work of Georg Herold (Iena, East Germany, 1947) has been of international importance for nearly three decades. Rejecting traditional materials, Herold creates sculptures, assemblages and wall-based 'drawings' using bricks, baking powder, wood, vodka bottles, buttons and mattresses. His work has been linked to Arte Povera although any influence the movement has had upon him is likely to have filtered through the work of Joseph Beuys. Often political, his work engages with socio-cultural issues as well as art history.

Reinhard Mucha (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1950) studied at Staatliche Kunstakadamie Duesseldorf and has had solo exhibitions at the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Kunsthalle Bern and Kunsthalle Basel. He has been included in Documenta IX and Documenta X and represented Germany (with Bernd and Hilla Becher) in the 1990 Venice Biennale. His work uses the forms of vitrines and furniture made with materials such as wood, felt and glass to evoke specific memories and to reflect on the nature of memory itself. Recurrent in Mucha's work is the practice of reproposing and recontextualizing his own previous objects and actions in relation to the place in which they are produced and exhibited.

Rachel Whiteread (London, England, 1963) is one of the leading artists of her generation. Since 1988, when she graduated at the Slade School of Fine Art, she has used ordinary domestic objects and architecture as the basis for her sculptures. She fills the negative space in and around the object so that the void becomes solid and what is negative becomes positive. Through the description of the absence she manages to produce sensorial associations by making use of materials such as polyurethane, resins, plaster and rubber, to increase the perception of something that no longer exists but was once indissolubly connected with human life.

For more information please contact the gallery at 212-206-9100 or check our website at www.luhringaugustine.com.