Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce Half-Sleep-City, an exhibition of new works by Mark Handforth. Marking the artist’s first solo show with the gallery, the exhibition will be on view in our Tribeca location from May 6 to July 28. Complementing the presentation, Handforth’s new public sculpture, Franklin Street Four, will be installed across the street through November 2023.
By employing elemental shapes, Handforth’s sculptures evoke a familiarity – not trees, not chimneys, not figures, and yet suggesting all of them at the same time. A twisting shank might be a ring, or a four, or any number of other recognizable shapes, bending where it will, where it can. Solid in their bearing but loose in their movement, the sculptures almost appear to be animate, to be simply making themselves. His sinuous, meandering forms draw directly from the lived landscape without ever directly picturing it; they situate themselves as things to be dealt with, dancers in your place and space, awkwardly beautiful. As at ease outside on the street as they are inside a room, the works exist in the world as part of one looping conversation.
The exhibition brings together a collection of Handforth’s new sculptures that showcase the artist’s signature lexicon. Inside the gallery, a beam bows into a casual star, a large copper cylinder curls into a twisted ring, and a handful of ghostly oversized burnt matchsticks loom. Gathered in the center of the space, an installation of brightly colored tubes appear to sprout up from the floor, their forms gently curve like rising smoke, swaying against the regimented iron columns of the architecture. Outside on a median called Barnett Newman Triangle, stands Franklin Street Four. The hot-pink color of the bending pilar is an homage to Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Barnett Newman) two (1971), a light portrait of Newman, whose studio used to overlook this triangle in Tribeca. The outdoor installation is presented as part of NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program.
Mark Handforth was born in Hong Kong in 1969 and grew up in London; he currently lives and works in Miami and New York. He completed his studies in the early 1990s at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Significant solo shows include White-Light-Whirlwind, San Carlo, Cremona, Italy; Dr Pepper, ICA Miami; Smoke, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy; Sidewalk Island, Governors Island, New York; Rolling Stop, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; MCA Chicago Plaza Project: Mark Handforth, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work is in the collection of major international institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Fonds régional d’art contemporain (FRAC), France; The Pinault Collection, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Mairie de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Région Rhône-Alpes, France; Rubell Museum, Miami; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
