Foundation News
Open House Sundays
June 12th, 2016
Open House Sundays at The Brant Foundation
1-3pm on the following dates:
June 12th, 19th, 26th
July 10th, 17th
August 28th
September 4th, 11th
On view:
Jonathan Horowitz: Occupy Greenwich
Parking for The Brant Foundation’s open house Sundays will be located at Greenwich Polo Club. A designated parking area will be on your immediate left before Greenwich Polo check-in. If you wish to stay for the polo match please proceed to Greenwich Polo check-in to purchase a ticket. You may also purchase a discounted ticket online at: greenwichpolo.com.
Please contact us with any questions: 203-869-0611 or info@brantfoundation.org
About Occupy Greenwich:
Opening amid the presidential election season, the exhibition is comprised mostly of work made over the course of Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency. As such, the exhibition presents a timely opportunity to examine Horowitz’s ever-evolving practice within the context of the current political landscape.
Since the early 1990s, Horowitz has created work that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop Art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. His work in video, sculpture, painting and photography examines the deep-seated links between consumerism and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art. Recent painting projects have explored the personal psychology of mark making, at times prominently employing the hands of others. Appropriation of both pop cultural and art historical sources figures heavily in the show, with imagery transformed through both technology and the human hand.
Anchoring the exhibition is the installation November 4, 2008, which re-stages the day eight years ago when Obama was elected president. In the piece, 19 hours of CNN and Fox News coverage (originally presented as live feeds) play on back-to-back monitors in the center of a room. Red and blue carpets divide the space into opposing sides and 42 official presidential portraits circle the room, with Obama’s portrait in waiting on the floor.
Upon arrival at the Foundation, viewers are confronted by a functional solar panel sculpture on the lawn, which powers Horowitz’s video Apocalypto Now inside. Using found footage, the film weaves narratives on the history of the Hollywood disaster movie, climate change, terrorism, and the Christian apocalypse. In another room, a human scale, bronze statue of Hillary Clinton greets visitors. Rendered in the style of a 1970’s greeting card figurine, the sculpture is captioned “Hillary Clinton is a Person Too,” evoking Clinton’s vilification as both a political leader and a powerful woman.
Notwithstanding its political undertones, viewer participation and social interaction are recurring tenets of Horowitz’s work. A sculptural installation titled Free Store invites viewers to leave objects that they wish to discard and take away whatever they would like. Another work, Contribution Cubes, is a series of Plexiglas donation boxes each dedicated to a different charitable or political organization. Suggesting minimalist sculpture and relational aesthetics, the work describes the population that passes through the exhibition space through the varying donation amounts that accumulate. 402 Dots, the first of Horowitz’s Dot Paintings, is a monumentally scaled work comprised of 402 canvases, each painted by a different person. Participants in the project were instructed to paint a perfect, solid black dot with an 8-inch diameter in the center of a 12-inch square canvas, using only provided paint and brushes. The resulting dots all differ in size, shape, position, and texture. The paintings are hung in a brick pattern, suggesting a blown-up field of irregular Ben-Day dots. Like a vast population, together they create a paean to human struggle, acceptance, and individuality.
Current Exhibition
- Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf
New York November 13th to February 28th, 2025
November 13, 2024 – February 28, 2025
Tickets are now available through January 31st.
PRESS RELEASE: The Brant Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of a major survey of pioneering artist, Kenny Scharf. Opening November 13, 2024, the exhibition brings together over 70 paintings, sculptures, and objects created throughout the artist’s expansive career, beginning with works from the late seventies. The survey is compiled from the Brant collections as well as major loans from institutions and private collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Broad (Los Angeles). Kenny Scharf is co-curated by Peter M. Brant and Tony Shafrazi in close collaboration with the artist.
Scharf’s surrealist, psychedelic scenes burst with a comical sensibility and playful spirit. His seminal painting, When the Worlds Collide (1984), which was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, is indicative of his enduring style and dynamic canvases. The artwork, created in a monumental scale, features cartoonish figures, whirling–almost moving–patterns, and highly contrasted colors. On the bottom right of the painting is Scharf’s version of Keith Haring’s classic baby figures, painted as an homage to the artist for allowing Scharf to use his studio to create the work. Scharf’s use of acrylic spray paint on canvas nods to his street-art style that was rarely seen or exhibited in museums or galleries. Scharf stated, “this painting is my idea of showing how everything exists at the same time. There’s peace; there’s chaos…everything exists all together.1” Whereas the painting is clearly influenced by “fun” as the artist has suggested, there is also an underlying anxiety to the work stemming from Scharf’s fear of nuclear catastrophe and other contemporary concerns. Amongst these chaotic scenes are Scharf’s jungle paintings, perhaps most notably Juicy Jungle (1984). Filled with characteristically amusing plants and figures with cartoonish faces, the canvas is absolutely brimming with color and action. In his pop-surrealist style, a term coined by Scharf, the artist toys with the balance between unease and humor in his encompassing works.
In addition to these outlandish figures, Scharf’s early works often meditated on contemporary society in caricatures of the middle-class set against apocalyptic scenes. George Simpson’s Barbecuing (1978) depicts the quintessential American man preparing hot dogs over a charcoal grill, yet instead of a backyard, this scene takes place in a bathroom where fictional vines grow from the sink and bathtub. In another painting from the same year, Barbara Simpson’s New Kitchen, a QVC-esque scene of a woman in a pink kitchen is interrupted by a dragon figure looking directly at the viewer. Both comic and subversive, Scharf conveys the angst around the failed promises of the American dream.
While Scharf is perhaps best known for his fantastical and metaphysical works, Kenny Scharf will also feature several portraits of the artist’s friends and other art-world contemporaries during the early 2000’s. In Baccanalba (Alba Clemente) (2003), the actress, artist, and costume designer is transformed as a wine goddess with blue grapes for hair, staring off into a strange world. Ed Head (Ed Ruscha) (2001) portrays the fellow artist as a detached blue-skinned head floating through space; and writer, musician and poet Patti Smith is depicted as a Pharaoh wearing a leopard fur coat in Patti Smith (1978). These portraits show a lesser-known side of Scharf’s work—his circle of friends and collaborators.
Kenny Scharf’s ingenuitive and unconventional attitudes towards art is a source of inspiration to a number of artists today. With this exhibition, the Brant Foundation’s East Village location continues its commitment to showcasing major exhibitions of artists associated with the neighborhood’s historical and pivotal art scene. After previous exhibitions of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2019) and Andy Warhol (2023), Kenny Scharf, brings a major survey of Scharf’s work back to his roots.
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