HARRISON, Rachel
Stage Fright

Guided by a desire to illuminate and to inspire reflection on the sculptural form, Dominique Lévy of LGDR invited Rachel Harrison to curate a presentation of 20th-century sculpture. The exhibition that emerged presented a group of works that consider modernism’s devotion to that most fundamental of subjects: the human figure. Stage Fright featured works by Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Marisol Escobar, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, and Alina Szapocznikow that represent the body in extremis—shown ruptured in pieces or pared down to the essentials—in surrogates that stand for the whole. A stack of bronze discs forms an unequivocally genital tower that lists to one side; a bronze bust’s scored features individuate a polychrome face the size of a fist. Taken together, the works on view incarnated various conceptions of personhood as routed through objects, whether rendered with aching specificity, as in the clefts and folds of Szapocznikow’s plaster Ventre (Belly) (1968), or invoked as a generic type, as in the leather panes of Duchamp’s widow/window or Marisol’s totemic couple The Blacks (1962), named for a popular play by Jean Genet that ran off-Broadway the year the work was made.

[publisher's note]

Published by Lévy Gorvy / Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2024
Exhibition Catalogues