Ohad Meromi
08 Nov - 17 Dec 2011
OHAD MEROMI
Stand Like a Sculpture
8 November – 17 December, 2011
Harris Lieberman is pleased to present Stand Like a Sculpture, Ohad Meromi’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. In his videos, sculptures and installations, Meromi takes the disintegration of high modernism as a base for explorations into the open-ended relationships between performance, work, community and architecture.
In Stand Like a Sculpture, Meromi continues to address a tradition that understood modernist aesthetics as inherently bound to the project of social change, whether in the early Soviet Union or in the Israeli Kibbutz. Aware of the oppressive historical realities of communism’s failed promise, Meromi proposes the white box as a site in which it might still be possible to revisit this promise’s pathos and negotiate its hopeful and emancipatory potential. Large in scale, but keeping monumentality at bay, the work emphasizes a tentative mode of placement in the space and a maquette-like material language.
The works in Stand Like a Sculpture comprise an immersive, hand-built landscape that engages with the audience’s sense of scale and situation. The installation suggests an unfinished narrative or a play in intermission, inviting the audience to reactivate it through dialogue and movement, lending the work its completion.
Ohad Meromi has had solo exhibitions at Art in General and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. His work has been included in Knight’s Move at Sculpture Center in New York, Thrice upon a Time at Magasin 3 in Stockholm, the Carrara International Sculpture Biennial, the Lyon Biennial and the traveling exhibition Uncertain States of America. His sculpture is currently on view at Public Art Fund’s A Promise is a Cloud. Meromi received the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Grants to Artists award in 2008.
Stand Like a Sculpture
8 November – 17 December, 2011
Harris Lieberman is pleased to present Stand Like a Sculpture, Ohad Meromi’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. In his videos, sculptures and installations, Meromi takes the disintegration of high modernism as a base for explorations into the open-ended relationships between performance, work, community and architecture.
In Stand Like a Sculpture, Meromi continues to address a tradition that understood modernist aesthetics as inherently bound to the project of social change, whether in the early Soviet Union or in the Israeli Kibbutz. Aware of the oppressive historical realities of communism’s failed promise, Meromi proposes the white box as a site in which it might still be possible to revisit this promise’s pathos and negotiate its hopeful and emancipatory potential. Large in scale, but keeping monumentality at bay, the work emphasizes a tentative mode of placement in the space and a maquette-like material language.
The works in Stand Like a Sculpture comprise an immersive, hand-built landscape that engages with the audience’s sense of scale and situation. The installation suggests an unfinished narrative or a play in intermission, inviting the audience to reactivate it through dialogue and movement, lending the work its completion.
Ohad Meromi has had solo exhibitions at Art in General and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. His work has been included in Knight’s Move at Sculpture Center in New York, Thrice upon a Time at Magasin 3 in Stockholm, the Carrara International Sculpture Biennial, the Lyon Biennial and the traveling exhibition Uncertain States of America. His sculpture is currently on view at Public Art Fund’s A Promise is a Cloud. Meromi received the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Grants to Artists award in 2008.