PLOT

Art Market Hamptons

Bridgehampton Historical Society

July 10-13, 2014

Opening reception Thursday, July 10, 7-10 p.m. 

Quattlebaum Foretich Gallery is pleased to present PLOT, an outdoor installation featuring work by Matthias Neumann, Thea Lanzisero and Keren Benbenisty. Each of these interactive works encourages viewers to sit and look out, recline and look in, stop and look up.

Matthias Neumann’s Bench is a cubic object that exaggerates, in minimalist style, a garden bench with trellis.  The self-contained unit is designed as part of a larger installation called “basics,” which reinterprets the essence of domestic space through sculptural interventions set in and outside a vintage airstream trailer.

Thea Lanzisero’s Starfish is a semi-performative work created through workshops similar to barn building and sewing circles, where groups build structures together, through which notions of solidarity, unity, and social connectivity emerge.

Flying above Matthias’ and Lanzisero’s structures, Keren Benbenisty’s This is the Color of My Dream, readymade flags, carry the opposite traits of nationalism. Hand-drawn with a blue writing pen, they have no defined graphics or solid colors, and they are impossible to be identified from afar.  The blue fields replace the hard-edge geometry traditionally employed to represent a concrete identity.

Matthias Neumann (b. 1969, Stuttgart, Germany) was educated as an architect in Germany and moved to New York City in 2000. His work fluctuates between architecture and a wide range of collaborative media that compound sculptural space and social interaction. He was a finalist in the internationally open competition for the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City (2003) and has designed structures for Vik Muniz, Hendershot Gallery, and the Spier Biennial for South African Art (2007), among others. Neumann has exhibited and produced projects for: Galleria HIT, Bratislava, Slovakia (2011); Kunstmeile Krems, Austria (2012); Site:Lab, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2013); and National Museum for Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania (2014).

Thea Lanzisero (b. 1965, Huntington, New York) creates sculpture, installations and public art using steel, plant materials, bamboo, four-foot knitting needles, and ceramics among other media. Her  structures have been exhibited in galleries, art-parks, public and permanent venues, and are held in numerous private collections. Lanzisero has received numerous grants and residencies and is a member of the Sculptors Guild, International Sculpture Center and the College Art Association. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase College and her MFA from CUNY Queens College 2012.  

Keren Benbenisty (b.1977, Herzeliya, Israel) graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 2004. She attended California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. She moved to New York City in 2011 and participated in the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). Her works superimpose mundane, everyday objects with historic artifacts, relics and monuments charged with cultural, social and political meaning. Through exploration of ancient forms and her own origins, Benbenisty questions the contemporary language of Western societies.