IN/SITU 2015

Curated by LOUIS GRACHOS | The Contemporary Austin

The IN/SITU program provides exhibiting galleries the opportunity to showcase large-scale installations and site-specific works by leading artists during EXPO CHICAGO. Known for his community-focused museum direction and considerable skills as an arts administrator, Dr. and Mrs. Ernest C. Butler Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin Louis Grachos brings his unique curatorial vision to the 2015 IN/SITU program. Prior to his work rebranding and successfully merging the AMOA and Arthouse institutions as The Contemporary Austin, Grachos served as Director of the renowned Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. During his 10-year tenure at the Albright-Knox, Grachos oversaw the growth and development of collections, exhibitions and programming at the 150-year-old gallery. Grachos was previously the director of SITE Santa Fe, where he was a driving force behind a highly successful international biennial. He has also held curatorial and administrative positions at the Americas Society Visual Arts Program, New York; the Queens Museum of Art; the Center for Fine Arts, Miami; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. A native of Canada, Grachos was educated at the University of Toronto and the Center for Museum Studies at John F. Kennedy University in San Francisco, California.

Grachos follows past IN/SITU curators Renaud Proch (2014) | Executive Director, Independent Curators International (ICI); Shamim M. Momin (2013) | Director and Curator, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND); and Michael Ned Holte (2012) | independent curator and art critic.

Participating Artists

Checklist of Works

Matthias Bitzer
drip(II), drip(III), and drip(IV), 2014
Marianne Boesky Gallery

Matthias Bitzer’s multimedia practice dissolves traditional artistic boundaries of form and content, producing works that operate on multiple aesthetic and conceptual planes. Bitzer’s Drip light sculptures are strong examples of this particular characteristic. Created for the artist’s first solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2014, these works pair the stark Minimalism of angular concrete with the airy beauty of fluorescent light, resulting in compelling musings on form and space. Notably, these works’ physicality co-exists with a more cerebral presence due to their textual motif, a nod to Bitzer’s ongoing literary interests. Drip sparks the viewer’s simultaneous contemplation of disparate but related visual and metaphysical realms.

Daniel Buren
From three windows, 5 colours for 252 places, 2006
Lisson Gallery

From three windows – 5 Colours for 252 places was first presented and conceived for the upper galleries at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 2006. The work creates a permeable space in which elements of the gallery’s architecture are multiplied. Buren used three large windows located at one end of the museum as a template for a sequence of eighteen rectangular panels with each one suspended from the ceiling. Each panel is subdivided into twelve transparent Perspex squares, both clear and colored. Embedded in a refined sensibility of color and form, the work engages the viewer in a visual and physical dialogue with space. From three windows - 5 Colours for 252 places will be re-configured especially for IN/SITU.

Andy Coolquitt
Alice (3472–76), 2015
Lisa Cooley/Lora Reynolds Gallery

The objects from Andy Coolquitt’s work come from everyday life. He explores the relationship between groups of objects as they travel from the street to the studio and the exhibition space. Colorful metal tubing—from abandoned shopping carts and children’s toys—is assembled into simple geometric forms, and often incorporates light bulbs. It can be difficult to tell whether Coolquitt’s objects are “somebody mades” (curiously modified things he finds as-is on the streets), “finished works” (in which the hand of the artist is evident), or “in-betweens” (objects that may have the potential to be incorporated into a finished work). This ambiguity of origin collapses the distinction between art and life, highlighting Coolquitt’s ultimate goal of honoring existing communities while building new ones.

Antony Gormley
Freefall, 2007
White Cube

The EXPOSED EXPANSION WORKS reveal the space where the body was, rather than represent the body itself. The works are so open in structure as to be for all intents and purposes drawings in space, and each reveals an empty body-space at its core. Neither architecture nor anatomy, they are more like the random matrices found in fractal geometry. Antony Gormley, 2007

Sung Jang
MOBI, 2015
Volume Gallery

In Sung Jang’s MOBI, subjects rise up—supported by a team of single modular structures stacked in succession—to form surfaces, shapes, and seats. Individually, each module contains three sleek S-curve sweeps joined by a trefoil band at its middle. Architecturally akin to buttresses, Jang’s lightweight modules divide and distribute weight, allowing MOBI’s fluted form to concisely withstand considerable weight or adeptly multiply many times over. MOBI’s multifaceted applications highlight the inherent structural integrity and capability of a single unit to create any shelter, sofa, or chandelier.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Drone Wing, 2013
Galerie Thomas Schulte

Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is known for his true-to-scale recreations of historical artworks, architecture and artifacts. Among these sources, the artist has worked with the subjects of the U.S. atomic bomb, in a piece entitled Fatman; Colin Powell’s fictitious Iraqi mobile biological weapons lab; Mies van der Rohe’s 50 x 50 House; and Brancusi’s Bird in Space. For the 2015 IN/SITU program, he presents Drone Wing, a 27 foot long rendition of a wing from the 2001 RQ-1 Predator, the first unmanned aerial vehicle deployed over Afghanistan.

Keith Sonnier
The European, 2009
Pace Gallery

Like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors in the Post-Minimalist and Minimalist generations, Keith Sonnier challenges traditional definitions of sculpture by using new materials and processes. He began using neon in 1968, exploring the effects of light and color in space as well as their impact on surrounding architecture. In The European (2009), Sonnier uses the ceiling as a support, similar to how he has used the wall and floor in other pieces.

Jessica Stockholder
Celestial Season, 2015
Kavi Gupta

Jessica Stockholder’s Celestial Season is a sculptural installation that adopts and interacts with the unique architecture of art fairs. A luminous “cloud,” composed of translucent plastic baskets, the piece floats just above the boundaries of art fair walls, buoyant and playful in the context of its locale. At once warm and cool, like a breeze on a summer day, the piece stands at odds with the formality of the art fair space, and encourages audiences to interact with it, move around it, and spend time with it as a reprieve from the regimental booth layouts.

Cerith Wyn Evans
In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, 2008
White Cube

Cerith Wyn Evans' In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consuminar Igni is one of his most well-known pieces that elaborates its post-cinematic context. The work consists of a suspended circular construction of neon lettering, that spells out its title. The title itself is taken from both an essay (1978) and a film (1981) by Guy Debord. The Latin phrase is a palindrome, which is literalized in the circularity of the piece, allowing one to see the letters both frontally and in reverse.