It is our great pleasure to inform you that the exhibition Eternal Gradient is travelling to Graham Foundation in Chicago. There will be public programs during the exhibition period.
Exhibition on view from February 7 – May 4, 2019
Opening Reception: February 7, 2019, 5:30 – 8:00PM (RSVP here)
The Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place, Chicago
Programs:
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: POLITICAL READING OF ARAKAWA+GINS, February 21, 6pm (RSVP here)
CHARLES BERNSTEIN: NEAR/MISS, POETRY READING, April 17, 6pm (RSVP here)
Tracing the emergence of architecture as a wellspring of creativity and theoretical exploration for the artist Arakawa (1936–2010) and poet and philosopher Madeline Gins (1941–2014), this exhibition features over 40 drawings and other archival materials that illuminate a pivotal moment within a practice that spanned nearly five decades of collaboration.
In the early 1960s, Arakawa and Gins began a remarkably original and prolific partnership that encompassed painting, installations, poetry, literature, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and scientific research. Complementing their independent artistic and literary practices, their collaborative work launched with visual, semiotic, and tactile experiments that questioned the limits and possibilities of human perception and consciousness. During the 1980s—a critical juncture in their careers—this line of inquiry became increasingly spatial as Arakawa and Gins together developed a series of speculative architectural projects that sought to challenge the bodily and psychological experience of users. Through these investigations, the artists began to articulate their concept of “Reversible Destiny,” arguing for the transformative capacity of architecture to empower humans to resist their own deaths. This exhibition uncovers a little-known body of this visionary work that anticipated the artists’ subsequent commitment to architecture and their realization of various “sites of Reversible Destiny,” in Japan and New York between 1994–2013.
Eternal Gradient originated at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and is made possible, in part, by the Estate of Madeline Gins and through a partnership with the Reversible Destiny Foundation.
The exhibition was curated by Irene Sunwoo, GSAPP director of exhibitions and curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, with Tiffany Lambert, GSAPP assistant director of exhibitions. The Graham Foundation presentation is organized by Sarah Herda, director, and Ellen Alderman, deputy director of exhibitions and public programs. The exhibition design is by Norman Kelley, a Chicago & New Orleans architecture and design collective founded by Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley.
For more information please visit: https://grahamfoundation.org/
