Gagosian Rome is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of sculpture by Kathryn Andrews and Alex Israel. This is the first time that both artists have shown their work in Rome.
The readymade has emerged as an autonomous artistic medium, as persistent as painting, sculpture and photography. Andrews and Israel advance this position by insisting upon temporality and contingency as new parameters for their readymade art. Based in Los Angeles, each engages with the particular culture of the local film and media industries. Mining the "food chain" of show business, they interrogate and confound the fine line between “talent” and “raw material" while re-framing and re-presenting manufactured items whose formal and auratic properties are often overlooked. Deploying rented and/or recognizable film props and even going so far as to exhibit work by other artists and artisans as their own—Andrews' Umbrella Stand No. 2 (2013) depicts "stock" pattern designs for sale via internet; Israel's Sky Backdrop (2013) is painted by a Warner Bros. scenic artist—both artists demonstrate a renewal of Duchamp’s audacious undermining of the status of authorship and the art object. Whether re-positioning film props or celebrity memorabilia in a new setting of commercial engagement with a consumer audience (the art gallery), or replacing Modernism’s forms with Hollywood's particular brand of self-mythologizing visual tropes and surfaces, Andrews and Israel confront established expectations of process, authorship and permanence.
The multifaceted nature of Andrews’ work reflects her sensitivity to the decentralized urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Often she combines a meticulously fabricated “framing” element with a second notable object, the juxtaposition of which invites a multitude of implied narrative projections, while simultaneously de-stabilizing traditional assumptions about the formal hierarchies of sculptural pedestal, armature, and object. In Die Another Day (2013), a stainless steel vanity unit is the support for a single golden bullet used in the James Bond film of the same title, while reflecting the viewer in its frame.
Israel similarly engaged Los Angeles in a recent series of video portraits of notable locals, As It Lays (2011–12). In this bizarre spin on TV talk shows, Israel quizzed celebrities including Marilyn Manson, Christina Ricci, and Melanie Griffith on favorite colors, salad dressings, and ice cream flavors, generating spontaneous, unexpected interactions. In Property (2010-), a related body of work, the role of the performer is occupied by the rented cinema prop, which is selected by the artist to play the part of readymade sculpture.
