Schwarz
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Tiravanija’s redux of Untitled 1992 (Free) acts as a kind of invading organism that usurps the function of the gallery, displacing it with real life. All this is underscored by another recreation at Zwirner’s, next to Tiravanija’s. It is a signature piece of post-minimalist sculpture by the late Gordon Matta-Clark, made exactly 20 years before the Tiravanija, and as fate would have it, at the exact same address on Greene Street in SoHo where Tiravanija originally made Untitled 1992 (Free).
Nevelson was sui generis. Though a quintessential modernist, she was no joiner. During her long life of artistic activity, she studied Cubism, flirted with Surrealism, and imbibed the influence of Minimalism, but no avant-garde movement could claim her. She was Mark Rothko's favorite sculptor, but she wasn't hanging out with the Ab-Ex crowd at the Cedar Tavern. Jed Perl, who gives her short shrift in New Art City, his survey of mid-20th-century Manhattan's artistic avant-gardes, links her work with the sculptor Richard Stankiewicz's "junkyard Constructivism." But Stankiewicz (a generation younger) and David Smith (her nearer contemporary) were welders, while she worked with the regenerative capacities of wood, a once-living medium. And the room-size environments she began fabricating in the 1960s preceded the advent of installation art by some 20 years.
Tomorrow, the Maison Tropicale, a small aluminum-paneled house built in 1951 by Jean Prouvé, a French designer and the current court favorite of well-heeled contemporary art and design collectors internationally, is being opened to the public for preview in Long Island City. Christie’s, the auction house, will offer it for sale on June 5. The presale estimate is $4 million to $6 million.