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As a part of its programming for the upcoming Frieze Los Angeles truthful, Hauser & Wirth will restage David Hammons’s iconic work Concerto in Black and Blue (2002) for the primary time since its debut greater than 20 years in the past.
The one time Concerto in Black and Blue has ever been realized was in 2002 at Ace Gallery in New York. (On the time, it was the artist’s first present in New York in a decade.) Upon arrival, guests got blue-light flashlights to navigate 20,000 sq. toes of area. That area, which had 25-foot-high ceilings, was introduced fully darkish.
As artist Glenn Ligon recalled in a 2004 Artforum article on Hammons, “And what was in that twenty-thousand-square-foot area? Nothing. It was fully empty apart from the blue mild emitted out of your flashlight and from these of different individuals strolling round within the area with you.”
Ligon added, “You went into the present in search of the artwork, however you got here out having been the artwork. What’s there may be what we deliver to the area. … What was black about Concerto in Black and Blue is no matter you suppose blackness is, no matter you dropped at it, and what you probably did with what you introduced whenever you acquired there.”
Within the twenty years since, Concerto in Black and Blue has turn into legendary. Artwork historian Darby English opened his 2007 guide, How one can See a Work of Artwork in Complete Darkness, with an in depth studying of Concerto, writing “How one can see a murals in whole darkness? One can not, after all, besides in essentially the most extraordinary circumstances, corresponding to when darkness itself kinds the idea of the work`s visibility.” In a 2023 T Journal article on 15 New York gallery exhibits that altered modern artwork, artwork historian Sarah Lewis recalled that the work’s staging, simply over a 12 months after 9/11 and never removed from Floor Zero, “provided new methods of being in a society that, after that tragedy, was actually greedy at nighttime.”
The final time Hauser & Wirth collaborated with Hammons was in 2019 for an exhibition, additionally at its downtown LA area, that was one of many largest gatherings of labor by Hammons ever mounted. (The gallery’s publishing arm is publishing a post-exhibition catalog on the present this coming Could.)
Concerto in Black and Blue will take over the 2 north galleries in Hauser & Wirth’s sprawling downtown LA location. The exhibition will run from February 18 till June 1. As is usually the case with a Hammons exhibition, no press launch or description accompanies the upcoming Hauser & Wirth present.
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