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| STORM KING ART CENTER ANNOUNCES 2023 EXHIBITIONS BY BEATRIZ CORTEZ, UGO RONDINONE, AND RA WALDEN ON VIEW MAY 20 – NOVEMBER 13, 2023 |
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Beatriz Cortez will present three new and recent large-scale works, Ugo Rondinone will present the sun and the moon, RA Walden will present access points // alternative states of matter(ing) |
Mountainville, NY, April 5, 2023—Storm King Art Center, the world’s leading museum for modern and contemporary outdoor sculpture, inaugurates its 2023 season with site-specific presentations of new and recent artworks by Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, El Salvador), Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Switzerland), and RA Walden (b. 1987, England), opening May 20.
“This season’s exhibitions are emblematic of what makes Storm King such an extraordinary place to present sculpture in conversation with the natural world,” said Nora Lawrence, Storm King’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator. “Our artistic program is built on a foundation of support for artists from a breadth of backgrounds and perspectives, at various stages of their career. I’m thrilled by all the ways our collaborations with Beatriz Cortez, Ugo Rondinone, and RA Walden have opened up new avenues of exploration and created vibrant opportunities for visitors to engage with art.”
Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left
Beatriz Cortez’s exhibition The Volcano That Left presents new and recent large-scale works by the Los Angeles-based sculptor. With a vista from Storm King’s Museum Hill across the Hudson Valley landscape, ancient, geologic, and cosmic structures will be positioned in dialogue with one another, reflecting the artist’s journeying across multiple spatial and temporal realities. Working in steel, Cortez fashions each sculpture by hand, improvising to create undulating surfaces and organic forms that echo the surrounding landscape.
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Eric Booker, Associate Curator at Storm King Art Center, said: “Beatriz Cortez’s multidisciplinary practice explores the experience of migration through the lens of simultaneity, proposing other forms of existence that lie outside our definition. By placing her sculptures outdoors at Storm King, the exhibition highlights the integral role that nature plays within her work, shifting the notion of migration beyond the human. Over the course of the exhibition, the forces of time and motion will change how visitors experience the installation.”
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Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left is organized by Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with the assistance of Adela Goldsmith, Curatorial Assistant.
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Ugo Rondinone: the sun and the moon
Set against Schunnemunk and Storm King Mountains in the Art Center’s South Fields, Ugo Rondinone’s the sun and the moon, comprises two 16-feet tall delicate circles fashioned from cast-bronze tree branches. The exhibition is built upon the principles of two celestial forces from the natural world: the sun and the moon. Like the cycle of day and night, these two archetypes represent contradictory, codependent, and complementary values.
One gilded and the other silver-leafed, the sun (2018) and the moon (2021) are installed parallel to one another on an east-west axis, underscoring the real-life rising and setting of their titular celestial bodies. The natural world has held a place of great importance for Rondinone’s artistic practice across several decades. The artist found solace, regeneration, and inspiration in nature following the death of his partner Manfred Welser of AIDS-related illness. Nature continues to inform Rondinone’s practice as a space where the sacred and profane, the mystical and the mundane, vibrate against one another.
The presentation of these two sculptures will be accompanied by two interactive artworks, your age and my age and the age of the sun (2013–ongoing) and your age and my age and the age of the moon (2020–ongoing) in the Museum Building’s main floor gallery. For this ongoing activation, Rondinone invites children to draw the sun and the moon, an exercise that evokes both the communal and the personal resonances of natural forms—though each child’s drawing is unique, they are all starting from universal reference points: the same sun and the same moon. At Storm King, the gallery will feature contributions from students at schools in neighboring communities of Cornwall and Newburgh, and throughout Orange County. Children will also have the opportunity to contribute drawings through public programs in the spring.
Ugo Rondinone: the sun and the moon is organized by Nora Lawrence, Artistic Director and Chief Curator.
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Outlooks: RA Walden
RA Walden’s site-specific installation will extend across several acres of Storm King’s South Ponds for the tenth edition of Storm King’s Outlooks program, which offers emerging and mid-career artists the opportunity to present a temporary large-scale outdoor project in the landscape.
Titled access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing), the project will depict the electron configurations of the six most common elements on earth: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur (CHNOPS). The configurations of these elements—thought to be necessary for life on any planet—will evoke the form of crop circles, here constructed from rings of perforated aluminum and laid across a grassy hillside. Considering landscape as body and body as landscape, Walden explores illness as a kind of visitation that leaves traces that are not always visible. Tapping into themes of science fiction and speculative fiction, the artist draws parallels between the phenomenon of crop circles, often considered to be hoaxes, and the experiences and access needs of disabled people, which are often met with disbelief, if not disdain, from the medical establishment and society.
Each electron configuration will be accompanied by a poetic text by Walden, interpretive audio recordings by artist-composer The Honorable Elizabeth A. Baker, and a viewing area from which visitors can reflect on the interconnectedness of all life-forms on a molecular level. The accompanying texts and recordings will be available through signage, audio, and via Storm King’s digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects app.
Throughout the exhibition, Storm King will present a series of public programs in collaboration with The Honorable Elizabeth A. Baker, and herbalist, artist + organizer Remy of GOODWITCH.
Outlooks: RA Walden is organized by Nora Lawrence, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, and Adela Goldsmith, Curatorial Assistant.
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Opening September 2023
Later in the season, Storm King will inaugurate a site-specific commission for its permanent collection by the artist Martin Puryear. The commission will be accompanied by an exhibition of Puryear’s drawings and models for large-scale outdoor and public works from throughout his career.
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Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Cortez has had solo exhibitions at Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College (2022), Craft Contemporary Museum (2019), Clockshop (2018), and Vincent Price Art Museum (2016), among others. She has received numerous awards, including the Borderlands Fellowship by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and ASU (2022-2024); Atelier Calder Artist Residency in Saché, France (2022); California Studio Manetti Shrem Artist Residency at UC Davis (2022); Longenecker-Roth Artist Residency at UCSD (2021); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020); Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018); and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. Cortez holds and MFA in art from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American literature from Arizona State University.
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Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Switzerland) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations on nature and the human condition while establishing an organic formal vocabulary that fuses a variety of sculptural and painterly traditions. The breadth and generosity of his vision of human nature have resulted in a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances.
Rondinone’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006); Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014); Palais de Tokyo, (2015); MACRO, Rome (2016); Carre D’Art, Nimes (2016); Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley, (2017); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Belvedere, Vienna (2021); Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022 ); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022); Petit Palais, Paris (2022); and The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva (2023). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include: The Städel Museum, Frankfurt and The Phillips Collection, Washington; and Fosun Foundation, Shanghai.
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RA Walden (b. 1987, England) is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centers a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice spans sculpture, installation, video, and printed matter, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology. Walden is interested in our ability and failure to navigate physicality, interdependency and vulnerability both communally and individually; understanding world-building not as a visionary tool for an imagined future, but as an embodied methodology for the now. Walden has had recent solo exhibitions at Hau4, Berlin (2022); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2021); and Nars Foundation, New York (2019), among others. Residencies include La Becque: Switzerland, Shandaken: Storm King, Wysing Arts Centre: UK and Hebbel am Ufer: Berlin.
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Storm King Art Center is a 500-acre outdoor museum located in New York’s Hudson Valley, where visitors experience large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions under open sky. Since 1960, Storm King has been dedicated to stewarding the hills, meadows, and forests of its site and surrounding landscape. Building on the visionary thinking of its founders, Storm King supports artists and some of their most ambitious works. Changing exhibitions, programming, and seasons offer discoveries with every visit.
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AAQ / Resource: Stelle Lomont Rouhani Architects
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