Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
513 West 20th Street, NY 10011, New York, United States
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Visit
Kay Hassan: Everyday People
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Sat 18 Oct 2014 to Sat 15 Nov 2014
513 West 20th Street, NY 10011 Kay Hassan: Everyday People
Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Kay Hassan
Kay Hassan: Everyday People at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th St, New York, from October 18 to November 15, 2014
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Kay Hassan.
http://youtu.be/Ft6HB9fq90s
Installation Views
Kay Hassan: Everyday People at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th St, New York, from October 18 to November 15, 2014
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Kay Hassan.
http://youtu.be/Ft6HB9fq90s
The focus of the exhibition is a selection of new paper constructions that take the form of large-scale portraits created from scraps of discarded billboard posters. The subjects are fictional characters inspired by the “everyday people” the artist encounters on the streets of Johannesburg where he lives and works. The torn posters are reconfigured and pasted together with a painterly precision and hints of an expressionist hand. Upon close examination, the Benday dots of large scale, mass-produced commercial printing come into focus, anchoring the works in their own materiality of the everyday.
Throughout his work, Kay Hassan has sourced from his immediate urban environment, taking discarded and second-hand items and repositioning them through figurative representation that highlights social, political, environmental and economic issues. Hassan mines contemporary subjects within South Africa to speak to the realities of global urbanization that move far beyond the local.
In a new installation, Passage of Time, Hassan has assembled a collection of vintage radios playing old-school classics like Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Alongside the pile of radios is a grid of album covers. A bittersweet and yearnful expression, this piece brings together the analog hardware and the music that has been discarded by today’s digital generation. Hassan empowers these abandoned objects and guides our memory toward past shared experiences without losing the direction of a changing time.
Kay Hassan has exhibited his work internationally, in both solo and group exhibitions, at venues including Daimler Contemporary, Haus Huth, Berlin (2010); the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); Stenersenmuseet, Oslo (2009); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Johannesburg Art Gallery (2008); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2003) Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden (1998); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (1997); and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (1995). His first exhibition with the gallery was Recent Photographs in 2008. In 2000, Kay Hassan was awarded the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art.
