Orly Genger

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce exhibitions of new work by Orly Genger and Enoc Perez in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. There will be a reception for the artists on Thursday, September 9, from six to eight pm.

Orly Genger crochets abstract sculpture. Her works tend to hug the wall or the floor, or the perpendicular angle between the two, and appear to have a mass and weight that belie the airiness of their materials. While recalling the forms of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art from decades past, Genger imbues her sculpture with personal content by means of a venerable technique redolent of “women’s work” and the feminist practices that were in part a response to the masculinist muscularity of mainstream art of the 1960s and 1970s. A large, dark oblong hung on the wall seems to rest on the floor with the gravity of a Serra. A knotted shape of varied thicknesses of cord echoes the forms of the body and the jouissance of a Benglis relief. An irregular, forked piece with an upside-down V at its base brings to mind a Tuttle translation of Brancusi. Yet through all of this evocation of the art-historical past, Genger’s signature persists in the knotted lines of her sculpture, rough and erratic, idiosyncratic and personal like handwriting or language itself. Made without needles, using only her fingers, Genger’s work literally records her movement through time, indexing her self.

This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition. Concurrently, her work will be shown at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City and in The Peekskill Project. Previously, she has shown in the Triennial at the Haifa Museum in Israel and in a project room at Stux Gallery. She has recently been the subject of profiles in The New York Sun and Artnet.com.

Works on paper by Enoc Perez will occupy Gallery 2 and represent an anthology of his artistic concerns. Graphite drawings of a San Juan hotel, rum bottles from a Christmastime advertisement, and a nude after a photograph found in Picabia’s studio recapitulate for the artist the traditional genres of landscape, still life, and figure painting.

This will be Perez’s third show with the gallery. An exhibition of his paintings will be held simultaneously at The Happy Lion in Los Angeles. His work will be included in The Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in October and was recently seen in None of the Above at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.