Airports and Extrusions
Andrew Kreps Gallery | New York
September 13 – October 27, 2012
(with works by Peter Fischli and David Weiss)
The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Airports and Extrusions, an exhibition which features a series of ceramic sculptures by Frank Benson and photographs by the artist team Fischli and Weiss.
Frank Benson, known for his remarkably detailed life-like sculptures, has, for this body of work, employed a simple tool — an extruder — to create tubular geometric forms and meandering ribbons in clay. Although the process is simple, the resulting works inhabit a surprisingly wide variety forms while retaining the mechanical imprint of the tool used in their creation. The final fired, but unglazed ceramic sculptures, appear to be rendered from mild steel, moist clay or flexible leather. In these works, Benson achieves a rare formal elegance, accentuating the spontaneous and the arbitrary by allowing the vagaries of the process to inform his decisions about the individual composition of each work.
Airports, a photographic series by Fischli and Weiss examines the quotidian aspects of global travel by focusing the uniformity of the terminals and tarmacs of such disparate locales as Zurich and Rio de Janeiro, symptoms of the postmodern experience. The mundane subjects in these images are familiar to us all, fuel vehicles, baggage trucks, the daily routine of the airport worker yet these photos highlight the extreme complexities of such tableaus and everyday life. Deceptively complex these photos share the same conceptual focus as their other sculptural and photographic works — the exceptional in the quotidian experience.