Pavel Zoubok Gallery invites you to Ecce Homo, a three-part exhibition celebrating the work of pioneering artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt. The exhibition will include historical precedents, with works by Jack Smith, Florine Stettheimer and icons of the Stonewall rebellion, as well as a second group exhibition featuring eight artists who continued to mine gay aesthetics and sensibility through their use of reflection and refraction, beauty and glamour, and a collective embrace of found materials.

Ecce Homo (“behold the man”) - these are the words spoken by Pontius Pilate in the Bible as he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound, beaten and crowned with thorns, to a mob of angry onlookers before the Crucifixion. The suffering of Christ evoked by this well-worn phrase is the inspiration for an early work by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and has special resonance within the context of gay experience, particularly in the pre-Stonewall era when gay identity was publicly verboten and often articulated through an intricately coded, subterranean language of love and desire. Since the transformative Stonewall rebellion of 1969, in which a young Lanigan-Schmidt was an active participant, he has evolved a unique visual language that has endured over four decades of artistic practice and influenced subsequent generations of artists. His audacious mixed-media constructions and installations, stapled and taped from all manner of found material and glittering oddments, have given form to his experiences in the New York City environments of the Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen. He has been a pioneer both in his use of reflective and alternative materials (plastic, Mylar, colored foils, chenille stems, household staples) and in his unique confluence of aesthetics, religious and secular thought. His art celebrates gay sensibility and history not simply through the lens of homoeroticism, but through the more complex path of materiality and process.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including the Venice Biennales of 1980 and 1984, the Whitney Biennial of 1991 and the 1999 exhibition “The American Century” at the Whitney Museum. He has been an instructor in the M.F.A. Program of The School of Visual Arts in New York City since the mid-1980s. The artist has also served on the Governing Board of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine since 1992. In June of 2009 Lanigan-Schmidt was honored at the White House by President Obama for his courageous participation in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. In 2011 he was awarded a prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant and in 2012 was the subject of the critically acclaimed retrospective, Tender Love Among the Junk, at MoMA P.S.1 curated by Peter Eleey.

The current exhibition will contain important works spanning Lanigan-Schmidt’s distinguished career, many exhibited for the first time since his landmark exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery during the 1970s and 1980s. Among these are early mixed-media drawings and collages from the mid-to-late 1960s, important sculptural works from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as recent works. Our Cabinet gallery will feature a selection of historical artworks and objects that inform the artist’s unique aesthetic approach including works by Jack Smith, Florine Stettheimer and others.

Ecce Homo continues in Gallery 2 with a group exhibition featuring eight artists who have carried forward the lessons of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s distinctly gay sensibility in the decades following his emergence onto the New York scene. The works featured here focus on gay sensibility vis-à-vis materials and process rather than literal representations of homoeroticism. Arch Connelly’s (1950-1993) signature pearl-encrusted sculptures of the 1980s celebrate beauty, glamour, material excess and camp sensibility in their unapologetic embrace of the decorative. His language of divine excess is echoed in the richly encrusted mixed-media paintings of Christopher Tanner, whose highly theatrical performance work is literally and figuratively reflected in the constant play between the viewer and his sequin and jewel-encrusted surfaces. Tony Feher’s glittering abstract forms made from deconstructed commercial packaging celebrate the beauty of commonplace objects, silently evoking familiar forms. The luminous photo-weavings of Hunter Reynolds are metaphorical portraits that reflect the artist’s own journey of love and loss, recalling the community-based tradition of quilting. Oliver Herring’s ethereal woven Mylar sculptures from the 1990s underscore the fragility of life and the relationship between objects and memory, in silent homage to drag legend and performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger (1945-1990). Nayland Blake's mixed media sculptures point to the intersections of race and sexuality through a decidedly abstract handling of found materials. Artist and transsexual Greer Lankton’s (1958-1996) haunting doll sculptures give further dimension to the articulation of gay aesthetics in their exploration of (trans)gender and identity, fashion and glamour. Christian Holstad represents a new generation of artists who continue to expand the aesthetic and material boundaries of gay sensibility in visceral works that celebrate the transformative power of art to turn “trash” into treasure.

Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street
New York (NY) 10001 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 6757490
info@pavelzoubok.com
www.pavelzoubok.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 10am to 6pm