Lisa Tan

Andreas Grimm and Adrian Rosenfeld are pleased to announce, Lisa Tan, the first exhibition in their newly relocated gallery at 530 West 25th street, second floor. This will be the New York-based artist’s first solo show in New York.

Using sculpture, photography, drawing, and installation, Tan’s art practice distills issues of relationships, reciprocity, and intimacy into a concise formalism-turning experiences into objects. The exhibition will feature a new series of color photographs and an installation entitled “Philodendron Propagation.”

In her photographic series of books, Tan presents two copies of the same book, one belonging to her and the other to her current boyfriend. Documenting places where their individual libraries overlap, the images feature pairs of worn copies of such books as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” (now “Two Hearts of Darkness” (2006)) and Jean Francois Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” (now “Two Postmodern Conditions” (2006)). The works play off of their own coupling, and while deeply personal, the series also functions as a representation of how taste, culture and values inform relationships.

In the work titled “Philodendron Propagation” (2006) Tan assumes the role of caretaker of a friend’s houseplant, a living object of great sentimental value. Tan’s effort to nurture and propagate the plant- an act of kindness and generosity- underscores the manner in which these objects, books or plants, become substitutes for the things we truly desire. Nevertheless, by documenting these “events” in her life, library cross-over, the care of a friend’s plant, and turning them into art objects, Tan complicates her own relationships with the people and things she takes as her subject matter.

Tan’s work was recently featured in Artforum as a part of the annual “First Take” issue. Christian Rattemeyer writes: " If relational aesthetics is about the sociology of human interactions, then Tan’s aesthetics of relationships is about the economy of human intimacy, a romantic conceptualism grounded in the investigation of emotional drives….Her work introduces a timely sense of personal emotional investment at a moment when sentiment is being rediscovered in the histories of Conceptual art.”

Lisa Tan will have a one-person exhibition curated by Lauri Firstenberg at LA >< ART in Los Angeles this Fall. She recently participated in a group exhibition at Harris Lieberman in New York. She has also shown at Grimm|Rosenfeld, Munich.

Pressetext

Lisa Tan