For Mario
Opening Reception: Thursday, 27 June 2019 | 6 – 8 PM
Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present For Mario, an exhibition of modern and contemporary art and design curated by New York / Los Angeles-based architecture firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero (CHH). Works that span a spectrum of mediums are displayed throughout the galleries, which have been draped with cotton muslin in a classicizing gesture. For Mario will open with a public reception on June 27, 2019, from 6 PM to 8 PM and will remain until August 23.
In a performance staged specially for the exhibition’s opening reception, AMOC artists Anthony Roth Costanzo (countertenor) and Jay Campbell (cellist) perform the legendary final lament from Henry Purcell’s "Dido and Aeneas," perhaps the greatest monument to neoclassicism in the operatic canon. The performance animates the themes of the show and uses the exhibition design as its set, emerging from the muslin drapes.
The cloaked space is pure and austere. The pieces on view evoke the rooms of a closed-up house in which the owner’s possessions have largely been protected with a plain cloth. As a whole, the assembly of these works forms what the Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges calls a “dialogue of echoes”—one that explores the tensions between the ephemeral nature of the home and the transference of memories onto what is collected within. An Expressionist lamp from 1920, watercolors of a dressing table’s surface, a triangular bed designed for the nuclear family, a self portrait in oil, a manhole cover from an experimental capital city and more are revealed as the narrative elements in an imagined life.
For Mario is named for the writer Mario Praz, whose cataloguing and anthropological analysis of every object in his own Roman apartment formed his groundbreaking 1964 spatial autobiography, “The House of Life.”
The exhibition presents works by Pilar Almon, Louise Bourgeois, Sam Chermayeff, Mario Ceroli, Park Chan-Kyong, Milano Chow, Pierre Jeanneret, Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot, Candida Höfer, Misha Kahn, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Anselm Kiefer, Marka Kiley, Carlo Mollino, Oren Pinhassi, Gala Porras-Kim, Katie Stout, Cynthia Talmadge, Davide Balliano, Ghada Amer, Anna Weyant, Thomas Barger, Kwangho Lee, SO — IL and American Modern Opera Company.
ABOUT CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO
Charlap Hyman & Herrero is an architecture and design firm that takes a fully integrated approach to conceptualizing and executing spaces in their totality. Principals Andre Herrero and Adam Charlap Hyman lead a practice that considers all aspects of the built environment, from site plan to furniture. Working in various typologies CHH endeavors to create spaces that become worlds unto themselves, with gesamtkunstwerk at the core of the firm’s objective.
