ART + ARCHITECTURE
final Biennial in the Breuer building
as the Whitney decamps to its new
Renzo Piano-designed home in the
Meatpacking District next year,
perhaps more suitable terroir for
a contemporary museum than the
buttoned-up upper east side.
Fittingly, there is a piece in this year’s
Biennial which serves as an homage
of sorts to the Breuer ziggurat. On
the fourth floor, in a large windowed
gallery, Zoe Leonard has created a
capacious camera obscura using the
museum’s signature trapezoidal window with its panorama of tony Madison Avenue as a prismatic lens. The
window is covered save for a small
hole which inverts the exterior scene
and casts the image of the up-ended
tableau onto the opposing wall of the
gallery. One enters the dim space as
the streetscape is projected on its head
with traffic racing across the gallery
ceiling, shoppers madly rushing topsyturvy, and rooftops of brownstones
skimming the floor.
ABOVE, TOP : Photo of current building by Jerry
L. Thompson. ABOVE, BOTTOM : Rendering
of the new building, view from the High Line.
Courtesy Whitney Museum.
Zoe Leonard, 945 Madison Avenue, 2014. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Collection of the artist; courtesy
Murray Guy, New York; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
APRIL MAY 2014
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