Exhibitions close October 21

FINAL WEEKEND!Join us for the following programming tomorrow, Saturday, October 21st.

East Gallery

Barbara Ess – Archives

11am-2pm: Book sale from the library of Barbara Ess

2pm: Talk by Kirby Gookin

A forward-facing view of a gallery wall. On the left of the wall are two pieces of handwritten notes on lined yellow paper. To the right of those pieces are two larger mounted photographs leaning against the wall on a mounted shelf. The first piece is a highly contrasted black and white image of several dogs. The second piece is a diptych of watery reflections next to a high-contrast image of a baby with its eyes half closed.

Barbara Ess – Archives, installation view, 2023.

White Columns is proud to present Barbara Ess – Archives. Featuring materials drawn from the artist’s estate, the exhibition is a partial account of the life and work of Barbara Ess (1944-2021), a hugely influential and mercurial artist who was a photographer, musician, publisher, educator and longtime pivotal figure in the downtown New York art and music scenes. Forming a ‘portrait’ of sorts, the exhibition seeks to illuminate hitherto under-acknowledged aspects of the multifaceted artist’s life and work, underscoring what The New York Times described as a “rarefied position in the space where philosophical inquiry meets the cool-kid avant-garde.” Through her assignments for students, reading lists, diary entries, artist statements, and much more besides, we encounter Ess as continually probing the boundaries of the seen and unseen, what she called the “in here” versus the “out there.”

Learn more about the exhibition here.

West Gallery

White Room: Piero Penizzotto

(A close up view of a lifesize sculpture. A young boy in an orange Star Wars t-shirt makes a teasing gesture, with eyes half-way closed, his tongue sticking out and open hands raised next to his ears. Behind him can be glimpsed other large papier-mâché sculptures of people.)

Piero Penizzotto, installation view, 2023.

White Columns is proud to present the debut solo exhibition by the New York-based Peruvian-American artist Piero Penizzotto (b. 1998, Queens, New York.)

Penizzotto constructs uncanny, life-size painted papier-mâché sculptures that explore the artist’s dual Peruvian-American identity through themes of community, friendship, and the ebb and flow of daily life. For White Columns, the artist has created his most ambitious work to date, a new tableaux of several interconnected sculptural works depicting members of his immediate family. Taken as a whole, these imagined scenes of family members variously sharing a hug, chatting, barbecuing, and playing around produce a vividly animated portrait of a family depicted at a distance, but captured with a striking emotional immediacy.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
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