| Opening reception First Friday,
February 5, 5:30 - 8:30 pm
All art roads lead to Philadelphia in February and March 2010.
In the 14 years since inaugurating this important survey of innovative
non-traditional approaches to sculpture using fiber materials,
Gallery Director and Biennial Curator Bruce Hoffman has assembled
a remarkable collection that addresses the contemporary world
history of these practices with a mix of passion, gesture, intimacy
and powerful narrative.
The 7th International Fiber Biennial in 2010 has been
organized in conjunction with Philagrafika , an exposition that
examines the print in all its possible manifestations. Opening
January 29, and led by the Columbian Curator Jose Roca, Philagrafika
is a consortium of 86 organizations and venues throughout the
Philadelphia area. Consisting of a series of rolling exhibitions,
installations and lectures that continue through April 11, 2010,
it will feature a staggering array of works by both internationally
prominent artists and relatively unknown new talent, all assembled
under the theme of ‘The Graphic Unconscious’. Snyderman
Works Biennial Curator and Director Bruce Hoffman asked the invited
Biennial artists to address this theme as well.
Connecting the dots that link exhibitions such as the Fiber
Biennial with, for example, the recent tapestryinspired exhibit,
Banners of Persuasion , at the James Cohan Gallery in
New York (which included works by such international figures as
Kara Walker and Grayson Perry ), and with the large format tapestries
of William Kentridge , shown at his solo exhibition at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in 2007-08, leads to the realization that a serious
re-examination of the power of materials - when combined with
brilliantly creative fabrication - is underway.
Contemporary art has gone through a decades-long period of concept-driven
work, frequently eschewing the power of materials. And along the
way, perhaps in response to this over-intellectualization, we’ve
seen the rise of kitsch as a form of protest to the pretension
and self-referential nature of most of it. The Snyderman-Works
Galleries Fiber Biennial , and exhibitions such as the Cohan Gallery’s
and Kentridge’s, at PMA, are a very different pathway -
one that returns to the roots of art as a process connected to
us through the unspoken power of materials. Beginning as fabric
that touched our bodies, it is one of the oldest subliminal associations
we have as humans.
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