Tomma Abts
Tomma Abts was born in Kiel, Germany in 1967 and has lived in London since 1995. In 2006, she was the recipient of the Turner Prize, awarded by the Tate Britain in London Abts’ work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2006) Kunsthalle, Basel (2005), The Wrong Gallery, New York (2003) and in commercial galleries in Berlin, Cologne, Dublin, and London.

Paul Chan: The 7 Lights
This exhibition marks the American premiere of Paul Chan’s complete series The 7 Lights, offering a unique occasion to explore the practice of a New York-based artist whose work engages such fundamental themes as politics, poetry, war, death, and desire. Begun in 2005, Chan’s ambitious cycle combines obsolete computer technology with hypnotic imagery to create a series of enigmatic encounters with light and darkness. In the title, the word “light” has been struck through, drawing attention to its dramatic absence.

Presented alongside a selection of works on paper, older videos, and a new projection, the Lights create a vast image of cyclical destruction and rebirth, spread across floors and walls like light falling through windows. Structured over the course of a day, each of the Lights begins peacefully, with the warm colors of dawn. Slowly the atmosphere changes: silhouettes of objects rise up through the air and are dismantled by obscure forces, while human shadows plummet towards the ground. Like a dream deteriorating into a nightmare, the sequence becomes increasingly horrific until it fades to dusk and peace returns, waiting for day to break again.

Just as a shadow cannot fully describe the object from which it emanates, The 7 Lights convey a narrative that is inevitably incomplete, yet rich with historical references, including ancient Greek mythology and Baroque painting. The 7 Lights can also be related to Biblical accounts of the origin of the world and its impending end, suggesting a possible reading of Chan’s cycle as an allegory of the seven days of creation. Furthermore, Chan’s work calls to mind contemporary tragedies such as 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing eruptions of terrorist violence around the globe. Unfolding like a present-day Last Judgment, a subjective and anonymous hand decides what rises and what falls; touching on the viewer’s own fears, the result is not as one might have imagined - worthless objects ascend while human life is cast aside like rainfall. However, caught as they are in an endless repetition, the Lights suggest that perhaps there is no end, just an eternal beginning.

SANNA: Works
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA have, in a short time, developed from a relatively little-known Japanese partnership to an internationally esteemed firm responsible for high-profile projects including The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and our museum, the New Museum in New York. Often referred to as an architect’s architect, SANAA has avoided a signature style while embracing qualities of light, transparency, and openness. The show (in the gallery, the café, and lobby) marks SANAA’s first comprehensive exhibition in New York and presents commissions and projects made over a ten-year period, characterized by an alchemy of understatement, lightness, warmth, and respect for human scale.

SANAA’s work is luminous and deceptively simple, sophisticated in its treatment of complex building details and fluid, nonhierarchical space. Their inventive use of exterior façades as permeable membranes establish subtle but provocative relationships between interior and exterior, individual and community, and the realms of public and private experience. Their intricate use of variation, unevenness, and off-centeredness emphasizes the relationship of architectural elements not as discrete entities along a single axis, but rather how they relate to one another. The models and plans in “SANAA: Works 1998-2008” reveal an intense interconnectedness between, for instance, commercial building projects such as the Christian Dior Bulding in Omotesando, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Vitrashop Factory Hall in Basel, Switzerland (2004—); domestic architecture like the House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Flower House, Suiza, Switzerland (2006—); and cultural projects including the Zollverein School of Management and Design, Essen, Germany (2003—); EPFL Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland (2004—); and the highly anticipated Louvre-Lens, France (2005—).

Smaller, complementary prototypes, furniture, and housewares are presented in visual conversation with SANAA’s building designs. Among the already existing SANAA-designed tables and Rabbit chairs in the New Museum’s café, is a model of SANAA’s Flower chair; a set of Alessi Tea & Coffee Towers; and a hanahana (flowerflower) stand with fresh flowers.The exhibition is a collaboration between Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, Karen Wong, Director of External Affairs, and SANAA.