SINGULAR OBJECT

Curated by Romain Dauriac and Jenny Mushkin Goldman
Hosted by 53W53 at the 53W53 Gallery at 745 Fifth Avenue, NYC
April 3 - 21, 2017

Singular Object was organized in celebration of the future New York City building, 53W53, designed by the renowned architect, Pritzker Prize-winner Jean Nouvel. Exploring the intersection of art and architecture, Singular Object presents works by Jean Baudrillard, Sarah Braman, Isabelle Cornaro, M.C. Escher, Hugh Ferriss, Adam Fowler, Katsumi Hayakawa, Nir Hod, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Lee Hovnanian, Iván Navarro, Francesca Pasquali, Jon Rafman, Evan Robarts, Will Ryman, James Turrell, and Dustin Yellin.

Singular Object presents artworks by modern and contemporary artists in dialogue with Nouvel’s architectural philosophies. Since their inception, the visual arts and architecture have been connected. Here, the connectivity is seen through their shared power to destabilize by means of the confrontation between materiality and illusion, the resulting punctum being where their artistic creation is truly achieved. The artworks are singular in their varied methodology, such as appearance/disappearance, destruction/creation, appropriation/revelation and transparency/obscurity), yet all, in their enigmatism and rebelliousness, trigger a similar metaphysical sequence of constant evolution that goes forward in perpetuity in the cyclical search for the limit of nothingness and finding infiniteness within that which is most concrete. Jean Nouvel's structures, including 53W53, and the visual artworks presented, are singular objects that contain spirit of our age with the vitality for the future, their essence built with the ephemeral mediums of transparency, spontaneity, autonomy, mutation, time, and light. They contain, as Jean Baudrillard described in his influential statement regarding architecture, "a mixture of nostalgia and extreme anticipation."