The Armory Show

Throughout the past two decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that border on painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg’s series of sculptural flowers offer a fragile beauty and an untamable, organic logic of their own. Constructed from mixed media – modeling clay, paint, fabric and resin – the sculptures recall native lilies or orchids, as well as fantastical floral arrangements in other-worldly colors and forms. Flowers are a recurring motif in Djurberg & Berg’s practice, for their abiding interest in the fleeting nature of human emotions and their respective symbolism for emotions like love, joy, desire, sadness and vulnerability, and ultimately, the circle of life. In 2009, the artists created their first major work inspired by flora and fauna, a subversively surreal and immersive Garden of Eden, entitled The Experiment, for the 53rd Venice Biennial, for which they were awarded the Silver Lion for best emerging artists.

This series is an extension of Olafur Eliasson’s long interest in color, transparency, and layering – topics he first began addressing in watercolor paintings, to which the glass works are closely related. Both groups of works use compositions of circles and ellipses to create a sense of movement and depth or of space and time.

Arrayed in two leaning stacks upon a driftwood shelf, colorful panes of hand-blown glass overlap to create a variety of hues, while circular and elliptical cutouts allow surprising tones to shine through the layers. Because of the inherent visual confusion of the ellipse - which can appear to be a circle viewed in perspective - the sequence can both be seen as a circle transforming into an ellipse or as a disc spinning in illusionistic space. The driftwood logs - salvaged from the coast of northern Iceland - have been planed into a shelf on one side and left raw on the other.

Rodrigo Hernández works across drawing, painting, relief, sculpture and installation, to create a personal constellation of

images. His fantastical visual lexicon is rooted in a wide and distinctive range of sources: from Mexican pre-Columbian art to Japanese prints, from European modernism to science and literature. As in dreams, disparate scenes and sights are interwoven in surreal images, inviting the viewer to imagine new possibilities and uncover mysterious connections. Simmering with the emotional power of subconscious memory, Hernández’s works are suffused with the attraction of the unknown. His touchstones of poetry and philosophy frame his work within a broader epistemological and psychological exploration.

Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, imagery and objecthood, her work frequently includes plays on art historical references and traditions. This body of work sees Saban continue her investigations into the relationship between paint, pigment and canvas. Starting with her research into the history of pigments and the composition of paint that she conducted during a residency at the Getty Conservation Institute in 2016, Saban has found it interesting to change the relationship between paint and canvas. In this work, the paint is woven through the linen.

Foam SB114/47p is comprised of a complex geometric structure of translucent iridescent plexiglas that suggests the cell-like membranes of bubbles that emerge when oil is shaken with water. As in an organic system, this work is composed of many parts all similar but all different from one another, whose interconnected elements capture the iconic and intricate complexity of Saraceno's oeuvre.