Level & Co. to present GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s
17 Septiembre 2024 - 10:00AM
Level & Co. is pleased to announce the exhibition of GRIT:
Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s, featuring paintings by Christopher
Wool, Glenn Ligon, Cecily Brown, Richard Prince, Martin Wong,
Elizabeth Peyton, Yoshitomo Nara, and Banksy.
The artists in GRIT embody the spirit of the 1990s through
subversive subjects, countercultural concepts, and guerrilla modes
of production. Carrying the weight of a century and the
anticipation of a new millennium, many artists in the ‘90s took it
upon themselves to dissect and disrupt mainstream ideologies. A
Do-It-Yourself attitude led to thriving subcultures that championed
individuality and creativity. Their dialectical approaches to
identity gave way to new considerations in painting beyond the
rigidity of binaries like representation versus abstraction or
graffiti versus fine art.
Christopher Wool’s monumental Untitled (1995) anchors the
exhibition. Adopting an anti-compositional approach, Wool whites
out preceding paint layers constructed from black enamel rollers,
silkscreens, and spray paint with thick, dripping brushstrokes. A
visual echo of municipal graffiti removal, the artwork employs
urban aesthetics and commercial painting techniques to destabilize
conventional notions of process and image.
The inclusion of Glenn Ligon’s Stranger #55 (2011) honors the
origin of its series in 1997. These black oil stick and charcoal
dust stenciled reproductions of James Baldwin’s essay critically
engage with notions of race and sexuality through language and
material. The deliberate illegibility of his monochrome text and
background invites the viewer not just to accept but to find beauty
in ambiguity. His sparkling loose particles, a waste byproduct of
coal processing, transform grit from the ground into a fine art
material–a not-so-subtle allusion to the title of the
exhibition.
Cecily Brown’s One Touch of Venus (1999) strategically teases
the viewer with ambiguous hedonistic imagery in her feminist
reclamation of the nude Venus. She replaces the dichotomy of
representation versus abstraction with a harmonious synthesis of
both painting strategies to celebrate the specificities of women’s
bodies and sexuality through an art historically significant
allegorical subject. Brown’s painting juxtaposes Richard Prince’s
Are You Kidding? (1988) in technique and tone. An example of his
Monochromatic Jokes series, the punchy two-liner lands at the
expense of the narrator’s wife. He leans into the provocative irony
of screen printing a lowbrow, offensive joke onto a primed and
stretched canvas.
Home to six of the eight exhibiting artists, New York City
emerges as the underlying geographical context for GRIT. The
intimate social web of communities across the city shine through
the portraits of Martin Wong’s Lower East Side graffiti friends Lee
Quiñones, Untitled (1989) and Angel Ortiz, Angelito (1997), and
Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits of her collaborator, Piotr Uklanski
(1996), and her assistant Ben in Haircut (Ben & Spencer)
(2002).
Japan-based Yoshitomo Nara consumed the music and visual culture
of New York in the 1990s and participated in exhibitions across the
United States, Europe, and Asia throughout the decade. Paired with
Wool’s 1992 word painting, which reads “DOG DEAD,” Nara’s Kaputt
Pup King (1999) highlights the global reach of grunge and the
shared angst of his American contemporaries.
The exhibition ends with Banksy’s Exclamation Rat (2003), an
embodiment of the outcast rebellious spirit, which characterizes
the 1990s. Radical and nonconformist, the anonymous Banksy and his
spray-painted rats represent the unpolished dynamism of the decade
and its vestiges in the early aughts.
GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s will be on view by
appointment only from September 19th to December 16th, 2024, at
Level & Co. on 74th Street in the Upper East Side.
GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990sSeptember
20 - December 16, 202430 East 74th StreetBy appointment only
PRESSLevel &
Co.press@levelandco.com