Daniel Arsham is back in Amsterdam after 6 years with Static Mythologies, a solo exhibition that just opened at Ron Mandos gallery. The third solo showcase with the gallery marks the European debut of the Lunar Garden installation, as well as serve as an introduction for his upcoming career overview showcase with MOCO Museum in Amsterdam which will open on 18th of January.
For his comeback in Europe after more than a year, the NYC-based artist prepared a selection of works that showcase the projects and concepts he's been developing and experimenting with recently. The center point of the exhibition is surely the Lunar Garden installation, which was directly inspired by the artist's visits to Kyoto’s famous "karesansui," or Zen gardens. Seemingly unchanging nature of the parks which are carefully recreated every morning by the local monks made a strong impact on Arsham whose work already focused on ephemerality, decay, and timelessness, as well as the connection between creation and deterioration. Reinventing the Japanese tradition by using different materials, introducing colors, but keeping the general aesthetic, tool shape, and architectural elements, the artists already created a couple of these installations worldwide, from NY to Brazil.
Along with the immersive installation, Arsham is continuing recently introduced series of wrapped sculptures which are directly affected by artist's focus on recreating tiniest details of objects from "fictional archaeology" series. Focusing on presenting fine stitching or fabric surface these works are referring to the wet drapery technique in Ancient Greek sculpture, but also of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s iconic wrapped sculptures. Static Mythologies also includes a whole series of eroded sculptures that present the imaginary archeological artifacts from the distant future, including the new series of made up magazine covers from world-known publications. Created using seemingly real content to the tiniest, sometimes humorous detail, these works are demonstrating the possible remains of our culture when discovered centuries after us.
Text and photos by Sasha Bogojev
Check out our video on Daniel's dual shows with Perrotin and Nanzuka in Tokyo last year