Sargent's Daughters is pleased to present Emily Furr's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery: Delirious New York. Across paintings, drawings, and collages, this new body of work places Furr's precise imagery in dialogue with the iconic built environment of New York City. Rem Koolhaas' seminal work of the same title is a sprawling analysis of the architecture and planning of Manhattan and a manifesto on 20th century urbanism. Furr's new work critically engages with the history and mythos of the city she calls home, reinterpreting its signifiers through surreal and playful compositions.
In Delirious New York, Koolhaas charted the history of Manhattan’s development from the original Indigenous inhabitants, through the development of the skyscraper, to grand Modernist projects and redesigns. The book was published in 1978 and considers the city as a laboratory and origin point for modern urban culture, centering the psychology and ideology of the people who build and inhabit it. Koolhaas’ prose churns with historical anecdotes and enthusiasm for the next stages of Manhattan’s evolution.
Today, we inhabit a city very different from the one Koolhaas first encountered, yet the iconic landmarks he analyses still stand as signifiers of the city itself. Furr has lived in New York for the last 24 years, arriving in the city shortly after September 11, 2001. Across her major bodies of work, she has transformed signifiers of masculinity, violence, and power into wry visual puns and subversive scenes. In Delirious New York, she continues this project on home turf, invoking the same monuments as Koolhaas to interrogate the optimistic urban ideals they represent.
In the paintings on view, Furr conjures a moon floating amongst city blocks, a tongue licking up the side of a skyscraper, and architectural landmarks crumpled like discarded sketches. Scale, location, and gravity all become untethered, and the nocturnal cityscape seems to lose coherence. As we enter new eras of uncertainty and absurdity in the twenty-first century, Koolhaas’ dynamic understanding of the city continues to reflect its ever-changing development. Like Koolhaas’ text, Furr’s surreal compositions celebrate the contradictions of urban life, refuting linear conceptions of progress and expansion.
