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Advance Exhibition Schedule

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 9, 2018

Advance Exhibition Schedule

Nancy Holt
Dia:Chelsea, New York City
September 15, 2018–Spring 2019

The first solo exhibition of Nancy Holt (1938–2014) to focus on her room-sized installations Holes of Light (1973) and Mirrors of Light (1974) will open at Dia:Chelsea in New York City on September 15, 2018.

Holt’s five-decade-long practice included work in art, architecture, and time-based media that involved singular mediations on interior and exterior environments. Concerning the complexities of perception—focus, light, and space—Holes of Light and Mirrors of Light push the conventions of sculpture by proposing a participatory experience similar to the installation-based practices of artists such as Michael Asher, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin. The study of the circle as a visual frame, interaction of light and shadow, perceptual process, and visitor engagement in these works concretized major themes in Holt’s practice, which she continued to explore throughout her career. After observing the convergence of the specific conditions present within these two large-scale works and exploring these concepts in the landscape, Holt created Sun Tunnels (1973–76), her most well-known work in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, which is now part of Dia’s collection, as well as Dark Star Park (1984), a large-scale environmental installation in Arlington, Virginia. Dia’s exhibition will mark the first recreation of Mirrors of Light since it was originally installed in 1974.

Blinky Palermo
Dia:Chelsea, New York City
September 15, 2018–Spring 2019

Also opening September 15, 2018, To the People of New York City by Blinky Palermo (1943–1977) will be on view for the first time in New York City since it was shown over thirty years ago in 1987 at Dia Center for the Arts, 548 West 22nd Street. To the People of New York City, Palermo’s magnum opus, is a multipartite group of paintings whose palette is derived from the colors of the German flag and titled, posthumously, from a dedication that he inscribed on the backs of the metal panels.

To the People of New York City is part of Palermo’s Metal Pictures series (or Metallbilder, in German), which he started while in New York City from 1973 to 1976. During this time, the artist began to compose serialized groups of paintings on metal, using color and formal patterns to focus on a specific experience of abstract progression.

Completed upon his return to Düsseldorf in late 1976, To the People of New York City was discovered in Palermo’s studio after his death in February 1977. Consisting of fifteen parts—composed from forty painted aluminum panels arranged in various combinations of black, cadmium red, and cadmium yellow—the demarcated bands of color in To the People of New York City read as striking, didactic signs that may reference the early twentieth-century abstract painting of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. To the People of New York City, however, is distinguished by its prescribed hanging and its rhythmically changing formats, which also bring to mind the jazz performances that Palermo sought out during his time in New York.

In addition to the paintings, Dia will exhibit Palermo’s preparatory studies—a selection of watercolors and felt pen sketches on parchment paper—on which he recorded ideas about the singular arrangement of the painted panels. The studies provide insight into the evolution of this comprehensive cycle of painting.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx: That’s It
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York
September 24–30, 2018

In September 2018, Joëlle Tuerlinckx (b. 1958, Brussels) will present her first live commission, That’s It, in the United States. For more than twenty years, Tuerlinckx has been widely known for complex installations that combine materials from her personal archive, such as collages, drawings, music, objects, and projections. Out of the staging of these immersive settings, Tuerlinckx has more recently developed a body of work rooted in live choreography and sound, which furthers her interest in exploring the experiential boundaries of what it means to inhabit the museum. 

Taking place over the course of one week, That’s It will feature different events each day that respond to Dia’s collection and Dia:Beacon’s physical architecture; the project will also involve the surrounding Hudson Valley community. Each moment will be filmed in real time, resulting in a feature-length film. Tuerlinckx’s commission for Dia proposes a comprehensive “museum choreography”—an ambitious performance engaging multiple collaborators and live elements in several gallery and outdoor spaces at Dia:Beacon. Alongside a series of intimate events involving her core performers, Tuerlinckx has invited several groups from the local community—including firefighters, youth softball players, and a high school marching band—to enact a walking procession that traverses the galleries. The events will be set to a live score composed and performed on mobile platforms, which will move through the galleries.

Charlotte Posenenske: A Retrospective
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York
March 9–September 10, 2019

Dia Art Foundation is organizing the first retrospective of German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) in North America. The exhibition will recover Posenenske’s legacy as a critical and prescient voice within contemporary art.

Posenenske’s body of work was produced in an exceptionally focused and abbreviated period between 1956 and 1968, after which she turned away from the art world to pursue the study of labor. Charlotte Posenenske: A Retrospective will highlight the artist’s critical contributions to the development of serial, site-specific, and participatory practices. Embracing industrial fabrication, reductive geometry, and serial repetition, Posenenske developed a form of mass-produced Minimalism that pointedly addressed the pressing socioeconomic concerns of the decade, circumventing the art market and rejecting established formal and cultural hierarchies. 

While Posenenske exhibited widely during the years that she was active as an artist—alongside peers such as Carl Andre, Hanne Darboven, and Sol LeWitt—her contributions to the discourse of Minimal and Conceptual art remain largely overlooked and unexamined. Dia’s exhibition will be the most significant and in-depth exploration of her practice to be mounted since her death. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hardcover volume published by Dia.

Dia Art Foundation

Founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists. At Dia:Beacon and Dia:Chelsea in Beacon and New York City, Dia fulfills its mission by commissioning new projects, organizing temporary exhibitions, displaying its collection of art from the 1960s and 1970s, and presenting programs of public engagement. Dia also maintains several long-term sites including: Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, which was inaugurated at Documenta 7 in 1982), all of which are located in New York City; the Dan Flavin Art Institute (established in 1983) in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico; Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76) in the Great Basin Desert, Utah; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany. 

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For additional information or materials, contact: Hannah Gompertz, Sutton PR, hannah@suttonpr.com, 212 202 4128

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