Renée Green marks the multidisciplinary artist’s first major solo museum presentation in New York. Since the late 1980s, Green has produced densely layered and knowledge-based installations that return to and adapt strategies of Conceptual art from the 1960s and ’70s. In her uniquely recursive process, Green juxtaposes a range of materials—archival, documentary, and literary fragments, personal and found ephemera, speculative narratives, and her own extant work—to probe the unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, public recollection and personal memory.

Constellating historical, reconfigured, and newly commissioned work in the nexus of Dia Beacon’s floor plan—the two expansive, parallel central corridor galleries, and its adjacent perpendicular corridor—this chronologically defiant presentation aptly stages the artist’s practice in contact and context with influential figures of Minimal and Conceptual art key to Dia’s history and Green’s formation. Foundational multimedia installations that critically reconsider art-historical genres of site, landscape, and Land art will return to view in the United States for the first time in over three decades. Reunited in its entirety at Dia, Green’s Color series from the early 1990s examines how color functions as a tool for categorization, an arbitrary and socially coded value system, as well as an efficacious perceptual and spatial device for the artist’s poetic imaginings. Extending this chromatic engagement both on the wall and the ceiling, Green will suspend a new series of vibrant, text-based fabric banners, or Space Poems, along the corridors’ linear expanse, complemented by a new body of wall-mounted variations in enamel. Similarly, new hybrid configurations of the artist’s multicolored, modular geometric units for viewing and listening will be distributed throughout the galleries, functioning as provisional media architectures featuring selections from Green’s compendium of moving-image and sound works.

Renée Green is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Ella den Elzen, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Renée Green was born in Cleveland in 1959. She lives in New York City and Somerville, Massachusetts. 

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