Typical gallerists moving to TriBeCa spend a small fortune making their new space look like the derelict former warehouses that originally attracted artists downtown because they were cheap. It’s this kind of paradox that makes the art world what it is—a high-end luxury business with an extraordinary devotion to Minimalism. But it can feel a little jarring at times, and that’s why I was thrilled by the frankness of Jack Scheinman Gallery’s new TriBeCa flagship at 46 Lafayette Street, and its accompanying opening show.Nick Cave: Amalgams and Grafts“
Instead of simply looking back to the 1960s, Scheinman jumped all the way back to the Beaux-Arts 1890s, when Kim wasn’t quite there yet, and installed his new flagship in the historic Clock Tower Building. Formerly known as the New York Life Insurance Building, the block-long structure was designed by architect Stephen D. Hatch and completed by McKim, Mead & White after Hatch’s death in 1897. Scheinman’s new main exhibition space is the building’s magnificent “Bank Hall,” with titanic white marble columns, sweeping staircases and an intricate 29-foot-high coffered ceiling.
Additional exhibition spaces in the building include the renovation of a former meeting room led by Scheinman’s husband, Painter. Carlos VegaWorking with architect Gloria Vega Martín and preservationists Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, fully rounded corners and edges, and a secondary, street-level gallery on Broadway with a unique mural. In total Sheinman occupies 20,000 square feet, with offices, viewing rooms and many dramatic views of the courthouses and municipal buildings around Foley Square.
Rising from the middle of the hall is Nick Cave’s new bronze sculpture “Amalgam (Original), a barefoot figure draped in flowers and leaves that almost scrapes the ceiling. Instead of a head, branches and limbs protrude from his shoulders. A dense cluster grows. Birds perched on many of the branches. It was digitally created by combining the artist’s 65-year-old body scan Sirocco The ornaments and bird figurines, before being cast in wax and cast in bronze, are the largest of the cave to date. The highly detailed hands and feet were cast directly from his own.
Ghar started making his dress. “Sound Suit” Seen in a major show recently at the Guggenheim, as a response to the beating of Rodney King in 1991, he has made a career-long project of using his body to represent black male identity. And there is an indisputable charge of raising the movement so dramatically, the nearly 26-foot-tall black man, presented as a vast, poetic monument, placed in the center of a large art gallery. is
At the same time, you only get so much mileage out of a conceptual premise if the aesthetics aren’t equally understood, and I wasn’t sure that “Amalgam (the original), as a sculpture, did enough with its material or scale.” .. if Cave had made the whole thing by hand, or even attached the original found ornaments and branches to a 3-D printed form, rather than scanning them, it would have made a more powerful statement.
“Amalgam (Plot)”, on the other hand, in which two small figures are sprawled on the floor nearby, as if suffering from a violent attack, is accompanied by a spectacular cluster of metallic flowers and leaves of their own variegated composition and Colors are increasing. Among them, shocking and arresting. And “Amalgam,” from 2021, a seated bronze on the other side of the building, with a cluster of branches “in Amalgam (Original),” is actually more striking. Because It’s small – the contrast between the more or less life-sized figure and the lifelike quality of the frozen, funereal metal in which it’s cast is evocative.
I was thoroughly engaged, too, as I strolled upstairs through the hall and secondary galleries, through the door-sized collages of tin plate or tool serving trays that Cave calls “graffits.” These do everything the big bronzers promise, offering an easily accessible pleasure that doesn’t evaporate when you look at it for too long. Some of the pieces include large needlepoint portraits of Cave’s own face — the first time, the news release notes, that he has ever shown himself so clearly — and several include more decorative floral and leaf clusters that are tied together in bouquets.
The grafts have political or conceptual meanings, if you will – nods to questions about service and class and race. Turning serving trays decorated by anonymous, long-lost artisans into blue-chip art, Cave points to the arbitrary way we assign value to artifacts. His own face also reminds us that these arbitrary values extend to people. But because he arranges the greens, blacks, and pinks of the grafts with such confidence and generosity, because he combines so many different kinds of flowers with so many three-dimensional accents, their sheer visual complexity is his. The most important thing is the content.
This is what distinguishes the building’s luxury finishes, too, from other expensive constructions and renovations in the art world. Like the elements of the cave sculptures, the extravagant visual details of the clock tower building gain a new life, even an aesthetic innocence, when they are disconnected and recombined. Instead of being broken up and joined together, as the cave does with its contents, the rosettes and banisters and Corinthian capitals were re-plastered, touched up, or strengthened, and updated the business. has gone to which space is devoted. But the effect is the same: you feel free to simply enjoy how wonderful it all looks.
Nick Cave: Amalgams and Grafts
Through March 15, Jack Scheinman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, Lower Manhattan; jackshainman.com.