Christian Schwarzwald and Ethan Breckenridge at Derek Eller Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Derek Eller Gallery presents a site-specific drawing installation by Christian Schwarzwald entitled Boxed. Consisting of a series of large works on paper which are mounted on partially painted gallery walls, Boxed challenges the viewer’s experience of pictorial space. As two-dimensional drawings interact with the three-dimensional room, the installation becomes sculptural. This quality is further enhanced by Schwarzwald’s repeated use of the box form which functions both as a space-defining device and as a kind of presentation vitrine for the drawings within.

The majority of the works are done in charcoal and depict scenery which hovers somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Yet interspersed throughout are several images of rope structures, meticulously drawn in graphite and acrylic, and serving to remind us of the installation’s architectural space both real and imagined. Viewed through such an untraditional perspective the content of the drawings is given new meaning. The notion that a larger context can re-define and illuminate a single gesture is central to Schwarzwald’s work. He writes, “Like language is formed by putting together a combination of words, my drawing installations are built out of single drawings that complete one another to form a new greater picture.”

Based in Berlin, Christian Schwarzwald has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna and Nina Menocal Gallery in Mexico City, and has also been featured in group shows at Bonner Kunstverein and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. His drawings are in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This will be his third solo exhibition at the gallery.

North Room: Ethan Breckenridge
Ethan Breckenridge employs glass and two-way mirror as a membrane, which folds and repeats a language of the familiar. For this project, he creates prisms containing sections of space, along side a series of common windows, covered with city dirt or drywall dust. Within the prisms, living potted plants highlight a division and collaboration between a literal and metaphorical section of time. On nearby windows familiar sayings are scratched in to the dust, appearing like apparitions. The statements are constructed to be powerful in the context of an appropriate conversation, but displaced as they are, they become like a fortune cookie, obviously at a loss for depth.

Breckenridge is interested in transitory places and objects as a means of exploring the presentation and rhetoric of social systems. These objects and architectural motifs facilitate a stylized encounter with the everyday. In the end, the work never exclusively becomes a representation of an experience, or a literal object, rather, the division and displacement of both.

Ethan Breckenridge’s work was recently featured in Trapdoor organized by The Public Art Fund at Metrotech in Brooklyn and at Zentrum Paul Klee Sommerakademie in Bern Switzerland. This will be his first exhibition with the gallery.