ALAIN KIRILI
ARTICULATE, a group exhibition curated by David Cohen.
With Clytie Alexander, Eve Aschheim, Willard Boepple, Diana Cooper, James Hyde, Alain Kirili, Harriet Korman, Jonathan Lasker, Katherine Mangiardi
Whether used as a verb or an adjective, the word “articulate” manages to suggest at once fluency and separate parts. We are articulate when we can join words together to form an eloquent whole, all the while savoring the precise quality and function of each word or phrase in our sentence. We can be effortlessly articulate or we can struggle to occupy language in such a way that the struggle itself is expressive. We can carve our meanings defiantly in space or we can painstakingly ensure that each concept is soldered in the right way to the next, through a process of elaboration. We are articulate when we enliven the silence that surrounds our words but by the same measure we can articulate meaning through correction, the line that makes sense of otherwise disparate utterances.
This group exhibition, selected by David Cohen, brings together artists working in a striking array of different mediums, genres, styles and milieu, as befits a curator and critic of ecumenical taste who prides himself in looking across lines of fashion and status. In the group he has gathered there is, nonetheless, a common sense of articulation taking the form of visible lines of thought, clarifying elements, or structures that read syntactically. The exhibition will include sculpture (forged metal, assembled wood, assembled found objects), painting, drawing, printmaking, photomontage, photogram and video. Artists draw inspiration from sources as diverse as landscape, computer systems and figure skating, or from gestures or structures rooted in purely abstract visual thinking. The moods vary, too, from the tentative to the declarative, but binding these disparate efforts and varying degrees of organizing principle is a common striving for articulation.
Katherine Mangiardi, Figure Variation, 2017
