In extravagant new gallery, Nick Cave goes big in bronze

The typical gallery owner setting up shop in TriBeCa spends a small fortune to make their new space resemble the old abandoned warehouses that originally attracted downtown artists because they were cheap. It’s the kind of contradiction that makes the art world what it is: an over-the-top luxury business with a disingenuous devotion to minimalism. But it can sometimes feel a little irritating, and that’s why I was so delighted by the frank ostentation of Jack Shainman Gallery’s new flagship, TriBeCa, at 46 Lafayette Street, and its companion opening exhibition, “Nick Cave: Amalgams and Graphts”.

Instead of looking solely to the 1960s, Shainman returned to the Beaux Arts of the 1890s, when less was still not more, and installed his new flagship in the iconic Clock Tower building . Formerly known as the New York Life Insurance Building, the one-block structure was designed by architect Stephen D. Hatch and completed, after Hatch’s death in 1897, by McKim, Mead & White. Shainman’s new main exhibition space is this building’s magnificent “Bank Lobby,” which features titanic white marble columns, sweeping staircases, and a 29-foot-high, finely cast coffered ceiling.

Additional exhibition spaces in the building include a renovated former meeting room, under the direction of Shainman’s husband, painter Carlos Vega, in collaboration with architect Gloria Vega Martín and preservation specialists Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, to have fully rounded corners and edges, and a secondary gallery at street level on Broadway with a particularly sinuous wall. In total, Shainman occupied more than 20,000 square feet, including offices, observation rooms, and many spectacular views of the courthouses and municipal buildings around Foley Square.

In the middle of the room stands Nick Cave’s new bronze sculpture, “Amalgam (Origin),” a barefoot figure shrouded in flowers and leaves that almost scrapes the ceiling. Instead of a head, a dense cluster of twigs and limbs grows from its shoulders; At the top of many of these branches are majestic birds. Digitally modeled, combining a scan of the 65-year-old artist’s body with scans of found Syroco ornaments and bird sculptures, before being printed in wax and cast in bronze, the piece is the most large de Cave to this day; the highly detailed hands and feet were molded directly from his.

Cave began making his costume-like “Soundsuits,” recently seen in a major exhibition at the Guggenheim, in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King, and he has made a career-long project of using his own body to explore representations of black people. masculine identity. And there is an undeniable charge in intensifying this impulse so dramatically, placing this nearly 26-foot-tall black man, depicted as a vast poetic monument, in the middle of a large art gallery.