John Giorno's first solo exhibition at Elizabeth Dee, SPACE
FORGETS YOU, is on view April 2 - May 9, 2015
545 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Elizabeth Dee is honored to present SPACE FORGETS YOU, a new exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by John Giorno. The exhibition opens on Thursday, April 2nd with reception from 6-8pm, and continues through May 9th, 2015. To accompany the exhibition, Giorno will also perform at exhibition's final week on Friday May 8th at 6:30pm.
Giorno's explosive, visual and concrete works continue in a new series of rainbow paintings that occupy the front gallery. Works such as LIVING IN YOUR EYES, LIFE IS A KILLER, and I WANT TO CUM IN YOUR HEART coexist and resonate. The exhibit continues with two bodies of drawings, including THANX 4 COMING, GOD IS MANMADE and IT'S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. The devoted rooms to each series manifest the range and depth of Giorno's creative production in painting, graphite and watercolor. The pulsating delivery of Giorno's reading style, with line breaks and repetition, dictate tempos within the exhibition and encourage reinvestigation of phrases.
Many of the texts employed in Giorno's new works were originally sourced from poetry that the artist has written, or lines that never made themselves into a final poem. The clarity of the word's visual impact hangs in the air and penetrates the mind. Giorno's history with concrete poetry techniques date back to his first visual works in the late 1960's. The culmination of his practice today, can arguably be traced back to his first series, when Giorno was exploring the audio and visual perception of words on a field. This interest led to collaborations and sound recordings that further defined Giorno's live performances.
Giorno is an artistic innovator who has been defying assumptions of poet, performer, political activist, Tibetan Buddhist, and visual artist since he emerged upon the New York art scene in the late 1950's. He is one of the most actively producing and performing artists of his generation. In the 1960's, noticing that poetry readings were curiously lacking in audio capability, Giorno began collaborating with innovators at the forefront of electronic audio technology. He began producing multi-media, multi-sensory events concurrent with Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He worked with Bob Rauschenberg in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in 1966, and with Bob Moog in 1967-68. His breakthroughs in this area include Dial-A-Poem, which was first exhibited in 1968 at the Architectural Society of New York, and was additionally exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's Information exhibition in 1970.
For more about John Giorno's latest solo exhibition please click HERE.