Mark Hadjipateras: Affordable Solutions for a Better Living?

Denise Bibro Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, 4th Floor, Chelsea New York is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of New York artist Mark Hadjipateras.

Mass production makes things cheaper, and therefore, more available to more people; however, as the world becomes more democratic, it also becomes more homogeneous. These thoughts provide the basis for Mark Hadjipateras’ installation Affordable Solutions for a Better Living?

This exhibition is comprised of two parts that while physically separate, are in conceptual dialogue with one another. In the first space Hadjipateras has fashioned an environment entirely out of products purchased culled from IKEA. The store functions as the perfect quarry from which to craft sculptural commentary on consumption. The component products are arranged in clusters and families throughout the space, bringing together traditions of minimal art, scatter, and pop art works from the ’60s and ’70s. In an adjacent space, hanging from the walls is a group of photographs (printed digitally on watercolor paper) which appear to be small paintings in and of themselves, making reference to movements and artists such as Pop Art, Russian Constructivism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

The effect, both in the three-dimensional work and in the photographs, is brought about by decisive appropriation and recontextualization of it in the gallery setting and in relation to other work. By bringing it back into the gallery setting, Hadjipateras has taken the modernist-inspired products full-circle, and, by pushing the limits of what these objects represent, he questions distinctions between art, design, and disposable merchandize. Inexpensive, modular, and ubiquitous, IKEA symbolizes a somewhat less utopian culmination of Modernism than crusaders like Mies van der Rohe sought. Hadjipateras’ ultimately aims to blur the line between expressionism and stoicism. Mass production and globalization has already resulted in universally accepted aesthetics and standards of taste. A Hilton or Inter-Continental hotel room is identical in New York, Beijing, Paris, Athens, Dubai or Tokyo. Is this only the beginning?

This is Hadjipateras’s third solo exhibition at Denise Bibro Fine Art. He has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Japan: Littlejohn/Sternau Gallery, NYC, Steinbaum/Krauss Gallery, NYC, Andre Zarre, NYC, Artio Gallery, Athens, Greece, Gallery K, London, England, Asuka Gallery, Tokyo. He has also exhibited in the Queens Museum of Art, Alternative Museum, Cooper Union, Socrates Sculpture Park, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece. Hadjipateras’ work has been reviewed in Art in America, ArtNews, Sculpture Magazine, Time Out NY, New York Magazine, Washington Post, The New York Sun, Newsday, The New York Times, and The New York Observer. His work is in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, Zimmerli Art Museum, and the National Pinacotheque of Athens. In 2003 he was a recipient of the New York Municipal Arts Society award for best public work for his MTA commissioned subway mosaics.

There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 1, 2007, 6 – 8 pm.