Artist Tezi Gabunia to feature in New York's Armory Show fair
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Contemporary artist Tezi Gabunia will bring his acclaimed project on climate change, social media news cycle and recycling of art to The Armory Show, dubbed "New York City’s premier art fair", in the coming spring.
The Flooding of the Louvre, a work that responded to the 2018 floods in the French capital by raising a possibility of the city's famed Louvre museum becoming a victim of the natural disaster, will be among exhibits of the fair via Berlin's Galerie Kornfeld.
The German gallery has selected the artist, recipient of the 2016 Tsinandali Visual Arts Award, as its showcase for the American fair held since the mid-1990s. Gabunia's project will be exhibited in the Focus section of the event.
Presented in 2018 via a Facebook live stream - amplifying the subject themes of the work - the work presented a fictional scenario of water entering the venue to gradually destroy the rich exhibits in its confines.
The artwork presents a scoop, a situation, where the information as a show exceeds terrifying nature of catastrophe”, the artist noted in his preview of the project.
It also developed a theme of artwork recycling via utilisation of museum space mockups from the creative's previous projects - including Put Your Head Into Gallery - which were destroyed in the "flooding".
Gabunia's selection for the New York fair comes as a fruitful continuation of his collaboration with the Berlin gallery, which featured him as part of a group display in the German capital last year. The artist is also set to hold his personal exhibition at Tbilisi's Window Project gallery in a collaboration between the venue and Galerie Kornfeld.
Beside the recognition at the Tsinandali Awards, the Georgian creative has received critical acclaim from Designboom - a leading digital magazine of art and design - which named Put Your Head into Gallery among best installations of 2016. The magazine's review noted "the artist’s notion of the art world by triggering a dialogue about hyper-realistic issues in art" in the work.
Gabunia also told an Imedi TV programme hosts he was working on another part of the series of his installations, along with preparations for the Window Project exhibition.
Galerie Kornfeld will present the Georgian artist's work at The Armory Show between March 5-8.