Join us on December 14th for a rare opportunity to visit with Lawrence Weiner in his Manhattan studio. ICI is proud to welcome our members into the workspace of one of the central figures of Conceptual Art. Lawrence will share his thoughts and ideas regarding his personal and long pursued inquiries into language and the art-making process.
Throughout Lawrence’s longstanding and prolific career, he has put forward a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of the artwork; translating his investigations into linguistic structures and visual systems across varied formats and manifestations. Most famously the works take the form of large typographic wall texts, referred to by Lawrence as sculpture, and the words, phrases and statements he employs are often representative of states or processes grounded in materiality. His works exist simultaneously as instructions, propositions and evocations as well as the object itself.

Lawrence has received numerous grants and awards, and in 2007/08 was honored with a 40-year retrospective of his work, entitled Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Lawrence is represented in New York by Marian Goodman Gallery, in London by Lisson Gallery, in Paris by Yvon Lambert Gallery, in Los Angeles by Regen Projects, and in Tel Aviv by Dvir Gallery.

This event is for ICI Members only.

On September 29th, join us at Julie Mehretu’s new Manhattan studio to visit with one of today’s most highly regarded abstract painters. Julie will share her own personal experience in creating her compelling large-scale, elaborate paintings, which are laboriously built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making in pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint.

In her paintings, Julie creates and communicates narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies. As she suggests, these rich canvases act as “story maps of no location” enabling the viewer to interpret them as pictures into the imagined.

Julie is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery here in New York and shows at White Cube in London and Carlier Gebauer in Berlin. A solo exhibition of Julie’s work, Grey Area, is currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (May 14th – October 6th).

This event is for ICI Members only.

Our first Fall New York Studio Event offers ICI members the exciting opportunity to engage with experimental, cross-media artist Olaf Breuning. Olaf will welcome us into his Tribeca studio for an exclusive look into his playful working methods and his most recent body of work. The artist will share his own personal insight into his extraordinary labyrinth of inspiration stemming from Woody Allen to the World Wide Web.

In addition to working with Metro Pictures here in New York, Olaf also exhibits at: Nils Staerk in Copenhagen, Air de Paris in Paris, Kodama Gallery in Tokyo and Kyoto, Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna, Galerie Nicola von Senger in Zurich, and Michael Benevento in Los Angeles. Last Fall Olaf had his fifth solo show at Metro Pictures titled Small Brain Big Stomach. The exhibition included an array of comically mischievous wall-bound drawings and sculptures. Currently, you can find a solo exhibition of Olaf’s work at the Centre d’Art Contemporain at La Chapelle du Genêteil, France (July 3rd – August 29th).

*Please note: The visit will take place in the artist’s studio in a 5th floor walk up building; there is unfortunately no elevator available for use.

This event is for ICI Members only.

An ICI members’ favorite in last year’s New York Studio Events survey, Carrie Mae Weems will take us on a private visit of her exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, unlocking the secrets behind the imagery in her new work. This is a special preview of the exhibition, exclusively for iCI members, held on the evening before the opening. Weems’ recent feature on art:21, which aired this Fall on PBS, showed her insatiable passion for history. In 40 years of artistic practice, she has mined the history of American photography, exhorting its spirits to come back to life. She has brought to American photography a reflective body of work that has time and again exposed much of the American imagination and collective unconscious.

This event is for ICI Members at the $500 level and above only.

On March 18th, join us at Rashid Johnson’s Brooklyn studio for an intimate look at the artist’s newest work, and an opportunity to better understand the ways in which this prolific artist successfully manages to work across media, in sculpture, photography and film. Set up to coincide with his current solo exhibition at the Upper East Side’s Salon 94 (which we strongly encourage you to see beforehand), this will be a timely opportunity to catch up with an artist whose career has shot up in recent years, with solo exhibitions in Europe and across the United States. At Salon 94, Johnson presents a sculptural installation that turns the domestic space of the townhouse’s ground floor into a trophy room to The Sweet Sweet Runner, a character portrayed in an accompanying film. In this manipulation of pop culture relics and artifacts, like in his photographic portraits of split identities behind faint smoke screens, Johnson is on a consistent quest for shifting notions of social and personal history, politics and spirituality. 

This event is for ICI members at the $500 level and above only.

Our first event of the Spring series will feature a preview of Relics & Reliquaries, a selection of Jeffrey Vallance’s assemblages at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea. Vallance is an iconic American figure. An artist who has investigated the various intersections of art history and suburban Americana, he looks at the world around him at times like a poet, at others in the manner of an anthropologist. Since the mid-1970s, he has explored the religious, the secular and the political, in his diverse practice including painting, sculpture, assemblage of “relics” and performative interventions, always with optimism and humor. His “relics” and “reliquaries”, collected by the artist over the years, are complex objects imbued with memories and histories, which take on surprising new meaning in these assemblages. As Vallance walks us through them, they become open portals into this fascinating artist’s mind.

This event is for ICI Members only.