Magdalena Sawon
presents
Chop Shop by GREG ALLEN at SPRING/BREAK Art Show


March 1 - 7, 2016




For this years SPRING/BREAK Art Show centering around the theme of "⌘COPY⌘PASTE," Magdalena Sawon presents a solo exhibition by Greg Allen titled Chop Shop.

Best examples of undisputed masters of contemporary art are rarely available to "regular" collectors due to their extraordinary price or scale, or often both. Greg Allen is remedying this. Now, you too, can have a piece of Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter or Andreas Gursky. Come to the Chop Shop, located in the cavernous vault of the former Post Office. (room #3124). We have the scissors.

Working with appropriated imagery and lost or unobtainable artworks, Greg Allen offers up the products of creative destruction. Through repetitions and fragmentations of works by influential contemporary artists, he creates specious objects from suspicious images, presented for sale, all questions asked. Products of reproduction and subsequent dismemberment, these pictures are tangible evidence of the scheme that implicates us all, artist, dealer, viewer, and collector alike.

It's not the first time.

British aristocrats broke apart Renaissance altarpieces for souvenirs of the Grand Tour. 19th century dealers doubled their Dutch Masters inventories by sawing double-sided panels in two. Manet's heirs cut his politically incendiary painting of the assassination of Emperor Maximilian into smaller, more benign-and salable-portraits. As even emerging artists like Amalia Ulman and Ibrahim Mahama have their large-scale works dubiously divided, should we look at centuries of chopping up artworks and feeding scraps to the market as a cautionary tale or a tutorial?

In serving up fragment-friendly embodiments of great artworks, Chop Shop operates from the presumption that Capitalism treats unsalability as damage and routes around it. It doesn't matter if an artwork was designed to drape an entire pavilion in Venice, or if a painting was originally meant to be seen from an escalator in a 20-story geodesic dome. It's not a problem if it's already in a museum's collection. Or even if it was destroyed, surviving only as a negative in an archive, or a small plate in a catalogue. No matter their past fate, Chop Shop reanimates these artworks for a fleeting present, and offers the chance, however uncertain, of a new future. Will they be treasured and displayed? Dispersed and forgotten? Five centuries from now, will the surviving fragments be reunited in 's-Hertogenbosch like Hieronymous Bosch's altarpiece, to become the toast of the Noordbrabants Museum's 2516 exhibition calendar?

Barnett Newman's 18 x 8-foot painting Voice of Fire was created for Buckminster Fuller's US Pavilion at the Expo67 World's Fair in Montreal. Because of its site-specificity and massive scale, curator Alan Solomon deemed it unshowable almost anywhere else, and "virtually unsalable." The National Gallery of Canada proved Solomon wrong in 1989 when it bought the painting from Annalee Newman. But the $1.5 million price sparked a conservative outcry over public arts funding, and amateur replicas of Voice of Fire were painted, waved, and destroyed in protests across the country. Allen's meticulous, full-scale repetition, Chop Shop Newman Painting No. 1 (2016), will meet a more genteel fate: it will be be transformed on-site into Chop Shop Newman Paintings No. 2 - ? (all 2016). These new, domestically scaled works will be custom cut and stretched to order, optimized to fit any collector's space. While supplies last.

Allen's Destroyed Richter Paintings (2012 - ) are real world incarnations of archival photos of early paintings by Gerhard Richter, which the artist photographed before destroying in the 1960s. These full-scale pictures made in Chinese painting factories approximate the long-lost physical encounter with Richter's works, while simultaneously refusing the market fetishism that has developed around them.

Meanwhile, Destroyed Richter Grids (2015 - ) resurrects the experience of more recent work by reproducing lost or destroyed squeegee paintings as a full-scale grid of digital photographs, printed from reference images on the artist's website. These inkjet simulacra mirror Richter's own recent practice of producing "facsimile objects," photo editions of abstract paintings. The paradigmatic example is Cage Grid (2011), an edition in which the artist mounted a photo of one of Tate Modern's iconic squeegee paintings onto 16 aluminum panels. The grids were broken up and sold separately in the museum's gift shop. They have since reappeared frequently at auction. A similar fate is anticipated here.

Three large-format images of Andreas Gursky will also be split in the interest of accessibility and convenience. Adapting the Chinese concept of resourceful, unabashed counterfeiting, Allen's Shanzhai Gursky series (2015 - ) begin as original-scale prints made from the highest- resolution jpeg files circulating online at the time of their production. These indexical, pixellated prints are split, like an expensive stock, into new, more manageable-and affordable-minor masterpieces. The Shanzhai Gurskys of an urban Hong Kong landscape and a towering composition depicting a Madonna concert come pre-sliced. But a 10-foot long image of the Rhine, which looks a lot like the most expensive photograph in the world, will be cropped and mounted to order, enabling collectors to take home as much or as little of the Rhine as they can handle.


Magdalena Sawon is a founder/director of Postmasters Gallery in New York est. 1984.

Greg Allen is an artist, writer and the artworld's best detective.


March 1 - 7, 2016
Skylight at Moynihan Station (Main Post Office Entrance)
421 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
http://www.springbreakartshow.com.
VIP Preview Day, March 1
Collector's Preview (12 Noon - 4 PM)
VIP Vernissage (5 PM - 9 PM)

Regular Show Hours:
Wednesday, March 2 - Sunday, March 6, 12 PM - 8 PM
Monday, March 7, 12 PM - 6 PM

For more information to purchase tickets, please visit SPRING/BREAK.






Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Cutting Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation of first cut of Chop Show Newman ptg #1
first section 4 x 3 feet


Chop Shop by Greg Allen at SPRING/BREAK Art Show
2016
Installation View


Gregg Allen
Destroyed Richter Grid No. A-L (12)

2016
UV pigment on aluminum
80 x 72 inches
(to be split into 12 parts, 20 x 24 inches)


Gregg Allen
Destroyed Richter Grid No. A-D (4)

2016
UV pigment on aluminum
40 x 36 inches
(to be split into 4 parts, 20 x 18 inches)


Gregg Allen
Destroyed Richter Painting No. 4

2012
oil on canvas
44 x 44 inches


Gregg Allen
Destroyed Richter Painting No. 8

2016
oil on canvas
36 x 36 inches


Gregg Allen
Shanzhai Gursky No. 5

2016
c-print
72 x 140 inches
(to be destroyed to make Shanzhai Gurskys No. 6...facemounted on acrylic)


Gregg Allen
Shanzhai Gursky No. 1 A-D(4)

2016
inkjet on paper
111 x 81 inches
(to be split into 4 parts, 55 x 40 inches, inkjet on paper, facemounted on acrylic)