STILL LIFE

NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY

New York | 2014

Still Life featured key works by Dan Flavin (1933-1996) and Alex Israel (b. 1982), “conceived fifty years apart at parallel points in the lifetimes” of the artists (Nahmad Contemporary). The minimalist exhibition, featuring only two works, hinged on a successful design concept. Both Flavin’s pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns)—a vertical fluorescent light installed in a corner—and Israel’s Lens, a massive sunglass lens scaled to a point of abstraction, are in the same back room of the gallery. The main space is left empty—pink light spills inward, onto the floor of the main gallery, and the connecting doorframe—a colored absence—takes on the quality of an astral portal. Still Life is inspired by light and inevitability. The exhibition space—with both rooms in play—indefinitely suspends a hue and quality of light usually reserved for flickering candles and the fleeting moments after sunset.