Meet May’s Artists in Residence
Andrés Aizicovich, Furong Zhang and Kadar Brock
This month’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess.
Andrés Aizicovich
In recent years, Andrés Aizicovich artistic practice has progressively turned to problems related to language, communication, oral transmission, conversation and translation. His work questions how we might transform speech into matter, and how we might make words an artistic medium. He contemplates the voice as a tool and as the sculptural action of forging bonds, not only in its mediating function in interpersonal relationships, but as an entity that shapes us, that carves our understanding and shapes our subjectivities. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world“ is a central statement within his practice.
Aizicovich’s sculptural works use breath, smoke, and singing as protoforms of voice and communication, or non-phonetic ways of referring to speech. The air expelled by the lungs and modulated through the vocal cords produces verbal sounds as the most ethereal component of these sculptures. His work has been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, Galerie Papillon in Paris, and at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. In 2022, he was awarded a year-long fellowship at Braunschweig Projects in Germany. He currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Furong Zhang
Furong Zhang’s oil paintings deal with his personal relationship to dual histories. They delve into emotional landscapes and memories of his native country, China alongside his experience immigrating to and living in America, where he has undergone a shift in labels and perceptions relating to his cultural identity. Growing up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution - a time of social unrest, widespread propaganda, violence, and expected obedience to authority - led Zhang to question the place of the individual self in relation to its society. In 1989, he participated in the controversial first China Avant-Garde art show at Beijing’s National Fine Art Museum, and immigrated to America shortly after. His images, through a deconstructionist and allegorical approach, investigate tensions between co-existing and often conflicting elements of contemporary society and memory; He is interested in dualisms such as tradition/history and erasure, political structures and the individual, capitalism and alienation, industrialization and nature, and material body and soul.
To create his paintings, Zhang pulls from his photographic archive and combines different spaces and times to create a build-up of moments revolving around aimless figures or characters performing mysterious tasks. Symbols of construction, detritus, ritual, subtle violence, and ambivalence reference the emotional effect of being caught in the middle of uncontrollable forces. The memory of his past coupled with current events, amid imbalances of power and political chaos, informs the emotional background of his works. Zhang’s work has been exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art in Japan, Gallery 456 in New York, and Yale University, among others. he currently lives and works in State College, Pennsylvania.
Kadar Brock
Kadar Brock’s paintings are created through a ritualistic cycle of addition and erasure, and expound on themes of belief, ambiguity, failure, and transformation. His works on canvas start with imagery that depicts concepts, people, and symbols mined in research; he then defaces and erases them with a simple razor blade and power sander, paints on them again and repeats the process. The act of erasure questions their validity and meaning, layers memories and beliefs, and wears them away by puncturing canvas and subduing imagery.
His interest in painting is intrinsically linked to the medium's long-standing connection to spirituality as told in the Western art historical narrative. For Brock, painting is a complex site where ideas of spirituality have historically been situated, propagated, and enacted. His work is informed by research into the New Age cult he was raised in, the history of the New Age movement, and how these areas of interest intersect with abstract painting. Brock’s work has been exhibited at Patron Projects in New York and Patron Gallery in Chicago, Mindy Solomon in Miami, and at Almine Rech in Brussels. He currently lives and works in New York.
