Laurent Grasso

Sean Kelly is thrilled to announce that the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will showcase video works by Laurent Grasso in their Black Box theatre, a space that features rotating exhibitions of contemporary artists who use film or video as their creative medium. The exhibition will feature two works, Polair and Les Oiseaux, which are representative of Grasso's signature manipulation of imagery to recreate phenomena that set up surreal and ambiguous juxtapositions of time and space. The exhibition opens on April 4, 2011 and will be on view through July 24, 2011.

On view in the exhibition is Polair, which surveys architecture in the area that was formerly East Berlin and focuses on the city's iconic television tower, its tramway equipment, and various structures that transmit electromagnetic waves. In interviews, Grasso has resisted offering an explanation of the meaning behind his videos, leaving one to investigate the significance of the surreal cloud which moves throughout the video.

Laurent Grasso's Les Oiseaux will also be on view. Filmed in Rome, Les Oiseaux offers viewers an experience of wonder and uncertainty. Throughout the video, oddly shaped clusters of dark particles reveal themselves to be flocks of starlings flying above the Vatican skyline. The hypnotic movements of the starlings are reminiscent of charged particles in a randomly changing magnetic field.

Grasso was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008 and is the subject of a major monograph – Laurent Grasso: The Black-Body Radiation – published by les presses du réel. Recent solo exhibitions have included The Horn Perspective at the Centre Pompidou and Gakona at the Palais de Tokyo, both in Paris in 2009. Grasso was also included in this year's 9th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates). Grasso's U.S. public art debut, Infinite Light, was installed on the exterior of the Hunter College Lexington Avenue pedestrian walkway in New York in 2008. One of Grasso's major architectural installations includes Nomiya, the temporary project he designed that is situated on the rooftop of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

For further information on the exhibition, please visit http://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/view.asp?key=21&subkey=509. For press inquires, please contact Maureen Bray at maureen@skny.com or at the gallery (212.239.1181). For all other inquiries, please contact Cécile Panzieri at cecile@skny.com or at the gallery (212.239.1181).