Independent 20th Century
Featuring: Allan Wexler

September 7 - 10, 2023
Booth B8

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth with Allan Wexler for  the 2023 edition of Independent 20th Century Art Fair.  A trained architect, Wexler has been producing functional absurdities for over fifty years that bridge and interrogate distinctions between human activity and the built environment. Featuring diverse works spanning media from drawing to sculpture, the presentation will center on themes of connectivity, constructedness, and ritual. In tandem with the booth presentation, Coffee Seeks Its Own Level, a work that epitomizes the main tenets of Wexler's practice, will be activated in Booth B8 on September 7 from 4PM - 6PM. 

Fascinated by the seemingly infinite ritualistic details of the Japanese tea ceremony, Wexler created Coffee Seeks Its Own Level as a way to investigate the social implications of performative ritual. Working with group dynamics, Wexler often utilizes a set group of four as a recurring motif in his work. As Wexler explains, “It is about four people at the table drinking coffee simultaneously. Because the coffee cups are connected by tubing, when one gets raised, the unleveling causes the coffee to overflow the other three cups. It is about playing with coordination among the guests. The remnants of such performances remain as stains of the white tablecloth” (1).

With wit and ingenuity, the selected works investigate the ways in which the day-to-day objects of our environment mediate social activity. They often stage delicate, unexpected interactive sites as catalysts for interpersonal connectivity. Some works highlight the isolating capacity of certain tasks while others create a sense of fragility that forces participants to navigate the environment together. 4 Collars Sewn Into A Tablecloth, 1991, conflates the solitary, routine act of dressing oneself with the spontaneity and company of communal dining. The nature of the work implies a contradictory isolating sense of community: dinner guests are connected at the seams yet physically restricted, sewn into place. The drawing 4 Handled Broom, 1991, on the other hand, visually transforms the mindless solitude of sweeping into an intentional symbiotic act as one envisions the collective coordination required to effectively operate such a tool.

Wexler’s fabricated scenes are strange and unconventional, urging viewers to consider similarly unconventional means of collaborative problem-solving. At the same time, viewers are encouraged to seek and acknowledge the constructedness and absurdity of those entrenched daily activities that are arbitrarily deemed ‘normal.’ Described as a “radical deconstructor of habitation,” Wexler aims to do just that - to look more deeply into what surrounds us and to reconsider and question the actions we tend to perform without a second thought (2). Understanding Wexler’s practice is an exercise in recontextualization, “my work is about finding poetry in something that seems purely functional. I take an object, destroy its function, and play with it until I discover a new function” (3).  Wexler exposes the conceptual world that informs our lived experiences, questions the conditions of its construction and turns it on its head.

About Allan Wexler
Allan Wexler (b. 1949) has worked in the fields of architecture, design, and fine art for fifty years. In the late 1960s he was an early member of the group of architects and artists who questioned the perceived divide between art and the design disciplines. They called themselves non-architects or paper architects. Wexler earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts (1971) and his Bachelor of Architecture (1972) from RISD and his Master of Architecture from Pratt Institute (1976).

Wexler is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a winner of both a Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and the Henry J. Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum. He has executed public art commissions at several locations, including Hudson River Park (2006), Atlantic Terminal, Long Island Railroad (2009), and Pratt Institute (2008, 2012). He has exhibited nationally and internationally including La Arsenale, Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen, GE; De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; among many others. Wexler currently teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. 

In 2017 Lars Müller published Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design, a book on Wexler’s work and creative process. The book features projects developed across the artist’s career that mediate the gap between fine and applied art using the mediums of architecture, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing.

About Jane Lombard Gallery
Jane Lombard Gallery has an established reputation for bringing to the forefront artists who work within a global perspective/aesthetic relevant to the social and political climate of today. The gallery seeks to promote both emerging and mid-career artists in a variety of media – painting, sculpture, installation, and film – in the US, Europe, and Asia. Founded in 1995 in Soho as Lombard Freid projects, the gallery later moved to Chelsea, first to 26th Street, and later to 19th Street in 2010. The gallery is now located in Tribeca at 58 White St.

(1) Allan Wexler, interviewed by Vladimir Belogolovsky, ‘Artist Allan Wexler uses hand tools to pull ideas out of his head,’ STIRWorld, February 7, 2022, n.p. Retrieved from https://www.stirworld.com/think-columns-artist-allan-wexler-uses-hand-tools-to-pull-ideas-out-of-his-head
(2) Michele Calzavara, ‘Meditations on Habitation,’ in Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design, 287.
(3) Wexler, interviewed by Vladimir Belogolovsky, ‘Artist Allan Wexler uses hand tools,’ n.p.

Image: Allan Wexler, Coffee Seeks Its Own Level, 1990. Coffee cups, saucers, vinyl tubing, fabric, dimensions variable.