Installation View

Gedi Sibony
Born in New York City, USA , in 1973.
He lives and works in New York City.

From left to right:
One foot to shoe on
The Shake
A month of saturday

Gedi Sibony uses found materials to create spatial collages that respond to the architectures they inhabit. In 2001, he received an MFA degree from Columbia University in New York, where he was born and still practices. Site is integral to Sibony, whose work results from formative experiments in his artist studio, where he continually shifts objects around, builds and dissolves walls, constructs selfmade impediments, and opens new apertures. Like the Arte Povera artists of the 1960s, Sibony shares a predilection for humble objects and a respect for the integrity of his materials, which he usually leaves unaltered. His jerry-built structures are made of crude materials such as scavenged plywood, cardboard, garbage bags, hollow-core doors, and carpets that are propped against walls, suspended from ceilings, or draped over one another. Their fragile poise recalls the sculpture–assemblages of Richard Tuttle or the combines of Robert Rauschenberg.
Sibony’s most recent works are wedded to gallery walls. They comprise aluminum sheets extracted from discarded truck trailers with logos and advertising text roughly blotted out with paint. In the eight works selected for the Biennale, Sibony intervenes between figure and ground, layering abstract shapes and pigment, along with collaged images of a landscape fragment and a Doritos tortilla chip. Hung here as paintings, Sibony’s structures continue to probe the contingencies of art and architecture informed by the specters of minimalism. Metal bolts poke through the top, scoring the surface and attesting to the object’s original, mundane function. Sibony’s painstaking arrangements belie a tenderness for what others have carelessly abandoned to the rubbish heaps and confide an artist’s ambitious, if tentative, pursuit to ferret out the sublime.