James Cohan Gallery has announced that it will represent Josiah McElheny in New York.Josiah McElheny has been closely observing the history of modernist ideas and aesthetics since over two decades now. Investigating and visualizing these concepts, McElheny performs a vigorously thorough research through his artistic oeuvre. His practice often combines glass with several other materials. Through his unique approach, McElheny creates some of his unique sculptures and represents his artistic politics through exclusive installations while also being involved in performances, projections, films and curatorial works alongside his writing projects.McElheny centers his concerns upon the alternate potentials of modernist artistic expressions inviting vast-ranging areas of study alongside artistic subjects that span from astronomical cosmology to re-contextualizing and re-exposing under-appreciated artists and art-mongers alongside varied schools of thought. This includes the visionary abstraction of Hilma af Klint, the crystalline sculptural paintings of Robert Smithson and the early 20th century writings of Paul Scheerbart. Through his practice, McElheny brilliantly combines these apparently disparate sources, thus developing hybrid narratives that would lucidly imagine divergent pasts.McElheny uniquely uses glass for its conceptual as well as perceptual properties, excelling the representation throughout his career. For McElheny, glass embodies its unique qualities of reflectivity as much as transparency, and fluid mutability which in turn highlights the interactive potential between object and viewer. This makes up to be a central concern of McElheny’s artmaking. As McElheny says, “If ‘the reflective’ can be described as a medium, it is one in which the viewer becomes the author, because without the viewer it is impossible to discern the something, or even the nothing, that is there.”Josiah McElheny (b. 1966, Boston, MA) has been exhibited widely and the solo shows featuring his works that demands a special mention include exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2013), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2011), Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2007), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2002), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2001), The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (1999), and the Seattle Art Museum, WA (1995). Some of his most revered works have also made their way to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Tate Modern, London, UK, among others. McElheny lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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