David Altmejd’s Gorgeous Gothic at Andrea Rosen Gallery

THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 28, 2011

"The Vessel" (2011) by David Altmejd

NEW YORK - As a mediator of the sacred and the profane, Altmejd makes every object a thing of beauty, the driving force of his work. “For me the grotesque is necessary to understand beauty,” he said the other day. “Things that are pure, I can’t feel them. They have to be infected or else they don’t exist — they don’t have a presence.” “The Vessel,” a 20-foot-long plexiglass diorama of disembodied hands and noses, fairly shimmers in the gallery’s main exhibition space. It features a pair of flayed, swanlike plaster arms, their hands clasping bird beaks of a particularly phallic shape. A kind of Greek chorus of raised fists grasping more beaks surrounds them, all trapped in a rigging of cascading colored threads set off by plantlike crystals. “I’ve really been into Catholic visuals in the past few years,” Altmejd told me. Not that he’s religious. “I just like the metaphors and the imagery,” he said. “David Altmejd” continues through April 23 at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street. [link]