Installation art is a rare – and thrilling – type of art in galleries. Rare because these enormous, room-filling works are much riskier to sell, as they can’t possibly fit into anyone’s living room, and even museums would likely have to build special cavernous spaces to house the pieces. Thrilling because viewers are not looking AT the art, but are usually immersed INSIDE the art as they navigate its complex, often cutting-edge, contents. How especially exciting, then, that my Sat. Oct. 15 Chelsea “Best Exhibits” tour will include not one but FOUR extraordinary shows of installation art, among the 7 exhibits we’ll visit! Three of these shows will be sculptural installations, and one will be a video installation.

One of the sculptural installation exhibits we’ll visit is of special note, as it consists of the two largest artworks I’ve seen in the close to 10 years I’ve been leading gallery tours. The artist is so world-renowned, he had a solo show a few years ago of similar work at the Museum of Modern Art that for months was the talk of the world’s art critics. His current Chelsea gallery show is brand new work of labyrinths made of huge, georgeously-colored steel plates that had to be built in a European shipyard and then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. The gallery had to be closed for weeks as dozens of workers installed the pieces. A concern I have is that my participants will literally get physically lost in these works if the group doesn’t stick together, and I have no idea how I’m going to round everyone up to leave at the end. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

The video exhibit we’ll visit is a stunning 3-screen animation created by a female Japanese artist who has become the toast of international art festivals for her innovative large-scale video works. Her current central piece consists of tens of thousands of hand drawn pictures that have been spliced via computer to form a rich, surreal animation. The coloration brings to mind ukiyo-e prints, translated as “floating world” in English, referring to an evanescent world of fleeting beauty and a realm of entertainments (kabuki, courtesans, geisha) divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world. One of the three screens is on the floor, so we’ll actually stand on top of some of the animation, while the other two screens are on specially-built curved walls that resemble the interiors of a suburban skateboard park.

It’s going to be a day of one breathtaking exhibit after another. Can you handle that?

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours