PRECURSE
Park Place Gallery is pleased to present Precurse, a group show curated by John Hodany.
This exhibition explores the wide variety of small works that artists often make when they are initially formulating ideas. The small format typically allows artists to be more free, uninhibited by large amounts of material and time-consuming, larger-scale projects. My attention has always been drawn to these “raw” works that many artists choose to make as they possess a unique intimacy. Generally, you only get to see these works when doing studio visits. Smaller works like the ones in this exhibition often don’t make it into a public show because the show presents larger “finished” work.
Precurse (definition being “something that presages a future event”) aims to display the different ways in which small works affect and enhance the studio practice. Often they function as studies or alternate versions, sometimes they just remain contained images which may later become a detail in a larger work. There are also examples in the show where artists started with a large scale work and later realize that they want to reinvestigate the idea on a more intimate scale. Other examples show "testers" or "duds", which are intriguing due to their experimental nature. Many of the works in the exhibition show a history of thought that seem like a map or guide for larger visual worlds.
The exhibition is comprised of 33 artists, all of whom are either based in Berlin or New York City, the two cities I have lived between for the past 13 years. In 2008, I curated an exhibition of the same name in Berlin, in which I brought artists’ work from NYC back with me to exhibit together in Berlin. 10 years later, I am bringing work from Berlin to NYC. These two cities are brimming with creativity. They can differ from each other in artistic style and diversity of culture, but are similar in how they act as hub cities for artistic migration and freedom of expression. Precurse brings together a spectrum of artistic modes, spanning from representational and comic to abstract, minimal and conceptual, all with a focus on this elemental, small scale.
Text by John Hodany
