Layr curated by Gaylen Gerber
„Support“

Gaylen Gerber’s work as an artist often incorporates the artwork of other artists in its realization. Gerber asks other artists to cooperate with him and let their work be installed against the ground he provides. In doing so he focuses our attention on a central aspect of perception, which is that to perceive something at all you must first be able to perceive it as distinct from its context or background. By positioning his work as the contextual ground against which we see other activities or another work of art, Gerber draws attention to the permeability of the distinctions between object and context and fundamentally questions the stability of perception itself. Gaylen Gerber has exhibited widely including recent exhibitions and cooperative projects at the Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, Luxembourg; FRAC-Bourgogne and Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland; and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

We often think of artists as having a singular voice, internal, intentional and considered. We also recognize that artists can occupy multiple positions and draw from outside influences often intuitively, incorporating the expressions of previous generations of artists in the flow of contemporary practice. The challenge in an exhibition like this, and maybe in any exhibition, is to create a situation in which the actions of different generations of artists reveal a shared understanding of their common insight into the essential nature of the art as well as its distinguishing character. Through their work, artists often convey particular emotions that are drawn from the details of their situation, addressing the qualities of their time and place and helping to define it. This shared drive to reflect a true representation of lived experience seems continuous from generation to generation and exists in part as recognition that even when things feel incongruous there is also an unbroken sense of a common aspiration present over time. For example, in Lisa DeAbreu’s work we sense a search and longing for what is missing in a family’s and culture’s history that may never be fully reconciled but may be represented. In the same room as DeAbreu’s Forgotten & Foreseen, 2024, Stephen Parrino’s Freud in Flop,1987, and Hirsch Perlman’s Accidence (5),1989, represent absence literally and rhetorically in ways that imply that absence is essential to the whole of our understanding, exemplifying how generations of artists often touch on like themes in different ways.