“The objects circulate in long, drawn-out orbits over short distances. I set up a large amount of situations that don’t amount to anything. So I leave these like the opposite of traps, trying to create something else inside the exact same space, so the sequence of prepared, inverted traps can become unset”
Gedi Sibony
I Was Like Wait stages a series of encounters, expansive and confounding. The works on view draw on items salvaged and saved, worked and reworked, over the past twenty years of Sibony’s practice. Paintings some layered atop found canvases, some on new ones depict bright vessels that orbit a void, and reconfigured objects constellate across the charged expanse of a room that holds them. Wires that function to tether fragments to architecture are also a means to draw in space; a spectral column mirrors a studio support, loosed from the task of enforcement. Such doublings recur within works and between them, extending the reach and resonance of a given object.
Gedi Sibony lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Mister Fahrenheit, New York (2022), and Greene Naftali, New York (2020, 2018); solo institutional presentations include The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin (2014); Culturgest, Lisbon (2011); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2009); and In the Still Epiphany, a curatorial project at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2012).
His work is in the collections of the Astrup Feamley Museet, Oslo; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Saint Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Add your thoughts to the discussion