Catch the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Justin Caguiat, whose Triple Solitaire immerses the viewer in a theater of perception combining lush abstract paintings and soundworks.

In Justin Caguiat’s hands, painting is a slow cinema. His work spans a nostalgia for imagery of the past while speculating on possible futures, expressing a duration that brings together multiple temporalities in the present of the gallery. Triple Solitaire is anchored by three large canvases, abstractions that take time to perceive but also index time through their densely-layered compositions. Even the pigment the artist uses marks time—designed to oxidize in response to the environment in which it’s situated. As the painted images themselves transform, sometimes at a rate imperceptible to the human eye, sound works by the artist suspended from the ceiling immerse the viewer in a different rhythm, a soundtrack to the experience of seeing that itself conditions the viewing experience. 

Caguiat’s practice extends across different mediums—painting, sculpture, film, poetry, and sound—and draws on a variety of references to the aesthetics and affective memory of his youth growing up in 1990s Tokyo. At the same time the artist also leans into abstraction. For Caguiat, it is more interesting how his works accrete or defer meaning rather than how they resolve in fixed or knowable images. Similarly, the paintings installed in Triple Solitaire do not assert a sense of fixity or objecthood. They are presented on unstretched canvases inside frames, leaving exposed the textiles’ edges.

The three large abstract paintings installed along the three recessed walls of Zilkha’s Main Gallery comprise a triptych, a singular panoramic work. The panorama, a type of painting popular in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, once presented audiences with the possibility of an immersive viewing experience where the distinction between image and reality could be blurred. As a means of instantly transporting the viewer into an imaginary world, the panorama is a technology of seeing bound up with fantasizing other, different worlds that hold the potential to be both violent and utopian. In making these paintings, Caguiat was particularly interested in “locality paradox,” a phenomenon associated with the panorama wherein a viewer loses awareness of their actual location. How might this experience be altered with a non-representational panorama? Further disrupting the panoramic function of his imagery, Caguiat’s triptych is divided by the gallery’s limestone buttresses as they intersect the white walls.

Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Tokyo) lives and works between New York and California. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2022); The Warehouse, Dallas (2022); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Modern Art, London (2023, 2020); and 15 Orient, New York (2018). Significant group shows include Modern Art, London (2023, 2021); Lomex, New York hosted by Arcadia Missa, London (2020); and Clima, Milan (2019). Caguiat is a published poet and has participated in various readings and performances, including in 2017 at the Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among others.

Witness the alchemical assemblages of Grant Mooney’s sculptures, which respond to the materials and processes embedded in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery’s building, specifically the limestone bricks that are the building blocks of the entire Center for the Arts.

The works in calcis center the processes embedded in the building, including the routines and functions in what constitutes its various activities, but also its chemical compositions. Calcium carbonate and its material properties are a foreground of Mooney’s practice while also the core architectural component of the gallery’s limestone brick walls. The exhibition extends into the labor production of exhibitions by utilizing existing physical supports as installation elements within the space.

The Center for the Arts is comprised of hundreds of Indiana limestone bricks which were cast and assembled on site. Limestone is a type of rock formed of crystalline calcium carbonate from deposits of seashells. Calcium carbonate is the predominant chemical compound found in cuttlebone, the cartilaginous internal shell of the cuttlefish. Cuttlebone is used for carving and casting metals within jewelry-making practices. Originally trained in jewelry design, Grant Mooney has used cuttlebone in a number of sculptures, foregrounding the material in exhibitions at Progetto in Lecce, Italy (2023) where limestone is a predominant architectural material, and at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York City (2022) where limestone can be found in the gallery’s floor tiles.

calcis, Mooney’s solo exhibition in the North Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, continues the artist’s sculptural practice of attending to the hyper-relational way materials shape and are shaped by their proximal surroundings. Working with the received conditions of the space, Mooney’s work departs from the materiality of the gallery’s limestone bricks. 

Though carefully attuned to the social extensions and technological production of this material, Mooney’s approach to sculpture is articulated through forms of ornamentation and touch, paying close attention to the formal and dynamic relationship between often overlooked elements of an environment. For Mooney, artworks are deeply entangled entities. 

For calcis, this attuned relationality is also expressed through the interaction of another active material in Mooney’s practice, light. In his words, light itself has “a material consequence,” transitioning substances in and out of visual presence. In front of the large windows leading into Zilkha’s North gallery Mooney will install sculptures and in the gallery itself, which is partially-illuminated by an ocular skylight, he will suspend a sculpture, activating the vertical axis of the space.

Grant Mooney (b. 1990, Seattle, WA) lives and works in New York. He studied art at Central Saint Martins, London and California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Mooney’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis (2024), Progetto, Lecce, Italy (2023), Miguel Abreu Gallery (2022/2023), Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin (2021), Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2019), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2017), and as part of the SECA Art Awards at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, PA (2015), and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2015). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024), the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2022), Braunsfelder, Cologne (2022), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2021), the ICA, Los Angeles (2021), Yale Union, Portland (2020), Stadtgalerie Bern (2020), SculptureCenter, New York (2020), Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017), and Kunst-Werke Berlin (2017), White Flag Project Library, St. Louis (2016), Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2016), and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2016), among others.

READING LIST

The following works inspired Grant Mooney in the creation of calcis:

John Roberts, Intangibilities of Form: Skilling and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
Christophe Benke, Cornelia Kastalan, Valérie Knoll, and Ulf Weggenig, eds., Art in the Periphery of the Center
Johanna Gosse, Timothy Scott, eds., Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960’s
Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide