Alina Grasmann: Sculpting in Time

Fridman Gallery is honored to present Sculpting in Time, Alina Grasmann's second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring two new series of Grasmann's masterful large-scale paintings, combining imaginary, real, and emotional places. The paintings reflect the artist's fascination with American architecture, landscape, mythology, cinema, literature, and otherworldly illusion.

The Montauk Project is inspired by several literary and historical references to the Eastern-most beach community of Long Island, New York. A conspiracy theory of the same name alleges that secret government experiments were conducted there, to develop psychological warfare techniques and esoteric research including time travel, teleportation, mind control, contact with alien life, and staged Moon landings. The Swiss writer Max Frisch used the town as the setting for his novel Montauk, a story published as fiction, however the events factually happened. Grasmann's Montauk Project depicts hauntingly deserted restaurants, hotels, and vantage points in and around the town.

In Sculpting in Time, the second series featured in the exhibition, bizarre dreams are set against the backdrop of the experimental desert town of Arcosanti, Arizona, a site of visionary utopia and a relic that embodies its future as well as its past. Inside its rooms, Grasmann leads the viewer through an imaginarium of items and objects arranged as a cabinet of curiosities that reject clear symbolism, lending the scenes to be explored and filled with subjective meaning. Sculpting In Time is the name of the creative manifesto written by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose visual language shares an enigmatic quality with Grasmann's work. The compositions unfold in time, yet every scene appears frozen in the minds of the viewers.