November 21, 2008-June 14, 2009
Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion
Free

View Orly Genger: Whole exhibition trailer

Listen to a conversation between Orly Genger, Lisa Freiman, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Richard McCoy, Objects Conservator.

Known for transforming common nylon climbing rope into elaborate monumental sculptures, New York-based artist Orly Genger created Whole, a unique site-specific installation, in response to the IMA’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion. Genger’s project for the IMA was her largest and most ambitious to date, incorporating thousands of feet of rope, which she hand-knotted, painted and stacked, creating immense sculptures that confronted the viewer.

Looped and knotted by hand, Whole evoked the normally intimate processes of knitting and crocheting, yet expanded them to a newly epic scale. Genger’s work challenges typical associations with craft and textile through its intensely physical creation process, in which the artist wrestles rope into knots and amasses it into powerful sculptural objects. The resulting works are intended to provoke a visceral physical response from viewers, challenging them to reconsider their relationship to the normally unobstructed space around them and forcing them to navigate the space in new ways. Comprised of nine different sculptures, Whole was impossible to fully grasp from a single viewpoint, and in its interplay between its fragmented parts called into question the nature of wholeness itself.

In its reductive abstract vocabulary, Whole responded to the legacy of Minimalist art, and particularly the muscular abstractions of artists such as Richard Serra. Yet by using pliable rope to weave these monolithic forms, Genger also drew on the Post-Minimalist legacy of artists such as Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis. Genger’s sculpture embodies an elemental tension between obdurate mass and empty space, between hard-edge geometry and organic softness.

View photos of the exhibition on Flickr!

Special thanks to the Efroymson Family Fund, a CICF Fund, for their generous support of this project. And to Larissa Goldston Gallery and Universal Limited Art Editions.

Image credit: Studio installation detail. Courtesy of the artist and Larissa Goldston Gallery.