Faurschou New York, a new private museum, debuted in Greenpoint in December with an inaugural exhibition entitled The Red Bean Grows In The South featuring work by 17 international artists including Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin, Anselm Keifer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Danh Vo.
Edward and Nancy Kienholz, The Ozymandias Parade, 1985
The title of the show was inspired by Love Seeds, a Chinese poem about longing, penned by Wang Wei during the Tang Dynasty era. Love seeds “sprout from the desire for what once was, or what could have been—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible,” according to the exhibition notes. The show examines the notion of yearning and “revolves around themes of violence, war, politics, idealism, escapism, desire, hope, dreams, and memory.”
The red bean represents blood and tears in Chinese culture, according to the notes, as well as physical and emotional exile, and “political passion and the desire to break free from repression.” The exhibit’s title references the Faurschou’s Foundation’s ties with China and the “desire to engage Western audiences with important ideas, thoughts and themes from the region.”
Cai Guo-Qiang, A Boat With Dreams, 2008 (above); Alison Saar, Dying Slave, 1989 (right); Dahn Vo, Photographs of Dr. Joseph M. Carrier 1962-1973 (rear and side walls)
(L-R) Tracey Emin, The more of you the more I love you, 2016; Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2003; Ai Weiwei, Two Figures, 2018
Cecily Brown, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, 1997-98
Housed in a former warehouse, the gleaming new 12,000-square-foot venue was launched by Danish art dealer/collector/advisor and philanthropist Jens Faurschou. He created the Faurschou Foundation in 2011 "to champion artists and foster cross-cultural dialogue and exchange internationally, in particular between the East and the West." The foundation opened an exhibition space in Beijing in 2011 and a second in Copenhagen in 2012 to showcase its collection of approximately 400 contemporary works, many large-scale installations, according to The New York Times. Faurschou works with his wife on building the collection and with his three children on curating exhibitions.
The show currently on view in New York features painting, sculpture, photography, and video. The centerpiece, The Ozymandias Parade by Edward and Nancy Keinholz, is an immense “satirical tableaux” depicting a leader “mounted on a horse upside down,” a general riding on the back of an “overburdened taxpayer” surrounded by green toy soldiers and a mélange of other found objects.
Edward and Nancy Kienholz, The Ozymandias Parade (detail), 1985
Robert Rauschenberg, The Lurid Attack of the Monsters from the Postal News, August, 1875, (Kabal American Zephyr), 1981-82 (foreground); Yoko Ono, Happy Xmas (War is Over), 1971/2003 (single channel video displayed on screen)
(L-R) Anselm Kiefer, Für Velimir Chlebnikow, 2015-16; Christian Lemmerz, The Last God, 2018-19
Christian Lemmerz, The Last God, 2018-19
(L-R) Georg Baselitz, Mit Roter Fahne (With a Red Flag), 1965; Paul McCarthy, CSSC, Frederic Remington Charles Bronson, 2014-16
Just off the central gallery, four works addressing sex and love are displayed: Louise Bourgeois’ The Couple, a hanging aluminum sculpture featuring a pair of twisty figures reaching out to one another; Cecily Brown’s feverish painting Seven Brides For Seven Brothers; Tracey Emin’s pink neon piece The more of you the more I love you; and Ai Weiwei’s Two Figures, life-size nudes of the artist and a woman sleeping on a mattress beside a mound of red seeds.
Edward and Nancy Kienholz, The Ozymandias Parade, 1985
“We’re making shows because that’s actually what we love to do,” Faurschou told the NY Times. “It’s become a passion to make exhibitions.”
Head over to Greenpoint and check out this labor of love. Learn more at faurschou.com.
The Red Bean Grows In The South
Faurschou New York
148 Green Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view December 15, 2019 through April 11, 2020
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