Whitney Museum acquires Rodrigo Valenzuela “Stature” series

Asya Geisberg Gallery announces the acquisition of Rodrigo Valenzuela‘s series Stature by The Whitney Museum of American Art. Stature features eight photogravures taken of the artist’s studio constructions. As is typical of the artist, the series masterfully balances on a fulcrum between fiction and documentary traditions, “commonplace” materials and rarefied results, flattened photos of ambiguous scale and three-dimensional references. The forms in Stature could refer to Brutalist architecture, outdated machinery, or modernist monsters, but in fact they are concrete and plaster casts of discarded consumer packaging. Their immobility, too, is an illusion – all the forms are carefully stacked and tenuously balanced, rather than glued in place. There is ample metaphor to be quietly contemplated – i.e., undoing a politically repressive regime’s monuments with one push – but Valenzuela resists didactic urges, and instead embeds his interests in labor, capitalism, and socio-political symbols into serene images that slowly reveal their many languages.