Catharine Czudej

Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to present Squeeze, a site-specific installation of new work by Catharine Czudej.

Catharine Czudej’s materially driven practice hones in on late-capitalist consumerism to examine the violent ways it collides with a nostalgia obsessed culture. For Squeeze, Czudej pinpoints the moment of late childhood when consumer consciousness and groupthink takes hold. The immersive exhibition intervenes in the gallery architecture by immersing the space in vinyl parachutes to display new bismuth works and aluminum sculptures. Used for team-building and cooperation in schools, the parachute transforms the gallery architecture into a disorienting environment to view Czudej’s metallic works—each existing in a fantasy realm where the familiar is melted down into a luminous wrapper.

Czudej symbolically and physically melts commonplace objects and conventions into absurdity, as if building an alternate reality from the raw materials of our own. A high-density, silvery, pink-tinged metal, bismuth was originally used to decorate caskets and used today in cosmetics and pepto bismol. Czudej utilizes this dense, colorful metal to melt and reconfigure each work through a vigorous process of heat, destruction, removal and addition until a shimmering landscape emerges. Faces, maps, and suggestive masses recede and reappear in Czudej’s metallic abyss. The sparkling artifice provokes a deeper investigation into the mechanisms of transforming raw materials into the surplus objects of contemporary American cities. Surrounded by a gallery saturated in colorful plastic, the bismuth works take on connotations of whimsy, playfulness, and utopian world building. Czudej fractures the boundary between the natural and artificial. The bismuth works lie somewhere in a destabilized middle ground, their material autonomy heightened, yet to be ingredients in medicine and make-up. Their status as art objects sealing this in-between space as permanent, fixed in an unsteady becoming.

New aluminum sculptures resemble balloon figures, but rather than colorful, airy objects, they are frozen in time, their gestures weighted by their metallic shell. The playful figures become almost melancholic, on the verge of deflating completely. Czudej’s sculptures question the monumental work of Jeff Koons, inviting a more subtle interrogation into the impact of commodity saturation. The hollow nature of these aluminum works mimic the parachute structure and gallery architecture, reinforcing our attention to the surface. The sheen of objects we come to desire and acquire so as to be participants in a world of cooperative consumption.

Catharine Czudej (b. 1985 Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in New York. Czudej holds a BFA from New York University (2007) and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2015). Her work has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe, including presentations at MoCA, Los Angeles, California, Vleeshal Centre for Contemporary Art, Middleburg, Netherlands and Peep Hole, Milan, Italy. In 2015 Czudej received the Pirelli Prize, Art Brussels, Belgium; followed by the Fürstenberg Fellowship, Heiligenberg, Germany in 2017.