Exhibition · Red Bull Arts
Gretchen Bender
So Much Deathless
Mar 6 – Jul 28
4 images · swipe
About the show
Red Bull Arts New York is proud to present the first posthumous retrospective of the life and work of the influential, multi disciplinary artist Gretchen Bender (1951-2004). This ambitious exhibition returns the spotlight to one of contemporary art’s most prescient figures, detailing her historic importance and contemporary relevance.
Bender was a pioneering artist who worked across video, sculpture, computer graphics, photography, print and installation to interrogate the accelerated age of mass media. Moving to New York in 1978, Bender quickly fell in with the Post-Pictures Generation scene, centered around the artist-run gallery Nature Morte, as well as a milieu of artist and performers connected to The Kitchen. She befriended and collaborated with such figures as artists Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and musicians Stuart Argabright and Vernon Reid.
Developed in close collaboration with the Gretchen Bender Estate, and bolstered by in-depth oral histories with many of her notable peers and friends, the exhibition will include examples of every major body of work in Bender’s oeuvre, from her early photographic installations to the studies and archival material surrounding her magnum opus, which was to be entitled So Much Deathless, left unrealized due to her untimely death. The exhibition will also feature Bender’s monumental work of electronic theatre entitled Total Recall (1987), and artworks and videos that have not been exhibited since the 80s or 90s, newly restored by Red Bull Arts New York.
When Bender died in 2004, at the age of 53, the media climate that she had long anticipated was well on its way to reality—a “cannibalistic river” and seamless totality of screens, social media, smartphones, visual and data-tracking surveillance, the melding of politics and entertainment, and fake news. Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless serves as both critique and map of the contemporary landscape, a guide to how viewers might navigate through their world.