Cory Arcangel

Lisson Gallery returns to East Hampton for a third year, beginning with a debut of new works from Cory Arcangel’s Flatware series. 3- follows Another Romp Thru the IP (Times Square Edit), Arcangel’s nightly takeover of Times Square that transmitted the artist’s striking analog computer visuals onto electronic billboards through the month of March, and precedes his participation at the Front Triennial, Cleveland in July, and the solo exhibition Flying Foxes at Kunstverein Hamburg in November this year.

To create works in the Flatware series, Arcangel scans fast-fashion garments on cheap office scanners, pairs the resulting scans, and then — after embossing his signature and year in Photoshop — UV prints the completed composition on stacked panels of ready-made Ikea Linnmon tabletops. The resulting Trompe-l'œil (they are often mistaken for fabric) inkjet collages are composed as abstractions and read as “paintings” — a long standing interest of Arcangel’s. Typically created and printed on-demand in-situ (by leveraging the global supply chains of office tools, Ikea, fast-fashion, and commercial printing techniques) works from the series were featured in Arcangel's institutional exhibitions Back Off at Firstsite, Colchester (2019), and Topline at CC Foundation, Shanghai (2019).

In 3-, Arcangel has further refined this series, confining each work to four tabletops, as well as zeroing in on only black Adidas garments — a global signifier of leisure — to create a series of semi-abstract images that dissociate line and colour. In a recent interview with Artforum the artist adds, “I see celebrity, fast fashion, branding, and supply chains as connected and part of internet/IRL junk space today. How far away are those three Adidas stripes in any given Instagram feed, or for that matter, just outside our doors?”