CHAIR SHOW

125 Newbury presents CHAIR SHOW, opening April 17 and running through May 23, a group exhibition that examines the chair as receptacle, object and idea. The exhibition brings together chairs that are utilitarian, chairs transformed into the subject of art, and artworks that deal with chair-ness itself.

Ranging from objects that bridge the gap between furniture and sculpture to representations of chairs in painting, drawing, and photography, CHAIR SHOW celebrates the chair as both fantasy and fact, but most of all as subject. The exhibition includes works by Gertrude Abercrombie, José Bento, Dike Blair, David Byrne, Jim Dine, Urs Fischer, Hugh Hayden, Donald Judd, Alicja Kwade, Bob Law, Robert Longo, René Magritte, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, André Masson, Louise Nevelson, Adam Pendleton, Ryan Preciado, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Julian Schnabel, Joel Shapiro, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Wilson.

As a cipher for both presence and absence—a symbol of authority and power as well as comfort and repose—the chair is an indelible image in the history of art. At once supportive, imposing, and subtly animate, its uncanny anthropomorphism stands as a surrogate for the body. The image of the empty chair has provided untold inspiration to artists working across time periods and mediums. Taking as a starting point the contrast between Lucas Samaras’s fantastical, often sinister chair constructions and the austere minimalism of Donald Judd’s chairs, this exhibition attempts to topple the chair, rotate it, levitate it, and otherwise reveal its strangeness.

The works that comprise CHAIR SHOW often suggest a wry, metaphysical meditation on the ponderosity of the body, as in surrealist works by René Magritte and Alicja Kwade. Meanwhile, Kiki Smith’s elegiac, airborne chairs made from paper and David Byrne’s whimsical macaroni chair add notes of levity and transformation, even as they underscore the chair’s oscillation between ease and disquiet, rest and even latent menace, as in Warhol’s famous Electric Chairs.

The empty chair’s inherent play between absence and presence is echoed in the notion of a chair and its shadow, explored in two different ways—and decades apart—in works by Urs Fischer and Robert Wilson. While the notion of the chair as a constructivist object informs works by mid-century masters like Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson, Julian Schnabel reminds us that the genesis of all chairs is in the notion of the throne. Across this diverse range of works, the functional chair is made dysfunctional, revealed as a site of formal invention, tactile engagement, and political or social commentary. Throughout, the chair persists as a stage for the body and a charged cultural sign.