Álvaro Urbano

 

51st and 7th, 2024

Concrete, metal, paint

2 elements; each approx. 2 ¾ inches (7 cm) (diameter)

Series of 15 hand-painted, unique works

 

Purchases directly support Álvaro Urbano’s forthcoming commission at SculptureCenter in New York City, opening Wed, Sep 18, 2024, 6pm

 

On view Sep 19, 2024–Mar 24, 2025

 

Álvaro Urbano is a Madrid-born and Berlin-based artist whose site-responsive practice involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that painstakingly replicate specific spaces, architectural gestures, and symbolic plant life by hand, the artist excavates the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. His staged realities are inhabited by vegetal and animal elements, that in close examination reveal themselves as intricate organic simulations.

51st and 7th, a new series of unique works made by the artist in support of his forthcoming commission at SculptureCenter, includes two hand-painted trompe-l’oeil sculptures of apples, coupled together while seemingly left behind after an incomplete snack.

 

 

Urbano’s upcoming exhibition at SculptureCenter includes dozens more apples (among other flora) installed on and around a monumental work by the American artist Scott Burton, a major figure in sculpture and performance, who died of HIV-related illness in 1989. Burton, who referred to himself as “lunch artist,” is best known for his many artistic variations on chairs, benches, tables, and seating in public spaces. The series’ cross-street title refers to the office lobby site of a now-removed Burton bench in marble. Urbano’s half-bitten pairs of apples in concrete speak to Burton’s subtle interest in the human intimacy of the day-to-day, elegiacally trading one “Big Apple” for two small ones, alongside the often-imperceptible presence of Burton’s legacy in queer art histories today.

Àlvaro Urbano (b. 1983, Madrid) has presented his work in exhibitions and projects at Bergen Assembly, Norway; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Art Basel Statements, Basel (with ChertLüdde); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Boghossian Foundation, Brussels; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; CAB, Brussels; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; among others. Urbano’s work is part of Hamburger Bahnhof Collection, Berlin; Collection Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris; TEA Tenerife, SP; TBA21, Madrid; Collegium, Arévalo; Colección Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Fonds régional d’art contemporain Bretagne, Rennes, France.

 

 

Álvaro Urbano studied Interior Architecture at the ETSAM in Madrid, and Fine Arts at the Institut für Raumexperimente, Universität der Künste in Berlin; he lives and works between Berlin and Paris.

 

Sold in series number order (#1–#15), for inquiries regarding specific work numbers email editions@sculpture-center.org

$2,000.00