Keith Tyson in New York

In last week’s inaugural ARTINFO Weekend Picks, the New York-based artist Sarah Sze recommended several exhibitions that she planned to see in London. This week the two cities reverse places, with the London-based artist Keith Tyson suggesting shows to New York gallerygoers. Keith made his picks while he was in the city for the installation and opening of his latest exhibition at PaceWildenstein, called “Large Field Array,” which is on view through October 20.

NEW YORK—The 38-year-old artist Keith Tyson first gained notoriety for his 1991 Artmachine, which used computer algorithms to generate proposals for artworks and helped make his reputation as the “mad professor” of the English art scene. In 2002, he was a central figure in the controversial Turner Prize exhibition that was dismissed as "conceptual bullshit" by the Labour party minister Kim Howells; Tyson, who eventually won the prize, contributed to that show The Thinker (After Rodin) (2001), a black column filled with buzzing supercomputers that could be seen as an attempt to manifest the very act of thought. While the artist is certainly best known for these techie, sci-fi creations that engage philosophy, probability, physics, and computers, he is also a talented practitioner of more traditional mediums, celebrated for his drawing, painting, and sculpture no less than for his madcap conceptual tinkering.  

Tyson’s latest work, Large Field Array (2006), opened at PaceWildenstein in New York on September 8, following stops at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the De Pont in Tilburg, The Netherlands. The giant, gallery-filling installation takes its name from the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico that generates an image by focusing on a single spot from multiple vantage points. The principle behind Large Field Array is the same. Tyson has created over 230 sculptures, all based on a two-foot cube and arranged at four-foot intervals, which comprise a single epic artwork. The individual elements range in style from total abstraction to hyperrealism, and evoke everything from popular culture to the history of art to what one imagines are incidents from the artist’s life. Large Field Array is a kind of mental labyrinth, with no limit to the possible relationships between its elements, no ready-made answer to its insistent riddling, and no end to its myriad fascinations, both visual and conceptual.

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Here are Tyson’s recommendations for shows to see this weekend in New York:

1. Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at the Museum of Modern Art, through September 24
“When you’ve finished marveling at these feats of engineering and artistry, you can marvel at the work of the structural engineer who has managed to keep the sixth floor of MoMA intact under such a weight.”

2. Raymond Pettibon: Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) at David Zwirner, through October 20
“What can I say, I’ve always liked his work.”

3. Friedrich Kunath: Twilight at Andrea Rosen Gallery, through October 13
“A strange show, deeply idiosyncratic and moving, which stayed with me for quite a while after seeing it.”

4. Larry Clark: Los Angeles 2003–2006 at Luhring Augustine, through October 13
“After your stop in the Andrea Rosen Gallery, go next door and see Larry Clark’s photographs at Luhring Augustine, which, as always, strike the perfect balance between touching and disturbing.”

And upcoming…  

5. Paul Noble at Gagosian Gallery, September 20 through October 27
“Seeing how Paul’s OCD deals with the vast spaces of the Gagosian Gallery should be quite intense.”