Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Gedi Sibony, "Partly Me Manners" (2008). Door and paper, 88 x 24 x 4 in.

February 2009 Field Guide

Roni Horn

"Where in the World?"

Paper Cuts: 200 Years of Black Paper Dolls

Charles Darwin

Dan Graham

"The Dirty Hands"

Yayoi Kusama

Year of Fashion

Isabelle Cornaro

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Sophie Ristelhueber

Santiago Sierra

Glenn Brown

The Face of Our Time

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Gedi Sibony’s detractors — who became more and more vocal as the Brooklyn artist appeared repeatedly on 2008 end-of-year hot lists — have a lot to work with. His favored materials (discarded doors, discarded trash bags, discarded carpet), arranged in preciously casual tableaux, are invariably familiar, adhering as they do to the Home Depot-loving, "Unmonumental" school of cool young sculptors everywhere. His works themselves, however, are rarely cool. Instead, his nuanced, tender installations are intensely sincere — even melancholy. Panes of plywood stand just off the wall, stoic reminders of one’s own isolation. Lengths of carpet lie alone on the floor, palpably out of reach of a deflated cardboard box or a laconic trash bag. In each of Sibony’s works, balance, materiality, pathos, and a profligate appreciation of space play out their post-post-Minimalist narrative with great authority. His first monographic museum exhibition, in St. Louis, includes new, site-specific works as well as pieces from the past few years.

contemporarystl.org

"Gedi Sibony" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.