Friend of the Artist

About

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce its 15th Biennial exhibition, Friend of the Artist, curated by Eriola Pira. Taking an open-call format, the exhibition asks artists to invite the public into their webs of relation, love, and mutual support. The works in Friend of the Artist offer intimate glimpses of individual friendships, as well as considerations of collaboration, community, and solidarity in artmaking and life. 

Bringing together works meant for gallery display with a performance (Duvet), publication (Peer Review), and correspondence (Manxs Americanxs), the exhibition is offered as a place for artmaking, communing, and organizing. Exploring collectivity, mutuality, and reciprocity, these and other works in the exhibition (Priscilla Otani, Valérie Hallier) speak to sociality as a condition of artmaking and to the relations and networks that form in the pursuit of an artistic life. Artists, as many do in this exhibition, turn to their friends or befriend strangers when exploring subjects as varied as leisure and joy (Kariny Padilla and Elise Rasmussen); finding community and care (Shia Conlon, Georgia Lale, Annika Sarin); the alienating effects of capitalism and technology (Elisabeth Smolarz and Angie Waller); and interspecies love and human loss (Super Futures Haunt Qollective).Taking a turn toward the abstract, Luiza Kurzyna and Shirin Towfiq and Bryan Truitt create sculptures that evince friendship’s slippery, hard-to-pin-down relationality. 

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.