Gedi Sibony
In That’s Tall’s Tale, Sibony configures a ‘painting’ from plastic sheeting and packing tape, with the irregular shape of the ‘canvas’ drawing reference to artists such as Ellsworth Kelley and Frank Stella. By exposing exactly how the work was made, Sibony instigates a performative role for the artistic process, focusing attention on the subtle tensions within the composition and its very considered and sophisticated balance of form, materiality, and space. Through this intense scrutiny, Sibony affirms the authenticity of artistic integrity, positing a refined connoisseurship of, and heightened sensitivity to, visual tradition as an intrinsic and enduring value.
Gedi Sibony’s constructions draw from the traditions of minimalism in their pared down aesthetics and conception of sculpture as selfcontained conceptual objects. Unlike the highly polished works of artists such as Donald Judd or Ad Reinhardt, Sibony’s objects adopt an impoverished style and are often made from found materials such as cardboard, plastic sheeting, and wood. Through these media, which are associated with both construction and
debris, Sibony’s work elevates the humble qualities of everyday ‘stuff’ to create instances of poetic beauty. In Untitled, Sibony presents a strip of carpet mounted on the wall as a ready-made ‘painting’ picturing a geometric composition made from tape; through its delicate arrangement and tactile surface, Untitled seduces invested contemplation of its precarious form and physicality.
In addition to minimalism, Sibony also cites inspiration from Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Richard Tuttle’s post-minimalism in his synthesis of disparate media, and the arte povera movement in its approach to experimentation and mystical conception of the natural quality of materials. Side Show, Side Show is a deceptively simple arrangement of two wooden frames leaned against the wall, establishing a contingent relationship to both each other and the surrounding gallery architecture. Delineating empty space as a comparable field by which to measure the sculpture’s existence, Side Show, Side Show wittily hovers between ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’, exuding a quiet spiritual aura in its delicate self-assertion. Presented with understated elegance, the frames operate as both a form and its shadow, action and onsequence, a receptacle and echo of viewer perception.
Sibony’s Untitled is a monumental assemblage of plastic wrapping and packing tape. Its overwhelming scale magnifies its fragile physicality, making its precarious presence simultaneously awesome and embarrassed. At first glance Sibony’s piece seems happenstance, as if the packaging of a work had been hung, rather than the work itself. The brown tape however, forms a rough image of a canvas on an easel; sketched out on the clear tarpaulin, Sibony’s witty conceptual game challenges expectations of perception and demythologises the processes behind art production – from the laborious work in the studio to final exhibition - making the creative methodology quite literally transparent.
Juxtaposing a sheet of carpet and an unfitted door, Sibony’s Untitled dissembles ideas of both architectural space and the selfconscious flatness of colour-field painting. Recontextualised as formal devices, his common household furnishings are made alien and seductive, elevated from their functional familiarity to the status of pure aesthetic. As ‘readymade paintings’ they form a strange diptych, their cheap purpose-built textures become oddly possessing through their assertion of autonomy, creating a sense of the sublime through the ordinary fixtures of everyday life.
