P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Pacific Coast Highway by Richard Sigmund, along with two recent paintings: Hudson Street Candle (1999) and Diamond (2000).
Pacific Coast Highway, made in Los Angeles in 1984, is being shown for the first time in almost twenty years, and for the first time outside of California. Composed of eleven panels and fifty-three feet in length, the work gives physical sense and actual scale to its subject: the Pacific Coast Highway. To walk past the painting is to cross almost the entire width of the highway, and hanging the work on the wall creates the sensation of an overhead view. As an image/object, it hovers between painting, photography, and relief sculpture, and between realism and abstraction. The painting implies a particularly "West Coast sensibility," and expands on the work of artists such as Vija Celmins, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha. Pacific Coast Highway is a painting in life-size.
Richard Sigmund was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1951 and currently lives and works in New York City. Among Sigmund's solo exhibitions were those at Eighth Street Gallery, Los Angeles (1984); Koplin Gallery, Los Angeles (1987); Ananda Ashram, Monroe, New York (1999); and Crozier Fine Arts, Warehouse, Alternative Space, New York (1999). He has also been included in group exhibitions at, among others, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (1984); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California (1983); The Drawing Center, New York (1993); R Town, Brooklyn, New York (1996); I-20 Gallery, New York (2003); and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (2004).
This exhibition is curated by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas.
