NEW YORK
Ornamenting Crime curated by Irena Jurek
February 4 - 27, 2015

Jessica Bottalico
Sarah Bednarek
Caroline Wells Chandler
Jennifer Coates, Matthew Craven
Evie Falci, Alicia Gibson
Raul De Nieves
Rachel Schmidhofer
Natalie Collette Wood
Jacques Louis Vidal

We are very excited to launch Irena Jurek’s book of drawings with an essay by David Cohen titled Comfortable In Their Own Fur, The Drawings of Irena Jurek.

“The decorative impulse occupies a ubiquitous yet ambivalent position in visual culture, historically trivialized by the Modernists, most notably by Adolf Loos, in his seminal essay, Ornament and Crime, often disparagingly dismissed by the critics, its vital and irrepressible role continues to be underestimated. In the mid seventies and early eighties, the Pattern and Decoration movement emerged as a revolt against the predominantly male art world that dismissed the feminine and deified occidental dominance. Offering a contrast to the prevailing acetic Puritanism of Minimalism, P & D also blurred the boundaries between art and craft, using as its subject textiles, rugs, and wallpaper.
Ornamenting Crime, is a celebration of the throbbing, pulsating, force that is decoration. Each of the artists in this exhibition takes on a highly individualized approach to pattern, giving themselves over to sumptuous swirls of ecstatic ecstasy. The maximalist urge to deploy horror vacui is an essential formal tool in the execution of these works, proving yet again that decoration is more than pretty ribbons and bows.”
-Irena Jurek