March 3, 2025
Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago
"The Autonomy Illusion"
Artist Gedi Sibony delivers and OPC talk titled "The Autonomy Illusion".
For over twenty years now, Gedi Sibony has been consistently transforming cast-offs and other found materials such as cardboard, plastic sheeting, and wood scraps into spare, elusive works of art, forging an evocative new strain of Minimalism from the salvage of contemporary life.
In his practice, Sibony appears to bridge two traditions of artmaking—a highly site-specific staging indebted to minimalism which foregrounds spatial context and the viewer’s perception, and an anti-art strain beginning with dada that questions the fundamental nature of the “art object” both materially and as a categorical term. In truth, while evoking both of these idioms, his interests lie also in more metaphysical concerns—the creation of complex pictorial spaces and a recalling of more ancient purposes for art, which simultaneously tether the viewer to concrete reality while pointing to unknowable possibilities.
Gedi Sibony lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York and Mister Fahrenheit, New York (2022). Solo institutional presentations include The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin; Culturgest, Lisbo); and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.