Tag: Spencer Finch

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Spencer Finch’s inventive visual translations

Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch is fascinated by Japan, which he first visited some 50 years ago, when he was a teenager. “One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige),” his current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, includes four installations grounded in that experience. Fourteen Stones, inspired by a Japanese Zen garden and made with ordinary concrete bricks, encompasses simulacra of fifteenth-century garden stones. Even these banal objects, Finch suggests, warrant contemplation. For Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), he has installed stained glass to evoke Japanese moon-viewing. Four LED sculptures present images that recast traditional Japanese haikus through lit color schemes. And Finch’s 42 watercolors reference Utagawa Hiroshige’s renowned One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in 1856–58, through present-day New York. 

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Spencer Finch’s dazzling originality

Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch’s new and recent work at Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea are set in dialogue with The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise, a magnificent 1533 stained-glass window by Renaissance master Valentin Bousch. “Lux and Lumen,” the exhibition’s title, comes from Abbot Suger of the cathedral at Saint-Denis, who praised the power of stained glass to transform natural light, or lux, into sacred light, or lumen. Inspired by that medieval idea, and by his visit to Claude Monet’s pond and garden at Giverny, Finch’s Painting Air, an immersive hanging-glass installation, is a dramatic visual essay on light.