P!CKER proffers a particular proposition: that curating, design, and other artistic pursuits in our present times must eschew the promotion of perfect products, instead presenting the creative process itself, with its plurality of positive outcomes and periodic faux pas.
This peculiar statement connects the activities of Stanley Picker Gallery, whose programme embraces the intersections of art and design within a university context, with that of P!, a hybrid exhibition space and ‘Mom-and-Pop-Kunsthalle’ that existed in New York City from 2012–2017. Founded by designer, curator, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy, P! operated with a quixotic drive to remake conventions of exhibition display, reexamine the relationship between aesthetics and political agendas, and reconsider accepted boundaries of contemporary creative practice.
With this collaborative context, P!CKER emerges as a series of two solo exhibitions – presenting polymathic practitioners Elaine Lustig Cohen and Céline Condorelli – alongside a programme of activities. Building off P!’s five year exhibition history while pointing towards future pursuits, the exhibition offers alternative models for considering interdisciplinary pedagogy and ways to work within the world.
P!CKER, PART I
Elaine Lustig Cohen Looking Backward to Look Forward
How do we take stock of a multifaceted creative life that never stood still? Over six decades of practice, Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) moved between diverse activities including design, art-making, art dealing, archiving, collecting, and researching. While she is known most widely for her groundbreaking graphic design work from the 1950s and 1960s, which extended the vocabulary of European modernism to an American context, the visibility of her rigorous body of artwork has grown substantially over the past years. Always changing, Lustig Cohen shifted from hard-edged abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s into photographic collage, work on paper, sculptural assemblage, and alphabetical experimentation in her later decades. Her visual output developed in close ‘intellectual friendship’ with leading writers, architects, designers, and artists of her time.
Reflecting this open spirit, P!CKER, Part I – Lustig Cohen’s first solo exhibition in Great Britain – positions her practice within an experimental framework. Conceived and designed by Prem Krishnamurthy of P!, who worked closely with the artist during her last years, the exhibition focuses on a small selection from Lustig Cohen’s prodigious production alongside other objects, documents, and displays from her final exhibitions and collaborations. Presented subjectively and acknowledging its own gaps, the show aims to be generative rather than definitive – asking questions about the work on view and suggesting pathways for further research.
A series of reading groups, informed by Lustig Cohen’s work, her literary interests, and other theoretical and philosophical strands, take place over the course of the exhibition. In November, the show transforms into Prologue: a solo presentation by Céline Condorelli, which overlaps in content and concerns with Epilogue, the closing exhibition at P! from Spring 2017.
It seems sometimes the future arrives before the past.