Adler Beatty is pleased to present Eyes Unspoken, a group exhibition organized by Cindy Ji Hye Kim. The exhibition features the death masks of Frederic Chopin and Theodore Gericault alongside recent works by Kelly Akashi, Srijon Chowdhury, Gabriel Cohen, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Hannah Levy, Brandon Ndife, and Fin Simonetti—seven contemporary artists working in diverse mediums exploring the interplay of stillness and animacy. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, September 19 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
As a collection, Eyes Unspoken explores how the animating force of life can be embodied, rather than illustrated, in contemporary paintings and sculptures. Though an artist's materials will never amount to a breath, can an artwork, as an inanimate object, embody the dynamism it wishes to represent? “The work is the death mask of its conception,” writes Walter Benjamin in his 1928 book One-Way Street, a collection of writings akin to a surrealist novel, resembling an imagistic collage or a series of sketches. In a similar spirit, Eyes Unspoken is an assemblage that places not the artworks, but the departed faces of two artists of modernity, together with artworks by artists of the new millennium. The exhibition probes what remains in the absence of the author, the artist, and the spirit of its maker—anima—to suggest that the soul of an artwork lives not in its finality but in its eternal search for an idea.
