By Zoë Lescaze 4/16 1:43pm

destruction

12 Photos

IMG_1159

A Smashing Show at Family Business Gallery

As the sun set on Saturday night, sending long shafts of light east down 21st Street, everything looked fairly normal at Family Business gallery. At least by its standards. An eclectic array of ceramic sculptures was sitting on shelves lining two walls of the shoe-box-sized space. Two scruffy DJs, architecture grad students from Columbia, were manning turntables squeezed into a corner. “Tribal” bowls, as described by Daria Irincheeva, the gallery’s director, (they were either African or Native American—no one was sure) were on loan from a private collection and hanging from the ceiling. A small crowd was gathered outside watching a Kate Gilmore performance piece consisting of four women holding heavy yellow pots for three hours. The only indication of the imminent destruction was the shards of clay littering the floor.

The previous week, for the opening of the show, “In Praise of Chance and Failure,” artists and viewers alike destroyed work deemed unsuccessful by the creators. For this second smashing party, the shelves had since been replenished, and a new batch of sculptures was about to meet the same fate. Each doomed work was marked with a sad face sticker. Read More

By Zoë Lescaze 1/21 3:45pm

events

13 Photos

Fire in Chelsea! Family Business Gallery Burns Show

On Thursday night Ari Marcopoulos, curator of the most recent show at the Family Business gallery in Chelsea, was making a Molotov cocktail in a Snapple bottle. Outside, about 50 people were gathered around a trashcan overflowing with Xeroxed photographs, drawings, receipts, business cards, pornography and other paper ephemera that were on the gallery walls less than an hour before. You can probably guess where this is going. Read More

By Rozalia Jovanovic 3/29/12 6:04pm

galleries

Maurizio Cattelan at VICE Issue Launch Party (Photo: Rozalia Jovanovic)

Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘More and More Penises’ at Vice Holy Trinity Launch Party

At 8:20 p.m. last night, artist Maurizio Cattelan was standing in line for a rum drink by the make-shift bar at Anna Kustera Gallery in Chelsea to which his own tiny storefront gallery, Family Business, is annexed. There was a pile of magazines next to him with bright blue covers, as it was the Vice magazine issue release party for the Holy Trinity Issue and Mr. Cattelan had designed the front cover, which features a picture of three objects—a stapler, a red plunger and a dildo, the last of which was covered with a black sticker that had the word “dildo” printed on it. We made to say hello to the skinny Italian artist as he left the bar, but the artist, who was wearing a dark sport jacket, black skinny jeans and modish white leather sneakers, was intercepted by a tall blonde woman. Around him in the small bright space, was a group exhibition mostly of photographic work. The crowd was dressed casually and seemed barely out of college. Read More