Karin Schneider's SITUATIONAL DIAGRAM Exhibition Open This Fall at Dominique Levy

Beginning September 7, 2016, Dominique Levy will present Situational Diagram, an exhibition by Brazil-born, New York-based artist and filmmaker Karin Schneider. On view through October 20, Situational Diagram will be accompanied by a series of readings and gatherings.

Dominique Levy will publish a critical companion to the exhibition, edited by Schneider and gallery director Begum Yasar, with contributions by Sabu Kohso, Jaleh Mansoor, Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon O'Sullivan, Anne Querrien, Abrahao de Oliveira Santos, Valentin Schaepelynck, Schneider, Aliza Shvarts, Yasar, and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Situational Diagram takes as its point of departure a series of monochrome paintings structured according to the artistic practices of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko as they developed after WWII. These paintings are made with Mars Black pigment,

mixed variously with Cobalt Blue, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, and Phthalo Emerald. Schneider also blends derivatives of petroleum and coal (two primary energy sources) into the black pigment.

These 16 black monochrome paintings are installed on the gallery's second floor in a "trisected square" steel architectural structure, built according to the black-on-black squares that characterize Reinhardt's paintings. Paintings from this group can only be acquired by collectors with the agreement that another artist will at some point alter the canvas by painting over its surface. The name of the other artist is not to be revealed to the buyer prior to acquisition. Also on the second floor is a 16 mm film of the Adriatic Sea projected from a wood and Plexiglas "transparent partition." An Extraction features the silhouette of the female figure extracted as a form from Matisse's Nu bleu III (1952), rendered in black rubber and placed on the gallery floor.

On the gallery's third floor visitors will find two Splits, works referencing Newman's Onement I (1948) and Stations of the Cross (1958-66), and a large Void work referencing a painting at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX. The third floor also Cancellation presents Index, a series of paintings cataloguing the exhibition's various blacks; a Cancellation work that simultaneously combines and annuls two artistic styles and their corresponding sets of values (in this case, those of Reinhardt and Tarsila do Amaral) within one painting; and an Extraction from Tarsila's Abaporu (1928) (this silhouette rendered in black steel).

An advertisement for the exhibition placed in Artforum magazine features an image associated with a contemporary geopolitical crisis-a gesture that asserts connections between vastly different but nevertheless interconnected contexts. A copy of the magazine occupies the second gallery of the third floor together with three Sign paintings.

Each artwork in the exhibition is to be sold according to specific purchase agreements, structured to generate an economic model that supports collaborators involved in various aspects of the work.

Situational Diagram is an exercise that detours from a politics of aesthetics identified with traditional modes of authorship, viewership, and dissemination. It creates opportunities for multidimensional encounters with artworks. The ways in which the works confront various political, economic, and environmental issues are only detectable through a slowed-down perception of the exhibition. The gallery space can thus function as a political device, proposing a diagrammatic relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer. In this model, diverse forms of engagement can be established in relation to the artistic use of materials, time, space, and the exigencies of our time.

About the Artist - Karin Schneider is a Brazil-born and New York-based artist and filmmaker. In 1997, Schneider founded Union Gaucha Productions (UGP) with Nicola?s Guagnini, an artist-run, experimental film company that carries out interdisciplinary collaborations with practitioners from different fields. From 2005 to 2008, she was a founding member of Orchard, a cooperatively organized exhibition and social space in New York's Lower East Side. In 2010, Schneider cofounded Cage, a space that facilitates new kinds of social interactions. Her most recent body of work is Situational Diagram, which she first presented as a text at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, France, in 2015.