Between 1972 and 1983, the artist Colette transformed her Lower Manhattan loft into an immersive, ever-evolving installation and invited the public to join her in a dreamlike pastel world. Covering the ceilings and walls with ruched silks, blush satins, mirrors, cascading ropes and light boxes, Colette obsessively created a complete Living Environment in which every surface was a work of art.

Now Company Gallery reconstructs a portion of this legendary space through mixed-media paintings, sculptures, light boxes, costumes, short films, music, performance documentation, and ephemera. The new installation utilizes the original site’s elements, as well as revisits the prolific period of Colette’s practice during which she called the Living Environment her home. 

Moving fluidly between the public sphere and her own private space, Colette’s work embraced an unapologetic eroticism and effete femininity that short-circuited the feminist politics of the day. Her aesthetic combined the all-encompassing decadence of Louis XVI and the affected alienation of the burgeoning punk scene. In several of her performances, she incorporated sleep as an endurance practice, as if to show that through dreams of she would realize her impossible desires, becoming a living sculpture. An installation in the exhibition reconstructs a work titled Notes of Baroque Living (1978-1983/2021),] centers a life-sized doll sculpture of Colette, made in collaboration with Company Gallery artist Cajsa von Zeipel. 

Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972-1983 continues at Company (145 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan) through January 22. The exhibition was curated by Kenta Murakami.

January 20, 3:00pm online lecture: Käthe Kollwitz Art and Politics

In the course of her long career, Käthe  Kollwitz (1867–1945) developed an aesthetic vision that focused on social and political struggles of her time. This talk will address Kollwitz’s commitment to social critique, assess her complex process of art-making, and reveal the technical and formal experiments that underlie the production of the artist’s powerful works.

In conjunction with Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden,  Louis Marchesano, the Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will explore the work of the German artist. Above: Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), Frontal Self-Portrait, 1911; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Herbert Boswank. Tickets

Opening January 28: Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, at ICP

How  big can a photograph be? Actual Size! explores what happens when a photograph is the very same size as its subject matter—when a photograph of a bus is the size of a bus, when a photograph of Muhammad Ali’s fist is its actual size, when a postcard of hail stones records their sizes for posterity. Image makers of every kind, from fine artists to advertisers, have explored the strange magic that happens when the photograph becomes an uncanny double for the world it depicts. Works by Ace Lehner, Laura Letinsky, Kija Lucas, Tanya Marcuse, Aspen Mays, Jeff Wall and others share the walls with anonymous posters, magazine spreads, and book covers.

Curated by David Campany, ICP’s managing director of programs, and conceived especially for ICP’s unique double-height gallery, the exhibition is a rethinking of the fundamental qualities of the elastic medium of photography. Above: Tanya Marcuse, Woven No 30, 2018. 62 x 160 in. © Tanya Marcuse

Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, International Center of Photography, 79 Essex Street, NY, NY Info