NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present The Electric Chair, an exhibition of new works by Christian Marclay. The exhibition, which opens on 6 October at 521 West 21st Street, will remain on view through 4 November.

The Electric Chair, a new series of screenprints on canvas and on paper, is based on a detail from Andy Warhol’s famous Electric Chair image used in 1963 for his Death and Disaster series. This is Marclay’s first use of the medium. Working directly from Warhol’s original source photograph (obtained from The Archives of The Andy Warhol Museum), Marclay cropped a detail and adopted Warholian formal devices, such as enlargement, symmetrical formatting and serial repetition. To better emulate Warhol’s screenprint technique, Marclay collaborated with printer Donald Sheridan, one of Warhol’s assistants from 1977 to 1982.

The Electric Chair extends Marclay’s practice of sampling elements from visual culture (fine art or popular artefacts) in order to explore their potential to comment on the roles of sound and silence in our social rituals. In this particular case, Marclay’s riff on a Warholian theme shifts our attention to the staged aspect of capital punishment and the social regulation of sound and silence.

The exhibition will also include photographs relating to the screenprints and taken between 1995 and 2005.

Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, California) grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel. In 1977, he moved to Boston and attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Marclay’s work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Venice Biennale; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; Kunsthaus Zürich; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other venues. In 2004, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, organized a midcareer retrospective of Marclay’s work which traveled to major international venues. In March 2007, Marclay’s video works will be the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, France. He lives and works in New York City.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com