NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Sam Durant opening March 31st and on view through April 28th, 2007.

In 2002–2003, Sam Durant produced a series of drawings and vitrines with objects that reference Joseph Beuys’ iconic vitrines from the mid-1970s. Like Beuys, Durant grouped an assortment of seemingly mundane objects, both found and fabricated, and placed them in museum style display cases. Durant’s vitrines and the working drawings that accompany them examine aspects of myth and ritual in Beuys’ work.

Durant actively pursues political engagement through his art. His past work has focused on the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers; the Kent State, Ohio, student massacre; and the centuries-long struggle between Native Americans and white settlers. Durant has also created work about artists Robert Smithson and Isamu Noguchi, the musicians Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, and the art critic Rosalind Krauss.

This group of work was shown in 2003 at the Kuntsverien fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf. The Paula Cooper Gallery exhibition marks the first time that the work has been seen in the United States.

Sam Durant lives and works in Los Angeles. Other recent one-person exhibitions of his work have been at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. His work has been included in numerous group exhibition such as the 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennal, New York; the 2002 Venice Biennale, Italy; and Out of Place: Contemporary Art and the Architectural Uncanny at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This exhibition is Durant’s second one-person show at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

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