Ai Weiwei Breeds High Culture With Lego to Rebirth Readymades @ neugerriemschneider in Berlin

know thyself, Ai Weiwei’s fifth solo exhibition with nerugerriemschneider, continues his extended engagement with imagery created from Lego bricks to reassess, de- and reconstruct or contextualize anew works from throughout art history and the contemporary media landscape. Using a traditionally playful, immediate, generationally and geographically ubiquitous medium to analytical, critical extents, Ai shapes a veritable survey of both the Western cultural canon and of his own artistic trajectory.

Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

 
 

know thyself is on view through March 30th, 2024, at neugerriemschneider, Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin.

The Thing and the Thing-In-Itself @ Andrea Rosen Gallery

Andrea Rosen Gallery presents The Thing and the Thing-in-Itself, an exhibition comprising a tightly focused group of 20th-century masterworks curated by noted art historian Robert Hobbs.  Bringing together a compelling group of significant works, one by each of seven key 20th-century artists – Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth, René Magritte, Piero Manzoni, Yoko Ono, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Smithson – this exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to look at familiar artists in a new way and with much greater depth. The Thing and the Thing-in-Itself will be on view until January 24, 2014 at Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street. photographs by Jena Cumbo for Autre.