Flat Works
September 18, 2024 – December 21, 2024
The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, USA
Installation view of Flat Works, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, USA, 2024
Photo: Michael Tropea
Press Release
The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to present Haegue Yang: Flat Works, a defining exhibition marking the artist’s first North American retrospective to survey the artist’s two-dimensional explorations over the last three decades. Through a select number of key works, the ambitious exhibition identifies underlying connections and motivations across the artist’s oeuvre, offering a scholarly perspective on this aspect of Yang’s career for the first time.
Haegue Yang: Flat Works includes 58 works from seven series: Hardware Store Collages, Lacquer Paintings, Non-Foldings, Trustworthies (abstractions made from security envelopes and other materials), Wallpapers, Edibles, and most recently, Mesmerizing Mesh (cut and folded paper collages based on varied, international shamanistic practices). These diverse investigations have accompanied Yang’s practice in three dimensions—including her iconic venetian blind installations and remarkable sonic sculptures with metallic bells—and have been presented in all of her major exhibitions. Until now, however, they have never been comprehensively explored on their own. Pointing to the cumulative impact of these two-dimensional works, this exhibition unearths through-lines across Yang’s many diverse projects. Formed around the key word “flat,” it provides a rich but rare insight into Yang’s conceptual map.
One of the most important artists working today, Yang is predominantly known as a sculptor and installation artist. Nonetheless, her two-dimensional investigations have been consistent and essential to her creative development. A fundamental recognition of these series is that “flatness” registers a collapse of the three-dimensional world as image. The aesthetics of these investigations range from minimalist and discrete to maximalist and engulfing.
Yang’s revelatory exploration of “flat” projects is still evolving—and the exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago offers both landmark and recent materials that attest to this process. Yang hangs an excerpt from a room-scaled wallpaper on the vitrine surrounding The Arts Club of Chicago’s classic Mies van der Rohe staircase, while an elaborate wooden trellis is newly conceived to display collages from the Mesmerizing Mesh series with related archival research undertaken by the artist. Both the vitrine and the trellis show the evolving energy of Yang’s creative practice by compressing or exploding the space of the exhibition, which produces a sense of dimensional shift.
Exhibited works
Carsick Drawing – Toward Huu Nghi and Youyiguan #1, 2, 2016
Certificates, 2010-2011 Hardware Store Collages, 2012-
Gymnastics of the Foldables, 2006
Incantations – Entwinement, Endurance and Extinction, 2022
Last Destination Brussels, 2004
Non-Foldings – Geometric Tipping, 2013
Non-Foldings – Scenarios of Non-Geometric Folding, 2013
The Source of Spring is in the Trace of a Movement, 2021