Elizabeth Harris is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition of sculpture by James Biederman, on view in the gallery’s newly renovated space at 529 West 20th Street. The show opens Sept 9th and runs through Nov. 4th. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11- 6 pm. A small online catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Traversing an avenue of the organic, the sculpture of James Biederman explores the vulnerabilities of interwoven structures that enclose and expose imagined and actual space. The imagination seeks entrance to interior places where forgotten memories reside. The past encounters the present as access to the interior becomes a physical and imagined journey. These works are metaphors for the cultural mythologies and personal wanderings of our minds. Through entrance, the mind liberates itself from the density of gravity to a density of weightlessness and an awareness of the self, a place to float without the interference of the actuality of time and containment. These vessels contain the unknown nebula of space travel.

The influence of deconstructed architecture, UFO’s, Korean Moon Jars, Japanese Tea Houses and the subversion of the practical have been motivational forces in the forming of these works.

James Biederman is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Grant, Pollock- Krasner Grant, Rauschenberg Foundation Grant, NYFA Grant and two NEA Grants. Biederman’s monochromatic wall sculptures were included in Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany in 1982. He studied sculpture at SUNY New Paltz, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Yale University.

James Biederman’s work is included in the permanent public collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Everson Art Museum, Hayden Gallery, MIT, Hirshhorn Museum, Kroller-Mueller Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, National Gallery of Australia, Vero Beach Museum and the Wadesworth Athenaeum.