Simon Preston is delighted to present Lower East Side, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Austrian artist Hans Schabus. The show will open to the public on Sunday 2 March and run until Sunday 20 April 2014.

Hans Schabus has long remained interested in principles of order in architecture and society and persistently seeks to undermine and question them. Disrupting, re-configuring and re-erecting space is essential to his artistic practice. Site-specific installations frequently subvert exhibition space, notably The Last Land (2005) at the Venice Biennale, with its crystalline structure atop the Austrian Pavilion. Revised spatial thinking is also evident through his symbolic use of stairs, tunnels and corridors as conduits that lead back and forth to the vital source of his ideas, the artist’s studio.

His most recent series of four works, collectively titled Lower East Side (2013-14), is an existential investigation of site and context, relating to both the gallery’s private and public histories. Originating from the act of slicing and removing the gallery’s storefront to place in front of the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach last year, the series developed from the necessity to then build a makeshift temporary plywood façade at the gallery on the Lower East Side. Prompted by the neighboring manufacturers, Schabus devised a 1:1 scale drawing of the façade in his studio in Vienna with the purpose of having a final replacement storefront installed at the gallery. Each freestanding sculpture is shown together with a photograph that records the original action and its subsequent echo. Lower East Side mimics the multitude of entrances to the neighborhood’s eclectic diversity, simultaneously reflecting inside vs. outside and private vs. public.

Hans Schabus was born in 1970 and lives and works Vienna, Austria. He has exhibited extensively worldwide and recently participated in the Colombo Art Biennale 2012, Sri Lanka; Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana 2011; Berlin Biennale 2010, Germany; Biennale of Sydney 2008, Australia; Liverpool Biennial 2006, England; Turin Triennial 2005, Italy; and the Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2005, Italy.

Recent solo presentations at MAK Center, Los Angeles; Culturgest, Lisbon; Institut d’art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; Museum of Contemporary Art – 21er Haus, Vienna; The Curve – Barbican Art Gallery, London; SITE Sante Fe, New Mexico; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz; Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; Zero, Milan.

The artist has also exhibited at numerous international institutions including Witte de With, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Städelmuseum, Frankfurt; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Malmö Art Museum, Malmö; Art Metropole, Toronto; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg.