The Albright-Knox in Buffalo, NY has an incredible exhibition. It’s a short day trip from Rochester and with the weather getting cooler it’s the perfect way to spend a normally dreary afternoon. The current show is an incredible exhibition of contemporary art from the past decade, fittingly called, Decade. Here are a few of my favorite spaces in the gallery.
Sol Lewitt – Scribbles Staircase
Discussions for the acquisition and installation of Wall Drawing #1268 for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery began in 2006. After sending representatives from his studio to the Albright-Knox, the artist chose the Gallery’s main stairwell—this great transitional space that connects the 1962 Knox building and the 1905 Albright building—as the site for the work, his largest scribble drawing.
Built up from thousands of graphite scribbles that cover more than 2,200 square feet of wall surface, the drawing was scribbled into existence over nine weeks. Working according to LeWitt’s instructions—Line, continuous gradation, and feel of steel—a crew of sixteen people scribbled for seven hours a day for fifty-four days between August and October 2010. The scribblers—artists from the LeWitt estate and the Western New York area—worked for a total of 5,026 hours and used 1,717 pencil leads.
Rachel Whiteread – Untitled
This sculpture was created by casting the fire escape staircase at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in London, England (a late eighteenth-century, three-story building that was originally the home of Admiral Lord Nelson), and is one of several staircase pieces the artist has completed to date. By reincarnating the staircase in its negative form and taking it out of its original context, this work invokes a disorienting sense of both recollection and loss for the viewer, while simultaneously realizing the artist’s desire to bring together the purely formal and architectural qualities inherent to the sculptural medium.
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