New York, NY- Space 776 is pleased to present Detachments, a group exhibition featuring works by Dave Alexander, Frank Olt, Jude Tallichet, Katherine Jackson, John Digby, Etty Yaniv, David Freund, Seung Lee, and Jean-Michelle Haessle.  The group, which just like in the early 1980s, neo-expressionists such as Basquiat, Schnabel, and Salle are injecting a new sense of detachment — appropriating, rather than inhabiting the past strategies. 

​

“The decade of the 1980s is characterized by the coexistence of a diverse range of artistic practices,” said Sabine M. Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Gallery of Art. “Taken together, these different positions demonstrate the complete arrival of the postmodern in the art world.”

​

There has always been a tug of war between modernist ideals and postmodern’s relative realities. Jacque Derrida pointed out that all there is to truth lies in the words (and materials) we use to describe things. The things themselves may not exist at all. Much of the time postmodernism gets the bad rap from its lack of sincerity or higher purpose. David Foster Wallace proclaimed that Postmodernism had run its course by the late 1990s and he suggested a more sincere form of art in Post-Postmodernism, Metamodernism, and New Sincerity. The artists exhibiting in this show were working in the 1980s at the height of Postmodernist influences and still creating artwork. Not all were affected by this shift in art. Others took on the shifts in the art world head-first and it is interesting to see where these influences took their work 30 years later. After all the fuss of which or who’s reality can be best described, perhaps Robert Frost put it in a most hopeful light when he wrote, years before postmodernism: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”  - Robert Frost