Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery
Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery

Maccarone gallery opened the doors of the first exhibition dedicated to Phanos Kyriacou, View to River from North. New works are on view, unearthing Kyriacou’s practice for its first presentation to a New York audience. Over the past decade, Kyriacou has explored varying media interventions within space and poetic manipulations of sculptural form, in turn creating an unexpected dialogue with and about his environment.

Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery
Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery

The crux of Kyriacou’s practice manifests in his hometown of Nicosia, Cyprus, in modes such as the Midget Factory, a project space he founded there, or through spontaneous installations throughout the urban and rural landscape, each functioning autonomously yet on the whole creating a pulsing record of an ongoing conversation with his surroundings. Kyriacou’s position is one considered from the fringes of craftsmanship. His arrangements incorporate things found as well as commissioned objects often infused with the interventions of local craftsmen.

Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery
Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery

Most recently for the 2013 Venice Biennale (Kyriacou participated in the joint Cypriot and Lithuanian Pavilion curated by Raimundas Malašauskas situated within a working 1970’s modernist sports complex), the artist’s sculptural ensemble, Eleven hosts, twenty-one guests, nine ghosts, consisted of free-standing elements arranged on the bleachers of an in-use basketball court. This homage to humble reclaimed objects such as the back of a chair, a dried yucca tree, or ceramics, served to disrupt the surroundings while simultaneously creating asymmetry. These objects gain significance in an atmosphere of uncertainty.

Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery
Courtesy of Maccarone Gallery

Kyriacou plays with our perception of space, further problematizing the notion of location. For his inaugural exhibition at Maccarone, Kyriacou will alter the exhibition space with a site-specific intervention, concurrently presenting a series of sculptures and a multichannel video installation. Several of the sculptural works feature various sized objects upon plywood structures, alluding to a stage for continued exploration of informal aesthetics in this new city, at a new moment in time, in an open-ended drift through a reshaping of experience.

Maccarone

by Ingrid Melano