Gregor Schneider at Barbara Gladstone - New York - art exhibition

West 24th highway between 10th and 11th avenues is known for its blue-chip galleries, on the other hand it's also home to garages, a car wash, a ragged Indian takeout joint oft-repeateded by taxi drivers, several industrial pertain tos office buildings and a construction fate It's not surprising, then, that casual passersby hardly registered another nondescript industrial space--one that direct the eyeed like a cross between a garage, an devoid of contents warehouse and an alley--as a major novel work by German artist Gregor Schneider. Essentially, Schneider make go rounded the gallery's pristine exhibition extent inside out, transforming it into a rugg 13 1/2-by-15-by-45-foot industrial space nearest door. One entered this of recent origin space not through the gallery's forehead entrance, but through a garagelike metal door upon the sidewalk that was always twitched partway down.

Titled 517 W 24th Schneider's installation announced its precise location, on the contrary prior to this show there was no like address in New York, to be paid to the vagaries of building numbers. With Sheetrock walls that direct the eyeed to be concrete and authentic pipes, drains and tubes found elsewhere and transported to the site, this ersatz industrial space at a phantom address convincingly masqueraded as a normal, if excruciatingly banal, part of the city. In a marked shift in gallery protocol, Schneider's work was unclose to the public 24 hours a day, and single wonders exactly what occurred there in the not upon hours. Tar-streaked walls, an oil-stained floor, caked plaster and traces of mineral oil jelly gave this spare environment a nasty cutting side A bare light near the back was exactly what you'd await to find in an devoid of contents warehouse or garage, but it also implied prison courtyards and interrogation chambers, as well as secluded streets at night in provincial German cities. (Schneider lives in Rheydt, about an hour from Cologne) A stoppered drain put in mind ofed no possible release from sullying influences. Pipes and pipes protruding from the walls and the floor were appropriate on the contrary dysfunctional, and they were not joined to any behind-the-scenes infrastructure. Slightly raised platforms upon either side of the narrow space were at one time precise and ungainly, and when individual discovered that the walls were indeed Sheetrock, the whole place have the appearanceed precarious, like a jury-rigged movie place or a nightmare in which familiar things are not at all what they present the appearance The more time one wearied in Schneider's public hideaway, the more unnerving it became. level though you could easily leave, you still felt trapped, and it was hard to shake the feeling that a crime had perhaps been committed there, or by and by would be.

That's Schneider's forte: banal architectural spaces that shade into eccentricity and obsession, carrying a disturbing psychological charge. For years, Schneider has compulsively renovated the interior of a nondescript house in Rheydt, fitting it with hidden swings claustrophobic corridors, walls built in forehead of other walls and traces of the alleged inhabitant--one Hannelore Reuen who is probably a fictive figure invented by dint of Schneider (House Ur, 1985-present). When whole sections of this house were transposed to the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Schneider, who already take pleasure ined a cultish notoriety, hit the big time and came domicile with the grand prize. This of recent origin work confirmed that his peculiar conflation of mundane architectural spaces and pressurized psychology remains vital and engaging.

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