Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys Exhibition to Open 5/3 at MoMA PS1

The exhibition Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys: Fine Arts presents new and existing work by the Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966).

Featuring fifteen steel sculptures, more than eighty watercolors, and several videos, it will be the artists' first museum exhibition in New York City. The artists make tragic, comic, and silent portraits of the human condition. They are drawn to all that society can't digest or domesticate, and they create a perverse caricature that is populated by amateur actors, faces, dolls, animals, and other speechless objects. Their work is deadpan, in all senses of the word: funny and blank at the same time.

Standing at nine-feet tall but eight millimeters thick, the sculptures resemble cut-out figures or pixelated bodies. Watercolored faces, traced from anonymous images found online, are pinned to each one. Appearing throughout a series of eight carpeted galleries, the sculptures will be the visitors to an exhibition of new watercolors. This series of eighty-four watercolors depict the lives and rituals of groups all over the world and a new film, Die aap van Bloemfontein (The Ape from Bloemfontein, 2014), relates a story of impossible and exuberant transformations -- a computer becoming a lawnmower becoming a television.

Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966) have collaborated since the late 1980s. They have had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; M HKA, Antwerp; Kunsthalle Basel; Culturgest, Lisbon; and were included in the Venice Biennale (2013) and the Berlin Biennial (2008). Raven Row, in London, will present a solo show in September 2015. De Gruyter and Thys live and work in Brussels.

Jos de Guyter & Harald Thys: Fine Arts is curated by Anthony Huberman, Director and Chief Curator, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. The exhibition at MoMA PS1 expands on the one presented at the Wattis Institute and is co-organized with Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, MoMA PS1.

MUSEUM INFO:

Hours: MoMA PS1 is open from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Thursday through Monday. It is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. ARTBOOK @MoMA PS1 is open from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Thursday through Sunday.

Admission: $10 suggested donation; $5 for students and senior citizens; free for MoMA members and MoMA admission ticket holders. The MoMA ticket must be presented at MoMA PS1 within thirty days of date on ticket and is not valid during Warm Up or other MoMA PS1 events or benefits. MoMAPS1.org | MoMA.org

Directions: MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Ave in Long Island City, Queens, across the Queensboro Bridge from midtown Manhattan and is easily accessible by bus and subway. Traveling by subway, take either the E or M to Court Square-23 Street; the 7 to 45 Road-Courthouse Square; or the G to Court Sq or 21 St-Van Alst. By bus, take the Q67 to Jackson and 46th Ave or the B62 to 46th Ave.

MoMA PS1 is one of the largest and oldest organizations in the United States devoted to contemporary art. Established in 1976 by Alanna Heiss, MoMA PS1 originated from The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, a not-for-profit organization founded five years prior with the mission of turning abandoned, underutilized buildings in New York City into artist studios and exhibition spaces. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, as it then was known, became an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in 2000.

Pictured: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. Four Dogs and a Cat on a Bicycle. 2015. Pencil and watercolor on off-white cardboard in wooden frame. Image courtesy Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels.