Beginning February 26, 2015, Luxembourg & Dayan will presentDie Hexe, a solo exhibition by Alex Da Corte. For Die Hexe ("The Witch" in German), Da Corte has created a site-specific installation that consumes the gallery's East 77th Street townhouse, turning it into an implausible cross between a dollhouse and a haunted house. Here visitors will take a journey through familiar imagery and obscure biographical references that mingle, repeat, trade places, and morph into new provocations that invite reflections on memory, impulse, the stability of knowledge, and what constitutes value in a work of art.
Da Corte's largest installation to date, Die Hexe will remain on view through April 11, 2015. The exhibition will introduce a broader audience to the work of an admired Philadelphia-based artist whose first major museum solo exhibition will open at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in March 2016.Die Hexe is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a text by Da Corte and a new essay by David Rimanelli.From the moment they cross the threshold of Luxembourg & Dayan into Die Hexe, visitors will find themselves confronted by a series of vignettes that unfold sequentially like scenes in a movie. Proceeding from one gallery space to the next, from one floor to another, these "sets" correspond roughly to the familiar themes and functions of domestic rooms. In each mise en scenealong the way, Da Corte has embedded an artwork by another artist who serves him as foil or father figure. Sculptures by Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Bjarne Melgaard, and Haim Steinbach thus appear out of context like unannounced guests, familiar yet estranged. Through Da Corte's deliberate placement, these iconic works of art - all originally intended by their makers to question modes of presentation, among other things - are subjected to a strange rebirth.Videos