Blueprint
21 June – 14 September 2014
Curated by Sebastiaan Bremer and Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu of SO – IL
Exhibition design by SO – IL (Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu, Enzo Valerio)
Based on the exhibition Blueprint (1998) curated by Sebastiaan Bremer & Pieter Woudt
Blueprint at MOCA Tucson is a new iteration of an important exhibition mounted in 1998 at the Gallery Spark in Chelsea, New York, curated by Sebastiaan Bremer in collaboration with Pieter Woudt. It brought together a group of young artists, who at the time were equal parts “ambitious and broke”, in the words of Bremer. These emerging artists were developing their voice and vision and seeking a receptive audience for their innovative work.
Nearly 15 years later, many of these artists have gone on to significant critical success, and thus Blueprint remains a remarkable historical document about a significant moment in the New York art world. Blueprint is structured around a common module, the blueprint. This organizing principle gave shape and order to the polyphony of output by artists working in various media and across a range of discourses.
The blueprint as a standard unit is both beautiful and inexpensive, a necessary element for young artists with little money and a DIY spirit. The blueprint also conceptually suggests a generative seed of a project. Things often evolve from the original plan, and through the natural iterative process of realizing a project in real space and time. This version of Blueprint invites many of the primary Blueprint artists and architects to look back at their practice and identify one “fundamental” or “generative” work: the first piece that could serve as a blueprint for their mature work.
MOCA offers our profound thanks to the curators and artists of Blueprint.
This exhibition supported in part by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York and Heineken.