Matasheva and Tabak Launch Artist-Run Exhibit 260 Madison

Neck Cranes, Knees, and Competing Graffiti

The show deliberately rejects the sterile environment of a traditional gallery in favor of confronting the building’s raw architecture head-on.

“Some works make you look up until your neck hurts while also directing your gaze to the wiring and piping on the ceiling. Others force you to get down on your knees, making you aware of your body and causing a certain discomfort. Elsewhere, graffiti competes with wall work, making you question whether you’re looking at art, set design, or something left behind by previous tenants or the construction crew,” said Matasheva over email.

“The show needed to acknowledge its architecture, rather than exist in the vacuum of a white cube or black box,” Matasheva added.

Systems of Production, Generations of Artists

Fellow curator Tabak framed the exhibition as a large-scale investigation into how systems of production and material value shape perception, bringing together artists from different generations who approach the built environment in radically different ways.

“My own work is concerned with the relationship between materials, technology, industrial production, and the human hand. I’m interested in the systems that determine how things are made, what we assign value to, and how objects shape our understanding of the world,” Tabak said. “It was especially exciting to bring together artists from different generations whose work approaches materiality, technology, and the built environment in radically different ways. Curating this exhibition became a way of pursuing some of those questions on a much larger scale, through the work of artists whose practices I’ve admired and followed for years.”