MoCA Westport is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Helmut Lang, curated by Todd von Ammon, on view to the public beginning on Sunday March 15th and continuing through August 16th, 2020. The exhibition will span both galleries of the museum and consist of two separate projects, demonstrating the continued evolution of Lang’s contributions to culture and art.

The first gallery will host a self-contained exhibition of all-white wall-reliefs and sculptures. These wall-mounted planes, pillars and spikes are embedded within a practice defined by ruin, accretion and preservation of materials which typically takes on the charred and blackened complexions of decay. The planes—whose pale tones allude to bones and ashes—hang abutted to one another like altarpiece panels, and the mounds and spikes resemble an abstracted reliquary. This mise-en-scene is a striking corollary to the brunt of Lang’s exhibitions to date.

The second gallery will contain a site-specific configuration of sixty-three of Lang’s celebrated “pillar” sculptures. which share a common medium: a multitude of shredded and crushed objects and materials suspended in pigmented resin. This loamy, fibrous sculptural composite material consists of Lang’s destroyed design archive. Leaving a previous career behind, the artist staged an intentional cataclysm and has been making new work from its wreckage ever since. The lean, crusted pillars arranged in a loose grid stand freely in seeming precarity, with small gaps between one another through which the viewer may travel. This second installation, while aggressively economical in its content, provides an immersion into Lang’s ocean of material language.

Lang’s work is a disavowal of the illusion of time as periodic, tidy and rational. The sculptures on view portray history as entropic and digestive, a suggestion that the truest character of forms is their tendency to dissolve and transform through time.

Born in Vienna 1956, Helmut Lang lives and works in New York City and on Long Island. Select past solo exhibitions have been held at Sperone Westwater, New York; von ammon co., Washington, DC; Sammlung Friedrichshof, Vienna; Stadtraum, Vienna; Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; Deste Foundation, Athens; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; and The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn.