Of A Different Nature, a thematic group show of works by El Anatsui, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Maya Lin, is due to open at the Jack Shainman Gallery’s 20th Street Space in New York on 4 February. “We were really looking at artists working within this organic and unexpected grid,” explains the gallery’s senior director, Tamsen Greene.
The US architect and artist Lin and the Ghanaian artist Anatsui “together were the jumping-off point” for the exhibition, Greene says. However, “we didn’t have a show until we landed on the Bechers”, she says of the late German photography duo.
Greene adds that the artists’ formal links—with “the grid coming together, falling apart again”—are complemented by thematic links—such as “the relationship between the environment, conservation, materiality, human intervention”.
The gallery plans to display three to five works by Anatsui from his recent Metas series (2014), large pieces composed of old printing plates. “They’re totally monochromatic, they’re cut into a lot of precise squares, there are all these vestiges of their original purpose there, traces, smudges of ink,” Greene says.
Five of Lin’s works have been confirmed so far, including three freestanding sculptures from her Bodies of Water series (2006), in which plywood is layered to depict inland seas, such as the Caspian.
Two of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “typology” groups will be shown: nine silver gelatin prints from Water Towers (2011) taken in New York, and 12 silver gelatin prints from Grain Elevators, Bins (2003, photographs taken between 1978 and 2000).
While Lin and Anatsui’s works are for sale—Jack Shainman represents Anatsui, and had the blessing of Pace Gallery, which represents Lin, to stage the show—the Bechers’ works are on loan from private collections.
• Of a Different Nature, Jack Shainman Gallery at 20th Street, New York, 4 February-12 March