Thirty years after it was first conceived, the New York dealer Elizabeth Dee is to stage Infotainment, a neo-Pop show that focused on slick art rooted in mass media, magazines and billboard advertising.
Infotainment was the brainchild of the Manhattan collector Anne Livet and the artists Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy, who opened Nature Morte gallery in the East Village in 1982, but the exhibition was never shown in New York. Instead it travelled to Texas Gallery in Houston, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and the Aspen Art Museum, as well as several European venues between 1985 and 1987.
Dee’s exhibition, Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years after Infotainment (29 October-17 December), will feature 38 artists, including 19 of the original line up, among them Sarah Charlesworth, Julia Wachtel, Laurie Simmons and Steven Parrino. Newcomers include Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Guerilla Girls and Christopher Wool. Nagy described the kind of work shown in Infotainment as “an art that engaged broader social issues while competing with the daily flood of visual stimuli”.
According to Dee, the 1980s is still a relatively untapped period in art history, and one that “feels distinctly relevant” today. “It’s like looking at where Minimalism was 15 years ago before David Zwirner made art of the 1960s and 1970s as popular and valuable as possible,” she says.
Dee’s show marks the launch of a new direction for her gallery; the dealer opens a new space in Harlem three times the size of her old gallery in Chelsea on 24 September. The revamped Infotainment exhibition is part of Dee’s plans to develop a series of historical group shows and single-artist displays.
The latter starts with an exhibition of works by Annette Lemieux (24 September-15 October), an artist who emerged in the 1980s alongside members of the Pictures Generation such as David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. “The aim of our programme is to respond to the challenges of the museums that used to do that work,” Dee says.