Andrea Geyer: Manifest
Hales is delighted to announce Manifest, the gallery's fifth solo exhibition with Andrea Geyer. The exhibition focuses on a new series of applique banner works, which were first realized for a site-specific commission at the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA in 2023 and followed by a sprawling installation at Gropius Bau, Berlin earlier this year. Works from this series are currently on view in andrea geyer / a promise of lightning, her solo exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NY, through January 12, 2025.
Geyer's work ranges across multiple media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. Engaging specific biographical, social, and political events, Geyer's work creates spaces of critical reflection on the construction of their collective histories by creating artworks championing people, stories and ideas that have been continuously marginalized or obscured.
Manifest is an ongoing project which stems from Geyer's research into the role women played in the establishment of the modern art museum at the turn of the last century. In a series of sewn banners featuring silver text on white ground, the artist's carefully crafted statements invite viewers to reimagine how they engage with contemporary art institutions today. Originally drafted as a script for a video commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 2017, Manifest was inspired by Grace McCann Morley, the founding director of SFMOMA and her belief in museums as integral to civil society and civic life. Geyer drew on her own experiences and conversations with colleagues to translate those ideas forward into the present moment, where museums have been called to be places of resistance and sanctuary while at the same time have become contested sites of speech and politics. Geyer's use of applique lettering on nylon banners references turn-of-the-20th-century political speech, particularly the suffragettes' use of hand-crafted textile protest signs.
The banners in Manifest, along with an accompanying newsprint handout, ask us to question what we need from museums in this very moment. Addressing both the cognitive and somatic experience of the museum by viewers, artists and museum workers alike, Geyer asks what we bring as internalized rules, expectations and behaviors. By shifting the focus from the institution itself to the experience within it, Manifest invites the viewer to re-imagine what a museum can be and assume agency in a collective re-definition of the museum as a unique and potent public sphere.
Geyer (b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany) studied photography and film design at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and fine art at the Braunschweig University of Art, both in Germany. She is a 2000 graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Geyer lives and works in New York.
Geyer's work has been exhibited widely at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Artists Space and White Columns, all in NY, USA; Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA; Contemporary Art Museum Houston, TX, USA; Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada; KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art and Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Red Cat and LACE, CA, USA; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden; Generali Foundation and Secession, Vienna, Austria; HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Austria; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; the Turin Biennale, Italy; the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; and dOCUMENTA (12), Germany.
International public collections with Geyer's work include the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, NY, USA; Jewish Museum, NY, USA; Neue Galerie, MHK, Kassel; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria; and the Federal Collection of Germany.
