À rebours: Venus over Manhattan, New York
Venus Over Manhattan, a new exhibition space created by art collector and writer Adam Lindemann, opened to the public in New York City on May 9, 2012 with the inaugural exhibition À rebours.
Including several dozen works of art spanning the 19th century to the present, this show will remain on view through June 30th. The exhibition takes its title from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 anti-novel “À rebours” known in English either as “against the grain” or “against nature.” This tale of fin-de-siècle decadence tells the story of the Duc Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric aristocrat who recoils from the manners and values of conservative Parisian society and flees to the countryside to immerse himself in art collecting and exotic fetishism.
À rebours at Venus over Manhattan explores the notion of “against the grain” through a selection of more than 50 works including African fetishes. The artists represented range from Odilon Redon − the favorite of the book’s protagonist − to Henri Fuseli, Gustave Moreau, Felicien Rops, Franz von Stuck, Lucas Samaras, William Copley, Jeff Koons, Glenn Brown, Salvador Dali, Walter Dahn, David Hammons and Bernard Buffet, as well as Jeni Spota, Andra Ursuta and Gavin Kenyon. The exhibition is accompanied by a free ZINE, available in the gallery.
