Alexandre Arrechea: Landscape and Hierarchies

ArtYard is thrilled to present Landscape and Hierarchies, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Alexandre Arrechea on view September 17, 2022 through January 22, 2023.

Arrechea has earned acclaim as an artist whose work continues to move, surprise, and deliver the type of optimism that sometimes only art can provide. This exhibition marks 20 years of the artist’s solo career. 

Landscape and Hierarchies explores the responsibility that lies between the individual and the collective and the ripple effects human actions have on society and nature. Curated by Elsa Mora, the exhibition was produced specifically for ArtYard and includes monumental watercolors, sculptures, and multimedia installations. 

For Landscape and Hierarchies, Arrechea draws inspiration from sports for his continued investigation into the power dynamics and structures of our everyday lives. Arrechea presents objects commonplace to baseball stadiums and playgrounds juxtaposed in surprising ways with natural elements such as glass trees, river water, and morning dew. His work transforms ephemeral moments like swinging and sketching into monumental acts, amplifying the importance of small actions. In addition, the artist offers multiple viewpoints into his creative process, blurring the distinction between what is personal and public while exploring the nature of truth. 

“In Landscape and Hierarchies, sports is a reflection of humanity,” says Mora, ArtYard Artistic Director and Curator. “Arrechea interrupts the dynamics those at the top of social hierarchies have enacted over generations—competition over cooperation, winners and losers, rules and penalties, the separation of humans from nature. Through his work and creative process, the artist invites us into a collaborative space to co-create a future where people and the planet thrive.”

A summer residency at ArtYard offered Arrechea the time to reflect, experiment, and create work. During that period, he became fascinated by the Delaware River, which resulted in the largest piece of the exhibition and likely of its kind, a 71-foot watercolor titled River and Ripples employing water collected from the river. 

The works also include Shared Words, five black and white portraits printed on an aluminum sheet mounted above a scoreboard-like acrylic grid covering the subjects’ mouths. Visitors are invited to give voice to those depicted by spelling words with sticks of white chalk.

Landscape and Hierarchies is an installation of a circular putting green inlaid with a track for a golf ball amid a forest of glass-blown sculptures of trees. The piece is flanked by video projections that offer alternative views of the imagined landscape.

In ArtYard’s VSG, or Very Small Gallery, are White Corner 2, 3, and 4, a series of three videos meant to be viewed through an intimate aperture showing two identical figures approaching a blind corner with raised weapons, unable to grasp the mutuality of their projected fears.

Arrechea is widely recognized for Nolimits (2013), a monumental project composed of ten sculptures inspired by iconic buildings in New York City and erected along Park Avenue, and Katrina Chairs (2016), erected at the Coachella Music Festival, Palm Springs, California. Last December, he created Dreaming with Lions, an immersive rotunda resembling an enormous forum-like library installed at Faena Miami Beach. This June, Arrechea’s Orange Functional, a sculpture with orange branches 20 feet high that seems to blossom into 25 functional basketball hoops, opened at Art Omi, which commissioned the work.

ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. Located in Frenchtown, NJ perched on the Delaware River a little more than an hour’s drive from New York City and Philadelphia, we are an interdisciplinary alternative contemporary art center comprised of exhibition space, a theater, and a residency program dedicated to presenting transformative artwork, fostering unexpected collaborations, and incubating original new work.