Luis Gispert

12 January to 1 March 2008
541 West 24 Street

LUIS GISPERT

On 12 January 2008 the Mary Boone Gallery, in collaboration with Zach Feuer Gallery, will open at its Chelsea location El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World is Yours), an exhibition of new work by LUIS GISPERT featuring a 26-minute film, a series of large-format photographs, and five sculptures.

Smother, the 26-minute film, is premiering at Mary Boone Gallery. Bathed in the atmosphere of 1980’s Miami, the film explores violent and sometimes twisted childhood nightmares through the retrograde lens of Freudian analysis. Drifting between real and hyper-real, the film follows an 11-year-old boy as he undergoes a series of painful physical transformations that ultimately lead him to break the adolescent bonds that bind him to his overbearing mother. Gispert wrote the script with artist Orly Genger and collaborated on the soundtrack with the Miamibased interdisciplinary bass experimentalists Phoenecia (Joshua Kay & Romulo del Castillo).

Large format photographs from Smother are shown at Mary Boone Gallery, while the mise-en-scène of the film is captured at Zach Feuer Gallery in photographs that combine images of incredibly ornate truck interiors with surreal Latin-American socio-economic tableaus. These works explore the aesthetics of wealth as they relate to the poverty and oppression evidenced in much of the Western world. This tension between auspicious wealth and cultural naiveté is also apparent in the installation of sculpture at Zach Feuer Gallery. Here, Gispert employs neon lights, mirrors, pastel colors and high-gloss lacquer finishes to reference the interiors of the opulent, narco-nouveau riche mansions remembered from his Miami childhood.

The Mary Boone Gallery exhibition, at 541 West 24 Street, will run through 1 March 2008. Please contact the Gallery if we can be of further assistance, or visit our website www.maryboonegallery.com.