Jack Pierson: Independent Art Fair

Cheim & Read will present works in various media from the early nineties by Jack Pierson at the 2018 Independent Art Fair. 

Centered on the iconic 1990 sculpture, Diamond Life, the presentation will focus on Pierson’s study of his personal, quotidian routine, and a poetic suggestion “that someone was just there.” Diamond Life is a domestic tableau made up of everyday items, including a linoleum floor and yellow wall paint the artist observed in his daily life. “Little lyrical rooms to die in,” the poet Eileen Myles called them.

In the wake of the AIDS crisis, queer artists turned to their own lived experience, especially during the Romantic Conceptualist movement in New York during which Pierson worked alongside his contemporaries and friends Felix Gonzales-Torres, Robert Gober, and Mark Morrisroe.

In a painful drawing from 1991, Pierson addresses the viewer as a lost lover: “Do you ever, even for a second, wake up and think it’s me next to you?” It is this romantic and confessional approach that takes banal everyday activities — smoking a cigarette, looking out the window — and elevates them to issues of life or death.