Sprint, 2017
About the artist
Using the vernacular techniques of crocheting, knitting, and knotting, Orly Genger, creates monumental sculptures with rope—transforming this workday material into powerful yet pliable sculpture. Genger’s work retains a reductive, abstract vocabulary along the lines of mid-century Minimalist art that was typically made and manufactured out of machined metal. With industrial rope, she both hints at and departs from that legacy, by injecting an organic softness into these large shapes as well as her own bodily labor into the process. Genger’s practice requires her to wrestle with enormous amount of heavy recycled lobster rope, and is inherently physical and labor intensive. The end result of the materials and scale makes clear this effort and reasserts the body—that of the artist’s—into abstract sculpture.
Orly Genger was born in New York City in 1979. She received her BA from Brown University in 2001, and attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She has since had major exhibitions at Madison Square Park, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Contemporary Austin and SCAD Museum of Art. Genger’s work is included in several museum collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Hood Museum of Art, and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art in America, Art + Auction, Sculpture, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post among others. (from 2015)
