Joan Jonas’ first exhibition at Gladstone New York opens in March.

Presentation debuts a new installation comprised of aerial sculpture, drawing and video.

“I didn’t see a difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase —memory erased.”

—Joan Jonas, „In the Shadow of a Shadow“.

Gladstone presents Joan Jonas’ „Empty Rooms“, an exhibition comprised of sculpture, works on paper, and video, opening this March in New York. This presentation includes new work while also exploring the artist’s process of revival. In „Empty Rooms“, Jonas’ cultivation of a resonant, fragmented space brings together objects and imagery that invite viewers to contemplate the throughlines that connect familiarity with loss.

Typical of Jonas’ practice, her work is not illustrative but highly interpretive; meaning is not fixed but emerges and recedes in poetic layers. Central to the exhibition are a series of 12 hanging sculptures constructed of handmade Japanese Torinoko paper sewn onto custom designed steel wire frames. Simple, white, and austere without adornment or embellishment, the 12 aerial sculptures embody the titular “empty rooms” and float above visitors as specters of absence. Felt as deeply as they are seen, these powerful vestiges vibrate in their repetition and multiplicity.

Jonas includes a video, quoted from the performance aspect of the installation, shown in the U.S. Pavilion, at the 2015 Venice Biennale „They Come to Us without a Word“. Projected on one wall of the gallery space, this sequence was partly inspired by the ghost stories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Jonas has visited and worked since the early 70s. Incorporating drawings, video, and sound, this performance was restaged at The Kitchen in 2016.

For its most recent installment at Gladstone, Jonas’ long-time collaborator, musician and composer, Jason Moran, will present a newly-configured score. Through the artist’s practice of revisiting and reconfiguring past elements, she enacts a process of transmission and produces a visual archive that has shaped her unwaveringly experimental body of work.

About Joan Jonas:
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas’ experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively around the world. Her notable exhibition history includes Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th São Paulo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon;
Haus der Kunst, Munich; and The Drawing Center, New York. Most recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a retrospective of Jonas’ work. Jonas is the recipient of many
awards including The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon (2016); the Maya Deren Award given by the American Film Institute (1989); and the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). In 2024, she was presented the Nam June Paik prize, awarded to artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art, mutual understanding, and world peace; and in 2018, Jonas was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, given to those
individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.



Image: Installation view of Joan Jonas solo show „Empty Rooms“ at Gladstone Gallery New York, © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: David Regen, Courtesy: the artist and Gladstone Gallery.