This is a 900,000 square foot building built over the 45th Street post office. It was built in the 1980s by the Hines Interests. The materials and design project classical purity.
The lobby has two main entrances on differing grade levels. The entrance from Lexington Avenue offers a vista of the lobby looking up a set of stairs into a large public reception area with a barrel vaulted ceiling.
Lining the corridor from Lexington Avenue are six elegant black and white photographs of Parisian parks by Alexander Vethers.
The 45th Street lobby is entered from the mid-block. The lobby is cool and elegant yet sonorous. Dominating the space is a larger than life size sculpture, Lexington Head, by Diane Moore.
The 8th floor Garden Lobby is a magnificent light-filled space with large tapestries by Helena Hernmarck.
In sum, the interior is a beautiful neoclassical interior, yet it evokes the muscular aesthetic of the eighties.
Art Assets will use apposite art in a variety of ways to especially address the building‘s heritage and its neoclassical architecture. However, rather than speak to past as the present artworks does, Art Assets will select art that will pastiche past with future, to invigorate a sense of the “now.”
This will be achieved by layering aesthetic ideas to reveal a constant sense of change, to contrast with the gravitas of the building’s reference to classical architecture.
Art Assets believes that the museum-like interiors of the ground floor and garden lobbies offer great context to launch memorable exhibitions of art.
Art Assets and Shorenstein Realty Services are pleased to present five of Ronnie Landfield’s lyrical abstract paintings as well as an installation piece by Markus Linnenbrink. Landfield and Linnenbrink represent quite opposite approaches to painting and are shown here together to highlight a point of departure in their approaches.
For nearly five decades, Ronnie Landfield has explored the metaphor of abstract landscape, the many aspects of human nature, and especially the positive power of aesthetic feeling. He uses color, surface, and drawing as a universal language and his paintings embody a wide range of emotional and psychological states of being. Mr. Landfield’s paintings are direct and bold. In general, his acrylic paints are stained into the surface of the canvas, often accompanied by hard-edge bands and strips of opaque color.
In contrast to Mr. Landfield, Marcus Linnenbrink allows the paint to dribble and run in response to gravity, creating an uneven grid-like pattern of broad stripes and thin rivulets, highlighting the energy and atmosphere of the rooms they occupy. His work represents a recent trend in contemporary practice in which surface materiality is the aim itself.