IVÁN ARGOTE: IMPERMANENT

Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to announce artist Iván Argote’s solo presentation Impermanent.

November 16, 2024 – January 25, 2025

The exhibition brings together a tightly-curated selection of the artist’s works made between 2012 and 2024 that critique the notion of public monuments and question the often-contested figures they commemorate.

Following on the recent debut of Argote’s High Line Plinth commission in New York, this grouping of works showcases the artist’s humorous yet incisive interventions in which selected monuments are alternately displaced, deconstructed, rendered invisible, or recontextualized. As the title of his exhibition alludes, in Argote’s hands, we are able to consider these public fixtures not as enduring symbols of power and conquest, but as objects that are eminently impermanent.

Displayed in dialogue with each other are selections from two bodies of work based on Argote’s research into the Roman Emperor Augustus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 27 BCE to 14 CE. Along the full length of a wall are five sculptures from Argote’s Wildflowers, Augustus series. Here, Argote proposes a dismantling of a bronze version of the famous Augustus of Prima Porta statue, in which Augustus is pictured in a heroic orator’s stance with raised arm, adorned in symbolic garments of classical antiquity. A marble copy of the statue (now located in the Vatican Museums) was discovered in an 1863 archaeological excavation; in Argote’s dismantled version, we see a conceptual proposal to return the statue back to nature by planting these statuary fragments with native plantings. Like the lush biodiversity of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, these sculptures speak to the abundance and resilience of the natural world to endure, regenerate, and overcome the ravages of mankind.

Using hired cranes to levitate his obelisk high above Rome, Argote uses an act of physical displacement to perform a cognitive act of making strange.