KLARA LIDEN — VERDEBELVEDERE

For her new exhibition of work at Reena Spaulings, Klara Liden has turned to the rooftops of New York, installing “rough, oblong slices of silver-painted tar paper collected from various building sites” around town.

Different qualities and quantities of this same, recurring roofing material have been hung flat against the wall and suspended by wires from the ceiling. Reinforcing the soft but tough, pliable bitumen with plywood backings, Liden disorients a surface we normally experience underfoot. We know this silvery stuff from rooftop parties in the city and might associate the look and feel of it with the experience of a festive, floating dimension, or moments lifted out of everyday pedestrian reality.

Roughly hacked apart with axes by demolition crews, these scrapped sections of city rooftops have been carefully reassembled on site by the artist. The rough chunks come together again like oversized puzzle pieces in the gallery, rejoined in coherent passages, with ceiling light sometimes leaking through the gaps of the cuts. Removed rooftops now become brutalist monochromes – heavy, layered, painting-like objects, sometimes treated with a fresh coat of silver. Meanwhile, the long straight seams where the tar paper was joined and fused by roofers now level Liden’s rough-hewn forms: one vast, blade-like work extends an even horizon line in the gallery.

On two video monitors, we see Liden squeezing her body through the regulation 12-inch square window-holes that builders cut into the plywood walls surrounding construction sites (the artist had often wondered if she could physically do this). This slapstick experiment in bodily plasticity seems to conspire materially with the bitumen – the tough, soft flesh of urban rooftops. Four benches made from cut sections of green-painted construction walls form a straight line down the center of the gallery. Each bench is supported on one side by a stack of bagged charcoal briquets.

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