Making Street Finds Into ‘Frozen Moments’

Gedi Sibony’s latest exhibition continues the artist’s practice of using the simplest of means to create captivating assemblage sculptures, and to create paintings that rely on gestures so restrained that they barely exist.

The press release for “Invisible Points,” his eighth exhibition at New York’s Greene Naftali since 2008, consists of just four sentences, explaining that his creative process is “driven by intuitive dynamics,” that the exhibition includes “objects drawn from remnants and waste,” and that landscapes depict “interacting beings.”

Then it moves out into the cosmos: “The extended space of objects and the realm of imagination interact by providing confirmation across chasms,” it concludes, “gesturing toward the mystery that humbles us.” The strength of Siboni’s work lies in his ability to create magic from no material—in this case, wooden bookshelves, broken plant stands, scraps of wire, and brooms found in junkyards or on the street—thus extending the tradition from Cubist collage to assemblages by artists such as Louis Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Tuttle.

I first became familiar with Sibony’s work in 2012, when I worked on american art About his exhibition “Epiphanies of Stillness,” curated by the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. The institution calls it not just an artist-curated exhibition but “a large-scale temporary art work” that includes objects from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer collections, ranging from Neolithic stone statues to a 1957 Philip Guston painting, often combined in unexpected, interesting and profound ways. When I asked him if there was a source for the show’s title, he revealed no: “A source? The amazing…mind…words…messy…process,” he said, bursting into laughter.

The artist has had great success with some of his past work at Greene Naftali, such as 2018’s The King and the Corpse, whose large-scale eponymous work included “an abandoned prefabricated building” that once housed the White Castle franchise. Others are much more low-key, such as a 2013 show american artThe editor (I was a staff member at the time, so it could have been me) described it as offering “his usual blend of meanness and precision,” as well as an “alchemy” that combines the likes of thrift store paintings into “extremely precise and seemingly cosmic codes.”

An untitled exhibition in 2014 offered a painting of sorts. It consists of a large metal plate found from a decommissioned semi-trailer, painted with his own branding, and the artist claims to present it as a find, although the technique of the painting raises my suspicions in some cases. These works emerged in the wake of considerable debate over “zombie formalism” (a term coined by critic and artist Walter Robinson) and ephemeral painting (coined by critic Raphael Rubinstein but which does not fit into either category). These works have earned Siboni a place in institutional collections around the world, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“These sculptures were created in the studio over the past three years,” the artist said during a recent visit; the lights were deliberately turned off to allow the gallery’s large north-facing windows to provide soft light and a sense of tranquility. pointing to the six-and-a-half-foot sculpture Use your own resources (2024), he says, “These shelves were ripped out and had this paint pattern on the back, with the invisible side dripping paint, creating a shimmering surface effect, a trembling border. I started finding and collecting prefabricated shelves that had been thrown away, and I thought that if I ripped off the plywood or something on the back, I could find this beautiful treasure on the back.” Like Sibony, the idea grew out of this tiny phenomenon.

This time, Siboni acknowledged, the sculptures are not being displayed exactly as they were found. On top of the main bookshelf Use your own resourceson the usually invisible paint detail on the back, he placed a smaller white bookshelf. But that back didn’t have the same accidental effect, so, interestingly, he faked it and painted a central brown strip on the back to mimic untreated wood. elsewhere, in Located in the main features quadrantFist-sized blocks of wood of various colors (painted by the artist) sit on a bookshelf painted dark green (presented as they were found).

Arrangements of sculptures with titles such as Located in the main features quadrant (2023), distribution form of order (2024), and Endowed with inexhaustible resources (2025), roughly recreates the relationships that formed between the works in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, he said.

Given the endless number of objects in the world, what characteristics do Siboni’s finds have that make them sculpturally valuable?

“If I had to try to guess,” he said, “I would say it has to do with a unique way of expression, a human expression of something.”

Once the sculpture is completed months ago, the artist is able to relax and start painting. “It was winter, it was cold, and I didn’t have to worry about the show, so I started painting just because I realized I could paint what I wanted to see. Tropical landscapes, that’s where I wanted to be, so I just had it in front of me.” He noted that the colors in the paintings echoed some of the colors in the sculptures, and he came up with the idea of ​​combining painting and sculpture. “I thought, OK, it’s easy to put them in a white room, but what about a space that they can emerge from?”

Initially he had no such ambitious plans for the canvas. His goal was to copy the work of Henri Matisse Luxurious, calm, passionate (1904), now in the drawing room of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. “I was making them for my apartment,” he says, “and then things got really complicated.” Complex as the process might have been, the paintings are small, with large expanses of white; Siboni removed the figures from Matisse’s originals, leaving in some cases only twinned versions of sparse trees at the edges, and the slightest hint of the horizon.

Instead of mixing paints, Siboni created these works and awarded them such titles as in the quivering quadrant of outlines, always make a differenceand Waves from the honey sea (2026), marked one at a time with oil sticks, the canvases arranged side by side in the studio, simultaneously.

“It was the first time I discovered working this way, and then with practice I realized I could get what I wanted to see more easily, so the repetition was well worth it, and I’m sure every painter knows this,” he said. “But practicing, practicing, getting good results faster, I love that process.”

He recalled an incident in his youth when he and several other contestants were playing against a chess champion, who rotated among them, making one move at a time, until he had faced all the contestants. “That’s how I feel about all these little paintings. I’m just moving really fast with the oil paint, not really thinking about it, just, like, ‘Man, man, man.'”

But then he corrected himself. “It’s not really ‘dude,'” he said. “What it is, there comes a point where, if you’re lucky, all the markers work perfectly and it’s easy to get past that point. So really it becomes about going fast, fast, fast, but also putting the brakes on. It can be a really fun process.”

Siboni noted that visitors entering the gallery from the elevator down the long corridor will have a special experience with a painting that is composed of a specific sculpture. One visitor began to wonder aloud whether some of the sculptures themselves could play the role of visitors moving from one place to another.

Siboni demurred.

“No, it’s very quiet here, there’s no ‘from’ or ‘to’,” he said. “I think the stillness of it is the sense of its presence, not that it’s coming from or going to…I mean, that’s what art allows you to have – this frozen moment.”

“Gedi Sibony: The Invisible Point” will be on view through June 20, 2026, at Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor.