“The Neighbors” Exhibition at the New Museum Favorite 

Beginning in February 2014, the New Museum will present the first US museum exhibition devoted to the work of Polish artist Paweł Althamer. The exhibition “The Neighbors” will include a new presentation of the artist’s work, Draftsmen’s Congress, originally presented at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012). Over the course of the exhibition, the blank white space of the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery will be transformed through the gradual accumulation of drawings and paintings by Museum visitors and a wide array of invited community organizations. For his New York exhibition, Althamer has also arranged for street musicians to play in front of the New Museum building on the Bowery with the music being broadcast throughout the Third Floor gallery and he instituted a coat drive to benefit residents of the Bowery Mission, a shelter for homeless men that is the museum’s immediate neighbor. Visitors who bring new or gently used men’s coats to the New Museum will receive free entry. All the coats will be donated to the Bowery Mission.

Since the early 1990s, Althamer has established a unique artistic practice and is admired for his expanded approach to sculptural representation and his experimental models of social collaboration. Just like the New York Time has described that to go beyond the self, the ethnic group, and the conventional limits of art has been a prime goal for Althamer. It was this continuing pursuit that has led him to adopt collaboration as the as the existential and aesthetic ideal form of creating his art. “It’s almost as if he were proposing art as the universal binder, the great leveler, a form of social and spiritual — he’s not afraid of that word — salvation.”