• Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) to open on Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from March 20 through early 2025
• Hyundai Motor’s multiyear commitment for the Whitney Biennial and the Hyundai Terrace Commission supports Whitney’s vision to expand opportunities for artists and curators to experiment beyond boundaries and realize their visions
SEOUL, March 20, 2024 – Hyundai Motor Company and the Whitney Museum of American Art today announced the opening of the inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission, entitled Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground). This groundbreaking work will be on view on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from March 20, 2024, through early 2025, as a part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
The unveiling of Torkwase Dyson’s new work for the Hyundai Terrace Commission marks the beginning of a 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney, announced earlier this year. Dyson presents an installation that is meant to be activated by visitors. Described by Dyson as a “monastic playground,” Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) invites visitors to touch, sit on, and experience the work in a tactile way. This prompt speaks to Dyson’s conviction that liberation can be found at every register of movement: “freedom is an ongoing spatial question of motion and imagination.”
Dyson composes geometries on an architectural scale using light and space as formal building blocks. Together, the monumental arcs, implied gestures, and surrounding natural light articulate changing abstract shapes over the course of each day and night. For Dyson, the intertwining of abstraction and Blackness is a central philosophical concern that came out of an interest in public infrastructure. The relationships between ecology, belonging, and personal history take on new meaning with the terrace’s view of the Hudson River and the museum’s location in one of New York City’s most vulnerable flood zones, along the West Side Highway and near the water’s edge.
“We are delighted to have the unique opportunity that Hyundai Motor provides to realize the Hyundai Terrace Commission”, said Whitney Biennial 2024 co-curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. “Torkwase has created architectural sculptural paintings that speak to the cityscape around the Whitney, the river nearby, visible from the sculptures, and the terrace as a space for visitors to rest, spend time, and reflect. Viewers can look upwards at the sky and at the museum’s terraces above, as well as across into the city, in an expansive experience of space, volume, scale, and form that points to new possibilities in how we experience of the world.”
"By pushing the boundaries of forms, Torkwase Dyson's work explores our relationship to the environment,” said DooEun Choi, Art Director of Hyundai Motor Company. “We are excited to see how Dyson’s installation for the inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission inspires audiences to engage with the work and the surrounding environment beyond the terrace.”
The inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission is being launched in line with Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, which will be open from March 20 to August 11, 2024. The 2024 Biennial is a thematic exhibition focusing on ideas of “the real” to acknowledge that, today, society is at an inflection point, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines. More information about Whitney Biennial 2024 can be found here.
**These images are approved only for publication in conjunction with the promotion of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing. Each image may not be cropped, bled off the page, colorized, solarized, overlaid with other matter (e.g., tone, text, another image, etc.), or otherwise altered, except as to overall size. Reproductions must include the full caption information adjacent to the image. Any form of treatment and use of images for front covers may attract a fee and will require the prior authorization of the owner and copyright holder of the work. Please contact the Whitney Press Office for such use: [email protected]
- Image Credit:
Image 1-3: Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground), 2024. Photo: Steven Probert.
Image 4-5: Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 20–August 11, 2024). Photo: Steven Probert.
About Torkwase Dyson
Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies. Dyson builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes, building surface, and configuring minimal geometric elements that lend a productive tension between image and object. The paint-handling producing various visual qualities using brushwork and other tools is made poetic by a juxtaposition of delicate marks and scored diagrammatic lines. This compositional rigor imbues the works with an architectural presence and optical gravity. Dyson considers spatial relations an urgent question both historically and in the present day. Through abstract paintings, Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through natural and built environments become both expressive and discursive structures within the work.
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About Hyundai Motor’s Art Projects
For over a decade, Hyundai Motor Company has deepened its partnerships with global museums and cultural organizations, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, Hyundai Motor announced a new 10-year partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art to support the Whitney Biennial and the museum’s newly launched Hyundai Terrace Commission. Hyundai Motor’s own art-initiatives include open call programs such as the VH AWARD, the Hyundai Blue Prize, and Artlab Editorial, a digital platform dedicated to art writing by transnational voices. Our ongoing collaborations embrace the complexities of the cultural landscape by exploring new ideas and perspectives within and beyond the art ecosystem.
Visit https://artlab.hyundai.com or follow @hyundai.artlab #HyundaiArtlab to learn more about our partnerships and programs.
About Hyundai Motor Company
Established in 1967, Hyundai Motor Company is present in over 200 countries with more than 120,000 employees dedicated to tackling real-world mobility challenges around the globe. Based on the brand vision ‘Progress for Humanity,’ Hyundai Motor is accelerating its transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. The company invests in advanced technologies such as robotics and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) to bring about revolutionary mobility solutions while pursuing open innovation to introduce future mobility services. In pursuit of a sustainable future for the world, Hyundai will continue its efforts to introduce zero-emission vehicles equipped with industry-leading hydrogen fuel cell and EV technologies.
More information about Hyundai Motor and its products can be found at: https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/ or Newsroom: Media Hub by Hyundai
Contact:
Hee Chon
Global PR Strategy & Planning / Hyundai Motor Company
[email protected]
