Cynthia Broan Gallery is delighted to announce Slots & Dots, an exhibition of new sculptural works by Tim Thyzel. This is the gallery's first show in our new location, located at 546 West 29th St. Designed by the Architects of Lot-ek, the former garage has been transformed into a uniquely versatile exhibition space featuring floating walls and a billboard-style facade. Almost two years after leaving 14th Street, the gallery has re-emerged on Chelsea's northern front, kicking off with a show that places us squarely at the intersection of Art and Commerce. 

Slots & Dots, sculptor Tim Thyzel's third solo show with the gallery, utilizes the slotwall and pegboard commonly seen in low-end retail stores to create a series of sculptures which reflect on formal aspects of art and architecture as well as issues of merchandising and consumer appeal.  Also known as MDF (medium density fiberboard), slotwall accommodates hardware such as hooks and shelving for interchangeable retail display. Several of the works shown include these hooks to add both texture and context to the work. The crisp white laminate, punctuated with lines and holes, transcends its usual application to construct a series of towers and stacks, which are both elegant and humorous. The show includes a replica of I.M. Pei's Bank of China skyscraper, a group of boxes perched atop the tiptoed legs seen in stocking departments, and a cage of beach balls held inaccessible within a slatwall tower. Other towers bend and slump, or bristle with hooks. A group of pegboard boxes containing lights are installed in a dark room as a nocturnal urban landscape.

Tim Thyzel's playful use of everyday materials reveals the overlooked aesthetic value of the stuff our world is built of, as well as the power of even the most common materials to define the environments they are used to construct.  His previous series Tiled (2002) used ceramic tiles and bathroom fixtures to create gleaming cubes and columns, which evoked the perceived purity of private space while demonstrating the formal purity of the material, and it's replication of the graph-paper sketch. Although Thyzel is first attracted to the aesthetic and constructive nature of low-brow building materials, he does not attempt to remove the meaning, instead adding sly humor to encourage social, environmental, and historical inquiry while celebrating an urge to build that is as innate as a child's impulse to stack blocks.

LOT-EK has brilliantly designed the exhibition space as band of wallspace along the original raw interior, the line continuing throughout the suspended units used for reception, video room and storage. The units glide on a framework of steel tracks, allowing us to reconfigure the space for each exhibition. The exterior of the garage also remains intact behind a skin of printed vinyl mesh commonly used for billboards. Hidden upstairs behind the screen is a unique lightbox studio with rooftop patio.

For further information about the architects, go to www.lot-ek.com.

• in front of Cynthia Broan Gallery at 423 W.14th St
• in front of White Columns at 320 W.13th St
• on 19th St near 10th Avenue
• on Broadway near the New Museum of Contemporary Art (btwn Houston and Prince)

Artist Tim Thyzel has launched his latest addition to a series of works designed for the urban outdoors. The Barricade Bench Project 2002 consists of four public benches constructed from the safety barricades which are seen throughout the city's streets and sidewalks. The benches have been placed on the sidewalks of New York, inviting passers-by to stop and relax.

Because of their prevalence throughout the urban landscape, the orange and white striped barricades control pedestrian traffic almost subconsciously. At first glance, the Barricade Bench may register as just another obstacle to avoid, but a closer look reveals the opposite: a rare opportunity to pause and rest. By simply redesigning the barricade to include extra planks for seating, Thyzel has subverted a universally recognized object and it's inherent message of boundaries and control.

In addition to his artworks exhibited in galleries, Tim Thyzel has developed a number of objects such as Streetworks, sculptures designed to be taken into the city's public spaces and presented to the unwitting viewer as useful solutions for city living. Other Streetworks include Rucksack (a garbage can backpack), Bird Housing Projects and Aldi-Tent (sewn plastic shopping and carry all bags installed on the dividing strip of Hamburg's main shopping street). In 1999, his Movable Park, a personal-size plot of grass on a cart, toured several of Manhattan's grassless parks. The Barricade Bench Project is Thyzel's most utilitarian Streetwork to date, humanizing the urban environment by turning a common annoyance into an unexpected invitation for anyone who happens by.

The Barricade Benches are scheduled for placement at the addresses listed above. Locations may vary, however, and some benches are expected to make surprise visits around the city.

Cynthia Broan Gallery is pleased to announce Tiled, an installation by Tim Thyzel consisting of more than thirty sculptures made from bathroom tiles and fixtures. This new series of works continues the artist's playful investigation of space and how it is constructed and defined. For Street Works, his exhibition last year, Thyzel cast a new perspective on the use of public space through humorous, eccentric contraptions for maximizing one's use of shared sidewalks and park areas. He now brings our attention to the contradictions within what may be the most private of spaces, where we retreat to relieve ourselves after the excesses of consumption.

Construction materials and hardware used in the bathroom are designed for cleanliness, the sterility of the smooth white surfaces repelling and denying the colonies of filth within. Thyzel's porcelain constructions turn the bathroom inside out, revealing a purity which lies deep within the materials. Endless Column, a stack of toilet bowls which appears to support the ceiling, has the beauty of Brancusi, the spirit of R. Mutt and the utilitarian design of both ancient architecture and modern hygiene. The ceramic tiles used in the other pieces naturally lend themselves to cubist forms, but Thyzel undermines the aesthetic of minimalism with the enthusiasm of a child with Legos, creating pointless constructions for the pure fun of stacking blocks. Some of the Tilies are simple cubes, but include useful hardware such as a drain, a spigot, or a towel hook. One piece is shaped like a pedestal with a sink mounted vertically like an empty television; another is a cube with glowing light fixtures sprouting from each side. One tall column topped off with a plunger resembles the Empire State building. The Tilies are scattered through the space, some stacked atop one another or tilting on edge, both breaking and enhancing the 90-degree angles.

The subversive humor of the work seeps through the gleaming surfaces on many levels. By using Home Depot materials, Thyzel demonstrates the artist's urge to construct as well as the lack of inspiration and generic look of contemporary housebuilding. Slipped Disc, a large frame-shaped Tilie with a rubber duckie squashed under one corner, might portray the artist's futility, precariousness and actual pain of creating. The bathroom materials remind us of our own confrontations with our bodies, the dirty bar of soap and worn toothbrushes leaving telltale traces of the endless battles. Gravity Zone, a floor area tiled with 36 bathroom scales, reveals the private anxiety of our own physical form, the dials spinning wildly as one walks over the surface. Pipes, drains, spigots and plugs reveal the flow of matter through the seemingly contained forms, the secret voids which are filled and flushed. Aside from all this, the works can be appreciated solely as nonsensical forms, yet their chunky, proletarian concreteness seems to wash away into abstraction.

Cynthia Broan Gallery is pleased to announce Street Works, a solo exhibition of sculpture and photography by Tim Thyzel, a German artist now living in New York. Thyzel's work incorporates sculpture and performance, as well as a wonderful sense of humor and irony, to create a conceptualism often disguised as logical and utilitarian inventiveness. The exhibition will feature the artist's Moveable Park, a plot of lush grass on wheels, which he carted to various grassless recreation areas in Manhattan last summer. Photographs of the Park Tour show Tim comfortably lounging on the patch of grass against a backdrop of rubble, pushing it through the streets and down steps, and running to retrieve it from a pack of children. The show also includes photographs documenting some of his other creations as they were used in public, including a garbagecan backpack, a shoppingbag tent and a bird housing project.

Thyzel has recently produced three series of objects cast in concrete and plaster, which will be presented as installations in the gallery. Concrete casts of pairs of shoes and boots are lined up on shelves, the various sizes and styles reminding us of the proverbial walks of life, the shoes we fill, the weight we carry and the pavement we pound. For New Yorkers, concrete is the earth we walk on, and the material has an organic, timeless quality which makes the grassy park seem even more incongruous.

Thyzel's Crystals are plaster forms made from clusters of Clorox bleach bottles. At first glance they may resemble a natural form similar to that of atomic particles, but with a closer look the objects appear to be cancerous mutations, the bottles sprouting from the center unevenly. The Crystals are scattered and stacked, such as a game of jacks or a minefield, humorously portraying an urban paradox: the futility and perhaps the danger of keeping the city clean. The more we clean, the more we pollute.

New Yorkers are all familiar with the struggle of carrying heavy and cumbersome loads through the city, and the daily sight of sidewalk vendors and homeless people desperately yet creatively devising means to trundle their things in the streets and subways. Inspired by the shopping carts, luggage dollies and jerry-rigged contraptions rolling by, Thyzel has created a series of Wheelies, concrete casts of boxes and bundles with wheels attached. The mysterious packages seem to have been carefully wrapped and contrived for safe and convenient mobility. However, they are awkward and immobile, indeed useless, some with the wheel embedded into the concrete. The Wheelies present us with another dilemma of urban living: the desire for material goods, but the hindrance they put on our freedom of movement. For New Yorkers, the burden of ownership begins with the logistical problem of getting it home. The pieces could be fossilized remains of contemporary urban hunting and gathering.

As the cast objects lose their functional attributes in exchange for a purely formal nature, the paradox of our cultural obsession with Things is revealed. Although we find the things we own to be useful, there is a physical attraction to objects as well, a sensuality of possession, and an internal void. By casting the negative space of a thing, Thyzel subverts its use and plays upon our tactile needs, our desire to have and to hold a thing. The concrete reveals details normally overlooked, and the weight of the material demonstrates the physicality of the object. The objects the artist has made for public use also invert our original intent of a thing, inspiring us to cope with city living with finesse and creativity.