Exhibition View for Students with Ingrid Schaffner

About the exhibition
For Jason Rhoades, the car was a vehicle of artistic pursuit and ambition. Starting 5 September, Hauser & Wirth New York will present a major exhibition of his ‘Car Projects,’ including a fleet of different makes of readymade car sculptures. The installation will also feature a monumental work from 2000 named in tribute to the dada modernist and car collector Francis Picabia. ‘DRIVE II’ will run concurrent to the yearlong exploration of Rhoades’ art and car culture taking place at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles.

‘I spend hours going to my studio, so I established this extension of my studio, or rather this second space, in my Caprice.’

Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) was renowned for the driving imagination and exuberance of his work, as well as, at times, its reckless provocation and overwhelming materiality. His epic-scaled installations established him as a force of the international art world in the 1990s while he was based in Los Angeles. Going with the storied flow of L.A. traffic, Rhoades considered the car an extension of the studio: a space in which the artist’s mind can race and wander. However, as a body of work, the ‘Car Projects’ have not been widely seen or considered within the scope of his art, in large part because the sculptures themselves have been in storage for decades, with one notable exception being the presentation of the ‘Caprice Auto Project’ in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, in which the 1992 Caprice was installed on the museum plaza as an outdoor sculpture.

About the curator
Internationally admired as a curator, art critic, writer and educator with nearly four decades of experience in the field of contemporary art, Ingrid Schaffner is known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism and alternate modernisms. From 2000 to 2015, as Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania, she led a program that was renowned for its creativity and dedication to artists. Among her many critically acclaimed ICA exhibitions is ‘Four Roads,’ the first major American museum presentation devoted to Jason Rhoades. Schaffner was the curator of the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018. Prior to joining Hauser & Wirth, she was the curator at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. She served for many years on the Graduate Advisory Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Image (Top): Installation view, ‘Jason Rhoades. DRIVE II,’ Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street, 5 September – 19 October 2024 © The Estate of Jason Rhoades. Photo: Thomas Barratt. Image (Center): Jason Rhoades, 'Caprice Auto Project', 1996. Installation view, ‘Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept.’ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 6 April – 16 October 2022. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Image (Bottom): Ingrid Schaffner. Photo: Mario de Lopez