In its April edition, Artforum, the renowned international contemporary art magazine, featured the most recent solo exhibition from CalArts alumnus Jason Kraus (Art BFA 08). The New York-based artist’s show, Finished Objects, had its run Jan. 28-Feb. 21, 2015, at the Algus Greenspan Gallery in New York’s West Village.
Finished Objects included five pieces, assemblages of objects that fit perfectly into their display cases and on shelving units. The works challenge commonplace assumptions about presentation, composition and the objects themselves. Artforum writer Michael Wilson noted that the objects themselves were from two of Kraus’s earlier projects: a “never-exhibited student experiment” and Concrete Form (2013) at Redling Fine Art in Los Angeles.
From Artforum:
Jason Kraus’s recent exhibition certainly had a degree of polish, in that the show also incorporated mass-produced artifacts that are “finished” insofar as they have already been manufactured, bought, sold, and sometimes used—but these sculptural groupings are hardly an end point. Rather, they represent just the most recent stage in a system of acquisition, combination and presentation that extends back to previous bodies of work and seems unlikely to stop with this one.
In addition to the exhibitions at Algus Greenspan and Redling Fine Art, Kraus has also had solo shows, including Edits at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco (2012) and In Practice at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New York. His work was also featured in the group shows Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials…, at Galerie Johann König in Berlin (2011) and Circus Hein, traveling show, at FRAC Orleans in Orleans, France (2009), among others.