“On 20th anniversary, Triple Candie new opens (extremely modest) space near U.S. Capitol”

655 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE photos courtesy Triple Candie

From a press release:

“Twenty years after opening an exhibition space in a massive 6,000-square-foot Harlem warehouse, Triple Candie is pleased to announce its latest endeavor, an extremely modest 22-square-foot gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue six blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The new DC space occupies the shallow façade of a green, one-story, mock-Tudor structure that for years was a beloved neighborhood bar. Triple Candie joins Frank’s Place, a sidewalk kiosk run by Frank Lloyd that has been selling hand-drawn portraits, t-shirts, and hats since 1984.

Triple Candie’s return to a bricks and mortar existence follows a decade of nomadic exhibition production for museums and contemporary art spaces across Europe and the United States. Its most recent project manifested an exhibition at Oregon’s Portland Art Museum on the once influential alternative space Portland Center for the Visual Arts (1972 -1987). From 2018 to 2019, Triple Candie produced five exhibitions at the Grazer Kunstverein in Austria as part of a multi-year inquiry into the work and legacy of Michael Asher (1943 – 2012), a pioneer of situational aesthetics. In 2017, Triple Candie staged an exhibition on the failure of capitalism in three vitrines in a shopping arcade in Prague, a block from Wenceslas Square–site of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Its work has been the subject of surveys at FRAC Le Plateau, Paris (2013) and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (2017).

Triple Candie will use the new space to stage pocket-exhibitions on a monthly rotation. Its first exhibition, United and Untied, Simultaneously, is a curatorial riddle. Typical of Triple Candie projects, it levels hierarchies of value, mixing art and non-art elements such as a painting with a protest sign. Also included are objects and props fabricated for past exhibitions, which displayed out of their original context have lost their initial references and meaning and become perplexing curios. These include two hand-sewn “bunnies” from the exhibition Throwing Up Bunnies–inspired by a short story by Julio Cortázar, Letter to a Young Lady in Paris.

Triple Candie cites the following precedents for its vitrine gallery: Ohio Photomagazin’s vitrine in Cologne (2000 – 05); The Wrong Gallery, New York (2002 – 05); Galerie Ferdinanda Baumanna, Prague (2010 – ); and NICC, Brussels (2013 – ).