On View
December 17 2024 – March 15 2025

Marciano Art Foundation
4357 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90010 – 3706

Tuesday – Saturday
11AM – 6PM
by Appointment

Marta is delighted to announce Quaternion, a composition and installation of sixteen new sculptural furniture works by New York-based artists and long-time colleagues Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon.

An institutional commission by the Marciano Art Foundation—the site and host of the presentation—Quaternion is both a reflection and extension of its architectural and decorative surroundings, drawing on the materials, textures, and palettes of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, designed by prolific California artist and architect Millard Sheets in 1961.

Named for the double-headed eagle, a central emblem in the visual culture of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Quaternion is located on the ground floor of the Foundation, in its nascent library. Composed of sixteen individual works, these gestures for tabling and seating, fabricated in industrial-grade foam and skin-thick pigmented coating, reside in dialogue with the surrounding wall works—a pair of photographs by Thomas Demand and an expansive mural by Sheets himself—the disparate subjects of which unify in their rendering of uninhabited spaces: a lone Monobloc Chair on a balcony; an empty luthier’s workshop; an earthly nightscape devoid of human figures. The patent isolation of these works is countered by Wentrcek & Zebulon’s compositions, whose designs unite, both literally and thematically, in their psychology of communion—a tenet of Freemasonry and its attendant spaces—and support a dialogue between disciplines separated by time, materiality, and ritual engagement.

Across three main bodies of seating, the works form a circuit-like composition that prompt contact with other visitors, as well as with the books that line the room’s shelves. The deep seats of the installation’s Club Chairs—cut with serrated blades from a larger block of milled foam with an organic force that induces a material trompe-l’œil effect—represent the most direct quotation of the furniture found in the library’s original incarnation as a lounge, offering individual stations for rest while the artists’ Club Sofa and Daybed pair extend their capacity to larger groups. With formal references to the architecture of cruise ships, fortresses, and airports—just three of the several motifs Wentrcek & Zebulon studied while conceptualizing the installation—the artists’ functional gestures merge these more global allusions with the idiosyncrasies, both historic and contemporary, of the Temple itself, responding to the building’s decorative details, such as mosaic, glasswork, and carpeting, as well as its structural components—its angles, orientations, and philosophies of space.

Within Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon’s practice, there is a sustained interest in liminal spaces and the set of controls that determine our engagement with them—at the gate of an airport, ensconced in a cruise ship’s conversation pit, or behind the parapet of a fortress, we are contained in stasis while the designs that surround us seek to systematize our bodily interactions as we prepare to travel, converse, or await ...

By accepting Wentrcek & Zebulon’s invitation to repose, visitors are encouraged to organize themselves within the installation, either in solitude or en masse, and exist in corporeal collaboration, if only in brief, while in concert with the holistic designs that have shaped the institution and its uses for over half a century.

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About the Artists
Kristen Wentrcek (b. 1984, El Paso, Texas) and Andrew Zebulon (b. 1984, San Diego) are multidisciplinary artists living and working in New York City. Their work is wrought from an embrace of unlikely materials and reimagined craft and manufacturing processes. They are the gallery’s longest-running collaborators. Past exhibitions at, with, and for Martainclude In Support of Books (2017), Under / Over (2021), Hog Trap (2021), The North American Pavilion (2023), Make–Do (2023), and No Life (2023). Quaternion is the artists’ first institutional installation, and their third solo presentation in Los Angeles.

About the Foundation
The Marciano Art Foundation is a contemporary art space in the heart of Los Angeles. The Foundation is dedicated to fostering a spirit of collaborative creative freedom by making the unique spaces of our historic building available to artists, arts organizations, and other creative groups to realize innovative projects and public programs on an ongoing basis. With over 1500 works in the Marciano Art Collection, the Foundation continues to support living artists through acquisitions, operating a lending program to museums and institutions worldwide and ensuring free access to the collection through exhibitions.