Getting to Ethan Greenbaum’s New York studio isn’t exactly a charming experience. You cross the Gowanus and Brooklyn-Queens expressways, a path whose dreariness is rivaled only by the block that follows—a marble supply company, a fabricator of countertops, a metal shop, with its grinding, hammering soundtrack of industry. The artist’s workspace itself is a quiet reprieve, the walls filled with what appear to be large, luminous photographs. The works are excruciatingly vivid in their detail of ordinary cement and stone surfaces. But this isn’t standard photography: Greenbaum’s images are printed onto clear acrylic, like so much commercial signage in the city—which often serves as inspiration. For instance, the faux- granite siding of that nearby marble supply company, visible from Greenbaum’s studio window, has made its way into Back Slash, 2012. The artist photographed the artificial surface using a meticulous 1:1 tiling process so that he can catch every nuance of the material. He has then digitally removed the grout between each rock and printed the resulting image on a 90¾-by-100-inch acrylic sheet; on the material’s back side, he has printed an expanse of red, white, and black faux-marble Formica. (Greenbaum occasionally incorporates found digital images, as in Veneerist, 2012, which turns a swatch of material on Formica’s website into a pattern resembling colored mold.) The overall effect is beautifully disorienting, casting the banality of ready-made materials in a new light.
“I never set out to be a photographer or a sculptor per se,” Greenbaum says. “I had to teach myself those methods in order to create the works that I had in mind.” Though he originally trained as a painter, his practice is now fairly hands-off.
“Photographing on the street is the most tactile I get,” he says with a laugh, noting that much of his time is spent working with digital images on the computer or collaborating with commercial printers and set shops. He’s most concerned with investigating the mediated image and how viewing things via a computer screen or in print has changed the way we experience the physical world. “There’s something about the totality of an image in a book that is very satisfying,” he says. “The scale is uniform, the surface is uniform. You could say that my work is an attempt to bring the pleasure derived from viewing screen or print images into real space.”
And yet Greenbaum is doing more than simply enlarging pristine images; there is always an interesting dimensional friction at play. A print on acrylic plastic of a cracked and broken sidewalk leans nonchalantly against the studio’s back wall—it’s a work, Facing Stone, that will be included in the artist’s October exhibition at Kansas, in New York City. Close inspection reveals an odd topographic effect: The printed piece of acrylic has been vacuum formed around a set of ceiling tiles (which are themselves faux representations of a rock, such as limestone), giving this piece an altogether different kind of disquieting presence, as the grid and texture of the ceiling tiles awkwardly conflict with the haphazard cracks in the image of the sidewalk. With this piece, Greenbaum wittily refers to both the markings on ancient cave ceilings and contemporary floors and surfaces, questioning the choices we make about covering and resurfacing spaces, whether with marble, faux marble, or something entirely unrecognizable. “I grew up in very rural areas, first in Virginia and later in North Florida. Coming from places like these, I’ve always had an ambivalent fascination with the urban landscape,” Greenbaum says.
Ethan Greenbaum, "Back Slash," 2012
Greenbaum clearly has an affinity with the Formica-obsessed artist Richard Artschwager, thanks to their shared delight in combining flattened imagery within the medium of sculpture. He also owes a debt to other 1970s artists who experimented with perception and space, such as Robert Overby and John Divola. Yet Greenbaum is also engaged with a small group of cohorts who produce similarly photo-based sculpture, like David Kennedy Cutler and Letha Wilson. These artists follow one another’s work closely, to the point that Cutler, Greenbaum, and artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty have held “materials meetings” in which production secrets were shared. The three are currently working on a collaborative artist publication that takes the form of a materials sample book, akin to what you’d find in a supplier’s showroom.
Greenbaum is ready to take his own production to another level, and he doesn’t shy away from an entrepreneurial approach to artmaking, as he considers branching further into the fields of printmaking and architecture—as well as experimenting with wall reliefs, room dividers, and even window design. What will remain a constant is the visual hiccup that Greenbaum’s oeuvre provides, allowing us to see the spaces and materials we interact with every day in a new and alluring light. “What I’m looking to share,” he says, “is an experience of wonder and estrangement.”
This article is published in the September 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
