Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present How Bats Drink Water, an online exhibition of works by Vincent Tiley curated by Evan Garza, on view from April 10th to June 22nd.
This is the first exhibition to focus on Tiley's Rope Paintings, a group of works executed between 2016 and 2019 that are firmly tied to ideas of the body, its absence, and the material elements of sexuality. In these works, Tiley evokes the body without relying on figuration or narrative while referencing particular modernist touchstones like abstract expressionism, minimalism and geometric abstraction. As the artist explains, “the body is a point of almost total potential. The potential to expand outward connecting and touching a world of other bodies around it, and also a space to be entered. The body is a vortex of forces being swallowed up and expelled out.” By using knots and binding methods of Shibari, a form of erotic bondage with origins in 18th- and 19th-century Japan, Vincent Tiley forcibly ties these works to notions of exquisite control and performed eroticism.
