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2 Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver and gold on canvas, 54 x 54 in., Collection of Neue Galerie, New York.
metal in their practice—technically, aesthetically, or conceptually. The 57 participants work in both fine art and craftbased media, from painting and photography to jewelry and large-scale sculpture. Many examine art historical traditions, while others experiment with new combinations of materials—rubber, cement, ceramic, paper—and take full advantage of the metal’s multimodality. Exhibition themes address gold’s layered histories, symbolism, and natural properties that have captivated humankind since the first pair of eyes was laid upon the element.
For thousands of years, gold has stored value, backed economies, and governed the rise and fall of currencies. Although gold has long since been abandoned as the foundation of most monetary systems, it remains a value standard, as explored in several of the works in Striking Gold. In Lisa Gralnick’s Part I: Commodification and Sensible Economy of her Gold Standard series, the artist reconstructs quotidian items in plaster and registers their market price through an