Maren Hassinger

Dia presents a yearlong installation by artist Maren Hassinger at Dia Bridgehampton, New York. Spanning five decades, the artist’s wide-ranging practice examines intersections between ecology, humanity, and identity. Hassinger, who lived in East Hampton and taught at Stony Brook Southampton on Long Island during the 1990s, has created a site-specific installation for Dia Bridgehampton. The installation on the first floor features a series of hanging fabric panels, each of which is printed with an image of one of the artist’s bush sculptures and sized to the exact measurements of the sole exposed window in the gallery. For this new work, Hassinger has chosen to use documentation of her outdoor installation Circle of Bushes, which was organized by Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, Brookville, New York, in 1991. Although the original installation consisted of five bush sculptures arranged in a circle, Hassinger has selected a photograph that gives focus to the details of a singular sculpture. The image has been printed on multiple, diaphanous fabric panels, which are suspended and organized in a grid. Facing the entrance to the gallery, the series of panels resembles a field or forest. Installed on Dia Bridgehampton’s back lawn and visible through the gallery window is a new bush sculpture, Hassinger’s first such work in several years. Anchored into the ground with concrete, the work is made of lengths of galvanized steel rope and arranged like a bundle of twigs. Though the form extends up and out of the earth, evoking and imitating organic growth, the unbound metal ropes point to both a loss of the natural and a concurrent undoing of the industrial. Maren Hassinger at Dia Bridgehampton is made possible by generous support from Farfetch. Additional support is provided by the Fuhrman Family Foundation, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, and the Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Foundation. Maren Hassinger was born in Los Angeles in 1947. She graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, with a BA in sculpture in 1969, and from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an MFA in fiber art in 1973. While living in East Hampton in the 1990s, Hassinger was an active participant in the Long Island arts community. Her work appeared in numerous local exhibitions including Volume: 6 Contemporary Sculptors, Guild Hall, East Hampton, in 1992, and Sightings, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, in 1994. She also realized performances such as A Day at the Beach for the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art, Amagansett, in 1995. She was a lecturer in the art department of Stony Brook Southampton from 1992 to 1997. Hassinger has completed solo presentations and projects at, among others, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Baltimore Museum of Art; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Insitution, Washington, DC. She recently retired after twenty years as the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Hassinger lives in New York.

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23 Corwith Ave, Bridgehampton

Hamptons, NY