MINÁ MINOV: AMERICAN ELEGANCE

Marvin Gardens is pleased to present American Elegance, Bulgarian native
Miná Minov’s first solo exhibition in New York. All of the works shown here were created onsite or filmed in Ridgewood and Bushwick. The title itself is borrowed from a furniture store one block up the street from the gallery.

Minov’s work eludes straightforward description. One can start by noticing what these works are not. They are not paintings in a crowded culture of painting, not sculptures in a crowded marketplace of sculpture, nor are they strictly videos in an ever-expanding archive of video. The work is somewhere in-between, as Minov operates from a place of in-between (His CV notes no permanent live/work place).

Cobbled together with a homemade engineering style, the objects are made from unlikely materials, to perform a specific and often seemingly simple function. Aesthetic value isn’t considered in and of itself. Though in the use or documentation of these objects, an aesthetic begins to emerge. A thin line is tread here whereby what might appear casual at first is actually an environment with tight controls. Take for example the video work A Man Goes To See An Exhibition. In order to get a shot of a random passerby in front of a chosen building façade, Minov constructed a special tripod reaching over 4 meters high. This was done to avoid seeing any cars that might have been parked on the street, and had the added benefit of giving the work as a whole a consistently unique vantage point, however subtle. Then he waited, and waited, and waited... The uniqueness of this piece can again be described, at least in part, by what is not there. No cyclists, no cars, no couples, no children, no dogs. Just a single random passerby.

American Elegance consists of videos and objects which serve their own ambiguous purposes. In its disregard of market constraints, Minov’s work speaks to the vision of Marvin Gardens, and we are happy to host him as the gallery’s first artist-in-residence.