Acclaimed for their respective critical approaches to artistic production, both Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff make work across a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, and single-channel video. The Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art devotes its inaugural exhibition at 18 Wooster Street to the artists’ first major New York institutional show, This Is Not My Color / The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This exhibition will include a selection of recent work by the artists in a variety of scales. Curated by Gianni Jetzer, the Swiss Institute’s Director, the exhibition remains on view from September 15 through October 30, 2011.

This Is Not My Color / The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People features paintings, assemblage, sculptures, and single-channel videos. The multimedia installation addresses the loftier concept of the human self in bodily and conceptual manifestations. The title of the exhibition suggests two diverging but overlapping artistic approaches: the first, a scientific and chemical analysis of the self and a disavowal; the second, a constructed and systematic operating procedure. While none of the work in the exhibition actually presents the human figure, the size, proportion, and posture of the works reflect a common concern for the bodily. The work of both artists reflects a strategy that borrows from and critiques a consumer industry that sells an idealized self—one which can be attained through the purchase of commodities, from self help books to luxury water.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the idea that the made-for-purchase person is an illusory construct, one that can be unpacked through scientific, philosophical, and psychological analyses.

Curated by Gianni Jetzer