Gedi Sibony

The three-year-old project space Mister Fahrenheit isn’t clandestine, per se. Unlike Manhattan’s strictly word-of-mouth galleries (Fulton Ryder, Club Rhubarb), its address is on the record: 234 West Tenth Street. From noon to five, Mondays through Wednesdays, visitors to a busy West Village block—lined with town houses, coffee shops, thrift stores, and the N.Y.P.D.’s Sixth Precinct station—are buzzed through a discreetly marked gate to discover a garden-level refuge from the commercial grind of contemporary art’s big-box mainstream. It’s hard to imagine an artist better suited to the liminal charms of Mister Fahrenheit than Gedi Sibony, a mid-career New York sculptor acclaimed for his alchemical way with salvaged materials, in which concealment often plays a key role. The dramatic centerpiece of his exhibition, a quintet of recent works on view through June 22, is a twenty-six-foot-long ochre curtain that cascades from the ceiling, draped so that it appears to envelop the space when seen from above while opening a narrow passageway at ground level. Sibony’s repertoire also includes tenderly retouched found canvases, one of which is included here. But painting materializes most surprisingly in a cast-off cupboard, which, in Sibony’s hands, becomes a floating homage to Matisse. (Mister Fahrenheit; April 26-June 22.)