NEW YORK, NY.- For Roxy Paine’s fourth solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, the gallery presents the artist’s new large-scale installation Distillation (2010). A single continuous piece, the artwork begins at the gallery’s front door and pierces its walls to travel all the way through the space to the back offices. The sculpture is Paine’s newest addition to his stainless steel Dendroid series, which includes Maelstrom, featured on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden in 2009. Roxy Paine’s monumental new work Distillation becomes a metaphor for the artist’s mental process. Paine re-examines alchemical methods to create a meditation on mystical industrialism. If the process of distillation is an attempt to find purity, the sculpture Distillation demonstrates the impossibility of that goal. An apt analogy can be found in Hilary Mantel’s writing on the alchemic practice in her 1989