AR T
AM EM ER PO ICA RA N RY
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JANU ARY 2011
JANUARY
FEBRUARY 19 - APRIL 30
“Some Assembly Required” Group Exhibition
Assemblage & Collage
Modern & Contemporary Paintings Drawings Jordi Alcaraz Hannelore Baron Romare Bearden Hans Burkhardt Joseph Cornell Jim Dine Claire Falkenstein Llyn Foulkes Mathias Goeritz Patrick Graham George Herms Freindensreich Hundertwasser Edward Kienholz MarcaConrad Marca-Relli Robert Motherwell Louise Nevelson Man Ray Robert Rauschenberg Mark Tobey Frank Stella Gordon Wagner Jerome Witkin & Others
Prints Sculpture
Visit us
January 19 - 23
Los Angeles Art Show L.A. Convention Center Booth D-120
Gordon Wagner, “Construction,” 1950 , 45 x 19 x 11 1/2 inches
also
JACK RUTBERG FINE ARTS
357 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90036
Telephone (323) 938-5222
www.jackrutbergfinearts.com
Michael Salvatore Tierney Michael Salvatore Tierney AEROSPACE Michael Salvatore Tierney JanuaryAEROSPACE 8 - February 26, 2011
AEROSPACE
January 8 - February 26, 2011 January 8 - February 26, 2011 5797 Washington Boulevard | Culver City, California 90232 323.272.3642 | www.blytheprojects.net 5797 Washington Boulevard | Culver City, California 90232 323.272.3642 | www.blytheprojects.net 5797 Washington Boulevard | Culver City, California 90232 323.272.3642 | www.blytheprojects.net Michael Salvatore Tierney, ‘Durand Durand,’ 2010, archival pigment print
Sol leWitt StructureS. WorkS on PaPer. Wall DraWingS. 1971 – 2005.
alSo SHoWing:
PHotograPHY
RichaRd deacon FRedeRick hammeRsley sol lewitt sean scully J uan uslé 20 January — 26 February.
45 North Venice Boulevard Venice, California 90291 Tel 310 822 4955 www.lalouver.com
JANUARY 2011
CONTENTS FEATURES Korean Art in Los Angeles 22 Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus & Beyond 24
COVER Abland - Ulf Puder 36 2010 - oil on canvas - 83” x 59”
EXHIBITIONS 30 35 36 39 39 40 41 41 41
Los Angeles San Francisco New York Philadelphia Boston Washington Santa Fe Tucson Scottsdale
Richard Kalisher PUBLISHER Donovan Stanley EDITOR Eric Kalisher DESIGN
Advertising Inquires advertising@acamagazine.com 561.542.6028 / Richard Kalisher
Cui Xiuwen - Existential Emptiness No.20 - 2009 - c-print - 37.4” x 181.1”
acamagazine.com
© 2010 R.K. Graphics. All Rights Reserved. Content courtesy of represented institutions.
Alexander Kroll Unfoldings January 13 - February 20, 2011
207 W. 5th Street Los Angeles, CA 90013 www.cb1gallery.com 213-806-7889 gallery@cb1gallery.com Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, noon - 6 p.m. Thursday & Friday open until 7:30 p.m.
EDWARD CELLA ART
+ ARCHITECTURE
Lora Schlesinger Gallery BRUCE HOUSTON NEFERTETES, TRUCKS & ASSEMBLAGES
February 5, 2011 - March 12, 2011 Reception: Sat., February 5, 5-7 p.m
East Gallery:
monochromes No. 10, 2010, oil & alkyd on canvas, 23 x 23 "
w w w . l o r a s c h l e s i n g e r. c o m 2525 Michigan Ave. T3 Santa Monica CA 90404 t (310) 828 -1133 gallery@loraschlesinger.com
EskE kath thErE arE housEs EvErywhErE January 8 – FEbruary 12, 2011 opEning rEcEption January 8, 2011 7-10pm
).'82/+ 0'3+9 -'22+8? )./4':5=4 259 '4-+2+9 975 chung king road Los angELEs, ca 90012 www.cjamesgallery.com o (213) 687-0844 info@cjamesgallery.com F (213) 687-8815
Ahn-Nyung | Hello
IntroduCtIon to Korean Contemporary art January 22 – February 19, 2011 Opening receptiOn January 22, 2011 | 7pm – 10pm Curated by Jae yang | art-merge.cOm | bringing promising emerging artists to america
6023 Washington Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232 310.558.0200 www.lebasseprojects.com
RAY TURNER
15 FEBRUARY - 15 MARCH www.riveragallery.com
RUTH BACHOFNER GALLERY Bergamot Station Arts Center Unit G2 Santa Monica, CA 310 829 3300 www.ruthbachofnergallery.com
Walker, 2010, Oil on linen, 70” x 60”
DAVID KAPP New Paintings
January 15 – March 12, 2011
Whitney Hubbs, “Untitled”, 8 x 10", Silver Gelatin Print, 1993
Laura Kim, detail from “Artifact Drawing #1”, 6.8 x 10.2", C-print, 2010
EmbarrassmEnt 2: thEory through February 10, 2011 michael Dopp Liz Glynn Peter holzhauer Whitney hubbs Laura Kim
2903 Santa Monica Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Juliana romano Frank ryan Lily simonson Caleb Waldorf Jessica Williams
310-828-1912
Gallery Hours: Tue–Sat, 11am – 5pm or by appointment
www.gallerykmLA.com
Featured Exhibition
Korean Art Showcase in Los Angeles
Ahn-Nyung | Hello is an exhibition of 15 multimedia works by four Korean artists exploring the conceptual and visual currents igniting the Korean contemporary art scene today. Curator Jae Yang is the founder of Art-merge, a Los Angeles-based consultancy that supports emerging artists. Drawing on seven years of introducing cutting-edge contemporary work to the American art market, Yang mines the vanguard of South Korea’s dynamic gallery scene to deliver the American audience an unprecedented survey of works that are as effusive in their naiveté as they are expansive in their aesthetic achievement. As a whole, AhnNyung | Hello uncovers a culture in transition: memories are mutable, synthesis abuts tradition, and experience is subject to a regimen of creative re-envisioning. Featured artists include Hyung Kwan Kim, Seok Kim, Yeonju Sung, and Jin Young Yu. A companion exhibition, Paperwork, will take place in the gallery’s project room, featuring works on paper by artists Kim Eull, Tae Heon Kim, Kakyoung Lee, and Yong Sin. In Ahn-Nyung | Hello, the artists utilize a range of media to explore a rapidly changing society, working with either synthetic materials (Hyung Kwan Kim’s plastic tape reliefs and Jin Young Yu’s PVC sculptures), or
22 A|C|A January 2011
organic matter reinterpreted anachronistically (Seok Kim’s wooden robot sculptures) and unexpectedly (Yeonju Sung’s photographs of haute couture designs constructed from a variety of common foodstuffs). In contrast is Paperwork, the companion exhibition in the gallery’s project room. Where Ahn-Nyung | Hello embraces postmodernity’s fragmented, disparate luster, Paperwork evokes tradition and continuity in its presentation of contemporary work made from Asian art’s most fundamental media—ink and paper. Taken together, Ahn-Nyung | Hello and Paperwork operate in dialogue with one another to offer an engaging and challenging overview of Korean contemporary art. Jin Young Yu’s work depicts the outsider longing to be invisible—the fly on the wall or the observer seeking to go unseen. Artist handiwork meets the commercial perfection one would usually expect from the likes of Koons or Murakami, as Yu constructs her figures from a ultra-transparent PVC and hand cast and painted plaster. The resulting sculptures explore the dynamics of social anxiety and expectation through a semi-apparent cast of subjects who are somber, withdrawn and exquisitely unapproachable.
(left page) Hyung Kwan Kim, More Than This #3, plastic electrical tape, 70”x46”. (above) work by Seok Kim (below) Yeonju Sung, Banana, pigment print, 35"x54".
Jin Young Yu, Family in Disguise, mixed media, 14"x51"x18".
The robot — a childhood plaything, object of desire and memory, and once a cornerstone of Asian pop-cultural vernacular — assumes a transcendent role in Seok Kim’s sculptural work. In his monochromatic plastic pieces, the artist’s subjects appear nearly untouchable, deep in epic poses of thought and prayer. Meanwhile his colorful wooden robots take on distinctly human frailties, as they sit alone at a desk or pose alongside their bicycle during a commute home. In her photographs of clothing constructed from material
that could never be worn, YeonJu Sung captures a series of phantoms — temporal checkpoints depicting objects destined to decay, objects that fail in function what they seem to fulfill in appearance. By ultimately rendering what begins as sculptural work in the photographic medium, Sung exposes an authority of image over reality, revealing the tenuous line that separates lived from imagined experience. In Hyung Kwan Kim’s work, wistful scenes of discovery are born out against dense, hyper fields of urban activity. Human figures appear obscured, dismembered or caricatured in each colorful relief, as Kim explores the concept of cities and societies as grand artificial exhibition halls. This is a process-rich endeavor in which the artist derives a nuanced palette from the subtle color deviations and inconsistencies in plastic electrical and packing tape.
“Ahn-Nyung | Hello” LeBasse Projects Culver City [through February 19] Feature
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Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus by Hugo Anderson
Bauhaus and our very sense of what is modern in twentieth century art and design are practically synonymous. We are surrounded in our everyday lives by the designs and theories put into practice by the Bauhaus. While the school of the Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, its principals and influence resonate today because of the achievements of the artists and architects associated with it: Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Joseph Alpers, Lyonel Feininger, Laszlo MoholyNagy, Warner Drewes and Herbert Bayer. By definition Bauhaus means construction or architecture (bau) and house (haus) in German. It was the creation of Walter Gropius, who in 1919 assumed control of the Weimar School of the Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. He combined the two into the Weimar Bauhaus School. It was Gropius’ intention to create a new generation of craftsmen without the class distinctions between craftsmen and artists. No doubt it
“No institution has affected the course of twentieth century art and design so profoundly as the Bauhaus. Its impact is staggering. Bauhaus precedents provide sources for everything from the appearance of our urban skylines to the modern dinnerware on our hard-edged, contemporary tables. They are found in virtually every functionally designed object and graphic today.” - Gwen Chanzit
Curator, HerbertJanuary Bayer Archive at the Denver Art Museum 24 A|C|A 2011
and Beyond was an attempt to build something new and positive out of the ashes of World War I when Gropius stated “Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together.” The central concept was that no one art form was inherently better than any other and that the fine arts and applied arts must be studied and used together. Through good design the new artist/craftsman would create a better world. The very fact that easel painting was replaced in the curriculum by mural painting showed Gropius’ commitment to integrate all the arts within architecture. Of all of the artists associated with the Bauhaus during its brief 15 years, it is Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) who actually devoted a lifetime to a career which incorporated the ideal of total integration of the arts, in design, advertising, architecture, public sculpture and painting. Herbert Bayer was born April 5, 1900 in Haag am Hausruch, Austria. Because of a book he read by Vassily Kandinsky (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) he enrolled at Weimar Bauhaus at the age of 21. He actually arrived at the Bauhaus six months before Kandinsky began teaching. Bayer studied at the Bauhaus for two years, taking a leave in 1923 to travel through Italy. He had arrived at the Bauhaus with almost no prior background in art, and thus offered the perfect “blank slate” upon which to create the essential Bauhaus artist. Since the Bauhaus offered no art history in its curriculum it made sense to expand his firsthand knowledge of art architecture and design by spending a year traveling in Italy, sketching and painting. To support himself he painted houses and stage sets during his travels, thus applying the integration of craftsman and artist at the first opportunity. In 1925 he was offered a position on the faculty at the Bauhaus, as Master of Typography. It was then, in conjunction with the ideas of Moholy-Nagy, that Bayer developed a “universal alphabet” using only lower case letters. This was designed to be a practical typeface, which was large enough to read and free of distortions and curlicues, sans-serif type. Bayer applied this type design to ad copy, posters and books throughout his career. In 1928 Bayer left the Bauhaus to pursue a design career in Berlin. It was his desire to put the theories of the Bauhaus into practice in design and advertising. In 1933 he produced a “bayer type”. During his Berlin years, in addition to his design work, Bayer ventured into photography, which he used in both commercial (ads and posters) and fine art production. With Maholy-Nagy, Hebert Bayer was an early creator of photoplastic or photomontage. The altering of photographic imagery through the use of multiple
negatives and collage meshed well with Surrealist imagery, as in self-portrait (1932), lonely metropolitan (1932), and metamorphosis (1936). The later 1930’s were difficult times for free expression. Artists were among the many groups who felt the need to find exile outside Nazi Germany. The Bauhaus had closed in 1933 and many of its artists/faculty had already emigrated to the United States, finding work teaching at Harvard and at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Bayer had traveled to the U.S. in 1937 and became involved in the design of an exhibition on the Bauhaus at the newly created Museum of Modern Art. In 1938 he moved to New York City. Deposition (1939) while depicting the tools of Christ’s crucifixion, also portends the dark future of a Nazi victory in Europe, a victory that seemed quite possible in 1939. The exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 opened at the Museum of Modern Art and later traveled around the United States. It provided an introduction to modernist design to a country slow to accept abstraction in painting, much less in advertising, which required client acceptance. During his tenure in New York, Bayer’s graphic work prospered, but when the opportunity arose to move back to a mountain environment he took it, moving to Aspen, Colorado in 1946. He accepted a position as design consultant for Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, whose headquarters were in Chicago. The Aspen of 1946 was a small mountain town of less than 800 residents and only the beginnings of a ski town, Feature
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with two pre-war ski runs. Paepcke and Bayer were instrumental in initiating the changes that would make Aspen a cultural oasis in the 1950’s and beyond. The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was founded by Paepcke in 1949, with Herbert Bayer working as architect and design consultant. He designed a complex of buildings for the institute, integrated within the natural landscape of the mountain valley. In 1955 he created a work called grass mound, a forty foot grassy place for relaxation, years before the concept of “earthworks” became popular. He also created marble garden using discards from an old marble quarry. In 196364 he designed a new tent for the Aspen Music Festival. With his return to mountain living, mountains and contour map elements began to emerge in his artwork from the late 1940’s on, as in his lithograph mountains and lakes (1948). He designed a series of ski posters, including ski broadmoor (1959). In 1953 the Container Corporation published world atlas with graphics designed by Herbert Bayer. His goal was to put together an atlas with clean graphics that was easy to read. The interaction between fine art and commercial art again shows in Bayer’s paintings and prints with continuing use of weather related symbols, such as arrows, flow charts and contour maps. The Container Corporation employed the talents of Man Ray and Fernand Leger as well as Bayer in the late 1930’s. It was their concept that through good design, corporations could influence good taste and profits. Bayer, with his Bauhaus ideals, was a natural to work in this collaboration of art and industry. In their ads, text was limited to fifteen words of copy in order to put the emphasis on visual images. Lengthy texts were out; clean copy was in. Advertising was seen as good public relations with consumers and buyers at other corporations. Bayer used collage and photomontage, elements from his fine art, in his early advertisements. He became chairman of Container Corporation’s Department of Design in 1956. He was more than
26 A|C|A January 2011
just an art director, contributing in management decisions, including the design of buildings and interiors. The Great Ideas of Western Man was a Herbert Bayer advertising campaign of the 1950’s and 60’s. These ads had no sales message, again working on the concept that a good corporate image was also good for business. The ad concept was an out- growth of discussions at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. The Institute worked to bring business executives and managers together to discuss ideas in a relaxed setting and a cultural environment. The Aspen Institute was as responsible for putting Aspen on the world map as was skiing. It was also a great concept for expanding the year past ski season, with many of its programs in the summer months. It was through connections at the Aspen Institute that Bayer met Robert O Anderson, founder of Atlantic Richfield Oil Company. In the early 1950’s they became friends; Anderson bought Bayer’s house in town when Herbert moved his studio onto Red Mountain, overlooking Aspen. Along with the house, Anderson also began to buy artwork by Bayer, providing the beginning of a relationship of patron and friend that would last until the end of Bayer’s life. After Walter Paepcke’s death in 1960, Bayer began working for ARCO as an art and design consultant, starting in 1966. Bayer oversaw the design of corporate offices in New York and Philadelphia, as well as Los Angeles when the corporate headquarters moved there. He designed the artwork for ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles: double ascension, two linked staircases in a pool of water. He also advised ARCO on the development of its large corporate art collection and the performing arts programs it sponsored. He designed carpets and tapestries for the corporate offices. He designed a sculpture for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. A similar sculpture resides at the Design Center in Denver, Colorado. He also developed a seriesof sculptures for ARCO that were designed to hide/beautify the Philadel-
phia refinery area. These were among a number of sculptural projects that were never created and exist only in the form of maquettes. Currently the Bayer family is working to try to realize some of his models as larger works in Denver and other cities. Bayer moved from Aspen to the Santa Barbara area in 1976. He lived there for the last ten years of his life. A fine collection of his work can be found in the Santa Barbara Museum, while The Herbert Bayer Archive is at the Denver Art Museum, with over 9000 artifacts in the collection. During the last four decades of his life, Herbert Bayer was well employed in design positions with the Container Corporation and ARCO. In addition to his corporate responsibilities he developed a significant fine art portfolio during these years. Artistically Bayer is probably better known for his earlier photomontages from the Berlin years (1928-1938). Having two significant patrons in Walter Paepcke and Robert O. Anderson, there was little need for Herbert Bayer the fine artist to go through the normal routine of gallery exhibitions and reviews necessary for artwork to find its way into important private and public collections. The town of Aspen is full of Herbert Bayer paintings that moved directly from studio to private hands. To a certain degree his reputation as a painter, printmaker and sculptor never received the critical acclaim that exhibitions and reviews would have allowed. He suffered a bit from being too successful. In his later years Bayer used his graphic skills to create fine art prints, using lithography and silkscreen, the same mediums used in his commercial work. A skill learned in one area is used in another. In these graphic images, as in his later paintings, he returns to geometric design and abstraction in a se-
ries of works he called “anthologies”. In these works the Bauhaus artist has returned to basics: color, geometry and design. The sculpture he produced during these same years still maintains a freshness today, thanks to his combination of clean design and primary colors. His surrealist photomontages from the 1920’s hold as much shock value today as they did then. The success and legacy of Herbert Bayer are the combination of Bauhaus ideas and American optimism from the post WWII period applied to a work ethic and career which lasted until his death in 1985. It is the combination of clean design and a fresh palette of primary colors that explain the continuing appeal of his artwork. His work is optimistic and easy to live with, the result of his lifelong adherence to good design. More than any of his contemporaries, Herbert Bayer stayed true to his Bauhaus ideals through his sixty-year career. Hugo Anderson is the Director of Emil Nelson Gallery, which represents the works of Herbert Bayer from the Bayer Family Collection.
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BLEICHER GALLERIES BGartDealings.com info@bgartdealings.com
(Ann McCoy Feb /2011)
CB Gallery [Caporale/Bleicher] BG Gallery [Bleicher/Golightly]
355 N. La Brea Avenue, LA, CA 90036 (323) 545-6018
1431 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90401 (310) 878-2784
EXHIBITIONS
LOS ANGELES Nigel Cooke Blum & Poe Los Angeles [through Feb 12]
Nigel Cooke, Washed Up Thinker, 2010, Oil on linen backed with sailcloth, 87” x 77”.
Sol LeWitt LA Louver Venice [through Feb 26]
Sol LeWitt: (top) Structure with Three Towers, 1986, wood painted white, 48.75”x121.5”x 48.5”; (bot) Pyramid #10, 1985, wood painted white, 79.87”x 47”x 37.5”. Courtesy of LA Louver.
30 A|C|A January 2011
Nigel Cooke's paintings — "hybrid theatrical spaces" as he has called them — often depict fantastic graffiti-strewn architecture and supernatural landscapes. Rendered in a naturalistic style that bounces back and forth between affirmation and complication of the canvas surface, Cooke's paintings hover in the vicinity of landscape, still life, portraiture, and narrative tableau without ever touching down. His current paintings similarly flirt with and confound another painting tradition, the "figure in the landscape as allegory." Departure, Cooke's three-panel centerpiece is a self-aware take on the German artist Max Beckmann's 1933-1935 triptych of the same title. In Beckmann's painting, images of torture and brutality bookend a central panel in which a dignified family sails to salvation. In contrast, Cooke's figures hang in the end panels pathetic, comedic, and tragic all at once, while in the central panel they writhe and wretch in a boat, tossed about on a dark ethereal sea. Whether abused by nature's
whim or their own bacchanalian excesses, for them there is no escape. Cooke describes his reworking as a vision of "provincial philosophy lecturers sailing to Ibiza for a rave," yet falling prey to a disastrous reckoning en route in which only one "thinker" makes it to land. Cooke imagines this avatar of hubris washed up in more ways than one, dragging himself and his wreckage onto strange shores to begin the process of rebuilding and reflecting. The other paintings in the exhibition continue to present scenes of thickly bearded "Master chefs", sailors, artists, and philosophers as they navigate the dystopian environment in which they find themselves. This psychic landscape is peopled by dredged-up corpses, ancient philosophers and burnt-out fry cooks, all overshadowed by the decaying specter of factory buildings that echo modernist geometric painting. These haunting portraits model failure, but also artistic production in the face of peril and creativity on the verge of existential self-immolation.
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), a pioneer of minimal and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, achieved a major breakthrough in his work in 1968, when he began employing predetermined line-making procedures and materials usually associated with drawing or commercial art techniques. He used this method to execute large-scale drawings directly on the wall. In 1980, a variety of geometric shapes emerged as autonomous subjects, which in turn led LeWitt to isometric projections in 1982. By dividing the sides of the basic cube into halves, thirds and quarters, and connecting the resulting dividing points with lines, LeWitt transformed planar figures into three-dimensional forms. This exhibition, Sol LeWitt: Structures, Works on Paper, Wall Drawings 1971-2005, will address the artist’s investigation of the cube – the basic modular unit of inquiry throughout his art practice – with a focus on triangulation. Four of the artist’s wall drawings will be presented in a dedicated gallery on the
first floor. Dated October 1989, the drawings are from the artist’s 620 series, with forms derived from cubic rectangles and superimposed color ink washes. These were installed in the Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain in October 1989, and have not been exhibited since that time. The wall drawings were over three weeks, employing four L.A.-based artists, working with, and directed by, Gabriel Hurier from the Sol LeWitt Estate. LeWitt’s renowned modular structures originate from his exploration of the cube, which was the form that inspired him throughout his career. Works in the exhibition range from seminal squares from the ‘70s and ‘80s to the artist’s division of the cube through triangulation. It will be rounded out by large-scale works on paper, executed in gouache. Comparing the gouaches to his wall drawings, LeWitt stated that only he could make the gouaches, which “followed their own logic,” whereas the wall drawings “have ideas that can be transmitted to others to realize.”
EXHIBITIONS In Alexander Kroll’s first solo show in Los Angeles, Unfoldings, modestly scaled abstract paintings are simultaneously structural and intuitive; informal and hyper-considered; gestural and geometric. Alongside an interest in exploring binary positions, Kroll’s work deals with scale, painting history, intuition, systems, emotions, and painting as a conversational nexus and means of producing an object that can embody and contradict these issues. His work exists at a place of complexity and intensity. Through its conversational nature the work asserts an expanding set of ideas. As the work unfolds there occurs a process that necessitates further viewing and conMore than or Equal to Half of the Whole, a two person exhibition of photography by Kate Johnson and Siri Kaur, is a vivid exploration of both the power and the illusion of the photographic medium. The exhibition examines the awe, dislocation and limitation inherent in photographic practice. Illusion and limitation play a central role in Kate Johnson's work in a series she calls More Than Or Equal To. For each of these infinity portraits - self-aware photographs that attempt to capture the concept of infinity - Johnson constructs a small glass and mirror diorama which she then photographs. There is a sheer, crystalline beauty in each of these prismatic pieces, even as they wryly admit to the illusion that infinity and depth are being rendered falsely within a finite, two-dimensional work space. Johnson's hall of mirrors visual trick (in which images repeat endlessly against one another) purposefully calls attention to itself through the repeated appearance of her camera lens (as well as the green-blue edges of the glass) throughout the photographs. Paired loosely in dark and light opposites, these photographs intrigue aesthetically and entertain conceptually. In pursuit of a profound sense of the sublime, and playing, like Johnson's work, with the dynamics of perception, illusion, and immeasurable scale is the Half of the Whole series by Siri Kaur. This series features a number of extra-galactic photographs (taken between 2007-2010 using a digital sensor attached to a Meade solar telescope on Kitt Peak in Ari-
Alexander Kroll CB1 Los Angeles [through Feb 20]
tinuation of a dialog — both sensual and intellectual. zona), alongside "faked" astrophotographs (evidenced by such titles as Lightbulb with Sunspots Made by Hand), and a single diptych. After shooting the initial frames, Kaur exacts a battery of darkroom "experiments" on her work by applying color filters and chemical drawings to both the photo negatives and positives. By manipulating the printing process, Kaur effectively dislocates the signified from the signifier - distinguishes what is represented from what might represent it - as her images transform from distant celestial objects into light and ultimately back into physical form, albeit much smaller, within the gallery. Rounding out the series, and further illustrating her penchant for aesthetic awe and print manipulation is Kaur's stunning diptych of the Aurora Borealis, fittingly titled (in the descriptive vernacular commonly associated with late 20th century photography), On the Left, Aurora Borealis, White Horse, Yukon, March 31 2008, 235 AM. On the Right, the Way I Wanted It to Look (see below).
Kroll, 2010: (left) Untitled, oil, egg tempera, and ink on panel, 10”x8”. (right) detail of Untitled, oil and egg tempera on linen over panel, 12”x5”.
Kate Johnson & Siri Kaur Garboushian Beverly Hills [through Feb 12]
(above) Kate Johnson, Untitled #14, 2010, from series More Than Or Equal To, 1 of 3, Lambda print mounted on aluminum, 34”x40”. (below) Siri Kaur, On the Left, Aurora Borealis, White Horse, Yukon, March 31 2008, 235 AM. On the Right, the Way I Wanted it to Look, 2008, Diptych 1 of 3, Chromogenic print. Each 30” x 38”.
Exhibitions
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EXHIBITIONS Margie Livingston Luis de Jesus Santa Monica [through Feb 26]
Margie Livingston, Study for Spiral Block 3, 2010, acrylic, 5.75” x 6” x 6”.
“After the Rain” Carmichael Culver City [through Feb 5]
(top) Boogie, Train To Bushwick, 2005, silver gelatin print, 20”x24”. (middle) Guy Denning, Jocelin’s Nail, oil on canvas, 36”x36”. (bottom) Pascual Sisto, Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work), 2010, neon light installation based on situationalist graffiti in Paris, May 1968, 33” x 82”.
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Margie Livingston has long been admired for her abstract paintings that articulate the interaction between the architectural grid and the natural, organic world. Based on three-dimensional models that she builds in the studio (perspective grids crafted out of string and wood around branches and twigs) her paintings directly translate the phenomena of space, light, color and gravity upon these hybrid structures into lines and bands of color that hang seemingly suspended in space. Now, letting accident and discovery meet invention and experimentation, Livingston reverses her usual process, using paint to construct objects. Her new paint objects—built entirely from dots, strips, and skins of dried acrylic pigment—investigate the properties of paint pushed into three dimensions and offer a compelling view into how the medium of paint can be used sculpturally. With this major transformation of her practice Liv-
ingston has moved away from working with the illusion of space and toward working with literal space, constructing objects that straddle two media — painting and sculpture. Like her earlier canvas paintings, which were an accumulation of multiple gestures and parts, Margie Livingston’s new paint objects can be seen as a calculated decision on her part to show her process and to “reveal how I got from one point to the next…building a concrete relationship between each part and the whole.” Her goal to create an equivalent sense of light and space with minimal means (“especially when a daub of paint is referencing a bit of air in the middle of the room”), asserts its emphatic physical presence in the form of paint objects suspended from the ceiling, attached directly to the wall, or as solid cube, slab, or egg-like forms installed on work tables and pedestals.
After The Rain, a group exhibition featuring Boogie, Guy Denning, Aakash Nihalani and Pascual Sisto, merges and contrasts the palettes of four artists who work in a range of media. The precise neon color sculptures and abstract mixed media canvases of Aakash Nihalani highlight the raw, candid nature of Boogie’s black and white photographs, while Guy Denning’s dark portraits, built with indulgent layers of oil paint, situate Pascual Sisto’s video and sculptural works in a new contextual light. As a photographer, Boogie is singular in his ability to remove his presence as the mediator between the subjects of his work and those viewing them from without. His illumination of the complexity of the human condition without the imposition of his own ego or ideologies presents a more compelling foundation for the contemplation of his weighty subject matter and the socio-economic, philosophical and emotional currents that press from beneath. He will present a series of black and white photographs. He lives and works in Belgrade. Guy Denning’s enigmatic portraits of androgynous figures possess a strange and often ethereal beauty, blending the smoothness of classical form with a blunt contem-
porary perspective. Sexual and temporal politics, objectification, and isolation are illuminated through carefully honed contrasts of shape and shade. His will present a series of oils on canvas. . He lives and works in Finistère. Aakash Nihalani has fashioned a visual language all his own. The neon in his work highlights details that might otherwise go unnoticed, while his minimalist patterns form self-contained pockets which encourage examination both within the isolated space and of the world at large. His work often engages the public by creating three-dimensional environments that can be physically entered, transforming passersby or gallery visitors into participants and offering them a momentary escape from daily life. He will present new sculptural works from his Optiprism series, as well as new works on canvas. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Los Angeles-based Pascual Sisto’s works, which include neon, video, photography and text-based series, reassess and recontextualize a range of historical dialogues that have been instrumental in shaping both contemporary society and his own artistic practice. He will present a video installation, amongst other works, in one of the gallery’s project rooms.
EXHIBITIONS Anthony Pearson's sculptures and photographs are, on the one hand, records of a studio practice dedicated to non-representational mark-making and the pursuit of free aesthetic movement; on the other, they are the elements of a vocabulary designed to systematize the irrational and inexplicable facets of artistic endeavor. For the first time, Pearson has created large-scale steel sculptures whose forms are derived from two of these photographs. Compositions originally made with ink and brush have undergone a complete alchemical transformation, passing through the photographic process to become templates for three-dimensional objects in space. Until now, photography has served as a way to create conceptual distance between the act of making non-representational compositions and the act of displaying them in the context of other artworks. Here, however, photographs have been cycled back through the studio practice, and have led to an expansion of physical scale, the adaptation of new technical procedures, and
increased conceptual reach. Corresponding developments can be seen in new examples of Pearson's trademark 'arrangements', which combine photographic elements with bronze sculptures made from castings. The 'arrangements' are powerful examples of instances in which Pearson applies curatorial logic to the results of idiosyncratic, even hermetic, processes. The relationship between the pictorial and the physical is also explored in a series of small bronze wall-based sculptures. Created using molds made from shaped clay forms, these works mark the first time that Pearson has hung objects directly on the wall, as well as the first time that he has exhibited bronzes without photographs.The work is not only a study of the alchemical relationships between materials, but an ongoing record of competing forces at play in the studio. As such, Pearson's practice represents the furthering of a tradition exemplified by figures as diverse as John Cage, Jackson Pollock and Bruce Nauman, one based in both pragmatic and rigorous experimentation.
Luis Cornejo paints with cheek. He dons pretty young things with Mickey Mouse ears, tails, clownish caps and surrealistically long hands, marring their exquisite beauty. By using slapstick and coarse distortion, Cornejo challenges our idea of perfect beauty and our tedious worship of it. Cornejo has had sold out many shows and has exhibited individually and collectively in Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, Canada and Germany. His work continues to take off, with a one year paid scholarship
in Berlin and top awards from the Museum of Art of El Salvador. Wedding pop and
hyperrealism, Andriy Halashyn’s dystopic dreamscapes juxtapose moneyed beauty with ruin, waste and contamination. His canvases tell a tale of two cities in the optic language of a deadpan and painterly pop. Ukranian born but living and working in Costa Rica for over ten years, Halashyn brings a cosmopolitan sensibility to his lush paintings.
For more than 40 years, Olivier Mosset has challenged the historical notion of painting as an art object. Beginning with his involvement in B.M.P.T. (a Paris-based group of painters active during the mid-1960s consisting of Daniel Buren, Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni), Mosset sought to question authorship and democratize art through "radical procedures of deskilling". As each artist became identified with a specific composition, the members of the group would then sign each other's work thus calling into question the origi-
nality of the painting. Following his affiliation with B.M.P.T., Mosset has become a pivotal figure in artistic practices spanning monochrome, abstract and 'Neo-Geo' painting. By employing variations on color, size, paint application, format and the stretch of the canvas, Mosset has continued questioning the preconceived notions of what constitutes a painting. Collaboration remains an integral aspect to his practice. For this exhibition Mosset will collaborate with Vincent Szarek and Jeffrey Schad by exhibiting their custom motorcycles.
Anthony Pearson David Kordansky Los Angeles [through Feb 5]
Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Transmission), 2010, steel, patina, sandblasted white Portland cement, 81” x 70” x 30” unique.
Luis Cornejo and Andriy Halashyn
SALT Laguna Beach [through Feb 28]
Andriy Halashyn. Baby Garbage, 2010, oil on canvas, 39.5”x32”.
Olivier Mosset
Christopher Grimes Santa Monica [through Mar 5]
Jeffrey Schad, Rootbeer Bike, 2004, custom. 96 in3.
Exhibitions
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EXHIBITIONS Josh Peters Kaycee Olsen Los Angeles [through Feb 12]
For his exhibition Furious Seasons, Los Angeles-based artist Josh Peters mined still images from obscure films and drew inspiration from a short story by the author Raymond Carver, the title of which Peters uses for his show. These most recent paintings can be described as both portrait-maskicons and figures-in-landscape paintings. Figuratively, the subjects are mainly taken from films, albeit mostly obscure with little inherent 'iconic' value associated. Peters makes references to figures "away from civilized society," or, more ambiguously, "a sense of impending violence or spiritual awakening lurking just under the surface." In Peters' recent work, these polarities register side by side, beneath surfaces both saturated and scraped to the canvas (or
frequently, especially in larger scaled work, linen), and in either case, luminous with a glow that seems to emanate from within, irradiating both its subjects and whatever space it happens to inhabit, including the viewer's own interior space. Most of this material falls loosely into a category we might label mood or atmospheric, with a few qualifiers. Peters is clearly looking for certain conditions, the “incident” or its potentiality, the possibility of creating a certain, transformative moment, of communion between subject and artist and viewer. This is not a narrative style, the spaces of these paintings are transparently abstract, existential, but almost quintessentially lyrical. [Accompanying this exhibition is a catalogue featuring an essay and interview.]
Josh Peters: (top) Furious Seasons, 2010, acrylic on unprimed linen, 65” x 86”; (bot) Autumn, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 11” x 14”.
David Kapp was born and raised in New York and has painted the city since the 1970's. While his subject of traffic, buildings and skewed aerial perspectives remain intact, his current work brings in images of crowds and figures. For Kapp, the physical painting is just as important as the scene being depicted; experiencing one of his paintings is sometimes seeing the paint and composition before the image itself. Kapp’s paintings extract the dramatic contrasts, harmonies and forms of urban movement through a graceful shift between abstraction and representation. The artist responds to his amplified surroundings through equally charged brushwork, yet keeps a taught, Mondrian-like structure intact throughout his work. Kapp’s physical movements of paint usher not only a two dimensional feel for the city, but also a physical sense for it; acute angles and dramatic perspectives viewed on a grand scale induces a vertigolike sensation in some works, while in others, Kapp sets you right into the thick of urban vitality. David Kapp’s work has been the subject of over twenty-five solo exhibitions throughout the country. He has received two Academy Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters along with a Rosenthal Foundation award. His work is in many public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Academy of Design, and The
Mint Museum of Art. In her current body of work, Soojung Park continues to create luminous linear abstractions that play on contrasts of flatness and space, buoyancy and heft. The severity that seems initially intrinsic to Park’s medium and precisely stacked slabs in the fashion of Donald Judd, is countered by the artist’s treatment of the plexiglass. Subdued hues of inks and pigments are rubbed into the front and back of the tablets, which are sandwiched together and arranged into grids. The overall weight of Park’s work is counter-balanced by diaphanous color applications and the array of striations which range from pencil thin to several inches thick. Where in previous work, color penetrated every surface, her current series offers more variation in both color and texture. Areas of clear plastic to play off saturated areas and rough, sandblasted bands intermix with smooth, reflective ones. Park’s stacked tablets seem to generate light from within as ambient light penetrates and bounces between layers of plexiglass, allowing infinite perceptions to emerge. While the layered striations allude to landscape, a more intimate dialog develops within/between panels, bringing the work into a sculptural and painterly realm. Viewers become immersed in the smokey spaces of the thick plexiglass and milky inks while always being drawn back to the syncopated rhythms of the etched lines.
David Kapp & Soojung Park Ruth Bachofner Santa Monica
[through Mar 12]
David Kapp, Big Crowd, 2010, oil on linen, 98”x76”; Soojung Park, June Paige, 2011, ink on plexiglass, 38”x56”.
34 A|C|A January 2011
EXHIBITIONS
SAN FRANCISCO Remembering, works from the estate of Dennis Leon, include many of the artist’s seminal sculptures and drawings. Two bodies of drawings, Dedicated to my Father (1984), and Thicket’s (1994), are brought together along with wood and bronze sculpture fromt he same time frame. Although some years separate the making of these drawings, they coalesce into a powerful, reflective exhibition. Dennis Leon’s work reflects his youth on the Yorkshire Moor’s, with it’s mix of Celtic stone monuments throughout the countryside. The work is also resonant of his adopted home, with it’s rich complexity of nature and artifice. With so much
written about Dennis Leon, his life and work, it seems best to offer a few insights from those voices. he London-born artist seeks a simple statement of unity in his works, which is rooted in landscape and memory. The anonymity in his works is intentional: “it’s not like the uniqueness of individuality. I tend to make things that look like no-one made them.”
This exhibition of works by Italian painter Marco Casentini will feature the artist's signature geometric abstractions, composed of overlapping rectangular shapes in intense, saturated colors. Working in acrylic on canvas, Casentini continues his investigation of color and shape in limited palettes of red, blue, white and silver. In each work, the artist incorporates painted plexiglass panels attached to canvas, adding a physical dimension to the paintings. The clean, hard edges of the plexi blend seamlessly into Casentini's geometric composi-
tions and create unexpected variations in surface and texture. Casentini's seemingly non-objective works are actually the artist's translations of his emotions and environment. Each painting is inspired by a feeling, place, or memory, expressed through color and composition. In large monochromatic canvases, subtle variations in tone give the paintings a contemplative, emotive quality. In contrast, the largest work in the show features blocks of multiple hues arranged in an energetic composition that echoes both urban architecture and natural landscapes.
Having refined her practice over a period of four decades, New York artist Max Cole has earned a reputation as a premier practitioner of reductive painting with a consistently and highly recognizable aesthetic. Employing a subtle palette of black, white, and shades of grey, this new body of work includes a selection of gem-like small-scale pieces as yet unseen here in San Francisco. From a distance, Cole’s works appear to be composed of simple bands of color. But upon closer inspection, these horizontal bands reveal intricate patterns of short, vertical hatch marks consisting of alternating colors. What at first appears devoid of the human hand reveals itself as an accumulation of subtle imperfections. The stripes seem to vibrate, at one moment alluding
to foggy horizons or waving fields of grain, and in the next falling flat on the canvas’s surface. This allusion to landscape is befitting of an artist who was raised on the plains. Horizontal, unpopulated landscapes are as much a part of her visual lexicon as is Native American thought (Cole maintained a close relationship with her paternal Grandfather, who was half-Cherokee), and indeed, her works evolve from the ideal of harmony with nature, which is at the heart of that culture. Cole’s work has been described as obsessive, but she prefers the term passionate, as it is self-determination rather than compulsion that urges her towards creation and completion. Cole does not rely on a preconceived plan; the work unfolds through time and rigorous process.
Dennis Leon: (left) Dedicated to my Father #7, 1984, pastel on paper, 30.25”x44.50”; (right) Heelstone, 1990, wood, saw dust, paint, 38”x40”x29” Courtesy Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
Dennis Leon
Patricia Sweetow San Francisco
[through Feb 12]
Marco Casentini Brian Gross San Francisco [through Feb 26]
Marco Casentini, The Bridge on the Sea, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 51”×51”.
Max Cole Haines San Francisco [through Feb 12]
Max Cole, detail of Briscone Pine, 2010, acrylic on linen, 33” x 49”.
Exhibitions
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EXHIBITIONS
NEW YORK CITY Ulf Puder Ana Cristea Chelsea [through Feb 19]
Ulf Puder: (top) Waldbad, 2010, oil on canvas, 71 “x 86.5”; (bottom) Abland [cover image], 2010, oil on canvas, 83” x 59”.
Christian Vincent Mike Weiss Chelsea [through Feb 12]
Christian Vincent, detail of Waterfall, 2010, oil on canvas, 92” x 154”.
36 A|C|A January 2011
Ulf Puder’s quiet yet forceful paintings depict an uninhabited world composed of vast, luminous skies and off-kilter manmade structures. Employing a distinctive color palette dominated by grays and pastels and a visual language that is both figurative and highly-abstracted, Puder creates images that are as inexplicably beautiful as they are haunting. In works like Waldbad and Schwestern, house-like structures are composed of flat and weightless planes of color, but some of these planes are askew or simply missing. The two bungalows in Schwestern are so battered that they appear almost entirely open to the elements, and stray walls float in what seems to be an expanse of water covering the ground. Offenes Gelände suggests a slightly new direction for the artist: Puder’s paintings have often suggested the disarrayed and desolate aftermath of an unidentified nat-
ural disaster, but in this painting, which depicts a massive tornado approaching a backdrop of low-slung buildings, we seem to be witnessing the moment just before the destruction begins. Born in Leipzig in 1958, Ulf Puder was a member of the nowfamed first generation to graduate from the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Along with Neo Rauch, also a member of this first generation, Puder was uniquely successful in melding East-German neo-realism with a more imaginative, dreamlike, even surrealistic vocabulary. His work is greatly admired by and has had a tremendous influence on a younger generation of Eastern European artists. Puder has been included in recent group exhibitions in museums in New York, London, Paris, Dresden, the Netherlands and Prague. He has had solo exhibitions in Leipzig, Amsterdam, and Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery.
Tunnel Vision, a show by Los Angelesbased artist Christian Vincent, consists of eight large-scale oil paintings, in which the artist deconstructs notions of the collective. In comparison with Vincent’s previous body of work, Tunnel Vision is notably reduced in palette, line, and narrative. Even the subject matter, while adhering to the male figure, is more stark and streamlined. Vincent is not concerned with mastering anatomical expertise but rather with conveying a polemical undertone, and intentionally leaves the works in contentious balance, overlapping political propaganda and pop culture. It is upon immediate encounter with the works that their massive scale divulges their confrontational underpinning. Being larger than human size, the boys depicted in the canvases are turned into monumental objects that intimidate, demand attention and inspire awe. The paint is thick but flat, as Vincent carefully sands down the remnants of his brushwork, thereby symbolically removing his fingerprints from the works and allowing them to exist autonomously. Much akin to early to mid twentieth-century mass-printed wartime propaganda, the identity of the artist
is usurped by the message of unity, solidarity and conformity. In Line Up, viewers are met with a descending row of young boys that cuts a sharp diagonal across the canvas. The convergence point on the horizon is eliminated, hinting at the infinitesimal continuation of the lineup. Despite the boys’ petite forms, they are endowed with noticeably large heads, becoming cloned eugenic man-child hybrids. Their nearly eyeless faces speak of their blind faith in a figure that could evoke as much spiritual benevolence as it could mass destruction. Group devotion is not meant to be outright rejected as much as challenged in these works. These scenes could be culled from a rock concert or a cult gathering, a private boy’s school outing or a militia camp – all of which are unified in the worshipping of a messianic figure to which the masses turn to for salvation and guidance. The desire for empowerment through belonging, while seductive, is hinged on the acceptance that a person’s dream would inevitably be sacrificed for a collective. Vincent, who was born in 1966, currently lives and works in Los Angeles and has been widely exhibited throughout the United States.
EXHIBITIONS For his new show Dark Day, David S. Allee derived the name and its theme from the manner in which he captured the images. In much of his earlier work, he photographed locations at night with intense artificial light and extremely long exposures, catching unreal landscapes in a nether time somewhere between night and day. For Dark Day, he did the opposite. The images for this series were shot on bright sunny days, using tiny apertures and the highest shutter speeds possible, with exposures reaching 1/10,000th of a second. This work captures the texture of the sun's brightest reflections by letting as little light as possible into the camera, enabling us to see something we wouldn't normally be able to see-a kind of dog-whistle light that leaves everything
else in the photographs underexposed and dark. In this series, the light re-imagines many different structures and places in the cityscape. In 4:02PM, for example, the sun's intense reflection on an aboveground subway car filled with commuters re-imagines this everyday scene with an unusual opacity and unexpected starkness. Additionally, a number of the images are of glass office buildings, which capture and provide the bursts of blinding light that move and flash across the skyline throughout a sunny day. The light doesn't penetrate them, nor does it illuminate- for our purposes anyway- the veiled things that go on inside the subjects here; such places as the World Financial Center and the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and other banking giants.
INDOOR/OUTDOOR will be comprised of works from the grand arc of George Rickey’s career, including some of his most recognizable imagery, his boldest variations, as well as some of his most delicate kinetic creations. Rickey turned to sculpture in earnest when he was in his early forties – late by most standards – but his opus is deep thanks both the artist’s longevity and his tireless work ethic. George Rickey died in 2002 at the age of 96, and had only stopped creating sculpture about a year before his death. Though he is per-
haps most well known for his bladed “line” sculptures, Rickey’s work varied greatly over the span of six decades. At the start, Rickey’s work resembled Calder’s catenary systems, though those early mobiles soon evolved into the finely balanced sculptures, “little machines” as Rickey called them – swaying, rocking, and twisting – that gave Rickey his renown. Along with the quintessential blades, Rickey used rotors, squares, triangles, and trapezoids. With this show the 16th of the artist at this gallery - the impressive career of George Rickey endures.
Through a series of eleven paintings, Robin Williams’ first solo exhibition, Rescue Party, reveals a surreal world inhabited by adolescents of ambiguous gender that are on the brink of discovery or revelation. Each painting has a distinct narrative but with no specific conclusion. There is a sense of pause in each work which heightens the sense of the impending chance for change. Williams is able to achieve this surreal timelessness through her painting techniques. While at once employing traditional painting methods, she is also experimental and intuitive. Her use of color, light, texture and composition are all used to explore painting as a medium and to link this to the conceptual content within each work. Represented through her adolescent subjects, Williams examines the internal phase of development that takes place during young
adulthood. These youths inhabit a liminal state of being; they are often stranded, Hopperesque figures, posing in their costumes, hoping their visage will evince an inner truth. Each of her characters is seeking a sense of identity, safety, and well-being. Some choose to wait for rescue, while others willfully adopt a persona hoping it will lead them toward salvation. In Rescue Party (see right) many possess this stare but there is also hope in this distant gaze. This painting, which pulls from art historical references such as Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, transforms the raft into a kiddie pool and although it is staged in a banal vacancy of surrounding and gesture, there is a sense of hope and possibility. Each of Williams’ subjects is searching for meaning: seeking an answer and they will endeavor in the absurd until it is revealed.
David Allee Morgan Lehman Chelsea [through Feb 19]
David S. Allee: (top) 4:02PM, Chromogenic print, 40”x60”, ed. 3; (bot) 3:46PM, Chromogenic print, 60”x80”, ed. 3. Both from Dark Days series.
George Rickey Maxwell Davidson Midtown [through Feb 12]
George Rickey, Etoile I, 1958, stainless steel, copper, and brass, 26” x 64” x 64”.
Robin Williams P.P.O.W. Chelsea [through Feb 26]
Robin Williams: (top) Swoon at the Waterpump 2010, oil on canvas, 40”x60”; (bot) Rescue Party, 2010, oil on canvas, 80”x90”.
Exhibitions
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EXHIBITIONS “Bella Pacifica” David Nolan Chelsea [through Feb 5]
(top) Sonia Gechtoff, detail of The Angel, 1955, oil on canvas, 72”x67”; (bottom) Deborah Remington, detail of Blasted Beauty, 1954, mixed media on paper, 30”x24”.
Cui Xiuwen Eli Klein SoHo [through Feb 27]
Cui Xiuwen, (above) Existential Emptiness No. 18, c-print, 56.7”x118”; (below) Existential Emptiness No. 20, c-print, 37.4”x118” (pg. 6).
38 A|C|A January 2011
Presented by Nyehaus, “Bella Pacifica” is hosted at four venues, including David Nolan Gallery, whose selection focuses mainly on 6 Gallery from the 1950s. Characterized by tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic instability, the 6 Gallery exemplifies the ‘50s at its most restless, carefree and experimental. The work shown at the gallery within its short life span (1954 to 1957) ranges from expressionism, to surrealism, illusionism, collage, assemblage and abstraction; pure and impure. A DADA attitude of Hilarity and Disdain had replaced the grave sense of mission that characterized the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. In San Francisco, the Alternative Scene resulted in collective projects such as galleries, publications, jazz bands and film-screening societies. Founded in 1952, the City Lights project became the center for the literary movement, and was to poetry what the 6 Gallery was to art.
The gallery, located on 3119 Fillmore Street, was an informal co-op with six members and no records were ever kept. The original 6 (members) were Jack Spicer, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan and David Simpson. The 6 fostered a spirit of coexistence not only between faculty and students, but between different art movements, disciplines and ideals. Some of the other artists who participated included Robert Duncan, Clyfford Still, and Sonia Gechtoff, the first woman to have a solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which later hosted Warhol’s exhibition. Beat poetry readings were also an important part o the gallery’s history. On October 7, 1955, the gallery hosted Alan Ginsburg first reading of his poem “Howl”. Everyone present understood they had been present at one of those moments when everything changes.
Cui Xiuwen, one of China’s foremost female photographers, is featured in her first solo exhibition in New York City. Her latest series, Existential Emptiness, pursues her reflection on the woman as individual in modern China. This body of work furthers her focus from physical to spiritual and illustrates her examination and analysis of the woman’s psyche. The girl protagonist, considered the artist’s alter ego, has matured and is accompanied by a life-size doll resembling her. Inspired from her own experiences, the appearance of the puppet without strings recalls Japanese Bunraku theatre. Companion, reflection, and baggage of the now familiar character, the dollcomplements the girl and acts as alter ego as well. The two figures evoke the duality
of body and soul, life and lifelessness. The presence and absence, posture, closeness or distance of the doll in each work capture the relationship between the two. The digital photographs are mostly monochrome. The palette and format are inspired by traditional Chinese ink painting. The scenes take place in the ice- and snow-covered mountains of Northern China. The quiet, ethereal landscape acts as a perfect setting for exploring the mind. The physical appearance of the doll — obvious joints, revealed ribcage bones and scarred womb — alludes to the violence of a woman’s experiences and how they impress upon her spirit. The sparseness of the scenes creates an absence of temporal sense, emphasizing the subjectivity of existence.
EXHIBITIONS
BOSTON / PHILADELPHIA The inspiration that Seattle-based artist John Dempcy finds in molecular structures is greatly evident in this new body of work, Wild Type. The forms closely resemble that of cells; small bodies working together to make a more complex, advance image. The colors are brighter than past work, the forms clearer, and throughout all is a new addition of white, which was not quite as abundant before. The white offsets the brightly colored paint, creating a contrast
to the presence of intense color with its more absent qualities. The white space adds a shimmering quality to the work, despite it's being a matte finish. It interrupts the business of the work and instills a sense of calm amongst the beautiful chaos. The organic forms float together, sometimes like flower petals along a stream. In it's abundant simplicity, there is an overwhelming sense of connectivity between the works, each presenting a new yet familiar image.
Al Loving (1935-2005) is one of the most intriguing artists of the 20th century. His work had a personal trademark created by extending the ideas of abstract expressionism in truly original and groundbreaking ways. His distinctive work united influences from the abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, colorist Josef Albers, and optical illusionist Viktor Vasarely. He was not simply an abstract painter but rather an artist who redefined the boundaries of abstraction throughout his career. A native of Detroit, Loving burst onto the New York scene painting hard-edged geometric abstraction in the late Sixties. Loving was the first African-American artist to have a oneman exhibition at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. In this landmark exhibition, Loving succeeded in breaking racial barriers and opened doors for other African-American artists, proving that abstraction was a viable way of working. Inspired to create work beyond the boundaries of geometry and traditional
painting on a stretched canvas, Loving began moving toward the expressive freedom found in the collage process. These later works were more fluid and freeform: layered constructions of rag paper painted in vibrant acrylics and crafted into elaborate compositions. Loving referred to these assembled works as material abstraction. This body of work introduced the iconic spiraling forms. The spiral affirmed a personal connection to the natural cycle of continuous growth and defined time and space extending out towards infinity. The driving reference for all of Loving’s work is the issue of space. He succeeded in expressing a new and dynamic spatial and aesthetic experience that pushed his work beyond the limitations of perspective and the modernist notion of the flat picture plane. This rare exhibition which will include a wide variety of mixed media works and prints. Al Loving has exhibited internationally and his work is held in numerous major collections in museusms throughout the world.
For his new group exhibition of digital media, alterations, curator and artist Peter Campus sought to understand "the transformation of our society to an age of electronics,” He writes that “it was so rapid and unexpected that the time elapsed to allow retrospective thinking is almost non-existent in its brevity. We don’t know the dangers contained in this age; it is too soon to know, and too integrated to identify. In this presentation there are five different messages, five different points of view, that present
only a fraction of the message." The videos of Peter Campus provide hopeful images as a remedy for the anxieties of contemporary life, while Nayda Collazo-Llorens creates multi-media video and installations to underscore the complexity of the mind and the obstacles of communicating thought. Kathleen Graves combines current technology with objects from the past. Jason Varone is inspired by the advancement of society through technology and its decline from eroding resources.
John Dempcy Walker Contemporary Boston [through Feb 12]
Dempcy, Coronado, acrylic on clayboard, 30x30”
Al Loving Sande Webster Philadelphia [through Jan 29]
Al Loving, Life & Continued Growth #12, mixed media on paper, 29” x 22”.
“alterations” Locks Philadelphia [through Feb 5]
Peter Campus, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay, 2009, high definition multi-screen video installation.
Exhibitions
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EXHIBITIONS
WASHINGTON DC “Bound” Hamiltonian Washington [Jan 22 - Mar 5]
Katherine Mann, Net, 2011, acrylics and sumi ink on cut paper, 90”x102”.
Simon Gouverneur and Andy Moon Wilson Curator’s Office Washington [through Feb 15]
Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled, 2010 ink and acrylic on paper, 10” x 10” Courtesy of Curator’s Office, Washington, DC.
“Saturnalia” Irvine Washington [through Feb 12]
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, detail of As we waited we were longing for Spring’s sun, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on Mylar, 78”x60”. Courtesy of Irvine Contemporary.
40 A|C|A January 2011
Bound, an exhibition of new works by Katherine Mann and Selin Balci, examine the limits of their medium, as well as notions of humanity within an expanded ecologic understanding of the living world. Whether in Balci's laboratory approach or Mann's painterly exploration, both artists create vivid abstractions, ripe with notions of growth, wonder and subjugation. Katherine Mann's oversized, abstract works on paper consist of accumulations of sequins, paint and ink, which illustrate the potentiality of growth, as well as the peril of overabundance. “I think of my work as baroque abstract, a celebration of the disparate” says Mann, who creates carefullycomposed fields with moments that are at once
chaotic, organized, thriving and decaying. Katherine Mann elegantly builds her paintings with hoards of ambiguous forms recalling elements found in systems of nature and in the highly-decorative, resulting in a menagerie of depth and color. By utilizing traditional lab procedures, Selin Balci creates microenvironments by incorporating biological material as a new art media to explore the literal process of life. From sterile beginnings the growth of microbes demonstrate a turbulent arc of life within a largely imperceptible world. Balci's simple living organisms live and die within a network of biological exchanges highlighting a wide range of behaviors similar to the human equivalent of social exchanges.
Debt, a new exhibition featuring Simon Gouverneur and Andy Moon Wilson, is not about money. Rather, it is about the slippery terrain of artistic debt. In 2006, artist Andy Moon Wilson was introduced to the work of iconoclastic and abstract symbolist painter Simon Gouverneur, who had been based in Washington, DC, for the last decade of his life prior to his suicide in 1990. Andy Moon Wilson has spent his artistic career exploring the infinite possibilities of visual design and ornament both as an artist and in his day job as a carpet designer. Simon Gouverneur also investigated global visual design motifs in his paintings and notebook sketches. Both artists share
a fascination with archetypal abstracted forms that can communicate on both ethnographically specific and universal levels. But there is where the similarities end. While Gouverneur intended a profound and rigorous spiritual engagement with his artwork, Moon Wilson rejects this spiritual quest in favor of an exploration of the intensely visual as it expresses itself both historically and, more importantly, in contemporary culture. Mostly, the artist just draws compulsively. But it is an intoxicating visual experience to present these two artists together. Gouverneur's two large paintings are flanked by hundreds of Moon Wilson's small intense works on paper.
Saturnalia is a group exhibition of new by Teo González, Melissa Ichiuji, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Akemi Maegawa, Alexa Meade, Susana Raab, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick. Teo González’s new paintings challenge the boundaries of organic and geometric form through a process of abstraction from the colors of skies over specific city locations. González’s new series of works are based on photographs of skies, which he uses to map a color palette in Photoshop. Melissa Ichiuji’s new work expands on her approach to materials, identities, domestic space, and sexualities.
Her sculptures and installations are performative works and staged fantasies that often explore the boundaries of childhood innocence and adult self-consciousness andrepression. Each sculpture is sewn and assembled from many materials. Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi presents new mixed media paintings on Mylar as provocative visual essays on Persian, Iranian, and American cultural identities. Ilchi uses militarist icons of the current Iranian regime as invasions and disruptions of a possible cultural coexistence and mines imagery from both Persian culture and Western abstraction.
EXHIBITIONS
SOUTHWEST Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. Cragg’s main artistic expression is sculpture; however prints are also a strong showcase in his oeuvre. The works included in his series Test Tubes and Bottles are some of the most recognizable and are being represented in the show. In sculpture, he works in metal, glass, and plastic fabrication, as well as in traditional sculpture materials, and applies a casually exquisite draftsmanship to drawings and prints. In the late 1970s, he began making wall sculptures of assembled found objects, and has said, surprisingly, that in doing so he was thinking of van Gogh. Van Gogh, Cragg explained,
wrote about going through the trash as “a fantasy journey through a land of strange forms and colors.” Cragg was elected Royal Academician in 1994. His works are in many private collections but also found extensively in many public collections, including The Tate Gallery in London, the New York Public Library and Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and several corporate collections among them Estee Lauder. In 2007 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, a major prize for outstanding achievement in the arts that is given by the Japan Art Association.
Terence La Noue's uniquely riven and reassembled sculptural-paintings have gained him worldwide recognition and over a hundred and forty acclaimed solo exhibitions throughout London, Paris, Tehran, Stockholm, Cologne, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Tucson, and Scottsdale. Museums such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern in London, and others in Japan, Singapore, France and Australia, have included his work in their permanent collections. One of the most intriguing qualities behind La Noue's brilliantly colored mixed-media paintings, is the way La Noue
creates them. He starts by combining layers of colored acrylic with cotton netting and acrylic saturated canvas into low-relief molds, and allows them to dry overnight. La Noue then proceeds to cut the dried reliefs into sections and shards, which he later unites in various ways to make up a finished work. The ending effect is a multidimensional art piece that is part mosaic, part tapestry, part painting, and even part sculpture. The diverse shapes, colors, and textures that are created invite the viewer to divulge into the intricacies of the painting, while at the same time, enjoy the work of art as a whole.
Tony Cragg Zane Bennett Santa Fe [through Jan 28 - Feb 18]
Cragg, Spores, T.P.E., 1988, etching, 23”x24.5”.
Terence La Noue Bentley Scottsdale AZ [through Feb 6 - Feb 26]
Terence La Noue, Return to Dakar, multimedia on wood, 33”x46”.
Mike Stack & Steve Murphy
Mike Stack constructs paintings of thin horizontal strips of oil paint, for a color field that shifts vertically in shimmering optical effect. Like so many modern painters, his works are fundamentally two–dimensional yet convey a subtle illusion of depth. His drawings are highly worked, spontaneous exercises in process, where order is wrought from non-specific gesture. In his introductory exhibit, Steve Murphy takes the Minimalist road to expression in highly refined, severely reduced metal sculpture. His simple shapes are proportioned to create substantial volumetric weight and seductive 360 degree views. Both these art-
ists have accomplished the abstract ideal of provoking thought and emotion through non-definable form.
Davis Dominguez Tucson [through Feb 26]
(above)Michael Stack, Pilot, 2010, oil on linen. (left)Murphy, Big Brother, 2007, leadened wood.
Exhibitions
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2010.21. 80 X 72 INCHES • MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS
Luc Leestemaker Songs of the Unconscious 1020 Prospect, Suite 130, La Jolla, CA 92037 • (858) 459-0836 www.madisongalleries.com
HERBERT BAKER
“SELF-PORTRAIT” 1932 FROM THE BAYER FAMILY COLLECTION
EMIL NELSON GALLERY 2864 COLORADO AVE SANTA MONICA, CA 90404 310-266-9904
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KAYCEE OLSEN GALLERY
exhibitions and special projects 2011 The California/International Arts Foundation’s New Encyclopedia L.A. Rising: So Cal Artists Before 1980 written by Lyn Kienholz and overseen by Joan Weinstein, Associate Director of the Getty Foundation
Make ‘Em All Mexican Two Solo Exhibitions
Ave 50 Studio
ChimMaya Gallery
Highland Park, CA
Montebello, CA
curated by Dr. Karen Mary Davalos
full color catalog
opening in April 2011
opening in October 2011
L.A. Xicano “Mapping Another LA: The Chicano Art Movement” UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with Getty Southern California Research initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas scheduled to open at the Fowler Museum, Fall 2011
Doin’ It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman’s Building as part of the Getty Southern California Research initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 scheduled to open at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art October 2011
Fierce Beauty: The Art Work of Linda Vallejo GO TO www.lindavallejo.com TO PREVIEW full color 220 page book “Xicana Pop” Peyote Earring 2008 86”(h) x 14” (w) x 16” (d)
with over 100 color plates with essays by Betty Ann Brown, Peter Frank, William Moreno, Gloria F. Orenstein and Sybil Venegas
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