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restless! c a v i n- m or r i s ga l l e r y
restless! Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to begin the fall season with RESTLESS. We will celebrate new work by gallery artists, and introduce two new artists whose work collectively reflects the concerns and tensions of these peripatetic times from the most personal to the most universal. A gallery is a space that changes and shifts ten to twelve times a year. Sometimes more. But it isn’t the only thing that shifts. History is discovered, new ideas emerge, new allegiances form as eyes grow. The world changes, and when the world changes Art changes with it. Even the artists one is familiar with or having grown with metamorphize. It is a truism that we live in restless times. Once fixed values have become porous as artists explore and adapt to darker temporal shifts. This exhibition examines some of the ways artists have met these challenges. Christine Sefolosha continues to innovate her unique stance on Surrealism. She is the only painter in the exhibition, and her figures move and lurk on the canvas and paper like the shadows of cave beasts already embedded in the stone walls. She paints nocturnal arks and activated spaces populated by travelling beings that move with internal purpose through clouds, oceans, electrical storms and subterranean landscapes. Solange Knopf, here in her first showing with the gallery, works on paper where she dances with decadent literary history. She fills space with intricate dream filigree, but at the same time, no matter how dark the dream, she touches her horror vacuii with light. She is, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, unstuck in time. Timothy Wehrle’s drawings deal with frames that can barely contain their contents. His work is subtle, beautiful and no less disquieting for its delicacy. The past and present howl together in the three-dimensional yard landscapes of Kevin Sampson. There are spiritual and ancestral concerns buried beneath the deceptively chaotic skin of his sculptures. His politics are immediate and incandescent. His pieces are urban yardshows connected by the heart to community, with a sense of outrage at America’s spiritual and political imbalances. It is street art dragged indoors by the throat, constructed like music in the clear sight of his Newark community. Each piece is a library abstracted into amuletic memories. Sylvain Corentin’s towers skew our expectations of balance and normalcy. They have music. One senses they rise from a steaming earth with a serial sound. He plays with the architecture of improvisation and movement, hinting at myth and defying definitions. His pieces are vertical maps of out of body experiences.
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Lidia Syroka’s work charts her own gypsy trail through the world and her wanderings through the Himalayas. Her obsession is the abstract structure of the body passing through time. She too has merged landscape and the body in deceptively simple diagrams of the soul. Her colors on handmade paper absorb the talc of the desert and the shadows of mountains. Rafa Perez’ imagination is endless. His shaped clay sculptures reference movements yet avoid specificity at any cost. They are futuristically contemporary yet always natural. We could see them scattered on an alien beach at low tide. But even at their strangest they explore concepts we are more familiar with; their careful textures and erupted surfaces tease the eye. Their abstraction hides mysteries and obscures all obvious answers. M’onma is the dark lucid dreamer. His drawings are the immediate manifestation of hallucination. He creates mediumistically, his hand is guided by entities he has no control over yet there is a consistent language of line and imagery in his work. His is not a peaceful world. There is a Japanese context of the fantastic--almost demonic--running through the work that rivets us in its enigmatic force. This will be the first exposure of his compelling drawing anywhere. Keith Goodhart’s work continues to examine the tensions between constraint and freedom. His sculptures are constructed from fabricated and found materials that his keen eye colonizes and transforms, rounding up unforgiving and difficult cast offs and breaking them like wild ponies into uplifting poems of deceptive simplicity. Sylvain and Ghyslain Staelens have captured an essence in their work that has a sense of wildness, of a European essentialism that has more to do with gypsies, pagans and herbal healers than the vagaries of contemporary angst. These sculptures are amuletic as well-they absorb, giving a bristling energized power. They are storytellers and the Forest is the source of their magic. They are watchers who tread the edge of the occult world. Gregory Van Maanen was blown out of his body in the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam war. When his soul and body reintegrated he was an artist and a pacifist. His old studio in Paterson, New Jersey was as close to a yardshow as a non-African American can come. It was filled, as is his new studio, with amulets, charms, spirit catchers, and paintings. He is a rememberer, a seer who has been pardoned by death in exchange for his forgiveness of Death in return.
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Sylvain Corentin Rome Tower, 2012 Wood, canvas, wire, yarn, glue, paint 88 x 16 x 13 inches 223.5 x 40.6 x 33 cm SCo 5 3
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Sylvain Corentin White Tower, 2012 Wood, canvas, wire, yarn, glue, paint 88 x 16 x 13 inches 223.5 x 40.6 x 33 cm SCo 6 5
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Keith Goodhart Blunt Cello, 2012 Mixed media 24.5 x 17.75 x 7.5 inches 62.2 x 45.1 x 19.1 cm GK 238 7
Keith Goodhart Masonary Plugs, 2012 Mixed media 61 x 10 x 11 inches 154.9 x 25.4 x 27.9 cm GK 240 8
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Solange Knopf
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Women and Birds (red), 2012 Colored pencil on paper 71 x 39.5 inches 180.3 x 100.3 cm SoK 28 10
Solange Knopf Sanguine Feeling #5, 2011 Ink on paper 16 x 11.75 inches 40.6 x 29.8 cm SoK 12 11
Solange Knopf
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Spiritual Ink #2, 2011 Ink on paper 7.25 x 4.5 inches 18.4 x 11.4 cm SoK 24 12
M’onma Untitled, 2000 Graphite on paper 15.16 x 11.81 inches 38.5 x 30 cm IMo 3 13
M’onma
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Untitled, 2006 Colored pencil on paper 20.08 x 14.57 inches 51 x 37 cm IMo 11 14
M’onma Untitled, 2006 Colored pencil on paper 15.75 x 11.81 inches 40 x 30 cm IMo 17 15
M’onma
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Untitled, 2002 Colored pencil on paper 20.16 x 8.66 inches 51.2 x 22 cm IMo 8 16
Rafa PĂŠrez Untitled, 2011 Ceramic 8 x 10.25 x 8.25 inches 20.3 x 26 x 21 cm RPe 9 17
Rafa PĂŠrez
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Untitled, 2011 Ceramic 8.25 x 12 x 7 inches 21 x 30.5 x 17.8 cm RPe 13 18
Lubos Plny Untitled, 2006 Ink on paper 33.25 x 23.25 inches 84.5 x 59.1 cm LuP 31 19
Lubos Plny
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Sternum, 2007 Mixed media on paper 33.25 x 23.25 inches 84.5 x 59.1 cm LuP 36 20
Kevin Sampson Venezia- African Jack, 2012 Mixed media 50.5 x 38 x 22.5 inches 128.3 x 96.5 x 57.2 cm SK 193 21
Kevin Sampson
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Jimmy Walker, 2012 Mixed media 23 x 9 x 6.5 inches 58.4 x 22.9 x 16.5 cm SK 195 22
Christine Sefolosha Accordionist, 2011 Oil on paper 14.96 x 21.65 inches 38 x 55 cm CSe 91 23
Christine Sefolosha Barbarian, 2011 Oil monotype on black inked paper 33.46 x 23.62 inches 85 x 60 cm CSe 93 24
Christine Sefolosha Flowers, 2012 Oil monotype on black paper 17.72 x 23.62 inches 45 x 60 cm CSe 92 25
Christine Sefolosha Wedding Day, 2008 Oil monotype on paper 54 x 49 inches 137.2 x 124.5 cm CSe 94 26
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Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staelens FĂŠitche Protecteur , 2012 Mixed media 27.5 x 9.25 x 9.25 inches 69.9 x 23.5 x 23.5 cm GSS 1 28
Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staelens La Ville, 2012 Mixed media 29 x 38.5 x 7 inches 73.7 x 97.8 x 17.8 cm GSS 4 29
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Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staelens Le Chasseur, 2012 Mixed media 43.5 x 14.75 x 7.5 inches 110.5 x 37.5 x 19.1 cm GSS 3 32
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Sylvain and Ghyslaine Staelens Le Touareg, 2012 Mixed media 49 x 16 x 8 inches 124.5 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm GSS 2 34
Lidia Syroka Untitled, 2008 Black Ink, Walnut Stain, Paper 56 x 22.5 inches 142.2 x 57.2 cm LSY 38 35
Lidia Syroka
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Untitled, 2008 Black Ink, Walnut Stain, Paper 36.5 x 23..5 inches 92.7 x 59.7 cm LSY 35 36
Gregory Van Maanen Untitled, 7/11/2008 Acrylic/board 3.5 x 3.75 inches 8.9 x 9.5 cm GVM 1785 37
Gregory Van Maanen
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Untitled, 10/8/2008 Acrylic/board 5 x 5 inches 12.7 x 12.7 cm GVM 1754 38
Gregory Van Maanen Hommage: Joan Miro, 3/30/09 Acrylic on board 4 x 4.5 inches 10.2 x 11.4 cm GVM 1693 39
Gregory Van Maanen
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Untitled, 2012 Acrylic on board 3.75 x 4 inches 9.5 x 10.2 cm GVM 2110 40
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Timothy Wehrle Sunday’s Mothership, 2012 Colored pencil, graphite, on paper 38 x 25 inches 96.5 x 63.5 cm TW 99
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Cavin-Morris Gallery New York, New York September 6 - October 13, 2013
Copyright Š 2012 Cavin-Morris Gallery Cavin-Morris Gallery 210 Eleventh Ave, Ste. 201 Aritst New York, NY 10001 t. 212 226 3768 www.cavinmorris.com Catalogue design: Mimi Kano Photography: Jurate Vicerate & Zoe Kira Mey 46