T H U R S D AY — S U N D AY 7 T H — 1 0 T H M A R C H 2013 / 8 2M E R C E R , N E W Y O R K , N Y 10 013
D E S I G N : W W W. H A U S E R - S C H W A R Z . C H
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532 GALLERY THOMAS JAECKEL, NE W Y O R K
ARMANDO MARIÑO
53 2 GA LLERY T. J AEC KEL: ARMANDO MARIÑO WEBS I T E www.532gallery.com E- M A I L info @ 532gallery.com PHO N E +1 917 701 3338 CEL L +1 917 701 3338 CONTA C T N A M E Thomas Jaeckel
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Per Adolfsen Peggy Bates Tatjana Busch Steven Chapman Joergen Geerds Ian Hughes John Alexander Parks Stefan Szczesny Rachel Valdes
COV E R Armando Mariño Havana Riders 2012 oil / canvas 60 × 96 in INS I D E Armando Mariño The Revolutonary 2013 oil / paper 30 × 40 in B AC K Armando Mariño We were so poor but happy 2012 oil / paper 30 × 40 in
“Once again, I am playing with the symbolic status of painting and its capacity to, at once, monumentalize and trivialize human drama.” AM The ethical dilemma implied by the aestheticization or domestication of a violent event — from the moment it becomes “breaking news” and is then converted into art through painting — constitutes the axis of the recent work of Armando Mariño. Appropriating images whose authorship and authority become less important (ordinary, everyday) and to which ordinary mortals have instant access via the web or print media, Mariño launches a new kind of neo-historicism. He atomizes the citation, a process made evident through a procedure of pictorial distancing — a distortion of a distortion, we might say — in which the original reference is totally lost. In this sense we can affirm that his images carry the bastard sign since their true lineage is unknown. And yet, the works continue to carry a certain mysterious aura since they have been converted; extracted from their origins and sublimated into art works.
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ADA GALLERY, R IC HMO ND
JARED CLARK
A D A G A LLERY: J A RED C LARK WEBS I T E www.adagallery.com E- M A I L info @ adagallery.com PHO N E +1 804 644 0100 CEL L +1 804 301 1550 CONTA C T N A M E John Pollard
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jakob Boeskov Kirsten Kindler George Kuchar Mike Hein Shannon Wright John Lurie Morgan Herrin Jimmy Trotter Michelle Forsyth Brian Novatny
COV E R Jared Clark Little Bild 2012 found objects 17 × 8 × 14 in INS I D E Jared Clark Little Bild 2012 found objects 17 × 8 × 14 in B AC K Jared Clark Two Ducks, Swan, and a Relaxing Sheep Painting 2012 epoxy resin on found ceramic animals 8 × 7 × 6 in
J A RE D CL A RK , B. 1974 “Clark is adept at taking the theoretical concepts of modernism and minimalism and reapplying them to conditions that are not ideal. With a laboratory full of objects culled from thrift stores he sets about reconsidering modernist painting and minimalist sculpture. While Jared’s use of rescued objects may liken him to those artists classified as making found-art, it is his affinity for the flatness of painting that imbues his work with a sense of newness. Jared’s sense of surface and texture serves to pull these pieces together, flattening and overriding their natural objectness in favor a privileged plane, a new painted image” — Andy Koslowski E D U CATIO N: BFA, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (2002); MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia (2006). F E L L O W S HIP S & RE S ID E N C I ES: Virginia Museum Fellowship, Richmond Virginia (2006); Dedalus Fellowship, Robert Motherwell Foundation; Art Omi, Full Fellowship, International Artists Residency, Omi, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Full Fellowship, International Residency, Johnson, VT (2007); Kompact Living Space, Full Fellowship, Residency and Exhibition, Berlin, Germany (2008); Utah Arts Council Fellowship (2012); UMOCA Artist-In-Residence, 2 years, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, SLC, UT (2013). S O L O E XHIBITIO NS : Kompact Living Space, Berlin, Germany (2008); Orbital, Mulherin + Pollard, NY, NY; Bild, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT (2011); Free Candy, House Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA (2012). S E L E CTE D G RO U P E XHIBI T I O N S: Kitsch Paintings, ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA; So Inclined, Denise Bibro Gallery, NY, NY (2007); Enter/Exit, Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA; Commune, Black & White Gallery, NY, NY, curated by Dominique Nahas (2009); Doomslangers, Allegra La Viola Gallery, NY, NY (2010); It All Ends (w/Michael Kelly), Control Room, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Jared Clark & Shannon Wright, Mulherin + Pollard, NY, NY (2012).
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.14
ARANAPOVEDA GALLE R Y, MA D R ID
REBECA MENÉNDEZ
A RA N A PO V ED A GALLERY: REBEC A MENÉNDEZ WEBS I T E www.aranapoveda.com E- M A I L contacto @ aranapoveda.com
“If things have the attribute of being things, if the objects are by definition real, why should we use the word? We live with real things, handle them as they come before us, without consciously asserting their reality.” Julian Bell
PHO N E +34 91 389 6073 CEL L +34 61 963 9650 CONTA C T N A M ES Juan Arana Christina Poveda
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Grimanesa Amoros Rosana Antoli Javier Arcenillas Ignacio Bahna Ignacio Llamas Guillermo Martin Bermejo Ruggero Rosfer Gema Ruperez Susanne Themlitz
COV E R Rebeca Menéndez Untitled 2010 Lambda print on dibond 165 × 118 cm INS I D E Rebeca Menéndez Untitled 2012 Lambda print on dibond 108 × 160 cm B AC K Rebeca Menéndez Untitled 2011 Lambda print on dibond 140 × 155 cm
If we think of a dream (and when I say “dream” I do not mean the desire to achieve a goal), we realize that we fall into it without being aware of where they will lead us to. The space where the action takes place is chosen by our brain in a seemingly random way, so we are not surprised to be found suddenly in a unknown set, but rather we adapt to it so that we believe that our dreams are real. By entering my installation and photographs we appear within a space that is odd and familiar at the same time. We are in a room, and we do not know to whom it belongs but we are able to recognize the doors, the furniture, the windows. Never mind that everything is in a mess, but these objects help us to move around the picture; they are like words with specific meaning, they are our connection with the “known” world. Nevertheless, the central figure always seems to be puzzled, like struck by a natural force over which she has no control at all. On one side we find what we can recognize and secondly we find the irrefutable action of the destiny. The first is familiar to us because we can play with it, we can smell and use it. There is no possible escape.
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GALER IE B AE R , D R E S D E N
STEFAN LENKE
G A LERI E BA ER: ST EFAN LENKE WEBS I T E www.galerie-baer.de E- M A I L kontakt @ galerie-baer.de PHO N E +49 35 1646 5033 CEL L +49 17 3564 1211 CONTA C T N A M ES Patrick-Daniel Baer Tilman Bruhn
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Theo Boettger Jan Brokof Stefanie Busch Sebastian Hempel Franka Hoernschemeyer Andreas Hildebrandt Stefan Krauth Hannes Broecker Anne Wenzel Martina Wolf
COV E R Stefan Lenke Tempo (detail) 2012 acrylic, varnish, pigment on canvas 23.7 × 19.7 in / 60 × 50 cm INS I D E Stefan Lenke double edge (108) 2012 acrylic, varnish, pigment on canvas 19.7 × 23.7 in / 50 × 60 cm B AC K Stefan Lenke AAA (109) 2012 acrylic, varnish, pigment on canvas 19.7 × 23.7 in / 50 × 60 cm
The paintings of Stefan Lenke are geometrically devised, abstractly constructed compositions of layers of varnish and pigments that are applied partly transparently in different coats. The works originate from a large fund of image material of different media and the artist’s own photographs. In his pictures, the artist reduces this material and still leaves hints and links from which real references of structures from landscapes and architecture, variations in time and mobility of urban and social life can be derived. Those references find their analogy in the over-layering of form fragments within the image, and also increasingly in the composition of different image bearers and in the enhancement of the spectrum of different materials.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.11
BALZERAR TPR OJE C TS , B A S E L
SEBASTIAN MEJIA
BA LZ ERA RTPRO J EC TS: SEBASTIAN MEJIA WEBS I T E www.balzer-art-projects.ch E- M A I L info @ balzer-art-projects.ch PHO N E +41 61 222 2152 CEL L +41 79 229 3306 CONTA C T N A M E Isabel Balzer
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Andreas Bauer Tom Fellner Sarah Frost Georgine Ingold Nici Jost Nicolas Kerksieck Mimi von Moos Nicole Schmid Angelika Schori
COV E R Sebastian Mejia Sombras Nada Mas 2012 Pedestal, Pencil Installation INS I D E Sebastian Mejia Painting Exhibition 2012 Permanent Marker on Plastic Foil 90 × 145 cm B AC K ( L E FT ) Sebastian Mejia Mario 2012 Bee, Nail 3 × 10 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Sebastian Mejia Dom 2012 Permanent Marker on Plastic Foil 55 × 110 cm
Sebastian Mejia’s (b. 1980) work focuses upon the dissemination of visual information in different cultures. He is especially interested in the dichotomy between European and Latin-American traditions where he foregrounds the symbolic significance of mythological, political and cultural icons. Without differentiating between seemingly innocuous and politically problematic subjects, this aesthetic of ambiguity links the historical realities of colonialism to the present political reality. Yet, a dominant feature in all of Mejia’s projects is “comic relief” promoting a post-modernist, less confrontational attitude towards political reality. Mejia’s work is an epistemological enquiry into the nature of knowledge, how it is acquired, presented, and how it can be retained, communicated, and implemented. Mejia takes the term “enlightenment” literally and conceptually: as in reconnaissance where projections and reflections using light create the “visual” reality of his work, as well the historical and philosophical sense of Enlightenment. In his more ephemeral silhouette wall drawings, entitled Sombras Nada Mas, Mejia challenges the cultural predominance of Greek icons as culturally biased. Large folded plastic drawings are juxtaposed with Greek sculptures, challenging the preeminence of Greco-Roman reference systems in European intellectual and aesthetic history. By using lightweight plastic sheets and permanent markers to draw symbols and scenes of culturally biased visual icons, he stresses the dichotomy of low and high culture, heavy–handed Imperialist theory and non-Western cultural assumptions. Mejia quotes realist and surrealist images and translates them into 2D representations. By re-introducing them as a “surreal 3D reality” through a process of folding, silhouette cutting, and shadow drawing on plastic, cardboard, and concrete, he implements the Platonian concept of Form in which the visual is analogous to the conceptual. Based on the “Allegory of the Cave”, Mejia argues that language is a mere shadow of reality. Translated into the “visual”, shadows of objects cannot represent reality of forms — truth must be experienced rather than told as language fails to convey belief. As ephemeral as his work seems at first sight, they are also about monumental historical and intellectual concepts, such as cultural interactivity, lightness, and adaptation. His work runs simultaneously parallel, yet counter, to the digital reality of the 21st century.
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BATTAT CONTEMPOR AR Y, MO NTR E A L
PATRICK BERNATCHEZ
BATTAT CO N TEMPORARY: PATRIC K BERNATC HEZ
CONTA C T N A M ES Daisy Desrosiers Grier Edmundson
Over the past decade, the subject of death has been fundamental to Patrick Bernatchez’s practice. The theme of death takes on variations of time, space-time, and cycles of degradation and renewal. The artist brings an omnivorous approach to media, making use of drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, film, installation, music and sound. He has developed diverse projects, of which the most recent are Chrysalides (2006 — ), notable for having demonstrated the maturity of his practice, and Lost in Time (2009 — ), which reveals the astonishing scope and originality of his perspective. His substantial conceptual worlds reread, inquire and reinterpret, while questioning our relation to creation and art history.
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S John Ancheta Sophie Jodoin Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline Beth Stuart Marion Wagschal
Bernatchez’s work has been exhibited internationally including MASSMoca’s Oh Canada (2012) and a performance at Palais de Tokyo (2012) among others. Lost in Time and Chrysalides will be exhibited together in a major catalogued exhibition opening in 2014 at the Casino Luxembourg, travelling until 2016 to the MAC / VAL in Paris, and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. Bernatchez lives and works in Montreal.
WEBS I T E www.battatcontemporary.com E- M A I L info @ battatcontemporary.com PHO N E +1 514 750 9566
COV E R Patrick Bernatchez Untitled # 1 (protagonist) from the Lost in Time project 2011 Tinted plexiglas on inkjet print 87 × 48 in INS I D E Patrick Bernatchez À la recherche du jour d’après from the Lost in Time project 2012 inkjet print on photo paper, 3 light boxes 72 × 144 in B AC K Patrick Bernatchez BW 2011 millennia calculating wristwatch, watchstrap in horse leather 11 × 5 × 1.5 in / 1.5 in diameter
Founded in 2009, Battat Contemporary is best described as a synthesis between a commercial gallery and a privatly funded project space. Based in Montreal, Quebec, the function of the gallery is two-fold: to provide opportunities for local, national and international artists to exhibit their works, and to expand the cultural landscape of Montreal by bringing these artists to the public’s attention.
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FED ERI CO BIANCHI CONTEMPOR AR Y A R T, MILA N
RADOMIR DAMNJAN
FED ERI CO BI A N CHI: RADOMIR DAMNJAN WEBS I T E www.federicobianchigallery.com E- M A I L info @ federicobianchigallery.com PHO N E +39 02 3954 9725 CEL L +39 34 5047 0917 CONTA C T N A M E Federico Bianchi
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Giuseppe Armenia Paola Di Bello Zuzanna Janin Tony Just Jacopo Mazzonelli Domenico Piccolo Clement Rodzielski Bert Theis Magda Tothova Alexander Wolff
COV E R Radomir Damnjan Just carry on, your life is promising 1976 black and white photograph 39.4 × 59.1 in / 100 × 150 cm INS I D E Radomir Damnjan Pitturare la pittura / Paint the painting spring 2012 oil on linen canvas various sizes Installation view at Federico Bianchi Contemporar y Ar t B AC K ( L E FT ) Radomir Damnjan QUADRO 2003 oil on linen canvas 7.9 × 7.9 in / 20 × 20 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Radomir Damnjan QUADRO 2007 oil on linen canvas 15.7 × 11.8 in / 40 × 30 cm
Radomir Damnjan’s project “pitturare la pittura” is an active manifesto of the contemporary meaning of pure pictorial language, which expresses itself in the work on the gallery’s walls with a dichotomous discipline and freedom. Damnjan has participated in the Venice Biennale; Documenta Kassel; Biennial in Sao Paolo (1st prize, 1963); Biennale of Sydney; and Quadriennale in Rome. His works are included in many museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris; SFMOCA; the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade; MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Museo Nazionale, Praga; Städtische Kunsthalle, Bochum; Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Belo Horizonte; and the Artistic Fund of the Historical Archive of the Biennale in Venice. Paintings, performance and sculpture are his favorite means of expression. He lives and works in Belgrade and Milan. Selected solo shows and public exhibitions include: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; IV Biennale des Pays Méditerrannéens, Alexandria; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Documenta III, Kassel; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; 9th Tokyo Biennale; Biennale Danubius, Bratislava; Civic Center Museum, Philadelphia; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kunsthaus, Graz; Venice Biennale and Rome Quadriennale (1976); Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Staatlische Museen, Berlin; Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Berlin; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; São Paulo Biennial (1979, 1981); Venice Biennale (1980, 1995); Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Museum of Modern Art Ludwig, Vienna; and Muzej Savremene Umetnosti Vojvodine, Novi Sad.
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RE NA BRANSTEN GALLER Y, S AN FR A NC IS C O
HUNG LIU
REN A BRA N STEN GALLERY: HUNG LIU WEBS I T E www.renabranstengallery.com E- M A I L info @ renabranstengallery.com PHO N E +1 415 982 3292 CEL L +1 614 403 5920 CONTA C T N A M ES Jessica Daniel Calvert Barron
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Ruth Asawa John Bankston Tony DeLap Rupert Garcia Candida Höfer Jun Kaneko Vik Muniz Ron Nagle Tracey Snelling Henry Wessel
COV E R Hung Liu Fortune: Reader 2012 Oil on canvas 48 × 59 ½ in INS I D E Hung Liu Happy and Gay: Boy and Kite 2012 Oil on canvas, metal star 60 × 98 in B AC K Hung Liu Red Book 2012 Oil on canvas 66 × 78 in
Hung Liu’s installation of new paintings and prints at VOLTA recreates her childhood memories of street libraries where primers or picture books could be rented for a few pennies to be read on premises. These small books or xiaorenshu were graphic novellas including patriotic stories, fable and fairy tales, biographies, and illustrated histories of military campaigns. Commissioned by the Maoist State, traditionally trained Chinese artists were assigned to illustrate this thinly disguised social propaganda that glorified service to the state and the importance of civic responsibility, the official realism tempered by their individual styles. Ms. Liu’s works in this installation are comprised of photographs, enlarged book pages by her favorite artists, and a small reading table of xiaorenshu. The installation operates as a meta exhibition — a contemplation of how she looked at art, artists, and her consideration of personal expression. It is also her examination of tension between youthful idealism and the reality of the Cultural Revolution. Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She immigrated to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego where she received an MFA. Liu currently lives in Oakland and is a professor at Mills College. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the National Endowment of the Arts Painting Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis among others. During 2013, Hung Liu will have an exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum, a Retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California, and an exhibit at The San Jose Museum of Art.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.4 3
BRUNDYN + GONS ALVES, C A P E TO WN
MOHAU MODISAKENG
BRU N D YN + G ON SALVES: MOHAU MODISAKENG WEBS I T E www.brundyngonsalves.com E- M A I L info @ brundyngonsalves PHO N E +27 21 424 5150 CEL L +27 83 277 2062 CONTA C T N A M ES Elana Brundyn Fiona Mauchan
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Sanell Aggenbach Beth Diane Armstrong Kevin Brand Tom Cullberg Liza Grobler Gina Heyer Matthew Hindley Carla Liesching Zwelethu Mthethwa Chad Rossouw
COV E R Mohau Modisakeng Untitled (Hieroglyph) 2012 Painted wood 211 × 221 cm INS I D E Mohau Modisakeng Untitled (Frame VI, VII & XIII) 2012 C-print 150 x 200 cm each Edition of 3 + 2AP
Mohau Modisakeng’s striking work focuses on the question of violence as a mediator of history, particularly within the complex framework of post-apartheid South African identity. Although the artist’s visuals are often realized in black and white, his subject matter is anything but. Modisakeng’s multifaceted work is concerned with power structures that are in some way historically connected with notions of conflict, aggression, and disorder within the South African context. Bearing a direct causal relationship to the present, these structures therefore cannot be ignored nor forgotten. They require confrontation in order to be revealed as politically engineered constructions. Taking from the vast field of “race discourse”, Modisakeng examines the various systems through which the notion of race has become a premise for subjection and subjectification within the history of South Africa. Here the concept of “race” is employed not as an organizing device or a framework of social understanding, but rather as a “formative” device through which its historical power and logic can be undermined. The artist suggests that the current post-apartheid situation necessitates a “reassessment” of artistic practice and the terms on which South African artists can engage with the fundamental changes affecting all facets of South African society. Modisakeng’s inquisition draws from his own personal history. Cultural artifacts and uniform attire specific to the South African political and historical context are all treated as signifiers that are then appropriated into the artist’s visual vocabulary. Although the works diverge between various media, they continuously inform each other and these signifiers recur throughout. A weapon depicted in a photographic image may be realized as a sculptural work, which may in turn be used as a prop in a performance piece. Modisakeng’s project is a historiographical one, a critical engagement with the past in order to shed light on the present. Mohau Modisakeng (b. 1986 — Soweto) lives and works between Cape Town and Johannesburg. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2009 and his Masters degree in Fine Art at the same institution in 2012. He was awarded the SASOL New Signatures Award for 2011 and has exhibited at Focus 11, Basel; Stevenson, Cape Town; Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar; and the Saatchi Gallery, London.
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BRUNNHOFER G ALLE R Y, LINZ
RONALD KODRITSCH
BRU N N H O FER G ALLERY: RONALD KODRITSC H WEBS I T E www.brunnhofer.at E- M A I L art @ brunnhofer.at PHO N E +43 73 277 8321 CEL L +43 66 4381 8104 CONTA C T N A M ES Stefan Brunnhofer Elisabeth Brunnhofer
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Lucia Dellefant Aurelia Gratzer Moritz Götze Indra. Thomas Kühnapfel Jennifer Nehrbass Anton Petz Andrew Phelps Christoph Schirmer Elisabeth Sonneck
COV E R Ronald Kodritsch NEW SKIN FOR THE OLD FIRE 2012 bronze / edition of 5 h = 9.8 in INS I D E Ronald Kodritsch BASTARDS I + II 2012 oil on canvas Each 66.9 × 51.2 in B AC K Ronald Kodritsch BLABABELS 2012 oil on canvas 70.9 × 78.7 in
“We shouldn’t let artistry get in the way of art.” This is a tall order in the world of contemporary painting, which shows signs of reverting back to figurative painting whenever it attempts to attract a maximum of public acceptance. The quotation at the start of this piece comes from Jonathan Meese and is certainly true of Ronald Kodritsch. Kodritsch is an artist who makes intensive use of the interplay between dimensions, stylistic levels and artistic media in order to arrive, ultimately, at an extraordinary concordance of form and content. He uses all the media at his disposal in order to approach each theme with the means best suited to his purpose. His drawings use a minimum of lines to get straight to the point while his paintings play openly, freely and generously with the means at their disposal. The contents of the pictures affect the viewer who cannot fail to remain unmoved. In Kodritsch’s case, painting is always recognisable as such; it remains in motion and is not deadened by the fatal rigidity of definitive revision. As a painter, Kodritsch is interested in art history, painting and the means of painting. “The making of socks” treats the painting process in an ironical way: the palette of paints he uses is included in the picture, and everything becomes clear: art comes out of tubes of paint, there’s no need to pretend this is a secret. Sigmar Polke made higher powers responsible for his pictures and Kodritsch takes this game a step further. (text from More than just a matter of size, by Hannah Stegmayer)
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LAURA BULIAN GALLE R Y, MILA N
ELISABETTA DI MAGGIO
LA U RA BU LI A N GALLERY: ELISABETTA DI MAGGIO WEBS I T E www.laurabuliangallery.com E- M A I L info @ laurabuliangallery.com PHO N E +39 02 4800 8983 CEL L +39 33 5604 0070 CONTA C T N A M E Laura Bulian
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Said Atabekov G. Kasmalieva & M. Djumaliev Alimjan Jorobaev Anastasia Khoroshilova Taus Makhacheva Marat Raiymkulov Andrei Roiter Eve Sussman David Ter-Oganyan Yelena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev
COV E R Elisabetta Di Maggio Butterfly flight trajectory # 01 2011 Entomological pins and acetate paper Dimensions variable INS I D E Elisabetta Di Maggio Paris 2008 Marseille soap Dimensions variable B AC K ( L E FT ) Elisabetta Di Maggio Untitled 2007 Tissue paper hand-cut with scalpel Dimensions variable B AC K ( R I G H T) Elisabetta Di Maggio Lotus 2012 Nelumbium leave dried and hand-cut with scalpel Dimensions variable
At first sight, Elisabetta Di Maggio’s works appear as decorative patterns. In fact, her method begins with embroidery, moving on from what is a highly precise, typically female skill. On looking more carefully, though, you see nothing romantic or specifically feminine in her works. They are dense bearers of the hardness in life, bitter and cruel. Usually, with a surgeon’s precision, the artist cuts through sheets of tissue paper, vegetable leaves, soap, and other surfaces like plaster. With a set of scalpels, she spends hours cutting these materials, obtaining a sculpted geography that alludes to many things. All of them, though, share a single theme: the form taken by life as it spreads and organises itself. It is there, in the themes and plots underlying the embroidery, that we see the way the roots of certain vegetables expand, the way the cells of living tissue develop, the way different kinds of towns unravel their networks of roads and electric-like circuits, only to discover the pattern taking the form of a butterfly’s flight. The artist thus takes her subjects from the real world, starting from anthropological, botanical, and all kinds of scientific illustrations and street maps. In this perspective, even the allusion to domestic upholstery, with its rose and flower patterns, becomes a manifestation of how nature works — in this case via the dexterity and taste of man. And so, in the great surfaces of paper, the structures made of pins, the preparatory drawings and the entire repertoire of Elisabetta Di Maggio, the rite of life and its inevitable propagation are repeated, with the dry branches being left sometimes to die and sometimes to live with an exaggerated vitality in the collateral branches. The entire work thus takes on the flavour of a reflection on our own existing as parts of a whole that tends to repeat certain laws of fractal growth. Human life is portrayed as made up of poetry and pleasure, but also of danger, a constant precariousness and the absence of peace. In this sense, the artist strips the flesh off life, reducing it to a skeletal form to convey the sense of being “dis-born”, taking it back to an original preconscious state with the ossification of existential processes and the freezing of malaise. The only way to allay the anguish of being lucid about who we are and where we come from seems to be action, the application of doing as a form of both meditation and, at the same time, anaesthetic.
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C24 GALLER Y, NE W Y O R K
REGINA SCULLY
C2 4 GA LLERY: RE GINA SC ULLY WEBS I T E c24gallery.com E- M A I L info @ c24gallery.com PHO N E +1 646 416 6300 CONTA C T N A M E Lisa De Simone, Director
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Skylar Fein Ali Kazma Charles Lutz İrfan Önürmen Grazia Toderi Rob Voerman
COV E R Regina Scully Elemental (detail) 2011 Acrylic on canvas 67 × 62 in / 170.1 × 157.4 cm INS I D E Regina Scully 32 Points 2012 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 80 in / 152.4 × 203.2 cm B AC K Regina Scully Navigation 5 2011 Acrylic on wood panel 48 × 60 in / 121.9 × 152.4 cm
Regina Scully’s paintings are highly gestural and densely packed with pictorial incident that can be read as both abstraction and as a form of representation of the Gulf Coast environment in which she lives. Her work strives to show the phenomena of contemporary cities and spaces from her own perspective of being situated inside them. Today’s world is an amalgamation of objects, spaces, and events that collide and detach, connect and disconnect. By distorting perspective, slicing up space, and building up forms by cutting and splicing them together, Scully hybridizes disparate elements while also discovering new imaginary spaces that reference an archetypal entrance into the subconscious. While the density of the urban environment continues to be present in her work, recent paintings have also been inspired by the mythology of ancient lost cities as well as futuristic imaginary places. Scully’s work attempts to find environments outside of the city limits or a natural oasis beneath the concrete. Her continuation of one of the oldest art forms allows the same explorations to the viewer as current media, yet is able to be appreciated at the viewer’s own pace. While a painting, as an object, is still, Scully’s paintings transform with the viewer’s discovery, and contain myriad pathways for exploration into the personal psyche as well as the collective unconscious. Regina Scully lives and works in New Orleans, LA. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia and received her B.F.A. in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions including: Everyday Hybrid, Prospect1.5, Isaac Delgado Fine Art Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Prospect.2 Lafayette, Lafayette, LA; Double Crescent, curated by Dan Cameron, C24 Gallery, New York, NY; External, Eternal, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA, among others. Her paintings are included in various private and public collections including the Microsoft Art Collection and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation Collection.
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THE FLAT-MAS S IMO C AR A S I, MILA N
PAOLO CAVINATO
TH E FLAT- MA SSI MO C ARASI: PAOLO C AVINATO WEBS I T E www.carasi.it E- M A I L carasi-massimo @ libero.it PHO N E +39 25 831 3809 CEL L +39 333 215 5325 CONTA C T N A M ES Massimo Carasi Daniela Barbieri
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Guido Bagini Michael Bevilacqua Edward Del Rosario Cristiano De Gaetano Greta Frau Michael Johansson Asuka Ohsawa Pesce Khete Michelangelo Penso Ward Shelley
COV E R Paolo Cavinato Window — Corridor 2012 black acrylic paint on fishing lines, wood frames 79 × 79 × 10 in / 200 × 200 × 25 cm INS I D E ( LE F T) Paolo Cavinato RILIEVO #2, Kitchen with presence 2012 cardboard, paper, acrylic paint, Plexiglas, plastic 34 × 34 × 4 in / 85 × 85 × 10 cm INS I D E ( R I G H T ) Paolo Cavinato Interior Projection 2012 white acrylic paint on fishing lines, wood frame, steel, Plexiglas 30 × 30 × 4 in / 75 × 75 × 10 cm B AC K Paolo Cavinato Interiors #2 (detail) 2012 wire fluorocarbon, acrylic paint, wood and metal frame 59 × 59 × 8 in / 150 × 150 × 20 cm
Paolo Cavinato’s artistic expression seems to refer, even if only implicitly, to the philosophic reasoning according to which space and time are forms a priori. His works begins with space, necessarily includes time, and aims to reach the so-called fifth dimension, that of the spirit and infinity. The artist begins his work in the objective, quantifiable world in order to arrive at something that goes beyond it, a higher level. The rational perception of forms in space allows him to study the elements’ position in detail so as to compose parallel universes through which he can project his own interior world. Thus, in his “research”, conceived as a unique imaginary room reproduced according to the four orthogonal projections, the black background behind the white threads creates a sort of dark room, a threshold between perceived reality and its imaginary counterpart. The space contained in his works is a mental space, while the objects that compose it are abstractions of real artifacts. Nothing is as it appears, everything is constantly questioned, set in limbo. This abstraction therefore begins in the concrete reality of the world around it, precarious, illusory, in continuous movement and subject to the future. From the detail to the overview, from a module to a series, Cavinato’s universes contain elements of alchemy, religion, metaphysics, mathematics and geometry that are harmoniously synthesised. The tradition of perspective so typical of Western culture meets the more two-dimensional and iconoclastic aesthetic of the Eastern world, defining a state of equilibrium that is open to multiple interpretations. The world as we see it is nothing but the reflection of an ideal world that lies beyond the realm of perception. Elisabetta Bolasco
Paolo Cavinato was born in Mantua in 1975. He lives and works in Mantua, Italy.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.4 6
ETHAN COHEN NEW Y OR K, NE W Y O R K
MICHAEL ZELEHOSKI
ETH A N COH EN N EW Y ORK: MIC HAEL ZELEHOSKI WEBS I T E www.ecfa.com E- M A I L ecfa @ ecfa.com PHO N E +1 212 625 1250 CEL L +1 917 854 1308 CONTA C T N A M E Ethan Cohen
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S John Aslanidis Orly Cogan Lijun Fang Yan Huang Xiaohui Liu Zhilong Qi Feng Qin Ushio Shinohara Hui Tang
COV E R Michael Zelehoski Intersecting Planes 2012 assemblage with found shelves and painted plywood 38 × 27 in / 96.52 × 68.58 cm INS I D E Michael Zelehoski Mr. Speaker 2013 assemblage with found speaker, plywood and painted plywood 38 × 49 in / 96.52 × 124.46 cm B AC K ( L E FT ) Michael Zelehoski Open Box 2013 assemblage with found box and painted plywood 25 × 35 in / 63.5 × 88.9 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Zelehoski in his Beacon, New York studio
My recent work involves the literal collapse of three-dimensional objects and structures into the picture plane. These found, utilitarian objects are deconstructed and cut into sometimes hundreds of abstract fragments before being reassembled twodimensionally. The negative space is filled with carefully fitted pieces of painted wood, creating a solid plane in which the object is trapped in a parody of its former perspective. Through this dialogue between the deconstruction of the object and the construction of form, I am able to create works that are picture, relief and object in one. The humble, quotidian objects that I work with are easy to miss in spatial continuity with the surrounding world. This is particularly true of objects like crates and pallets, which are ubiquitous to the point of invisibility and often seen as possessing little or no intrinsic value. There are many reasons why art objects are perceived differently, not the least of which is that we are able to observe them in the vacuum of the museum or gallery. I have found that the picture plane, acting as an autonomous coordinate, is capable of performing a similar function by incorporating actual objects. When a pallet, for example, is incorporated into the picture, we come to see it not as an eyesore or an obstacle that has to be navigated around, but as an actual object of aesthetic interest. The immediacy of these works owes much to the fact that they literally embody the objects they depict. Real interaction with an object demands a physical proximity that even the most effective representation cannot capture. For this reason, viewing these works in images is problematic. Beyond the visual and phenomenological issues, there is the simple matter of how these pieces are constructed, which can be elusive even in person. I hope that the viewer will look closely at these images and remember that the point of Magritte’s pipe is that it was not. An integral aspect of these objects is that they are what they are. My work deals with the relationship between mind and reality in a different way than most representational art. The pallet, which was once part of the physical, three-dimensional world, suddenly becomes autonomous from the rest of space. By unifying the picture plane and the spatial environment, I am trying to reconcile the dichotomy between pictorial and physical space, art and object, sculpture and painting. Michael Zelehoski
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 26
COOPER COLE GALLE R Y, TO R O NTO
RYAN WALLACE
COOPER CO LE G ALLERY: RYAN WALLAC E WEBS I T E www.coopercolegallery.com E- M A I L info @ coopercolegallery.com PHO N E +1 647 347 3316 CEL L +1 416 833 9084 CONTA C T N A M E Simon Cole
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Marc Bell Sara Cwynar Mark Delong Georgia Dickie Joseph Hart Maya Hayuk Lauren Luloff Geoff McFetridge Les Ramsay Jen Stark
Ryan Wallace, deeply attuned to contradictions of portraying the ‘cosmic’ or the ‘futuristic’, uses the lineage of abstraction to produce paintings and sculptures that visually adapt to the recent evolution of human spatial engagement, whether through the virtual space of a digital realm, or the theoretical space of the cosmos. In his most explicit references to cosmos the backgrounds explicitly reference the pixilated construction of the digital realm, and are glazed in glitter and blue/black textures that suggest denim, which are overlaid with a centralized orb of white paint. But are these really paintings of nebulae, exploding suns, or Big Bangs? Or are they bright spotlights pointing back at us, the viewers as a reference to the screen that reflects unto us our descent into cerebral insularity? And if they were as optimistic and opportunistic as the Big Bang, why wouldn’t they be Alpha, the beginning? Instead they are Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, declared by the book of Revelation as the definitive, absolute end. Perhaps Wallace is suggesting that the only constant in all the artifice of science, mysticism, technology, philosophy, literature and painting is that they represent no more than the system of the human mind itself. That at our most complicated levels of thought, we face limitations. That even if the particle physicists at CERN come up with a new explanation for formation of matter; that even if humans achieve singularity by fusing artificial and biological intelligence, inevitably it will be limited by the imaginations that constructed it. Excerpted from The Sky Inside by David Kennedy Cutler, 2012
COV E R Ryan Wallace Consensus IV 2012 Alumilite resin, oil, enamel, inkjet, automotive-tint, Plexiglas and MDF 48 × 10 × 10 in INS I D E Ryan Wallace L: Omega Point (Chrome) R: Omega Point (Violet) 2012 Enamel, acrylic, pigment, crystalina, cold wax on canvas 67 × 67 in each B AC K Ryan Wallace (((Ω.))) Cycle III 2012 Ink, monotype, lithograph, crystalina on paper 76 × 126 in ( Variable)
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.0 6
D AVIDSON CONTEMPOR ARY, NE W Y O R K
SARAH HARDESTY
D AV I D SON CO N TEMPORARY: SARAH HARDESTY WEBS I T E www.davidsoncontemporary.com E- M A I L info @ davidsoncontemporary.com PHO N E +1 212 759 7555 CEL L +1 917 533 8673 CONTA C T N A M ES Maxwell Davidson Charlie Davidson
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Ghost of a Dream Neil Hamon Kiel Johnson Darren Lago Ben Long Sam Messenger Megan Olson Kevin Osmond Mel Rosas
COV E R Sarah Hardesty INSIDE OUT (detail) 2011 Ink, acrylic, gouache on wood panel 30 × 24 in / 76.2 × 61 cm Signed, titled and dated verso INS I D E Sarah Hardesty The Impact of Optimism 2012 reclaimed wood, acrylic paint, string Dimensions variable B AC K Sarah Hardesty TRANSMIT 2012 Found wood, gold thread, acrylic on canvas 16 × 8 in / 40.6 × 20.3 cm Signed, titled and dated verso
Devastation that comes and sweeps through our lives leaves a wake of debris, both physical and psychological. In my work I pull together shards and planks that both represent and are actual debris into new forms. Discarded wood from buildings is strung together with a sort of centrifugal force into a massive web. At times it seems as if an entropic force is pulling these planks of wood that once had a structural purpose, into a new dimension, abstracting and de-grounding their original stability. My installations transform the initial weight and presence of these objects into a state of suspended liberation and halted chaos. The environment is meant to have a visceral effect on the viewer, helping them to connect to a tumultuous part of their own lives and find personal resonance. Similar concerns are addressed in my two dimensional work. Long isolated lines are a stand-in for string or strands — pulling, holding, capturing. Silhouettes of birds in flight represent freedom, fearlessness, and strength. Throughout my work I also hope to establish a presence of nature and its connection to the eroding of time. Wood, feathers, mica, and bird imagery combined with the impact of bright fluorescent colors and the geometric pull of string and line are meant to be a platform to discuss topics such as the power and presence of nature, the impact of natural disasters and human destruction, resolution and rebuilding, and the power of will and intention. Sarah Hardesty
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 32
DCKT CONTEMPOR ARY, NE W Y O R K
TIMOTHY TOMPKINS
D CK T CON TEMPORARY: TIMOTHY TOMPKINS WEBS I T E www.dcktcontemporary.com E- M A I L info @ dcktcontemporary.com PHO N E +1 212 741 9955 CONTA C T N A M ES Dennis Christie Ken Tyburski
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Helen Altman Josh Azzarella Oliver Boberg Castaneda/Reiman Sophie Crumb Lia Halloran Ryan Humphrey Maria E. Piñeres Brion Nuda Rosch Michael Velliquette
COV E R Timothy Tompkins Explosion 2013 Commercial enamel on aluminum 48 × 48 in INS I D E Timothy Tompkins Super Collider 2013 Commercial enamel on aluminum 29 × 48 in B AC K Timothy Tompkins Reenactment Arctic: V2 2013 Commercial enamel on aluminum 24 × 36 in
The inspiration for my paintings stem from an interest of engagement with the tropes and language of the medium’s historical movements such as pop, still life, and history painting. My ideas about art-making express a combination of concepts: the material nature of painting and how the viewer perceives its surface, the history of painting as a medium, abstraction, memory, representation, and technology. Using commercial sign enamel, the enamel paintings are executed on 1/8” thick aluminum panels. I manipulate the liquid state of the paint to make more evident the traced contours of the image and form. This quality gives a transitory effect to the piece, as if the image is still manifesting. The paintings reflect both physically and metaphorically a relational narrative which dissolves into form and color. This effect endeavors to mimic the layers of codes and semiotics of an image while simultaneously asking the viewer to participate in an expanded dialogue of contemplation and connotation of content. Additionally, the paintings attempt to reflect the influences of contemporary society, such as consumerism, mass media, and digital culture. Our image- and media-driven society creates an expanded dialogue for new ways of communicating ‘history.’ With ever changing and advancing technology, we experience events, from the mundane to the influential, rapidly and on a global level. I feel this sense of immediacy renders an intriguing pathway to the idea of what is accepted as history and social memory. My interest in both the language of painting and contemporary theories of visual culture attract to me what I see in the images produced by mass media, as a loose visual connection to painting’s history and the medium’s influence as a visual communicator. The paintings play upon the idea of revealing the unseen and invoke the notion of a disjunctive relationship between observation, representation, and interpretation.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.0 9
GALER IE DEPAR D IE U , NIC E
DANIEL ROTHBART
G A LERI E D EPA RD IEU: DANIEL ROTHBART WEBS I T E www.galerie-depardieu.com E- M A I L galerie.depardieu @ orange.fr PHO N E +33 493 964 096 CEL L +33 689 965 265 CONTA C T N A M E Christian Depardieu
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Marcel Alocco Maurizio Bolognini John Douglas Jean-Pierre Giovanelli Hannaka Alain Lestié Alain Arias-Misson Fredérique Nalbandian Bernard Pourrière Uffe Weiland
COV E R Daniel Rothbart Glass Tears 2012 digital print on polyester flag 393.7 × 1181 in / 1000 × 3000 cm INS I D E Daniel Rothbart Everything Flows, Nothing Stands Still (For Enrico Pedrini) 2012 Performance with sculpture Dimensions variable B AC K ( L E FT ) Daniel Rothbart Love I 1998 digital collage 11 × 17 in / 27.94 × 43.18 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Daniel Rothbart Esclaves 1996 digital collage 11 × 17 in / 27.94 × 43.18 cm
D A NIE L RO THBA R T: G L A S S T E AR S I N VEN I C E A body of digital collage prints that Daniel Rothbart created in the mid 1990s critically explores the international dissemination of American art and values. With irony and humor, the artist uses his collages to “promote” his country’s art using elements from American popular culture. Borrowing from the logic of commercials, slogans and political and party pamphlets, Rothbart creates satirical, tongue in cheek propaganda stories about American culture. Hollywood has been and remains a big part of American culture and is a source of inspiration for Rothbart. During the fifteenth edition of OPEN, the International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations held in the Venice Lido and on the San Servolo Island, Rothbart creates a flag out of a digital collage print with Hedy Lamarr, that will fly at a vaporetto station and most likely be frequented by Hollywood stars during the 2012 Venice International Film Festival, the oldest one in the world, founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica. Rothbart’s flag Glass Tears takes a scene from the classic Hollywood movie Samson and Delilah, representing Hedy Lamarr paired with the artist’s sculptures from the series Meditation/Mediation. Famous actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood are an important element in this series of Daniel Rothbart’s oeuvre. Early on in his career, the artist actually set up a fictitious enterprise called “Semiotic Street Situations” to reinforce his belief that American popular culture is desperately entangled in the market values of American capitalism. Certain parallels can be drawn between the Hollywood studio system and the approach of some New York galleries. During the early years of film production, studios would invest a great deal of money to recruit, groom and contract those stars who possessed the greatest box office potential. In the art gallery system there is a similar dynamic where certain dealers invest large sums of money into lavish productions of art, in the hope of making their artists into commercial stars. The current economic changes in the world are affecting the sociopolitical landscape of the United States and we have yet to see whether it will retain its place as a center of cultural production. Rothbart’s flag with Hedy Lamarr will be waving in the Venice air, reminding us that Hollywood is still a place where dreams can be made true. Boshko Boskovic
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.15
GALERIE JAN DHAE S E , G HE NT
MAX RAZDOW
G A LERI E J A N D H AESE: MAX RAZDOW WEBS I T E www.jandhaese.be E- M A I L jan.dhaese @ telenet.be PHO N E +32 477 43 77 94 CEL L +32 477 43 77 94
THE S P HINXE S The sphinxes, they whistle for the way of the hill. / There is one who watches the breath of the sun, / there is another who watches in shards of a mirror. / Together, their tails wind a riddle: / what in the eye of the cat counts as true?
CONTA C T N A M E Jan Dhaese
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Dolores Bouckaert Pavel Braila Hedwig Brouckaert Jennifer De Plu Marthe Ramm Fortun Stéphanie Leblon Christophe Malfliet Sebastian Moldovan Lee Ranaldo Kristof Van Heeschvelde
COV E R Max Razdow At the Cave of the Tile Fish (detail) 2011 Pen, ink on paper 36 × 24 in INS I D E Max Razdow The Interface 2011 Pen, ink gesso, Xerox transfer on paper 40 × 30 in B AC K Max Razdow The Planter 2011 Pen, ink, gesso on paper 40 × 30 in
Max Razdow (b. 1978 — Boston, Massachusetts; lives and works in New York). Recent solo exhibitions include Future Myths of the Surface (2011) and We Wait as Banshees Wait (2010) at Galerie Jan Dhaese in Ghent, Belgium, and Dusk Drawings (2012) at Trailer Park Proyect, San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has been included in the group shows Take-Out (2011) at Andrew Edlin Gallery, That Sinking Sense of Wonder (2012) at SouthFirst in NYC, What’s The Story? (2013) at Freight + Volume, and Bad Moon Rising 5 (2010) at UKS Oslo, among many other exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. Razdow’s work has been discussed in the New York Times, Art Fag City, L Magazine and (H)art (BE), and included in K48. He has published critical writing in ArtUS, The Maximillian and elsewhere, and co-curated EPIC (2011-2012), an exhibition of NYC video art for multiple venues in Belgium. In 2011, he was a resident of the Hafnarborg Museum in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. His art is held in collections in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and Belgium. Max received his MFA from New York University in 2008 and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.12
DILLON GALLER Y, NE W Y O R K
CHIHO AKAMA
D I LLO N GA LLERY: C HIHO AKAMA WEBS I T E www.dillongallery.com E- M A I L mail @ dillongallery.com PHO N E +1 212 727 8585 CONTA C T N A M ES Valerie Dillon Diana Lee Alvaro Perez Miranda
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Per Fronth Makoto Fujimura Maurizio Galimberti Masatake Kouzaki Christophe Laudamiel Brian Rose Silke Schoener Michel Tabori Ultra Violet Asami Yoshiga
COV E R Chiho Akama Lilies 2012 leather, aluminum, gold leaf, and others 19.6 × 44 × 15.7 in INS I D E Chiho Akama Traveling Banana 2010 FRP 80.3 × 48.8 × 26.3 in B AC K ( L E FT ) Chiho Akama Gateau Au Chocolat for Adults 2009 Cotton, polyester, and others 10 × 5 × 4 in (each shoe) B AC K ( R I G H T) Chiho Akama Mille Feuille 2009 Cotton, Japanese paper, and others 9 × 4 × 3 in (each shoe)
Chiho Akama developed an obsession with shoes during her adolescent years. Since the rigid Japanese school system regulated everything except for the shoes students wore, shoes became Akama’s outlet for expression, free spirit, and teenage rebellion. Akama follows the traditional shoe-making process, which starts with carving a mold. She creates the textiles by weaving hand-mixed threads or twisted Japanese papers (washi). Her shoes are therefore functional and can be worn, although that is not her intention. Akama enjoys the play between reality and fantasy as the shoes transform into an object that is uncommon. Chiho Akama is part of the DANDANS Group. In 2005, Kazuko Aso established the DANDANS Group in Tokyo as a response to the lack of opportunities for emerging artists in Japan. DANDANS Group is a cooperative group of artists that finds alternative venues in which to create, curate, and hold exhibitions within a supportive and stimulating environment. The group facilitates the presentation of the member’s work to a broad range of audiences in the art world and beyond, allowing for largescale exposure for this next generation of artists. Devoted to the representation of international contemporary artists in a variety of mediums, Dillon Gallery exhibits established, mid career, and young emerging artists whose works convey our approach to visual content. Formalism and structure carries through the various styles and mediums we present with an overall interest in the personal content behind the artists’ aesthetics. The gallery has published substantial monographs on several artists we represent in our dedication to expose a new wave of global talent to the Chelsea audience. It is Dillon Gallery’s mission to act as a forum for regional voices across the artistic landscape. Originating in SOHO in 1994, Dillon Gallery is now located on West 25th Street in New York City, occupying the ground floor space in a converted 19th century warehouse.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 51
DO T F IFTYONE GUZMAN & PER ELMAN G A LLE R Y WYNWOOD AR TS DIS TR IC T, MIA MI
MAURO GIACONI ( )
D O T FI FTYO N E G ALLERY: MAURO GIAC ONI WEBS I T E www.dotfiftyone.com E- M A I L dot @ dotfiftyone.com PHO N E +1 305 573 9994 CEL L +1 305 527 4422 CONTA C T N A M ES Isaac J. Perelman Alfredo Guzman
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Omar Barquet Hernan Cedola Liliane Eberle Gonzalo Fuenmayor Leslie Gabaldon Jose Luis Landet Leonel Matheu Jorge Miño Raquel Schwartz
COV E R Mauro Giaconi Partir (Intervention on Mamba Museum Buenos Aires walls) 2012 Graphite and rubber eraser on dry wall Variable INS I D E Mauro Giaconi Meters away of the buffalo 2012 Graphite and rubber eraser on paper 83 × 110 in B AC K Mauro Giaconi Temporada de Plomo 2012 Graphite, rubber eraser, sand paper, paint on dry wall and glass Variable
Ruin is abstraction is a proposed study of drawing that researches in a confined space (12 square meters) landscape, and space in a poetic state proposing the juxtaposition of two contradictory spatial states: closure and release. The project’s focus is framed by a study of drawings I’m currently developing and are part of the idea of expanded drawing, far from the traditional format, which is projected as a transformer and generator of spaces and thoughts. In a state of decay, insecurity, and tension of the landscape, space embraces and envelops the viewer to walk or dwell in a place to be aware of the precariousness of the surrounding environment. The drawing is done with graphite, and blurring is generated from gestural strokes of eraser, electric sander, diluent and different corrosive materials. From this process, in which the image is built and destroyed from successive layers of drawing and blurring is constructed, in turn it destroys the image, the representation, the gesture. Mauro Giaconi
Giaconi’s works for VOLTA NY 2013 were completed at the artist residency program of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during the months of January — February 2013. Giaconi (b. 1977 — Buenos Aires, Argentina; lives and works in Mexico City) studied architecture between 1995 and 1998 at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2001 he graduated from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón with the title of Professor of Painting. In 2010 he received a grant from the Arts and Research Center, and in 2012 from the International Symposium on Theory and Contemporary Art (Mexico City). Recently he was awarded with the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha — Nebraska) Artist in Residency Program. Giaconi’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows, and art fairs in Buenos Aires; Mexico DF; Miami; Los Angeles’ Marseilles (France); London; Bogota; and New York.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 3 3
EB &FLO W, LO ND O N
WILLIAM BRADLEY
EB& FLO W: WI LLI AM BRADLEY WEBS I T E www.ebandflowgallery.com E- M A I L info @ ebandflowgallery.com PHO N E +44 20 7729 7797 CEL L +44 77 2547 9826 CONTA C T N A M ES Nathan Engelbrecht Margherita Berloni
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Briony Anderson Gemma Anderson Neil Ayling Ross M. Brown Sue Corke Alinka Echeverria Nicholas Mcleod Steve Sabella Katie Louise Surridge Christian Zuzunaga
COV E R William Bradley Ponder This 2012 Oil on Canvas 200 × 155 cm INS I D E William Bradley It’s That Simple (detail) 2012 Oil on Canvas 70 × 65 cm B AC K William Bradley Rule of Thumb 2012 Oil on Canvas 225 × 270 cm
William Bradley’s work is abstract art about abstract art. Viewing the idea of the pure abstract language as problematised by its lack of communication from artist to viewer, Bradley builds in a more communal language of references or quotes from art history. His paintings distort numerous historical references, deconstructing the role of abstraction in both modernism and contemporary art practice. Rather than pure abstraction, his paintings are antonyms of the former — each is a study or story telling device about this specific moment in art history. Whilst the work continues to look at the painted depiction of painted codes, the current series looks increasingly to the digital program Photoshop as a tool for the manipulation of these codes. Digitally modifying scanned watercolours (which the artist paints as a preliminary/preparatory stage of the process), creates a new plan which moves yet another step away from the immediacy of the original authorial mark. The resultant painting may reference gestural marks or codes from the history of Abstraction (and painting more generally) but this is coloured by its digital pre-planning. Thus the gestural elements of the work are less about the intuitive use of paint and more a device concerned with the combining of source material and reference. William Bradley (b. 1984 — Yorkshire, England) graduated with a Masters degree from Wimbledon College of the University of the Arts London in 2008, selling out his end of year show. He has been selected for FutureMap, the Catlin Art prize 2009 and 2011, the Marmite Painting Prize 2010, and Valeria Sykes Painting Prize 2011. His work is included in several international major collections.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.19
GALLERI CHRISTOFFER EGELUND, C O P E NHA G E N
MARIA TORP
G A LLERI CH RI STOFFER EGELUND: MARIA TORP WEBS I T E www.christofferegelund.dk E- M A I L info @ christofferegelund.dk PHO N E +45 33 939 200 CEL L +45 26 272 871 CONTA C T N A M ES Christoffer M. Egelund Gry Stockinger
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Crystel Ceresa Ghost of a Dream Thierry Feuz Morten Stehen Hebsgaard Louise Hindsgavl Yuichi Hirako Jason Jägel Christoffer Joergensen Michael Johansson Ida Kvetny
COV E R Maria Torp Female Gesture 2013 Oil on canvas 80 × 60 cm INS I D E Maria Torp Rivers and Red Nails 2013 Oil on canvas 60 × 80 cm B AC K Maria Torp Against All Odds 2013 Bronze, edition of 3 40 × 40 × 27 cm
At this year’s VOLTA NY we proudly present the emerging Danish artist Maria Torp (b. 1975). The artist is exhibiting a new series of bronze sculptures and paintings inspired by her drawings that work as a blueprint for many of her works. Torp masters the superrealistic genre, which has been a continuous feature in her oeuvre. Her images are complexly orchestrated by a multitude of reflections and details. Like the 1960s Superrealists, she starts with the recognizable. But the recognizable reality is undermined — or expanded — in the clash between the many realities colliding and mixing in the specular surfaces. Her artworks are based on drawings, translated into photos, then translated into painting — a process that both integrates and resolves the weight of the superrealistic painting style and makes the experimental features more visible. For Torp, drawing is where she lets go of control, parks the mind and lets the ink flow. This results in a large quantity of drawings that, in action, mood, or gesture, refers to a person’s character, story, or situation. Subsequently, she stages the selected individuals and photographs them, then replicates their portraits in her interpretive paintings of personal characters. With such simple narrative techniques, intuition and free play, Torp converts the portrayed individuals into general characters in a mixture of realism, drawing, abstraction, and expressionism. Maria Torp lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and has previously studied at the London College of Printing. She has exhibited in several Danish art galleries, museums, and art institutions, and has made commissioned work for corporations such as FTF, TrygVesta, Ferring, and lately at the Velux Foundation. Torp is the co-founder of the artist trio MAM, together with artists Anika Lori and Mette Geisler.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.16
ENVOY ENTER PR IS E S , NE W Y O R K
WINSTON CHMIELINSKI
EN V OY EN TERPRI SES: WINSTON C HMIELINSKI WEBS I T E www.envoyenterprises.com E- M A I L office @ envoyenterprises.com PHO N E +1 212 226 4552 CEL L +609 902 3064 CONTA C T N A M E Jamie Sterns
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Luc Claus Gerald Collings David Alexander Flinn Erika Keck Niall McClelland Narcissister Alex Rose Desi Santiago Johan Tahon James J. Williams III
COV E R Winston Chmielinski Rub Dry (detail) 2012 Oil on canvas 48 × 36 in INS I D E Winston Chmielinski October 2012 2012 Oil on canvas 48 × 36 in B AC K ( L E FT ) Winston Chmielinski That Rainbow is Winking 2012 Oil on canvas 30 × 30 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Winston Chmielinski Looking Up, Spring Drips Down Onto Me 2012 Oil on canvas 48 × 48 in
Winston Chmielinski’s paintings indiscriminately engage figuration and abstraction by using color and form to create emotionally charged re-imaginings of the familiar. He investigates the body as well as its surrogate forms in nature, with a focus on plants and lighted expanses. The process behind his paintings lives in a space between pure intention and accident. One method Chmielinski used in creating his works was to paint a series of figurative and abstract paintings sequentially during one studio session. This fast-paced and near-seamless movement of brushstrokes across consecutive canvases created convergent forms that resulted in paintings that appear to grow into one another. Chmielinski employs paint as a means to distort static images and refers to the lexicon of the everyday to reveal what paint can do and how it can enliven the seemingly banal. Thin veils of paint allow the gesso from the canvas to shine through, creating lines, colors, and saturation that have been altered from their original states and transformed into captivating otherworldly motifs. W INS TO N CHM IE L INS K I (b. 1988 — Boston, MA) studied philosophy and creative writing at New York University’s Gallatin School Of Individualized Study, modern and contemporary Chinese literature at Peking University, and French literature and contemporary art at L’Institut Catholique in Paris. He has participated in several special commissions and projects including BOFFO Building Fashion, New York, NY (2011); MOVE! at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010); and Vaginal Davis is Speaking From the Diaphragm at PS 122, New York, NY (2010). He has been included in the following group exhibitions: Summer Affair at fordPROJECT, New York, NY (2011); I Am Solitary at Gift Gallery, London, UK (2011); and Tools for Thought: Rebuild Haiti at Sotheby’s, New York, NY (2010). In the summer of 2012 he was a fellow at the La Pan Residency in Barcelona, Spain. His first solo exhibition in New York was at envoy enterprises in November-December 2012.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 37
G ALERIE ANTOINE ER TAS KIR AN, MO NTR É A L
DOMINIQUE BLAIN
GALERIE ANTOINE ERTASKIRAN: DOMINIQUE BLAIN WEBS I T E www.galerieantoineertaskiran.com
Social and political history is at the heart of Dominique Blain’s work. Her art is a critical and imaginative reflection of — and a commentary on — contemporary society.
E- M A I L info @ galerieantoineertaskiran.com
Her ongoing project Mindscapes tackles the issue of human rights through carefully-constructed images whose provocative content defy their apparently innocuous form. The traditional Afghan design motif of Rug is composed of the myriad shapes of anti-personnel landmines. When Rug appears in a digitally manipulated image, it is strategically placed in The Oval Office in protest to the US government’s nonsignature of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. In the video Buddha from the Kabul Museum the stone head of a Buddha gazes intensely at passing viewers, an empty gaze replaced by the artist’s own questioning eyes. In another image, the Buddha of the Bamiyan valley is replaced by the image of an Afghan woman wearing a burka. At the time of these Buddhas’ destruction, international opinion strongly condemned the act considering it, almost worst than the Taliban’s intolerance towards women who continue to be victims of their oppression.
PHO N E +1 514 989 7886 CEL L +1 514 994 9690 CONTA C T N A M ES Antoine Ertaskiran Anne Roger
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Mathieu Beauséjour Jacynthe Carrier Martin Golland Tristram Lansdowne Luce Meunier Juan Ortiz-Apuy Jon Rafman Michael A. Robinson Andrea Sala Sayeh Sarfaraz
COV E R Dominique Blain The Oval Office 2013 inkjet on Moab archive paper 39 × 45 in INS I D E Dominique Blain Rug 2001 – 2012 wool, cotton, leather 73 × 111 in B AC K Dominique Blain Missa 1992 100 pairs of army boots, metal grid, nylon string 276 × 276 in
By subtly subverting reality, Blain brings into focus the tragedy behind her works. Her visual vocabulary draws one into her process of questioning, allowing the viewer to participate non-confrontationally in a dialogue on the nature of war, human rights and freedom of speech. Her particular interest lies in the perception of the real. The subjects she examines are, for the most part, universal in nature and always call into question our privileged and unique role as witnesses. Dominique Blain lives and works in Montreal, Canada. Her work has been shown across North America, as well as in Europe and Australia (Sydney Biennale, 1992). She has had three major retrospective exhibitions: at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2004; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 1998; and in 19971998, the Contemporary Art Centre Arnolfini in Bristol presented her work in five UK institutions. Her art has been shown in numerous museums: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen. In Quebec, she participated in three editions of Les Cent Jours d’art contemporain, and presented her work at Galerie de l’UQAM. Dominique Blain is represented by galerie antoine ertaskiran, a contemporary art gallery based in Montreal. The gallery focuses on emerging and established Canadian and international artists.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 3 8
BEATRIZ ESGUER R A AR T, B O G O TÁ
CAROL YOUNG
BEATRI Z ESG U ERR A ART: C AROL Y OUNG WEBS I T E www.beatrizesguerra-art.com E- M A I L be @ beatrizesguerra-art.com PHO N E +57 1 530 0339 CEL L +1 941 448 0918 (US) +57 310 249 5591 (Colombia) CONTA C T N A M E Beatriz Esguerra
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Carolina Convers Sair Garcia Max Steven Grossman Kamel Ilian Janice Mehlman Ismael Rivera Pedro Ruiz Alejandro Saiz Santiago Uribe-Holguin
COV E R Carol Young From the series Memory and Taxonomies of the Void 2012 Ceramic Installation Variable sizes INS I D E Carol Young From the series Memory and Taxonomies of the Void 2012 Ceramic Installation Variable sizes B AC K Carol Young From the series Memory and Taxonomies of the Void 2012 Ceramic Installation Variable sizes
Carol Young, born in Uruguay, has been living and making art in Colombia since the 1980s. Using ceramic as her primary medium, Young’s installations and sculptures transcend standard perception of the material, creating work that is unique, challenging, and beautiful. Her recent investigation explores the realms of memory, history and our conceptions of paper. Working from an intricate network of memory, both personal and collective, Young explores their unexpected influences: how we perceive the world and how we interact with others. Her installations evoke these subliminal memories through dialogue with the emptiness and freshness of a blank page. Drawing on an image that may refer to an ancient library composed of paper and parchment, her work conjures up the sign-filled archive of the many individual moments of experience — unknown and hidden information that yearns to be classified reviewed and studied. The “rolls” that Young composes in semidarkness contain no writing, only small creases and folds, somewhat like gestural “protowriting,” putting into action a subtle language of touch; a nuanced field which contains evidence of our presence in this world. The tactile experience contains complex relationships between the body, others, and the world. Carol Young has shown her work throughout Colombia and Latin America, exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums, and she has received numerous honors and prizes.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.10
JONATHAN FERRARA GALLER Y, NE W O R LE A NS
MICHAEL PAJON
J ON ATH A N FERRARA GALLERY: MIC HAEL PAJON WEBS I T E www.jonathanferrraragallery.com E- M A I L info @ jonathanferraragallery.com PHO N E +1 504 522 5471 CONTA C T N A M ES Jonathan Ferrara Jean Kennedy Burgess Matthew Weldon Showman
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S David Buckingham Hannah Chalew Skylar Fein Justin Forbes Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S) Marcus Kenney Adam Mysock Gina Phillips Dan Tague Paul Villinski
COV E R Michael Pajon The Hunter’s Gambit 2012 mixed media collage on tin type 22 × 22 in INS I D E Michael Pajon Scavenging Beaks Leave Little to the Lamp Drawn Moths 2013 mixed media collage on book covers 8.5 × 29 in B AC K Michael Pajon Aviary of Kept Men and Hungry Messengers 2012 mixed media collage 14 × 12 in
This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic. Michael Pajon was raised in a working class family in the southwest suburbs of Chicago where he occupied his time bicycling, wandering around half constructed homes, and building forts in cornfields. At the age of ten his Grandmother walked him to his first comic book store where he promptly raided the twenty-five cent bin. Through this newly found hobby he taught himself to draw by copying the pages of Frank Miller’s Batman, Jim Lee’s X-Men, and EC comic reprints. He had also developed a habit of collecting not only comics, but old magazines and things that most would deem trash. He later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking, gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved. He worked closely as an assistant and then studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick. During this time he started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed narratives. In 2009 he left Chicago and headed south, settling in New Orleans.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.0 3
GALLER I FLACH, S TO C KHO LM
KRISTINA BENGTH
G A LLERI FLA CH : KRISTINA BENGTH WEBS I T E www.galleriflach.com E- M A I L info @ galleriflach.com PHO N E +46 8 661 13 99 CEL L +46 70 750 16 70 CONTA C T N A M ES James Flach Eva-Lotta Holm Flach
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Mohamed Camara Twan Janssen Andreas Johansson Kiripi Katembo Siku Ville Lenkkeri Mikael Lundberg Patrick Nilsson Jesper Nyrén Pauliina Pietilä Jorma Puranen
COV E R Kristina Bength The Light that is Shared and Divided (detail) 2012 Watercolor on paper 115 × 110 cm INS I D E Kristina Bength The Light that is Shared and Divided 2012 Watercolor on paper 115 × 164 cm B AC K Kristina Bength The Light that is Shared and Divided 2012 Watercolor on paper 115 × 162 cm
Galleri Flach is proud to present a series of watercolor paintings, entitled The Light that is Shared and Divided, by the artist Kristina Bength. The paintings depict mental hospitals in different phases of construction and destruction. In her artistic practice, Bength deals with how photographic representation can be used in new forms of figuration. She tries to remember what one cannot remember by reusing photographic material depicting past times and events. Events of the past cannot return, but they can recur in new forms by using their archival storytelling potential. The mental hospital is a place for controlling the whole life of patients: their feelings, desires, behaviors, and thoughts. Definitions of sick and healthy are constructed in this interaction between institution and patient. The mental hospital is a kind of theater where roles are acted and values about normal and abnormal engage in and strengthen preexisting ideas about gender. A closed system arises where everyone has his or her role to play. In the water of the aquarelle develops disorder and control, liveliness and stillness, and the writing of photographic light comes in to sight. The light from the darkroom’s development process is recalled in some paintings, while others reflect the archive’s interior. The light of knowledge that shines within the psychiatric apparatus is never independent from its context. It is broken by what it touches upon and is split into directions that partly go beyond its own control. The same can be said about historians, photographers’ documentations, and the artist’s work, which takes this material as the point of departure. Kristina Bength (b. 1984) lives and works Stockholm. She graduated from the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 2008, and has widely exhibited in Sweden and abroad. She has received several scholarships and grants and is represented in both public and private collections.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.42
FOLE Y, NE W Y O R K
ALICE ATTIE
FO LEY: A LI CE ATTIE WEBS I T E www.foleygallery.com E- M A I L info @ foleygallery.com PHO N E +1 212 244 9081 CEL L +1 646 729 8117 CONTA C T N A M E Michael Foley
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Thomas Allen Richard Barnes Ina Jang Martin Klimas Henry Leutwyler Andrea Mastrovito Alexandre Orion Christa Parravani Casey Ruble David Trulli
COV E R Alice Attie Physics No. 1 2011 Ink on paper 16 × 12 in INS I D E Alice Attie Silence (detail) 2008 Ink on paper 30 × 22 in
Alice Attie continues to re-consider, redress and rewrite the formalities of language. Attie’s past drawing exhibitions at Foley Gallery were generated by the texts of our history’s literary master works. Her text becomes ever more abstracted; often a single word or phrase is re-iterated with miniscule inscription, allowing the accumulation of words to become something wholly other in its evolved form. Composed of countless tiny words, letters or numbers that coagulate, Attie’s drawings often investigate the shared terrain of writing and drawing, where fine lines mark collaboration between the imagination and the intellect. Writing about her artistic process, Attie observes that “…lines, as investigatory gestures, often pull us, as Victor Hugo said ‘towards the infinite,’ towards something that seems to tremble, as if the shimmer of the mind were passing through the hand. This is the force that seems to guide and urge the pulse of drawing.” In her most recent series, Class Notes, she composed drawings in both physics and philosophy seminars at Columbia University over a period of three years. Each drawing was made within the time frame of a single class. The philosophy and physics lectures on Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the philosophy of Islam and quantum physics and astronomy, respectively, address concepts and debates that occur at the meeting place of the tangible and the intangible. The physical and the metaphysical, the miniscule and the grand, a tangling and untangling of strands moving between what is legible and what is illegible, invoke these essentials tensions. The drawings are her explorations of interpretive possibility—inspired by the intersection of the aesthetic and the theoretical.
Alice Attie holds a Master’s Degree in Poetry and a Doctoral Degree in Comparative Literature. Her work has been widely collected, exhibited and published. Her drawings and photographs have been included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, The Studio Museum of Harlem and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 27
GALERIE FOR TLAAN 17, G HE NT
LAWRENCE MALSTAF
G A LERI E FO RTLA AN 17: LAWRENC E MALSTAF WEBS I T E www.fortlaan17.com E- M A I L galerie @ fortlaan17.com PHO N E +32 9 222 00 33 CEL L +32 475 55 01 77 CONTA C T N A M E Ischa Tallieu
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jacques Charlier Stief Desmet Manor Grunewald Pieter Laurens Mol Hermann Nitsch Eva Schlegel Kiki Smith Erica Svec Lotte Van den Audenaeren Zachary Wollard
COV E R Lawrence Malstaf Territorium 02010 – 02012 DC motors, Lanbox, aluminium, PS strings Dimensions variable 10 × 13 f t up to 36 × 36 f t INS I D E Lawrence Malstaf Conversation 02012 arduino microcontrollers, infrared sensors, chairs Dimensions variable (1 – 9 chairs) B AC K ( L E FT ) Lawrence Malstaf Shrink 01995 – 02012 PVC canvas, vacuum pump 7 × 10 f t B AC K ( R I G H T) Lawrence Malstaf Nemo Observatorium 02000 – 02010 fans, polystyrene particles, PVC canvas, steel structure 13 f t diameter, 12 f t high
The work of Lawrence Malstaf (b. 1972 — Bruges, Belgium; lives and works in Tromsø, Norway) is situated on the borderline between the visual and the theatrical. He develops installation and performance art with a strong focus on movement, coincidence, order and chaos, and immersive sensorial rooms for individual visitors. He also creates larger mobile environments dealing with space and orientation, often using the visitor as a co-actor. His projects involve advanced technology as a point of departure or inspiration and as a means for activating installations. Malstaf has received several international awards in the field of art and new technology. He is also well known as an innovative scenographer in the dance and theater world. In 2008 he received the Witteveen + Bos prize for Art + Technology (NL); in 2009 the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica (A); and in 2010 the Excellence Prize at The 13th Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (JP). In 2011 his project Pavilion was selected for iMinds Art&D-call (B). To develop Pavilion, he collaborated with the Ghent University Multimedia Lab. Living objects, kinetic architecture and physical interaction are characteristics of Malstaf’s installations. His responsive environments generate theatrical situations involving the visitor as an essential presence in their dramaturgy. In a complex play with unstable order, chance and change, his machines display emotion, doubt and other human qualities. Territorium, 02010 – 02012: A space is divided into four rooms by two walls. A E uclidean space moving like the XY-axis of a plotter. The four rooms are constantly changing in size. When one becomes larger another becomes smaller. However, the walls are nearly immaterial: vertical strings hanging down only indicate the plan of the walls. Together with light and shadow they may look like a sterile AutoCAD drawing or a projection. Yet when a string touches a visitor it curves and hesitates like only physical objects can. Conversation, 02012: A couple of vibrating chairs are slowly moving and turning randomly through the space. They seem to search and reject each other. When a visitor passes by or sits down, the chairs hesitate and then carefully try out different patterns. The patterns are not designed; it is a self-organizing system where new compositions and new behaviors arise spontaneously through the duration of the installation.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.4 4
FR ED LOND O N LIMITE D
GERALDINE [ SWAYNE ]
FRED [ LO N D ON ] L IMITED: GERALDINE SWAY NE WEBS I T E www.fred-london.com E- M A I L info @ fred-london.com PHO N E +44 207 323 0344 CEL L +44 771 218 3690 CONTA C T N A M ES Robin Page Fred Mann
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Joseph Bertiers Nayland Blake Peter Davis Godfried Donkor Susanne Johansson (ex Simonson) Alexandra Makhlouf Matthew McCaslin Ryan Riddington Greg Rook Anand Zenz
COV E R Geraldine Swayne Black Haired Rent Boy (detail) 2012 enamel on copper 3 × 2 in INS I D E Geraldine Swayne Boucheresque 2012 enamel on steel 3 × 5 in B AC K Geraldine Swayne Domestic Spanker in Orange Shoes 2012 enamel on copper 3 × 2 in
Geraldine Swayne was born in the UK. She lives and works in London. Her paintings are often included in high-profile exhibitions in London, the UK, and Europe, in solo exhibitions or alongside the work of such important international artists as Chantal Joffe, Dan Hays, Mke Silva, Neal Tate, and Tim Storey. In 1990 Geraldine won a prestigious Northern Arts Travel Award. She is also respected as a filmmaker and musician. In 1999 she made the world’s first Super-8 Imax film East End, with music performed by Nick Cave and narrated by Miriam Margolyes. It was shown at the London Film Festival in the same year. After leaving the film industry, Geraldine worked with Jake and Dinos Chapman, rebuilding the work, ‘Hell’. Since 2005, Geraldine has been the keyboard player and singer in the seminal “Krautrock” band, Faust. She has toured widely with them, playing and painting in museum and theatre spaces worldwide. In 2010, she was a finalist in the UK’s best-known painting competition, The John Moores Painting Prize. It culminated in an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and formed a key part of the Liverpool Biennial. She joined Fred [London] Limited in 2012, and her much anticipated first solo exhibition at the gallery will open in May 2013.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 3 9
FROSCH&POR TMANN, NE W Y O R K
EVA LAKE
FRO SCH & PO RTM ANN: EVA LAKE WEBS I T E www.froschportmann.com E- M A I L eva @ froschportmann.com PHO N E +1 646 820 9068 CEL L +1 646 266 5994 CONTA C T N A M ES Eva Frosch HP Portmann
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Raffaella Chiara Steve Greene Julia Kuhl Vicki Sher Hooper Turner Robert Yoder
COV E R Eva Lake Anonymous Woman No.12 2012 Collage 12 × 7 ¼ in INS I D E Eva Lake Target No. 41 (Ava) 2011 Collage 12.4 × 18 in B AC K Eva Lake Judd Montage No. 9 2007 Collage 7 ¼ × 8 ½ in
Before I ever collaged, I collected old magazines and nostalgia. I would read them cover to cover, ads and all — and still do. Smutty movie magazines from the ‘50s like Photoplay were probably my earliest fascination. My first collages were made in high school. By this time I was aware of Interview, Richard Hamilton, and Pop Art. Plus like many teenage girls, I devoured magazines aimed at beauty and fashion: American Girl, Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue. In 1978 I saw Dada and Surrealism Revisited at the Hayward Gallery in London while immersed in the original Punk Rock movement. Those two things changed everything for me. I saw how my own work was connected to a significant past. My collages were made for fanzines, mostly in black and white from a copy machine. By the early ‘80’s I was a post-punk buyer for a record store, while reading classic novels. My own work then, like the music subculture of the time, took a turn towards New Romanticism. Over the years I’ve made all kinds of work — painting, music, dance, performance — but photomontage is the most constant. I’ve called it Bedroom Art, as often that was the only place I had to work in. I completely relate to the “Cut with a Kitchen Knife” idea. You can make it out of a suitcase. I was never one to just slap things together, though sometimes images traveled around with me for decades before I used them. It is the medium which marries and mirrors the concerns of my time: love, labor, style, war, work, loneliness, respect, art. Because it was so personal and often private, it could survive. And because it often was not shown, it became even more personal.The work started out as messages to the masses but over time it became more like a diary. I studied art history, which often plays out in my work, as seen in The Judd Montages, the Targets and the Anonymous Women. I like to fluff what is meant to be serious and make serious what is seen as just fluff. For me beauty is fun but also a very serious business. Eva Lake, 2013
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 3 0
GALERIE JULIA GAR NATZ, C O LO G NE
VANESSA OPPENHOFF
G A LERI E J U LI A G ARNATZ: VANESSA OPPENHOFF WEBS I T E www.juliagarnatz.com E- M A I L info @ juliagarnatz.com PHO N E +49 221 340 6297 CEL L +49 170 186 2855 CONTA C T N A M E Julia Garnatz
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Siegfried Anzinger Gina Lee Felber Johanna Freise Robert Haiss Ilona Herreiner Marie Luise Lebschik Katarina Lönnby Adrian Norvid Ramona Schintzel Janet Werner
COV E R Vanessa Oppenhoff Foodtrucks 2012 Thread, Vellum, Newspaper, Tipp-Ex 166 x 100 cm INS I D E Vanessa Oppenhoff Monoceros 2010 Thread, Vellum, Newspaper, Photocopy, Tipp-Ex 22 × 30 cm B AC K Vanessa Oppenhoff Film Still „Desert Break“ 2005 DVD loop Box: ca. 19 × 23.5 × 50 cm
Vanessa Oppenhoff works with needle and thread on vellum. Sewing, a traditionally feminine medium since early mankind, has almost entirely disappeared from necessity in the West. Oppenhoff chose this medium as means of expression and has translated it into a contemporary pictorial language. She “draws” lines and sketches with needle and thread, thereby formally borrowing from the comic. However, the typically small formats go far beyond the cinematic or printed cartoon. Emulating collage, Oppenhoff irregularly stacks several layers above each other: newspapers, photocopies, fabric, wax, correction fluid, and on top always vellum — a solid, high-quality parchment that has its origins in the medieval illuminated manuscripts. Colorful threads connect the layers and leave the production process visible. Remaining threads are not trimmed nor hidden; they hang loose and become part of the image composition. Oppenhoff draws from Western imagery and experiences and plays with issues like interpersonal relationships, nature, science, consumption, or city culture. Enigmatic and sometimes humorous image compositions recall pictograms and allow a variety of associations. The same contents are found in Oppenhoff’s four- to five-minute short movies, which tell animated stories using sound but no spoken language. They recall the process of the sewed works, forming complex loops that appear to have no beginning nor end.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.4 3
GE GALER ÍA, MO NTE R R E Y
VARGAS – SUAREZ UNIVERSAL
G E G A LERÍ A : VA RGAS — SUAREZ UNIVERSAL WEBS I T E www.gegaleria.com
Thermal Dynamics, Orbital Debris and Telemetric Visualization of Frequencies: Vector Group Paintings from and Within Space.
E- M A I L info @ gegaleria.com
We tend to think of paintings as static, stable objects for our varied viewing experiences. The act of painting itself is regarded as a private, culturally valued and revered act as old as humanity itself. As painters adapt to the technologies of the day, painting becomes more layered — perhaps not physically layered, but conceptually layered, as well as multi-referential and multi-media oriented. My recent concerns regarding subsonic frequency vibration, thermal protection systems, analysis of force limits, and quasi-static load limits of aerospace design and spacecraft design has lead to creating paintings which not only function as a visual reference to these technological subjects but also contain a “voice” each their own. This voice is interpreted through painted linear logic, as well as through a soundtrack the viewer is able to feel and see but not hear. Whereby these paintings vibrate and become non-static objects using sub-sonic energy to create movement and patterns. The vibrating surface alludes to turbulence, music, and natural energies native to air pressure dynamics, as well as frequencies similar to the communications between whales, elephants and other mammals that communicate across vast distances. These paintings employ paint and thermal blankets used in aerospace architecture, all disposable materials in space, becoming orbiting space junk, polluting and disrupting communications. By using these materials as components in painting the works attempt to become more than just a sample reference but a actual artifact between art and science.
PHO N E +52 811 477 1367 CEL L +52 811 213 5040 CONTA C T N A M ES Gabriel Elizondo Lucía Lara
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Alfredo De Stefano Erika Harrsch Oscar Lozano Eugenia Martinez Segundo Planes Juan Miguel Pozo Ray Smith Emi Winter Santiago Ydáñez Jesus Zurita
Vargas-Suarez Universal, New York, 2013 COV E R Vargas — Suarez Universal Vector Structure 2012 Oil on canvas 60 × 48 in INS I D E Vargas — Suarez Universal View upon completion of Orbital Debris: E.V.A. 2012 Installation of oil enamel on thermal blanket paintings 24 × 24 in each B AC K Vargas — Suarez Universal Vector Group: Organic Compounds 2012 Oil on canvas 48 × 60 in
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FRED.GIAMPIETR O, NE W HAVE N
CLINT JUKKALA
FRED .GI A MPI ETRO: C LINT JUKKALA WEBS I T E www.giampietrogallery.com E- M A I L fredgiampietro @ gmail.com PHO N E +1 203 777 7760 CEL L +1 203 415 8713 CONTA C T N A M E Fred Giampietro
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Riley Brewster Melissa Brown Susan Carr Elizabeth Gourlay Cham Hendon Zachary Keeting Linda Lindroth Lucy Mink Enrico Riley Jonathan Waters
COV E R Clint Jukkala Terror Twighlight (detail) 2012 Oil on canvas 11 × 14 in INS I D E Clint Jukkala New Day Rising 2012 Oil and acrylic on canvas 9 × 12 in B AC K Clint Jukkala Sunshine in the Shade 2012 Oil on canvas 18 × 24 in
Clint Jukkala paints direct, intuitive images that hover on the edge of nameable things. Ostensibly abstract, his paintings evoke cultural, historical, and everyday references, from video games and cartoons to architecture and landscape. Using an elemental vocabulary of color, geometry, and textured surfaces, Jukkala’s work establishes a play between part and whole. Through the act of looking his paintings unfold, as window and eye-like forms become frames that reveal pictures within pictures and spatial ambiguities. While Jukkala’s work emerges out of the tradition of geometric abstraction, it plays with the genre’s conventions. At once reflective and irreverent, his paintings depict a realm in which rationality gives way to psychology, memory, and daily life. His work takes the viewer to remote and imagined places- from things bodily and tangible to sensation and experience. Saturated color has long been a driving force in Jukkala’s paintings. In his newest work he introduces the addition of highly textured surfaces, increasing the sense of spatial play. Paint application alternates between thin, dyed grounds, and heavy impasto, expanding pictorial depth and creating an immersive world that is visual and haptic, felt and analytic.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 3 6
GUIDI&S CHO E N, G E NO A
GIACOMO COSTA
G U I D I & SCH OEN : GIAC OMO C OSTA WEBS I T E www.guidieschoen.com E- M A I L info @ guidieschoen.com PHO N E +39 010 253 0557 CONTA C T N A M ES Guido Guidi Chico Schoen
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Olivo Barbieri Matteo Basilé Daniele Buetti Andrea Chiesi Davide La Rocca David Mramor Richard Kern Pugliese / Repetto Massimo Vitali Corrado Zeni
COV E R Giacomo Costa Plant 4 2011 C-Print 100 × 200 cm INS I D E Giacomo Costa Landscape 1_7_0 2013 C-Print 180 × 300 cm
The series Landscape is another chapter from the investigation that has characterized the poetry of Giacomo Costa. At the heart of these pieces is he relationship between man, his actions, and nature. In the text of the “European Landscape Convention” (Florence, 2000) landscape is defined as a certain portion of territory, as it is perceived by people, and whose character derives from natural and/or human factors and their interrelations. Moreover, it is conceived as an essential component of people’s living environment, expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage and foundation of their identity. Landscape is therefore the result of practices, knowledges, production systems, juridical traditions, social and economic organizations. It denotes physical, anthropogenic, biological and ethnic features, always binding to the observer’s perception and life. Landscape is the appearance of a place, the formal element of the nature-culture system, synthesis and expression of a region. It’s a language, a transmission of information, independent, dialectical, articulated. As a key element of individual and social well-being it should be safeguarded, planned, organized and managed in accordance with rights and responsibilities for everyone. Previously, Costa analyzed the city in its absolute dominant role respect to nature. The result of this investigation was translated with images of huge construction sites where buildings seem to grow up to conquer the world, completely suffocating environment. In the series Atti (2006) the destruction of cities by metaphysical elements like giant ships highlighted the fragility of landscape facing the consequences of unwise development patterns that our society has embraced and continues to pursue. In 2008 the unstoppable destruction of cities and of human civilization is fully realized. No trace remains of the illusion of being able to still work on landscape. There are only a few ruins that surround such a nature that has now taken over growing exponentially wild and vengeful. These Secret Gardens are the starting point of the research that lead to the work presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, entitled Private Garden. The Landscape series represents the total defeat of nature which, having triumphed over man and having reclaimed its space, takes upon itself the indelible signs left by the senseless behavior of man. An impossible landscape, though sour and unfriendly — a lifeless place without a geographical connotation, an area where the substances we have abused become the main subject of the reality described. A world flattened by hydrocarbons, covered with plastic, saturated with toxic agents, composed of acid ice and other impossible substances. This ambiguity underlines the urgent need to reflect on the significance of man’s interaction with environment, not only in search of new sustainable technologies to solve development problems resulting from a resource-hunger, but also to formulate a new concept of life style and development.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 23
H ALSE Y MCKAY GALLERY, EAS T HAMP TO N, NY
TIMOTHY BERGSTROM
H A LSEY M CK AY GALLERY: TIMOTHY BERGSTROM WEBS I T E www.halseymckay.com E- M A I L info @ halseymckay.com PHO N E +1 631 604 5770 CEL L +1 917 568 5271 CONTA C T N A M ES Ryan Wallace Hilary Schaffner
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Colby Bird Ben Blatt Patrick Brennan Chris Duncan Elise Ferguson Joseph Hart Denise Kupferschmidt Lauren Luloff Hilary Pecis Matt Rich
COV E R Timothy Bergstrom Glound 4 2012 Glue, acrylic, wire, acrylic and pigment on canvas 28 × 24 in INS I D E Timothy Bergstrom Glound 10 (left) Glound 2 (right) 2012 Glue, acrylic, wire, acrylic, pigment on canvas 40 × 30 in (lef t) 48 × 72 in (right) B AC K Timothy Bergstrom Glound 9 (left), Glound 4 (right) 2012 Glue, acrylic, wire, acrylic, pigment on canvas 40 × 30 in (left) 30 × 24 in (right)
Obsessed with inner workings of the body, the supernatural and influenced by the layered, repetitive sounds of electronica, Timothy Bergstrom’s paintings affect a gurgling and grumbling pulse against the wall. Straightforward materials such as hot glue, wire, and paint synthesize together on canvas to create the notion of the Glound, the artists’ aptly named amalgamation of glue and sound. The wire constructs project off the canvas, pregnant with possibility and ripe with the potential of an ungovernable noise. Timothy Bergstrom received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and was the recipient of the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey Mckay Gallery and Roberto Paradise Gallery, Puerto Rico. Other projects include exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery in New York; Nudashank in Baltimore; The Suburban in Oak Park, IL; Devening Projects and Hungry Man Gallery in Chicago. Timothy lives and works in Brooklyn.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.18
GALLER IA HE INO , HE LS INKI
IC-98
G A LLERI A H EI N O: IC -98 WEBS I T E www.galleriaheino.com E- M A I L info @ galleriaheino.com PHO N E +35 89 672 678 CONTA C T N A M ES Kati-Maarit Ritvanen Rauli Heino
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Axel Antas Lauri Astala Elina Brotherus Miklos Gáal Hanna Haaslahti Susanna Majuri Topi Ruotsalainen Pekka Sassi Kim Simonsson Mika Taanila
COV E R IC-98 Oikoumene (detail) INS I D E IC-98 Arkhipelago (Navigating the Tides of Time) (sketch) 2013 Media 3-channel HD-animation B AC K ( L E FT ) IC-98 Oikoumene 2012 custom made rotating table (maple, electric motor); architectural model (laser cut steel); real-time HD video with CGI-effects (camera, computer, LCD-screen); double vitrine frame (inkjet on archival paper) ø 74.8 in, height: 29.5 in (tabletop), 19.7 in (model) B AC K ( R I G H T) IC-98 with Mikael Brygger & Henriikka Tavi In large, well-organized termite colonies 2012 labyrinth built from 81 standard retractable belt stanchions, custom printed text on retractable belts 342.5 × 342.5 in
IC-98 (founded in 1998) is Patrik Söderlund and Visa Suonpää. IC-98 is interested in events that did not take place, fantastic connections between things, heresies and pure systems of thought, the presence of history in everyday life, the body politic, social formations and architectural constructions, control mechanisms and techniques for escaping from them. Recently, IC-98 has concentrated on artist publications, installations and especially animated films, which combine classical draughtsmanship and digital effects. Often these media are merged to produce thematic chains or context-specific sculptural installations. These new works build on the themes of their animated film A View from the Other Side (2011) and the sculptural real-time video installation Oikoumene (2012). Arkhipelagos (Navigating the Tides of Time) is an animation triptych, whilst The Island of Atlas a sculptural installation. In Arkhipelagos (Navigating the Tides of Time), the material debris present in the classical riverside building in A View from the Other Side has broken free from the spatiotemporal gravity of history. What remains is open water and rafts built from the debris — the remains of a sunken world. The rafts no longer navigate the treacherous waters of the archipelago — they are the archipelago, a loose community without roots. The rafts create temporary groups, gravitating towards each other only to part again, carried by the winds and currents. If we look at this scene in the framework of Oikoumene, the same rafts could just as well be sailing in the Mediterranean, off the Australian coast, in the Caribbean — aiming for the Promised Land. Climate, economy, social and political struggle — these are all present in this reimagining of the Raft of Medusa, simple at first glance but complex in its references. The Island of Atlas looks familiar to those who have seen Oikoumene: an island built of steel walls. This time, instead of a circular form, there are two rectangular islands — or to be exact, an island looking at its mirror image in the future: one shiny steel city descends into the depths of the ocean, another ascends on the other side, badly oxidized. We are looking at Oikoumene, or Atlantis, the unfortunate sea power in different phases of its history: a gleaming city, a sunken city, a city reborn — or redeveloped. IC-98: www.socialtoolbox.com
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.0 2
RI CHARD HELLER GALLER Y, LO S A NG E LE S
AMY BENNETT
RI CH A RD H ELLER GALLERY: AMY BENNETT WEBS I T E www.richardhellergallery.com E- M A I L hellergallery @ verizon.net PHO N E +1 310 453 9191 CEL L +1 310 866 1653 CONTA C T N A M E Richard Heller
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Corey Arnold Ernesto Caivano Daniel Clowes Edward Del Rosario Ryan Foster David Jien Brendan Monroe Marion Peck Paco Pomet Devin Troy Strother
COV E R Amy Bennett Setting the Stage (detail) 2012 oil on panel 10 × 18 in INS I D E Amy Bennett Off-Stage (detail) 2012 oil on panel 12 × 20 in B AC K Amy Bennett Celebrity (detail) 2012 oil on panel 5 × 9.75 in
Richard Heller Gallery is proud to present new paintings by Amy Bennett. Bennett’s paintings of fictional narratives explore themes of fragility, isolation and vulnerability. As a still life for each painting Bennett builds a detailed 3D model. The paintings are representations of a miniaturized world playing at reality, depicting suspenseful scenes in which something meaningful could happen at any moment. Bennett’s recent settings include a hospital waiting room, a restaurant, a theater, and a home so damaged that its insides are revealed for all to see. The tension between privacy and a search for connection ties many of the paintings together. “Developing a scene in 3D gives me complete creative control and helps me to process and extract bits of my experience in order to make what is intuitive and dream-like something more concrete and real — something I can observe real light affecting. While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my characters. I try to allow the awkwardness of the model to translate into the paintings to simulate the inadequacies of the memories, dreams and imagination that inspired the images in the first place.” Amy Bennett (b. 1977 — lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) has participated in numerous exhibitions including XS, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2012); Otherworldly, Museum of Arts and Design, NY (2011) & MUba Eugène Leroy, France (2013); Sore Spots, solo show at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm (2011); Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NY (2011); and Vacationland, solo show at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2009). Recently, she was a resident at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space Program and was awarded The American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and a NYFA Fellowship.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.0 2
RI CHARD HELLER GALLER Y, LO S A NG E LE S
DEVIN TROY STROTHER
R. H ELLER GA LLERY: DEVIN TROY STROTHER WEBS I T E www.richardhellergallery.com E- M A I L hellergallery @ verizon.net PHO N E +1 310 453 9191 CEL L +1 310 866 1653 CONTA C T N A M E Richard Heller
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Devendra Banhart Amy Bennett Ernesto Caivano Neil Farber Ryan Foster David Jien Brendan Monroe Paco Pomet Andrew Sendor Yuko Someya
COV E R Devin Troy Strother 297 Niggas on Linen (detail) 2012 acrylic and cut paper on linen 72 × 60 in INS I D E Devin Troy Strother Ohhhh, That’s Just my Gurrrrrllll Palameena 2012 acrylic and auto paint on aluminum 40 × 67 × 12 in B AC K Devin Troy Strother Contemporary African Compositional Arrangements / Guuuuuuuuurrrrlllll, Hallelujah Hallelijah, „I told you it was all about space relations and limitations“ said Shay Shay to Sha’naynay 2012 acrylic, cut paper, wood glass and mixed media on linen over panel
60 × 84 in
Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present an installation of new works by Devin Troy Strother. The presentation at Volta will consist of large-scale figurative sculptures, paintings from the Niggas on Linen series, and works from the Contemporary African Compositional Arrangements series. While the works formally address the issues of race and identity, Strother is more concerned with creating a narrative through the work that depicts a more contemporary view of “the struggle.” Not necessarily the struggle of the black man but a more universal struggle of all individuals to find their own sense of uniqueness. The works address ideas of celebration, inequities, joy and utopianism and how these ideas inform certain stereotypes. Strother has participated in exhibitions including, Stranger than Fiction at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2010), Front, Back Side to Side at Richard Heller Gallery (2012), My Nigga and I at Bendixen Contemporary Art in Copenhagen (2012), The Me and You, Your Mother and Even your Cousin Too & The Hey Sister, Soul Sister, Go Sister, Woah Sister, at Monya Rowe Gallery (2011), New York, and The Harlem Postcards series at the Studio Museum, Harlem (2011). Strother received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2009 and completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and sculpture in Skowhegan, ME in 2010. Strother lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.0 4
RO BERT HENRY CONTEMPOR ARY, B R O O KLY N
RICHARD GARRISON
RO BERT H EN RY PRESENTS: RIC HARD GARRISON WEBS I T E www.roberthenrycontemporary.com E- M A I L info @ roberthenrycontemporary.com PHO N E +1 718 473 0819 CONTA C T N A M ES Henry Chung Robert Walden
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Mike Childs James Cullinane Elise Engler Liz Jaff Colin Keefe Robert Lansden Sharon Lawless Derek Lerner Jerry Walden Andrew Zarou
COV E R Richard Garrison Circular Color Scheme: JC Penny, April 1 – 30 2012, Pages 2 – 23, “April Rainbow” (detail) 2012 Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper 25 × 25 in INS I D E Richard Garrison Circular Color Scheme: Rite Aid, January 3 – 9, 2009, Pages 10 – 11 (detail) 2009 Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper 22 ¼ × 30 ¼ in B AC K Richard Garrison Circular Color Scheme: Ocean State Job Lot, November 26-December 1, 2010, Page 1, “10 Hour Blockbusters!” (detail) 2011 Gouache, watercolor and graphite on paper 11 × 11 in
Richard Garrison analyzes ubiquitous materials and objects from the suburban American landscape, such as Sunday newspaper sale circulars, drive-thru window menu color schemes and product packaging. Through a process of careful scientific-like scrutiny Garrison dissects and restructures the color schemes of common everyday objects and creates Minimalist compositions that expose the beauty in the banal. This deconstruction of quotidian objects and experience is a personal, non-judgmental, examination of the visual, emotional and conceptual aspects of consumerism. Garrison’s recontextualization of aspects of consumer culture affords us a new perspective on commonplace objects. In his series, Circular Color Schemes, (puns intended), Mr. Garrison measures the amount of each color from Sunday newspaper sale circulars and then in concentric rings of color graphs the amount of each color in gouache and watercolor on paper. Each wedge of color in the circle is marked as to which picture of the product it originates from, like “dvd player” or “flat-screen T.V.” The resulting compositions look like a cross between a color wheel and a Joseph Albers painting. Garrison’s glorification of the insignificant similar to Zen philosophy is central to his studio practice. Coupled with Hanne Darboven-like analytical quantification and qualification his studio practice offers us a thoughtful re-examination of objects and experiences ubiquitous to the American experience. Richard Garrison was born and raised in Albany, NY and received his BS in Studio Art from the College of Saint Rose, Albany in 1993 and an MFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1995. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA and the Queens Museum of Art. He lives and maintains his studio in Delmar, NY.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.18
HILGERBROTKUNS TH ALLE , VIE NNA
MIHA ŠTRUKELJ
H I LG ERBRO TK U N S THALLE: MIHA ŠTRUKELJ WEBS I T E www.hilger.at E- M A I L ernst.hilger @ hilger.at PHO N E +43 1512 5315 CEL L +43 664 340 4728 CONTA C T N A M ES Ernst Hilger Michael Kaufmann
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Asgar / Gabriel Clifton Childree Oliver Dorfer Babak Golkar Peterson Kamwathi Ángel Marcos Brian McKee Cameron Platter Michael Scoggins Simon Vega
COV E R Miha Štrukelj STOZICE III (detail) 2011 oil on canvas, raw canvas, pencil, charcoal, masking tape, pastel 170 × 140 cm INS I D E Miha Štrukelj MELTING POT (installation view at INVISIBLE CITIES, MASS MoCA, North Adams MA) 2012 charcoal, masking tape, strings, wood panels approx. size 700 × 1800 cm B AC K ( L E FT ) Miha Štrukelj 10th AVENUE 2012 oil on canvas, pencil 200 × 140 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Miha Štrukelj UNDERCONSTRUCTION 2009 pencil on paper 95 × 65 cm
Miha Štrukelj’s works draw ambiguous confines of space and the concept of place, focusing on urban landscapes and creating a new sense of place by combining different real or fictitious elements, or by abstracting real topologies. He has also explored the painting process, creating paintings and drawings that question their own existence and the process of creation, trying to maintain the original moment of creation in the work, which challenges the viewers’ perception of painting. This exploration has led Štrukelj to experiment how painting and drawing function in physical space, and he has attempted to bring them into space by constructing large-scale installations. Štrukelj represented Slovenia at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and has received several awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Grant and the Henkel Drawing Award, plus he has had residencies like the APT Studio Program (Artists Pension Trust), New York and ISCP-International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York. His works are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; Ljubljana, Slovenia; the European Central Bank Collection, Frankfurt, Germany; the collection of Societe Gernerale, Paris, France; and the Uni Credit Art Collection, Vienna, Austria; as well as in private collections around the world. Exhibitions (selection): Invisible Cities, MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA) in 2012; 4th Beijing Biennial, NAMOC National Art Museum China (Beijing, China) in 2010; plus solo exhibitions at Hilger Contemporary (Wien, Austria) in 2008 and 2011.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.0 5
H PGRP GALLERY NEW Y OR K, NEW Y O R K C ITY
DONALD LOKUTA
H PGRP G A LLERY NEW Y ORK: DONALD LOKUTA WEBS I T E http://hpgrpgallery.com/newyork/ E- M A I L hpgrpgallery @ hpgrp.com PHO N E +1 212 727 2491 CONTA C T N A M E Shuhei Yamatani
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Adam Bateman Adela Leibowitz Becky Yee Kate Peters Katsuhiro Saiki Nao Matsumoto
COV E R Donald Lokuta Man On the Edge 2009 Black acrylic on gelatin silver print 17 ¼ × 14.6 in INS I D E Donald Lokuta Couple at Stone Railing (detail) 2009 Black acrylic on gelatin silver print 17 ¼ × 14.6 in B AC K Donald Lokuta Three Women On the Beach 2009 Black acrylic on gelatin silver print 17 ¼ × 14.6 in
IN P L ATO ’ S CAV E The series of photographs In Plato’s Cave is about a world of illusion and belief. The photographs were inspired by the “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. In this metaphor, Plato asks us to imagine prisoners, unable to see even their fellow prisoners. They are forced to face the far wall, and are only able to hear sounds and voices and to see a distorted reality of shadow figures cast on the cave wall before them. Being born in that environment, the inhabitants of the cave would believe that what they see and hear represents the reality of the world. Plato presents us with the possibility that we are the prisoners, and what we believe is truth may be based on illusion formed with limited information. And a reluctance to analyze and use our intelligence will lead us to a misconception based on illusion and belief. In our modern world, we may accept what we see and hear at face value, bringing us no closer to the truth than shadow figures on the cave wall. Donald Lokuta’s career as an artist spans over forty years. His artwork is published widely and has been included in over three hundred exhibitions. Lokuta’s work is in numerous private and museum collections, including the Art Museum at Princeton University; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Museum of the City of New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin; the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; the New York Historical Society; the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City; the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, MO; the Smithsonian Institution (Museum of American History) in Washington D.C. and many others. hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK was established in 2005 and is located in the Chelsea section of New York City. We represent a wide range of international contemporary artists. The gallery showcases established artists as well as emerging talent, giving young artists a public forum for their work.
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INDA GALLERY, B U D A P E S T
BALÁZS KICSINY
I N D A GA LLERY: BALÁZS KIC SINY WEBS I T E www.indagaleria.hu E- M A I L ataller @ freemail.hu brigimuladi @ gmail.com CEL L +36 70 316 4472 CONTA C T N A M ES Ágnes Tallér Brigitta Muladi
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Marianne Csáky Lajos Csontó Márta Czene Zsófia Fáskerti Zsolt Ferenczy Judit Fischer Kim Corbisier Kamen Stoyanov Ádám Szabó Zsófia Szemző
COV E R Balázs Kicsiny Killing Time 2012 Mixed media installation Life-size Photo by Balá zs Kicsiny, Mildred Lane Kemper Ar t Museum, Saint Louis, USA INS I D E Balázs Kicsiny Killing Time 2012 Mixed media installation Life-size Photo by Richard Sprengeler, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, USA
Balázs Kicsiny’s multimedia installation Killing Time was first exhibited in 2012 at the Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis. The installation has three components: the army, the circus and the restaurant. In all of them people are served: to protect or kill, to entertain or feed. The installation depicts how these functions are mixed up, confusing us as to who is serving who and for what purpose, and where we are in fact caught amongst these components. The installation evokes a provocative dichotomy of motion and stillness, referencing themes of time and its relationship to space and history. “In keeping with the violent intimidations of the title, all potential lead-ins to pastiche or political commentary are dead on arrival, making the exhibition feel like a bizarre netherworld existing beyond the familiar confines of narrative time...Kicsiny radically enacts a ‘frozen performance’ — as his work is often described — during which one can only pause and submit to its cues. It’s a massive game board poised for war, dinner or broadcast-where pawns forever mourn their manipulation by an off-camera arbiter.” Jessica Baran, Art in America, May 2012
“In Killing Time, history is enacted metaphorically, as its anonymous agents (allseeing and recording, yet with their own faces hidden from view) engage in activities that are by turns banal, burlesque, and sadistic, if not all three at once. There is a striking tension between motion and stillness apparent in Killing Time, and this quality is a mainstay in Kicsiny’s practice.” Ivy Cooper, Artforum, April, 2012
The installation consists of four life-size figures, dressed as “The Chef”, “The Waitress” and two figures as “The Couple”. They are standing in an area covered with sand. All the figures are dressed in specific outfits. The Chef is in white working clothes with a checkered apron. The Waitress is in a black dress with checkered collars and also with a checkered apron. The Couple are dressed in a funeral like black suit and black dress, with white collars. All the four figures are wearing soldier’s helmets, with surveillance cameras on and protective glasses. Their face and helmets are also covered with the checkered pattern. The Chef and The Waitress are caught in a frozen moment, whilst participating in a knife-throwing spectacle. The Chef, in the one hand holds the knife while with the other hand is poised ready to throw the knife at the Waitress. She is fixed to a rotating circular target. The Waitress’ and The Chef’s helmet cameras are filming the proceedings. The Couple’s helmet‘s cameras are filming also although covered by a funeral veil. They sit on chairs at a table. The surface of the table is made up of two LCD TV screens, which broadcast the pictures captured by the cameras of The Chef and The Waitress. The seated Couple are holding knives in both hands, the same types as the ones The Chef is using.
Killing Time installation was supported by Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist program.
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JARMUSCHEK + PAR TNE R , B E R LIN
MARC FROMM
J A RMU SCH EK + PARTNER: MARC FROMM WEBS I T E www.jarmuschek.de PHO N E +49 30 2859 9070 CONTA C T N A M ES Kristian Jarmuschek Stefan Trinks
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Oliver Gröne Carina Linge Dieter Lutsch Harding Meyer Nika Neelova Martha Parsey Markus Putze Jacob Roepke Carsten Weitzmann Jürgen Wolf
COV E R Marc Fromm Junge Dame mit Haustier (Young Lady with pet) 2009 Basswood, Stuffed animal, Steel 235 × 175 × 245 cm INS I D E Marc Fromm Esstablett 1 2010 Relief, resin paint 150 × 210 × 6 cm B AC K Marc Fromm Rolex (detail) 2009 Relief, Alderwood, oil, gold, Maassar, nacre, strass 150 × 100 × 5 cm
“In order to be able to understand reality and orient oneself within today’s day and age one must know the past,“ says Marc Fromm. The origin of ideas and the critical awareness thereof are central ideas in the artist’s work. So it seems to be a logical consequence that the recurring theme in his work is the adaptation of sculptures and paintings from past epochs. It is not only the art historical background or the temporal context of the respective role model work of art that move the artist to create his new interpretations, it is “the search for depth within the surface“, that guides him in his work. His work is consumed with our attitude towards reality. The observer is constantly confronted with his own perception of this reality. Furthermore, all of his work adheres to certain mysteriousness. They fascinate, surprise or even embarrass — the ideal prerequisites for a fruitful examination of the work and its origin as well as for “the search for depth within the surface.” After finishing carpentry school, Mark Fromm (b. 1971 — Langen) completed his training to become a wood carver. He studies illustration design in Hamburg and sculpting in Halle on the Saale. When he graduated he was a scholarship holder of the Art Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH NU MBE R 1.0 8
JENK INS J OHN SON GALLERY, NEW YOR K / S AN FR A NC IS C O
LYNN ALDRICH
J EN K I N S J O H N SON GALLERY: LY NN ALDRIC H WEBS I T E www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com E- M A I L nyc @ jenkinsjohnsongallery.com sf@jenkinsjohnsongallery.com PHO N E +1 212 629 0707 +1 415 677 0770 CONTA C T N A M ES Karen Jenkins-Johnson Karen Gilbert
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Nicolas Africano Ben Aronson Melissa Cooke Lalla Essaydi Scott Fraser Julia Fullerton-Batten Julian Opie Vanessa Prager Skip Steinworth Timotheus Tomicek
COV E R Lynn Aldrich Sky Light (Noon) 2009 lampshade, wood, modeling compound, gesso, acrylic, oil 44 × 44 × 8 in / 111.76 × 111.76 × 20.32 cm INS I D E Lynn Aldrich Desert Springs 2005 – 2009 steel downspouts, gutter extensions, gutter corners, enamel 59 × 70 × 62 in / 149.86 × 177.8 × 157.48 cm B AC K Lynn Aldrich Free Refill 2013 steel downspouts, gutter extensions, roof shingles, vinyl paint 27 × 27 × 15 in / 68.58 × 68.58 × 38.1 cm
“[Following] in the footsteps of the seminal bricoleur artist, Marcel Duchamp, scouting for manufactured objects that she subsequently hand-fabricates into sculptures. Transforming the known into something curious, intriguing, and unexpected, [Aldrich’s] newest sculptures convert drainage spouts into tree monsters reminiscent of German fairy tales or model green and blue garden hoses into the illusion of cresting ocean waves.” – Collette Chattopadhyay, Sculpture Magazine Los Angeles artist Lynn Aldrich’s sculptures use colorful and textured mass- produced items to raise questions about the state of the environment, natural resources, and human consumption. Her work references such concepts as deforestation, water supply, plastic accumulating in the ocean, coral reef degradation, flora and fauna, knowledge, and spirituality. Termed “Home Depot Pop” in a recent article in LA Weekly, Aldrich’s 21st century interpretations of Ready-Made sculptures embrace the physical purpose of the object employed, using hoses or pipes to represent water flow or lampshades to represent natural and artificial light. Her work brings environmental and transcendental awareness to viewers, challenging their expectations and offering further insight into our relationship to our natural and scientific world. Adrich states, “I go shopping — for unexpected materials or objects, a kind of up-dated, 19th century expedition to explore exotic locals, wonder at diversity, acquire knowledge, and collect data or specimens. Then, back in the studio, I design and construct, inspired by the simplicity and directness of Minimalism. Humility and irony seem more appropriate than angst, but there is an environmental concern or even apocalyptic understatement to many works.” Lynn Aldrich has shown extensively both nationally and internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and an upcoming retrospective at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Art in America. Her work is in the public collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Calder Foundation, New York; and the New York Public Library, among others.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.11
GALLER Y JOE, P HILA D E LP HIA
NICOLE PHUNGRASAMEE FEIN
G A LLERY J OE: N I COLE PHUNGRASAMEE FEIN WEBS I T E www.galleryjoe.com E- M A I L mail @ galleryjoe.com PHO N E +1 215 592 7752 CONTA C T N A M E Rebecca Kerlin
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Astrid Bowlby Christine Hiebert Sharka Hyland Rob Matthews Alex Paik Charles Ritchie Mia Rosenthal Mark Sheinkman Allyson Strafella Lynne Woods Turner
Nicole Phungrasamee Fein’s watercolor drawings are created one line at a time. From the slow accumulation of lines emerges a field. In her new work, wide lines are densely layered, resulting in atmospheric fields with an ambiguous sense of depth. The discipline of her practice makes for an experience both tense and tranquil. “The very first patterns were the simplest, the most basic; one line touched the next, and a field was made out of these lines touching. One day, I turned the paper ninety degrees and crossed over those lines, and a grid appeared. Every drawing since then has been another iteration, a variation on that idea; changing the spacing or the overlapping, changing the width of the line… I do keep coming back to the simplest drawings, in which each line touches the edge of the previous line. Those drawings keep me grounded. They are the essence of my practice.” Fein’s drawings are included in numerous public and private collections including The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA. Nicole Phungrasamee Fein lives and works in San Francisco, CA. She has had three solo shows at Gallery Joe, in 2006, 2009, and 2012.
COV E R Nicole Phungrasamee Fein 1081312 (detail) 2012 watercolor on paper 12 × 12 in INS I D E Nicole Phungrasamee Fein 1082812 (detail) 2012 watercolor on paper 12 × 12 in B AC K Nicole Phungrasamee Fein 1081312 2012 watercolor on paper 12 × 12 in
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 25
KAVACHNINA CONTEMP O R A R Y, MIA MI
SALUSTIANO
K AVA CH N I N A CO NTEMPORARY: SALUSTIANO WEBS I T E www.kavachnina.com E- M A I L info@kavachnina.com PHO N E +1 305 448 2060 CEL L +1 786 355 4394 CONTA C T N A M E Gala Kavachnina
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Emil Alzamora Scott Ashley Jon Davis John La Huis Angela Lergo Alejandro Mendoza Artem Mirolevich Armando Romero Marco Nereo Rotelli
COV E R Salustiano Winter. Salva 2012 Natural pigments and acrylic resin on canvas 61 × 47 in INS I D E Salustiano Bus Stops in the Rain (Maria con Coca-cola) 2012 Natural pigments and acrylic resin on canvas 80 × 61 in B AC K ( L E FT ) Salustiano Maria con Tejera 2012 color pencil on paper 29 × 22 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Salustiano Sin titulo (Jorge) 2012 color pencil on paper 29 × 22 in
Salustiano’s work has been exhibited in the most important museums, galleries and art fairs in the world: from New York to Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, and Seoul. As a centrepiece to his international contemporary trajectory, he was selected to participate in the international exhibition The Missing Peace, along with artists of the same stature as of Anish Kapoor, Bill Viola, and Marina Abramovic. This project, which began in Los Angeles in 2006 (UCLA Fowler Museum), has visited Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Tokyo, Madrid and Stockholm. Salustiano’s piece Reincarnation was chosen as the exhibition’s official image on its world tour. It would seem convenient to compare the work of Salustiano to those of the Italian Renaissance masters. The physical shapes of his canvases mirror those of wallbased frescoes and Michelangelo’s ‘tondos’, he reinstates the three-quarter posture for his subjects, and he bathes the canvases in multiple glazes of a sensuous, pulsating red in the same mode of production as van Eyck had done 500 years prior. But what transports Salustiano’s work into the 21st Century are the subjects themselves: children, adolescents, and young adults bearing the worldliness of living in the Postmodern. E M O TIO N: For me, emotion is a key word in contemporary art and should continue to be so in the future. In recent years, artists have tried to flee from ‘emotion’: saturated with every kind of visual stimulus, they have been more concerned with making an ‘impact’ on the spectator than in touching an emotional fibre. I strongly believe that emotion should be the principal motivation and purpose of the artist. For centuries art has emotionally impacted upon, moved or even perturbed the spectator; and this ‘interior’ movement has contributed to the evolution of mankind. I also think that even if the artist intends to stimulate the intellect of his or her audience, then this should be done through ‘emotion’. In my work, emotion is the raw material. What I mean is that I work with each of my paintings as if you could scratch through the surface of the canvas and find life teaming below. For this reason, my purpose is to craft each painting with the same raw materials that life itself works with: sentiments, longings, dreams, frustrations, the wish to overcome, to grow and to transcend. These impulses are not only inherent to human beings: we can see the same in every ant or bacteria. Their desire is to transcend themselves, to reach immortality through their DNA. And they do this will all their determination, with their life. Why should art, an ‘accessory’, have lesser aspirations than an amoeba? Salustiano
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.07
KEVIN KAVANAG H, D U B LIN
DIANA COPPERWHITE
K EVI N K AVA N A G H : DIANA C OPPERWHITE WEBS I T E www.kevinkavanagh.ie E- M A I L info @ kevinkavanagh.ie PHO N E +35 31 475 9514 CEL L +35 38 6396 2248 CONTA C T N A M ES Kevin Kavanagh Banbha Mc Cann
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Elaine Byrne Oliver Comerford Vanessa Donoso Lopez Nevan Lahart Sean Lynch Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh Mick O’Dea Geraldine O’Neill Dermot Seymour Ulrich Vogl
COV E R Diana Copperwhite Blind Date 2012 Oil on canvas 30 × 25 cm INS I D E Diana Copperwhite An Island from the Day Before 2011 Installation Shot B AC K Diana Copperwhite Glimmer 2012 Oil on canvas 80 × 80 cm
“Diana Copperwhite’s work focuses on how the human psyche processes information and looks at the mechanisms of how we formulate what is real. With her work, she is fully aware that such realities may only hold validity for an instant, and that we are constantly processing and changing what we logically hold as experience and memory. Layering fragmented sources that range from personal memory to science, from media and internet to personal memory, Copperwhite’s canvases become worlds in which the real is unreal, and this unreality is in a constant state of reforming.” Noel Kelly, Director of Visual Artist Ireland
Diana Copperwhite (b. 1969) studied Fine Art Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design and The National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She completed an MFA at Winchester School of Art, Barcelona in 2000. In 2007 she was winner of the AIB Art Prize and in 2008 she was a finalist in the Guasch Coranty Fundacio Painting Prize, Centre Cultural Metropolita Tecia Sala, Barcelona. She completed a Project Residency in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (2008) and was invited for an artist’s residency at the Josef Albers Foundation Connecticut, USA (2012). Recent exhibitions include: The Fold at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art (Carlow); New Works Visiting Artists at Graphic Studio Gallery (Dublin); Graphic Studio: 50 Years in Dublin at Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); The Mind was Dreaming the World was its Dream (Navan), curated by Jacqui McIntosh; and with Anna Bjerger and Oliver Comerford at Kevin Kavanagh (Dublin). Kevin Kavanagh is one of the country’s premier galleries showing Irish and international contemporary art. Founded in 1998, in 2008 the gallery moved to a 135m² space on Chancery Lane in Dublin’s city centre, designed by Architect Philip Crowe of MCO Project, Dublin. It represents both established and younger artists from Ireland and abroad. The gallery’s annual programme consists of 10 solo and two curated group exhibitions as well as special events, screenings, performances and participation at international art fairs. Since 1998 the gallery has published over 20 books on Irish art.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.10
GALERIE YUKIKO KAWA S E , PA R IS
STEVEN TABBUTT
G A LERI E YU K I K O KAWASE: STEVEN TABBUTT WEBS I T E http://yukikokawase.free.fr E- M A I L yukikokawase @ msn.com PHO N E +33 1 4044 0132 CEL L +33 6 2952 0122 CONTA C T N A M E Yukiko Kawase
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Billeneeve François Chaignaud Sarah Garzoni Andres Laracuente Mari Minato Daisuke Nagaoka Toul Otsuki Anthony Peskine Leigh Ruple Barbara Ryckewaert
COV E R Steven Tabbutt Infest (detail) 2011 Mixed Media on Paper 11.5 × 19 in INS I D E Steven Tabbutt Conquistador (detail) 2008 Mixed Media on Paper 18 × 12 in
Combining classical painting and drawing, Steven Tabbutt’s work of rare dramatic intensity finds its roots in the aesthetic and narrative of fairy tales, legends, and mythology. It reflects a strange and transient reality that opposes the fantasy of protected childhood and the lost illusions of corrupted adulthood. It is a troubling mixture of realism and idealization, of pure innocence and deep consciousness, an emergency of eschatological order. Complex images: The first impression is hard to describe. You discover a visual proliferation of allegories and metaphors which try to translate a world of ideas into images. His ideas are more than scant, drawn from the collective memories and the environment of his childhood. Ecology, nature, life and death are also favorite themes and raise numerous questions. Steven “digs up the original symbols and guides them to an end”. Those recurring symbols may be borrowed from simple elements of ordinary materials like a string or a fur. He projects through the association of theses every day objects a folkloric and quirky universe born from his personal fascinations. Ideal and disenchantment: Steven claims that mythology and child literature have “revealed him an ideal of fantasy” where human beings, animals and nature harmoniously coexist. But under the misleading appearance of an idyllic world, Steven is aware of the harsh realities of adulthood and their dark sides one can’t imagine when still a child. He is reminiscent of reassuring memories from a cloudless childhood, nourished with utopia while also perceiving the powerful disillusion he felt when confronted to painful realities. His work is fed by numerous contradictions and “loaded with ambiguous emotion”. Similarly the scenes he creates are filled with details and characters but most of the time inspires peaceful and silent contemplation. Excellent technical sense: Steven adapts the available media to the nature of his discourse and of his ideological struggles. He uses a sharp style with marked outlines, similar to etching, to respond to the underlying violence of his subjects. Nonetheless he longs for harmony in drawing with the simultaneous use of broad spaces, bold and translucent strokes. The use of mixed media (pastel, crayon, acrylic, photomontage or print) allows him to express the variety of an abounding artistic universe loaded with symbols. As for colors, Steven alternates the softness of lilac and the sharpness of rose and blue. To illustrate color conflicts, he is said to be using a warmer color range “transmitting through its energy a sense of urgency and of decay”. Thanks to Steven’s works, drawing and illustration are entering a new age of fame. Their dynamism and novelty fit into the circle of influence of comics and go beyond the traditional boundaries of the story books, the childish fairy tales coexisting with a disillusioned adult world. Steven Tabbutt (b. 1978 — Maine; lives and works in NYC) graduated from the Savannah College of Arts and Design in Georgia in 2002 with a BFA and from the SVA in NY in 2006 with an MFA. He works as an illustrator for several major medias such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy etc. He has participated in numerous group shows in New York, Paris, Brooklyn, London, and Tokyo. His first solo show took place at Galerie Yukiko Kawase in 2009. Steven also participated in several lectures and talks, won some excellence awards including a silver medal of Society of Illustrators Annual.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 25
KINZ + TILLOU FINE ART, NE W Y O R K
BRIAN DETTMER
K I N Z + TI LLO U FI NE ART: BRIAN DETTMER WEBS I T E www.ktfineart.com E- M A I L info @ ktfineart.com PHO N E +1 212 929 0500 CEL L +1 917 415 5001 (Lance Kinz) +1 917 912 3922 (Michelle Tillou) CONTA C T N A M ES Lance Kinz Michelle Tillou
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jeremy Blake Megan Greene Doug Hall Liz Insogna Kim Keever Winfred Rembert Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Edwina White
COV E R Brian Dettmer Tower 1 (Britannica) 2012 Hardcover Books, Acrylic Varnish 89.5 × 15 × 15 in INS I D E Brian Dettmer Tower 1 (Britannica) (detail) 2012 Hardcover Books, Acrylic Varnish 89.5 × 15 × 15 in B AC K Brian Dettmer Do it Complete Yourself Man 2010 Hardcover Books, Acrylic Varnish 18 ½ × 20 ½ × 4 in
Brian Dettmer is known for his artwork that involves the alteration of information media. A large body of his current work is created by altering vintage books and assembling sets of books into intricate and innovative sculptures. After carefully selecting the source and subject for his cultural explorations and sculptural possibilities, Dettmer determines the architecture of construction and aesthetics of presentation for his altered book artworks. Then, with the perspective of an archeologist, vision of an explorer and precision of a surgeon, using scalpels and x-acto blades, he selectively only removes, exposes and seals existing images and information to propose new conceptual contexts and map new visual journeys. Dettmer explains the impetus of his interests: “The book’s intended function has decreased. Its relevance remains vital but the content stays sedentary and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. We are left with raw material. ... We are at a pivotal moment as the monopoly of the book breaks down and elementary concepts and symbols are losing their traditional forms to be reformatted for the future. ... I continue to question the past, present and future of the book by exploring and expanding possibilities and perspectives of the book’s form and its content.” Brian Dettmer has received international recognition, with his work being exhibited at museums throughout North America and Europe including the Museum of Arts and Design (NY), The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute (DC), Museum of Contemporary Art (GA), Chicago Cultural Center (IL), and Museum Rijswijk (Netherlands); and with solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and Barcelona. His work has been featured on the CBS Evening News, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, Art News, Modern Painters, Wired, and National Public Radio.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.19
GALERIE KLEINDI E NS T, LE IP Z IG
STEVE VIEZENS
G A LERI E K LEI N D I ENST: STEVE VIEZENS WEBS I T E www.galeriekleindienst.de E- M A I L kontakt @ galeriekleindienst.de PHO N E +49 341 477 4553 CEL L +49 170 808 5816 CONTA C T N A M ES Christian Seyde Matthias Kleindienst
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Tilo Baumgärtel Peter Busch Henriette Grahnert Julius Hofmann Tobias Lehner Rosa Loy Nadine Maria Rüfenacht Christoph Ruckhäberle Annette Schröter Corinne von Lebusa
COV E R Steve Viezens General Donut (detail) 2012 oil on canvas 31.5 × 8 in INS I D E Steve Viezens Sofabild 2011 oil on canvas 24 × 32 in B AC K Steve Viezens Satansbraten 2012 oil on wood 12 × 10 in
Steve Viezens is not afraid of breaking taboos. He walks the borderline between painting and parody, a Helge Schneider of the young Leipzig scene. His light-hearted punchlines provoke the serious connoisseur: Is it suitable to laugh at paintings? Viezens seems to be aiming for the ridiculous. He is taking a risk: if you come across as too entertaining, you are running danger of not being taken serious. The painter plays the clown, puts on a cardboard nose, dresses up Tischbein`s Italian Goethe as a harlequin and puts Watteau`s Gilles on stage. Watteau´s Comedia dell´Arte character´s appearance is probably no accident in this context: it is a figure that Viezens likely identifies. However, he places a heavy-build hippopotamus skull on his shoulder, the gaping mouth in opposition to the inward look on Watteau´s tragic hero´s face. This is a celebration of nonsense and reversal. In Viezens’ paintings, the features of the world are grotesquely distorted. Viezens takes from the stocks of art history, picking up poses and physiognomies by Holbein, Velasquez and Van Dyk, but at the same time he also uses, paints over, and alienates magazines artworks with the nonchalance of Jeff Koons.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 24
GALLER Y KM, LO S A NG E LE S
CHRISTINE FRERICHS
G A LLERY K M : CH R ISTINE FRERIC HS WEBS I T E www.gallerykmLA.com E- M A I L deb @ gallerykmla.com PHO N E +1 310 828 1912 CEL L +1 917 971 3857 CONTA C T N A M E Deb Klowden Mann
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Bernard Chadwick Sienna DeGovia Rebecca Farr Laura Kim David Lloyd Thomas Macker Rebecca Ripple Matthew Anthony Stokes Alexandra Wiesenfeld Michael Wingo
COV E R Christine Frerichs Monovision 2010 oil on canvas 11 × 8.5 in INS I D E Christine Frerichs Lens 2012 oil and spray paint on canvas 12 × 12 in B AC K Christine Frerichs Freetime 2011 oil on canvas 11 × 8.5 in
Christine Frerichs is a Los Angeles based painter whose work utilizes an individualized language of color, form and material to recall and address past experience, and to offer viewers access to the loss, pleasure, vulnerability and humor available in personal memory. Frerichs creates abstracted landscapes and portraits noted for their densely textured paint surfaces, complex use of subtle and bold colors, and vibrating patterns. Basing her color choices on emotional responses, she draws from both personal and cultural memory. She begins by extracting the visually and emotionally potent aspects of a particular memory — a person’s flesh tone (she often uses a customcreated paint based on her own skin color), the lavender sweater her late mother wore, the specific green color of the grass in Bryant Park. As Frerichs builds layers of interlocking paint, the colors become stand-ins for people or places, transforming the pieces themselves into abstract diagrams of relationships, senses, events, and even the physical body. She integrates traditional and non-traditional materials and techniques — oil paint, acrylic, activated carbon, graphite, wax, Renaissance glazing techniques, Impressionist optical color mixing — alongside her own visual lexicon to create works that are both playful and probing, communicating mood and thought, while expressing the emotional and critical possibilities of abstract painting. Frerichs has exhibited at ACME, CB1 Gallery, Kaycee Olsen Gallery, and Young Art in Los Angeles, Duchess Presents in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, among others, and has an upcoming solo show at gallery km in June of 2013. Her work has been reviewed by ArtForum and The Los Angeles Times, and published in New American Paintings. She received her M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside in 2009, and has taught at U.C. Riverside and U.C. Irvine, and is currently Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and Adjunct Faculty at East Los Angeles College.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 28
CHRISTIAN LAR S EN, S TO C KHO LM
HARUKO MAEDA
CH RI STI A N LA RSEN: HARUKO MAEDA WEBS I T E www.christianlarsen.se E- M A I L info @ christianlarsen.se PHO N E +46 8 30 98 30 CEL L +46 347 925 8845 CONTA C T N A M ES Erik Jönsson Emil Bertz
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Atelier van Lieshout Christian-Pontus Andersson Max Book Mads Gamdrup Charlotte Gyllenhammar Katy Kirbach John Körner Daniel Lergon Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen Viktor Rosdahl
COV E R Haruko Maeda Adam and Eve and Baby (detail) 2010 Watercolor on paper 280 × 100 cm INS I D E Haruko Maeda Heartbeat of the Death 6 2011 Oil on canvas 180 × 170 cm B AC K Haruko Maeda Knockenbonsai 2 2011 Pig bones, pearls, cicadas, wire, velvet, ceramic and mixed media 41 × 30 × 26 cm
Haruko Maeda’s work relies heavily on a mix of the religious iconography of her native Japan and catholic Austria where she has spent the last 7 years. Positioning herself effectively between East and West she lends an outsider’s perspective to both cultures, resulting in surprising coexistences of opposing notions. A highly skilled oil painter, Maeda has chosen to build upon the European tradition of the vanitas still life. However, whereas the vanitas theme traditionally implicates the idea of life being finite, Maeda introduces into her paintings rebirth as a significant iconographic element. She thereby achieves an intersection of two opposing existential outlooks — the linear and the circular. This merging of philosophical opposites is represented in Maeda’s meticulous depictions of skulls, flies and over-ripe fruit that explode into ever growing floral patterns. With the canvases struggling to contain the sprawling motifs, Maeda chooses to pursue the same theme in the third dimension as well. Using materials that include the bones of slaughtered animals, she composes her sculptures in the shape of Japanese bonsai, again proving her ability to seamlessly combine symbols of death and decay with those of resilient life. Haruko Maeda (b.1983 in Japan) graduated from Kunst Universität Linz, Austria in 2012. She made her solo debut in 2012 at Christian Larsen, Stockholm. Christian Larsen is one of Scandinavia’s leading galleries showing Nordic and international contemporary art. Founded in 2007, the gallery is located in central Stockholm on the short street of Hudiksvallsgatan, home to nine of Sweden’s top tier galleries. The annual program is comprised of 7 exhibitions as well as participation in international art fairs.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.17
LYONS WIER GALLER Y, NE W Y O R K
GREG HABERNY
LYON S WI ER G A LL ERY: GREG HABERNY WEBS I T E www.lyonswiergallery.com E- M A I L gallery @ lyonswiergallery.com PHO N E +1 212 242 6220 CEL L +1 917 855 4894 CONTA C T N A M ES Michael Lyons Wier Deanne Shashoua
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Chris Cosnowski Mary Henderson David Lyle Cobi Moules Aaron Nagel Tim Okamura Fahamu Pecou Melodie Provenzano James Rieck Cayce Zavaglia
COV E R Greg Haberny Banned in New York 2012 Mixed media on wood 57 × 39 in INS I D E Greg Haberny I Think My Head Exploded 2013 Mixed media on wood 40 × 59 in
GREG HABERNY, VOLTA NY 2013
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VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 20
MA2GALLE R Y, TO KY O
KYOTARO HAKAMATA
MA 2GA LLERY: K YOTARO HAKAMATA WEBS I T E www.ma2gallery.com PHO N E +81 3 3444 1133 CEL L +81 904 220 2985 CONTA C T N A M E Masami Matsubara
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Yasuyoshi Botan Tamotsu Fujii Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Mats Gustafson Akihiro Higuchi Yasuko Iba Ai Kitahara Ken Matsubara Nobuaki Onishi Naoko Sekine
COV E R Kyotaro Hakamata People in a Skit 2012 colored acrylic E xhibition view at MA 2Galler y INS I D E Kyotaro Hakamata People in a Skit 2012 colored acrylic E xhibition view at MA 2Galler y B AC K Kyotaro Hakamata Explosion — large and small 2012 colored acrylic 85 × 53 × 3 cm / 69 × 42 × 3 cm
In terms of the logical process involved in making sculpture — which gets its whole shape via the integration of parts — my work, in its piling up of variously colored acrylic boards and shaping them, is made via the orthodox method. However, the stripes of the surface created by such a process deform and delude viewers’ visions when they try to see the shape of the work. Probably no one can perceive the exact form of the sculpture. So here you can see the contradictory relationship: the consequence of the basic process of making sculpture destroys the viewers’ visions. In addition, each acrylic board is really well made. It can be likened to a “mass of color” that might confuse the concepts of color and shape. The colors of these stripes on the surface are supported by a dense and solid materiality; in other words, by the very concept of the sculptural.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.4 0
WALTER MACIEL GALLER Y, LO S A NG E LE S
CYNTHIA ONA INNIS
WA LTER M A CI EL GALLERY: C Y NTHIA ONA INNIS WEBS I T E www.waltermacielgallery.com E- M A I L info @ waltermacielgallery.com PHO N E +1 310 839 1840 CEL L +1 415 336 3292 CONTA C T N A M E Walter Maciel
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S John Bankston Rebeca Bollinger Carolyn Castaño Freddy Chandra John Jurayj Hung Liu Dean Monogenis Maria E. Piñeres Robb Putnam Jil Weinstock
COV E R Cynthia Ona Innis Catchlight (detail) 2012 Acrylic, fabric and mixed media on wood panel 11 × 14 in INS I D E Cynthia Ona Innis Flash 2013 Acrylic, fabric and ink on canvas 48 × 60 in B AC K Cynthia Ona Innis Slit 2013 Acrylic, fabric and ink on paper 11 × 13 in
Cynthia Ona Innis’s recent work was introduced in a solo exhibition entitled Shine at Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles. The new work continues her interest in nature and interpreting the cyclical manifestations of landscape into well articulated abstractions. This past fall Innis became an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Golden Gate National Park just north of San Francisco. Set within an old military building on a hill and adjacent to a restored missile site, her studio overlooks the ocean and sublime environment of rolling hills and majestic valleys. The new work continues to be a study of forms under transformation, exploring exchanges that are seen and unseen to the eye and exposing moments when one thing becomes another. The subject specifically relates to the changing notions of light in the course of a 24 hour period. Time, movement and observations of the effects of light on the eye are explored within the range of weather patterns ranging from extremely bright coastal days to dense fog and pitch-black nights. The interference of light seen on objects and through the camera lens becomes the focus and is visually recreated using a variety of collaged information such as satin, silk and reflective metallic fabrics layered with ink and acrylic paint on canvas, wood panel and paper. In contrast to the layering of materials, there are tightly drawn areas of patterns, overlapping honey comb-like networks made from observations of light and the dust and pollution left in its path between the eye/camera and the natural/artificial light source. The work takes on a landscape format with a narrative created by a combination of drawing, painting and overall relationship of fabrics.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 3 3
MAGR OR O C C A , MILA N
CYRIL LE VAN
MA G ROROCCA : CY RIL LE VAN WEBS I T E www.magrorocca.com E- M A I L info @ magrorocca.com PHO N E +39 02 2953 4903 CEL L +39 339 291 1810 CONTA C T N A M ES Rosanna Magro Massimiliano Rocca
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Alejandra Alarcòn Kristian Burford Omar Chacon Floria Gonzalez Tamara Kostianovsky Francesco Merletti David Gremard Romero Jill Sylvia
COV E R Cyril Le Van Fridge printed photos on a rigid support, stitches and staples life-size INS I D E Cyril Le Van Chappy printed photos on a rigid support, stitches and staples life-size B AC K Cyril Le Van Shoes printed photos on a rigid support, stitches and staples life-size
At VOLTA NY the gallery is pleased to present the French artist Cyril Le Van with the “Old Street” project. The space is designed so the artist doesn’t try to magnify the real but rather questions the strength of the links between society and people. Le Van composes plastic artwork by using photography to reproduce in actual size and three dimensions objects of daily life, symbols of belonging to a group, a social or cultural identity, or characteristics of our age. The artist take photos of all sides of Nike sneakers, Vuitton bags, Adidas T-shirt, Rolex watches, etc., then prints them on a rigid support and finally recreates them with stitches or staples. So you have a new object, fake but extremely attractive. His work, mixed between New Realism and Pop Art, tries to recreate the identity unease of our society full of logos and pictures but lacking benchmarks. Le Van doesn’t draw the line between art and popular culture; he is using the brand concept to discuss globalization, consumerism, and their impacts on our society. MAGROROCCA focuses its research and its proposal in the contemporary art world. The gallery is in the center of Milan in Italy and was opened in 2003 by Rosanna Magro and Massimiliano Rocca. The gallery has a strong program of solo shows and promotes the work of emerging artists, whose proposals are innovative and multidisciplinary: photography, installation, painting, video and sculpture.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.01
MARX & ZAVATTER O, S AN FR A NC IS C O
ARNGUNNUR ÝR
MA RX & Z AVATTERO: ARNGUNNUR Ý R WEBS I T E www.marxzav.com E- M A I L info @ marxzav.com PHO N E +1 415 627 9111 CEL L +1 415 430 7716 CONTA C T N A M ES Steve Zavattero Heather Marx
The National Parks conjure up an almost idyllic setting that the viewer can immediately relate to. They make references to places of exquisite beauty that we recognize and claim as our own, gaining a sense of security and identity. It is an oversentimentalizing of these iconic places, where the setting becomes an overloaded torte of mountains, one weighing upon the next. There is a degree of suffocation at the same time referencing a place supposed to be “light” and uplifting. Initially the work was phenomenological that directly depicted my experiences in landscape. The newer works are still landscape based but have a more psychological approach, to explore the condition of the landscape and how we relate to it. They are intentionally askew and vortexed towards the center. They become about destabilization, and how the viewer navigates through the painting. The painting draws the viewer in, and refuses to let go.
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Michael Arcega Libby Black Bradley Castellanos Stephen Giannetti Yoon Lee Liséa Lyons Andrew Schoultz William Swanson Forrest Williams Patrick Wilson
S E L E CTE D S O L O A ND TW O- PE R SO N E X H I B I T I O N S: VOLTA New York, presented by Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; Àrnes Art Museum, Hveragerdi, Iceland (2013); Reykjavik Art Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland (2012); Kit Schulte Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2011); Distant, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2010); Upphafið, Transcendent, Reykjanesbær Art Museum, Iceland (2008).
COV E R Arngunnur Ýr Flourite Drift Pass (detail) 2012 oil on wood panel 48 × 82 in
S E L E CTE D P U BL IC CO L L E C T I O N S: Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; Hafnarborg Art Museum, Hafnarfjordur, Iceland; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Gerdarsafn Museum, Kopavogur, Iceland; OECD, Paris, France; EFTA, Brussels, Belgium; University of Iceland Art Collection.
INS I D E Arngunnur Ýr National Park II 2011 oil on wood panel 48 × 64 in
S E L E CTE D AWA RD S A ND GR AN T S: Ministry of Culture work grant for artists, Iceland (2012); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2005).
B AC K Arngunnur Ýr National Park VI 2012 oil on canvas 48 × 54 in
S E L E CTE D G RO U P E XHIBI T I O N S: Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2009); Þykkvibær, Iceland, with Georg Guðni (2008); Landscapes, Rural and Urban Realities, Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA (2007); Painting After 1980, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland (2006).
A new book of Ýr’s paintings is now in print.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 23
PATRICK MIKHAIL GALL E R Y, O TTAWA
AMY SCHISSEL
PATRI CK MI K H A I L GALLERY: AMY SC HISSEL WEBS I T E www.patrickmikhailgallery.com E- M A I L gallery @ patrickmikhailgallery.com PHO N E +1 613 746 0690 CEL L +1 613 276 3243 CONTA C T N A M E Patrick Mikhail
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jessica Auer Olga Chagaoutdinova Adrian Göllner Jonathan Hobin Thomas Kneubühler Jennifer Lefort Michèle Provost Cindy Stelmackowich Andrew Wright Jinny Yu
COV E R Amy Schissel Cyber Fields (detail), Panel 1 of 7 2012 Acrylic, Ink, Charcoal, Mixed Media on Paper 90 × 44 in INS I D E Amy Schissel Cyber Fields, Panels 1, 2, 3 of 7 2012 Acrylic, Ink, Charcoal, Mixed Media on Paper 90 × 132 in
Since becoming a finalist in the 2011 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Amy Schissel’s professional practice has addressed the function of drawing and painting in the new information age, by subscribing to digital processes with the aim of reappraising the traditional language of abstract painting. Her paintings visualize information flows that cut across cities, hover over continents, and seemingly negate the need of geographical location for human interaction. The works are an imaginative reinvention of contemporary landscape and have become a means to re-insert a sense of civic legibility where the World Wide Web calls us to be everywhere and nowhere at once. For VOLTA NY 2013, Schissel has created Cyber Fields, a site-specific installation examining the intersection of drawing/painting production with emerging electronic practice and theory through time-based media. Using digital patterning systems as a departure point, the project aims to examine the communicative potential of visual syntax while emphasizing the unique position of drawing/painting to register contemporary shifts and complexities in systems of knowledge. Cyber Fields focuses on the hybrid interactions between digital and analog forms of visualization. Amy Schissel was a finalist in the 2011 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, the U.S., and Europe in numerous projects and venues including Toronto’s Power Plant; Art Gallery of Alberta; Art Gallery of Hamilton; Carleton University Art Gallery; Karsh Masson Gallery; and art fairs including Art Toronto and Montreal’s Papier 12. Her work is in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank; Foreign Affairs Canada; City of Ottawa; Free University of Brussels; New Zealand Consulate; Gotland Museum of Fine Arts; and numerous private international collections. She was the recipient of Canada’s 2009 Brucebo Fine Arts Award. In 2013 and 2014, she will appear in projects at Papier 13, Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, Miami Art Week, and will chair a painting symposium at the College Arts Association’s 101st Conference in Chicago. Amy Schissel holds a BFA and MFA from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Since 2006, PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY has been committed to launching new and relevant bodies of work through its program of solo and group exhibitions, curatorial and academic collaborations, off-site nomadic projects, and participation in international art fairs and festivals. Through its vital relationships with museums, institutions, corporate collections, and private international collectors, the gallery has placed works in the National Gallery of Canada, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Foreign Affairs Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, City of Ottawa Collection, Ottawa Art Gallery, Nova Scotia Art Bank, and National Portrait Gallery. The gallery’s artists have exhibited internationally at Mois de la photo à Paris, Art Basel Week, Armory Arts Week, CONTACT Photo, and received and been nominated for prestigious awards including the Swiss Arts Awards, Sobey Art Award, RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Karsh Award, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture Prize. Essays, reviews, and critical discourses have appeared in Artforum, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Camera Austria, C Magazine, Afterimage, and Next Level. PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY is a member of the Art Dealers Association of Canada (ADAC), and l’Association des galeries d’art contemporain (AGAC).
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 24
ELLEN MILLER GALLE R Y, B O S TO N
IMI HWANGBO
ELLEN MI LLER G ALLERY: IMI HWANGBO WEBS I T E www.ellenmillergallery.com E- M A I L ellen @ ellenmillergallery.com PHO N E +1 617 536 4650 CEL L +1 617 620 9818 CONTA C T N A M E Ellen Miller
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Laylah Ali Nancy Blum Michael Harrington David Maisel Heather McGill Andrew Millner Lori Nix Michael Oatman Evelyn Rydz Deb Todd Wheeler
COV E R Imi Hwangbo Lepidoptera (detail) 2005 Archival Ink on hand cut Mylar 73 × 15 × 2 in INS I D E Imi Hwangbo Diviner (detail) 2010 Archival ink on hand cut Mylar 66 × 28 × 3 in B AC K ( L E FT ) Imi Hwangbo Verso Variation #1 (detail) 2012 Archival color pencil on cut Mylar 14.5 × 11.5 × 5 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Imi Hwangbo Lepidoptera IV (detail) 2010 Archival Ink on hand cut Mylar 9 × 7.5 × 1 in
Imi Hwangbo explores what drawing can be today. The artist begins with a visual unit, then multiplies it, using its very repetition as a kind of wondrous madness. These visual units find their sources in other cultures, other disciplines, post-feminist ideologies and science; they transfix us by their sheer conviction of form. Hwangbo’s obsessively controlled and highly calculated practice reflects her passion to create labor intensive, handcrafted work equally at ease with technology and in constant change. Hwangbo’s extravagantly constructed drawings refine and redefine the boundaries of drawing as we know it. It is the constructed nature of Hwangbo’s drawings that pushes limits. Using numerous cut layers of translucent Mylar combined with color and light, Hwangbo’s reliefs exist as both drawing and sculpture. The Spire series’ exquisite hand-cutting and dense layering of a single pattern (utilizing an algorithm calculating the pattern’s recession onto as many as 30 layers) has an equal counterpart in her painstaking hand-colored and complexly layered Verso series. The Spire series focuses on patterns found in Korean wrapping cloths, called pojagi. These four cornered clothes were often decorated with geometric or floral motifs. Hwangbo’s newly conceived Verso imagery is based on the ornamentation of Buddhist temple doors and Italian cathedrals. Traversed by light, the physicality of these decorative details are suspended, creating a dreamlike, almost sublime visual space. The dimensional richness and constructed nature of Hwangbo’s drawings push our very notion of drawing. Hwangbo’s art crosses boundaries between the disciplines of sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, creating work that is both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, pictorial and spatial, hand- and machine-made. The combinatory aesthetic and hybridization of Hwangbo’s work underscores its relevance to contemporary art. Hwangbo’s work has received national and international recognition, including residencies at the American Academy in Rome; Camargo Foundation in France; Yaddo; MacDowell Colony; and Bemis Center for the Arts. She has exhibited at David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University; Mass College of Art; International Print Center in NYC; Weatherspoon Art Museum in N.C.; and the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta. Hwangbo’s work has been critically reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.15
MIXED GR EENS , NE W Y O R K
STAS ORLOVSKI
MI X ED G REEN S: STAS ORLOVSKI WEBS I T E www.mixedgreens.com E- M A I L info @ mixedgreens.com PHO N E +1 212 331 8888 CONTA C T N A M ES Heather Bhandari Steven Sergiovanni Monica Herman
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Kim Beck Sonya Blesofsky Howard Fonda Joan Linder Mark Mulroney Coke O’Neal Rudy Shepherd Joseph Smolinski Julianne Swartz Mary Temple
COV E R Stas Orlovski Nocturne (detail) 2012 Charcoal, ink, Xerox transfer, collage, and hand-drawn animation on wall Dimensions variable INS I D E Stas Orlovski Nocturne (detail) 2012 Charcoal, ink, Xerox transfer, collage, and hand-drawn animation on wall Dimensions variable B AC K Stas Orlovski Nocturne (detail) 2012 Charcoal, ink, Xerox transfer, collage, and hand-drawn animation on wall Dimensions variable
In Nocturne, Stas Orlovski combines drawing, collage, and animation to layer images of broken sculptures, disembodied eyes, botanicals, birds, night skies, and rainstorms that evoke a series of shifting narratives. In his words: “The animations function as apparitions, memories, or psychological projections. I mine Victorian scrapbooks, Soviet-era Russian children’s books, Japanese prints, and Dutch botanical illustration in search of the bittersweet, the quaint, the melancholy, and the picturesque. These sources are reimagined, reorganized, and refashioned into a space where disparate histories, events, dreams, and desires collide.” – From the wall text of the 2012-2013 exhibition Drawing Surrealism at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Stas Orlovski (b. 1969 in Kishniev, Moldova; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) studied art in Toronto and Los Angeles, receiving a BFA from York University, a B.Ed. from University of Toronto, and an MFA from the University of Southern California. Orlovski has exhibited his work widely throughout the U.S. with solo exhibitions at USC, Los Angeles, CA; Nathan Larramendy Gallery, Ojai, CA; Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL; Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, CA; and Mixed Greens, NYC. His work has been acquired by prominent public and private collections including the American Embassy in Brussels, The Progressive Corporation, and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco. Orlovski has been awarded fellowships by Skowhegan, Yaddo, and Art Omi International Art Center. Most recently, Orlovski was a recipient of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA) and the J. Paul Getty Trust Fellowship from the California Community Foundation. His work was recently seen in Drawing Surrealism at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.5 0
MULHERIN, TO R O NTO
KRIS KNIGHT
MU LH ERI N : K RI S KNIGHT WEBS I T E www.katharinemulherin.com E- M A I L info @ katharinemulherin.com PHO N E +1 416 993 6510 (Canada) +1 347 406 3690 (USA) CEL L +347 406 3690 CONTA C T N A M E Katharine Mulherin
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Dean Baldwin Mike Bayne Shauna Born Michael Caines Oscar De Las Flores Eric Doeringer Heather Goodchild Michael Harrington David Kramer Winnie Truong
COV E R Kris Knight Parvenu (The Historical Rise of the Art Jock) 2011 Oil on canvas 36 × 48 in INS I D E Kris Knight The Dotted Map 2011 Oil on canvas 30 × 30 in B AC K ( L E FT ) Kris Knight The Early Riser 2012 Oil on canvas 40 × 48 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Kris Knight What The Moonflowers Told Me 2011 Oil on Canvas 30 × 40 in
Kris Knight is a Canadian painter whose work examines performance in relation to the construction, portrayal and boundaries of sexual and asexual identities. Drawing from personal histories of rural escapism through imagination, Knight paints disenchanted characters that are lost between youth and adulthood; they hide their secrets, but desperately long to let them go. His mythical and ambiguous portraits are a synthesis of fantasy and real-world memory; they tiptoe between the dichotomies of pretty and menace, hunter and hunted, innocence and the erotic. Throughout Knight’s professional practice, he has created thematic bodies of work that reference historical notions of regality, mysticism, romanticism and symbolism. He often skews these concepts with contemporary interests in androgyny, psychotropic alterations and the post-modern gaze. Knight’s lustrous classical cum illustrative figurative paintings, stride between a contradicting palette of sensual primaries and ghostly pastels, reflecting his adoration for 18th Century French portraiture. Kris Knight spent his youth in six small towns in rural Ontario before moving to Toronto where he currently lives and works. Since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2003, Knight’s practice has concentrated on thematic figurative works that are often as attractive as they are disturbing. Knight started exhibiting with Katharine Mulherin in 2005. In the past seven years he has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and various art fairs around the globe. His work is included in an abundant of public and private collections, most notably The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Oppenheimer Collection, The Agnes Etherington Museum of Kingston, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Recent solo exhibitions include “The Lost and Found” (2011- Rize Art Gallery, Amsterdam); “Tragic Kingdom” (2011 — Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto; and “A Deadly Nightshade” (2010 — Spinello Gallery, Miami). Recent Group exhibitions include MIXTAPE (2012 — Labasse Projects, Los Angeles); Makin’ It Natural (2012 — Mulherin + Pollard, New York); The Reflexive Self (2010 — Mike Weiss Gallery, New York); and New/Now (Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas). Recent international art fairs include Art Paris (2011); Toronto International Art Fair (2011); and Zona Maco, Mexico City (2010). Recent Press has included cover stories in Public Art Magazine (2012), and Milan Vukmirovic’s Fashion For Men (2012) as well as articles in Miami New Times, Miami Sun Post, Toronto Life, Xtra Magazine and Pref Magazine and Gorgeous Gallery, an International overview of contemporary queer artists by David Leddick (Bruno Gmunder Verlag, 2012)
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 31
N O M A D GALLERY, B R U S S E LS
AIMÉ MPANÉ
N O M A D G A LLERY: AIMÉ MPANÉ WEBS I T E www.nomadgallery.be E- M A I L walter@nomadgallery.be ashley@nomadgallery.be PHO N E +32 475 219 250 CEL L +1 704 408 0784 CONTA C T N A M ES Walter De Weerdt Ashley Peeler
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Hector Acebes Jean-François Boclé Jeanine Cohen Kay Hassan Satch Hoyt Shoshanna Weinberger Guy Woueté
COV E R Aimé Mpané J’ai Oublié de Rêver (detail) 2010 Installation, sculpture made of matchsticks, video projection Dimensions variable INS I D E Aimé Mpané Le Délire Urbain 2012 Installation, wood, serigraphies, text, coloured wool dreads Dimensions variable B AC K Aimé Mpané Untitled (from the ongoing series Ici on crève) 2006 — 2012 paint and mixed media on carved wood panel 30 × 31 × 5 cm
The work of Aimé Mpane (1968, born in Kinshasa, D.R.Congo) is charged with history and emotions and touches us at different levels. It acts as a reminder, a tool of collective empowerment and a quest for individual memory. The artist plays with the tactility of each material, following its nature and highlighting its expressive potential. The exploration of the material (an investigation carried out beyond the surface of the painting) allows Mpane to enter the psyche and emotional locus of the people and, more broadly, it enables the artist to narrate the history of an entire place NOMAD is the first Belgian gallery to showcase and represent emerging artists from the African continent and the Diaspora. After traveling widely throughout the African continent for over 15 years, the Brussels gallery is now sharing its experience in Contemporary African Art. NOMAD also promotes artists who engage in a dialogue with the African context. The gallery has participated in the Bamako Photo Biennale, during the Dakar Art Biennale, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Eurantica Brussels, Art Brussels, the Emerge Art Fair DC, Scope Miami, Scope NY, Scope Basel, Art Miami Context, and Art Wynwood.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 2 9
NOW CONTEMPOR AR Y A R T, MIA MI
MARK JENKINS
N O W CO N TEMPO RARY ART: MARK JENKINS WEBS I T E www.nowcontemporaryart.com E- M A I L now @ nowcontemporaryart.com PHO N E +1 305 571 8181 CEL L +1 786 290 3136 CONTA C T N A M E Pablo Dona
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Maria Fernanda Cardoso Long-Bin Chen Matej Kren Nelson Leirner Magdalena Murua Peter Opheim Shawn Smith 3 (Three) Federico Uribe Roman Vitali
COV E R Mark Jenkins Doorman 2012 Mixed Media Dimensions: lifesized INS I D E Mark Jenkins Litterbugs 2012 Mixed Media Dimensions: lifesized B AC K ( L E FT ) Mark Jenkins Drop Out 2012 Mixed Media Dimensions: lifesized B AC K ( R I G H T) Mark Jenkins Out of Reach 2012 Mixed Media Dimensions: lifesized
Mark Jenkins is an American artist most widely known for the human figure installations he creates using packing tape and other materials. His work humorously addresses themes of social isolation, but with the idea to bring humanity together rather than pull it further apart. On the street, passersby are absorbed unknowingly into his scenes as actors on this stage. Jenkins has shown his work in major cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Tokyo, Moscow, and London. He currently lives in Washington, DC.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.13
PABLO’S B IR THDAY, NE W Y O R K
FRANK GERRITZ
PA BLO’S BI RTH D AY: FRANK GERRITZ WEBS I T E www.pablosbirthday.com E- M A I L info @ pablosbirthday PHO N E +1 212 462 2411 CEL L +1 917 450 5354
Frank Gerritz is a sculptor. A sculptor, however, who for years has developed his sculptural ideas principally in the form of drawings that nonetheless emanate a markedly space-encompassing energy. Gerritz has been working with an extremely refined language of forms for many years. Derived from his early floor-sculptures, the artist has established two main series of wall-reliefs: pencil drawings on MDF and oil-stick drawings on anodized aluminum; exceptionally minimal in their arrangement, these paint-stick relieves are densely drawn, the underlying aluminum outlining painted sections.
CONTA C T N A M E Jimi Billingsley
Alongside these wall-sculptures, several series of drawings on paper as well as monumental wall-drawings have defined the artist’s oeuvre over the past two decades. Equally constructed from a consciously limited geometric vocabulary.
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Thorsten Brinkmann Henrik Eiben Christian Eisenberger Eckart Hahn Karsten Konrad Kristian Kozul Marc Lueders
Christophe Duvivier, Director of Musée Tavet-Delacour de Pontoise, where Gerritz had a solo museum exhibition in 2011, describes the corporeal experience rendered possible in the artist’s images as the “human aspect”. The observer senses a strange physical attraction to the black surfaces that is based upon their underlying proportional structures. Gerritz adjusts the sizes of overall and partial surfaces to the proportions of the human body.
COV E R Frank Gerritz Iced Honey — A love supreme 2012 Pencil on MDF panel 180 × 60 cm INS I D E Frank Gerritz Cinemascope l The definition of light 2012 paintstick on anodized aluminum 60 × 180 cm B AC K Frank Gerritz Two Center Connection 2008 pencil on paper 42 × 58.8 cm
In these works, which critically question the operating system of art, the artist’s sovereign ability to deal with art history is manifest. But Gerritz not only further develops methods of critiquing institutions; moreover, he also modifies the strategies of concept and minimal art, not to mention the additional allusions his works contain to artists like Barnett Newman or Ad Reinhardt and to abstract art in general. Here again, within the discourses of art history, Frank Gerritz’s works go deeper than the surface, providing a complex weave of the most diverse references and points of view.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 26
PDX CONTEMPOR AR Y AR T, P O R TLA ND
D. E. MAY
PD X CO N TEMPO RARY ART: D. E. MAY WEBS I T E www.pdxcontemporaryart.com E- M A I L info @ pdxcontemporaryart.com PHO N E +1 503 222 0063 CONTA C T N A M E Jane Beebe
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Johannes Girardoni James Lavadour Nancy Lorenz Wes Mills Megan Murphy Adam Sorensen Storm Tharp Heather Watkins Marie Watt Masao Yamamoto
COV E R D. E. May Haavisto 2012 colored pencil, graphite on paper 14 × 17 in INS I D E D. E. May Flageollet 2012 colored pencil, graphite on paper 16 × 20 in
For the last forty years art has been my occupation and preoccupation. I build twodimensional constructions and small sculptures that reference architectural studies, incomplete proposals, or the weathered evidence of past projects, but for me these constructions have no other aspirations beyond being the objects that they are. If they are referring to anything outside themselves it is to the process by which they are made. For instance, I draw and make templates that are often sourced from the working processes of disciplines outside of the realm of Art, from ship-builders’ plans to tailors’ cutting boards. If there are five steps to building something, I am interested in steps two and three. D. E. May
D. E. May lives and works in Salem, Oregon and has exhibited widely throughout the country. He is included in numerous public collections including the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, the Boise Art Museum, Portland Art Museum and the Seattle Art Museum, as well as the private collections of Blake Byrne, Werner Kramarsky, Brad Cloepfil and Driek & Michael Zirinsky. May has been written about in Artforum, Artweek and New American Paintings. May’s career and most recent show, The Template Files (2010) at PDX Contemporary Art, was written about at length on the arts website PORT (portlandart.net). PDX Contemporary Art is a gallery of accomplished individuals and is considered one of the most interesting galleries in the Northwest over the 15 years it has been in operation. PDX continues to expand and evolve while maintaining its original mission of facilitating and building artists’ careers. PDX is known for consistently programing rigorous and compelling exhibitions and is widely admired for its independent spirit while maintaining a collaborative attitude and dialogue with artists, fellow dealers, publishers and institutions. Located in Portland, Oregon, the gallery space was designed by award-winning architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works. The spatial layout makes use of natural light and utilizes the building’s historic character to reflect the gallery’s philosophy of recognizing the past, while still living in the present and looking forward to the future. Owner/Director Jane Beebe, an active member of the Portland art community, has served on the board of directors of the Portland Art Museum and Oregon College of Art and Craft, as well as on long-range civic planning committees addressing art and culture, and has been a guest speaker at numerous Oregon institutions. Artists represented by PDX Contemporary Art have been selected for numerous competitions and received awards, national fellowships and grants. Among other accolades, they have been recognized by the highly competitive Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, the Venice Bienniale, the Whitney Bienniale and have been purchased by national and international museums and institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Cleveland Museum and the Yale Art Museum. PDX participates in national and international art fairs. Shows are often reviewed in national publications such as the New York Times, artNews, Art in America, Modern Painters and Art Forum, in addition to the local press. Artists represented by PDX “are among the best, brightest and most interesting that Portland has to offer.” D. K. Row, art critic for the Oregonian
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.42
PENTIMENTI GALLER Y, P HILA D E LP HIA
DERRICK VELASQUEZ
PEN TI MEN TI G A LL ERY: DERRIC K VELASQUEZ WEBS I T E www.pentimenti.com E- M A I L mail @ pentimenti.com PHO N E +1 215 625 9990 CONTA C T N A M E Christine Pfister
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Steven Baris Kim Beck Cecilia Biagini Matthew Cox Kevin Finklea Kiki Gaffney Judy Gelles Mark Khaisman Hadieh Shafie Jackie Tileston
COV E R Derrick Velasquez Untitled #55 2012 Marine vinyl, wood 39 × 35 × 1.25 in INS I D E Derrick Velasquez Untitled #53 2012 Marine vinyl, wood 18.5 × 19 × 1.25 in B AC K Derrick Velasquez Untitled #52 2012 Marine vinyl 17 × 18 × 1.25 in
My most recent work deals with forces projected onto manufactured and industrially engineered materials. Some of these forces are natural, such as an accumulated weight created by gravity and some are more forced like tension applied by testing an object’s flexibility to its breaking point. The demands put on these materials reveal and obscure their intended consumer use and the qualities of the material itself. By using marine vinyl, masonite, handmade half-scale 2X4s, plywood and found objects, I aim to question the way we physically interact with the tangible and manufactured structures of everyday life. Through an investigative manipulation that observes and skews nominal measurements, my work teases out the language of those structure and our psychological relation to the dimensions and conditions given by such materials. Derrick Velasquez received his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his MFA from the Ohio State University. Velasquez has exhibited his works at the Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO; VAC University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; RedLine, Denver, CO; forthcoming: FOCA Bienniel, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM and Arvada Center for the Arts, Arvada, CO. He has been awarded by: Vertigo Art Space Artist Residency and RedLine Artist Residency in Denver, CO; Fergus Family Material Award, The Ohio State University. Derrick Velasquez is in the collection of the Metropolitan State University of Denver and in private collections in Denver, CO, Philadelphia, PA, New York, NY, Palo Alto, CA, Miami, FL, and more. He is represented by Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 32
THE POOL NY C , NE W Y O R K
DANIELE D’ACQUISTO
TH E PO OL N YC: DANIELE D’ AC QUISTO WEBS I T E www.thepoolnewyorkcity.com E- M A I L info @ thepoolnewyorkcity.com PHO N E +1 347 257 4103 CEL L +1 646 244 9783 CONTA C T N A M E Viola Romoli
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Gaia Carboni Eteri Chkadua Patrick Jacobs Austin Lee Martin Roth Andrea Salvatori Bianca Sforni Fabio Viale
COV E R Daniele D’Acquisto Strings 2011 / 2012 bleached wood, objects Dimensions variable INS I D E Daniele D’Acquisto Strings 2011 / 2012 bleached wood, objects Dimensions variable B AC K ( L E FT ) Daniele D’Acquisto +/-Space #1 2011 acrylic, plexiglass, inkjet print, bleached wood 48.46 × 81.16 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Daniele D’Acquisto W.I. J.Gagarin 2008 pigmented paper cut on wood 35.46 × 27.58 in
Daniele D’Acquisto’s (b. 1978 — Taranto, Italy) research is never exclusively aesthetic, and has become increasingly theoretical. For years, the artist has kept on questioning himself about the liminal space that separates what is real (the physical phenomena analyzed by science) from what is ideal (the imagination, as used by art). In other words, the artist aims at transposing concepts into objects, through a seamless juxtaposition of the phenomenal and neurological plane, given that the same brain areas are activated when we imagine and when we see things. The artist spent a long time pondering the question of Material Unaccounted For [MUF]. This awareness led him to avoid any losses during the making process: the waste materials resulting from the finishing of a work were therefore employed to produce the next ones. The ability of works to generate more works, and to expand volumetrically, was developed through the notion of ‘proliferation’; In order to understand this notion we need to recall to mind the work Permanent Eclipse, created in 2009, where a tree trunk had been dissected and put back together by means of ferromagnetic joints. Without overlooking specific differences, we can nonetheless say that the installation Strings is the logical continuation of this work. However, rather than modifying an existing model, the artist opted for formal and conceptual diversification, so that Strings can be described as a clade, not a simple clone. The work seems to be grounded, at least ideally, in Strings theory (the notion that matter and energy, but also space and time, are manifestations of primordial physical entities). It uses the exoskeleton form to try to represent the Theory of Everything [ToE]. This is a structure that can develop infinitely. Like an Ouroboros, or a modern Laocoön, this work in progress seems to trace an epidermal trajectory that connects objects, adhering to them and tightening around them, making them part of an unicum. Through his analytical, technical approach, Daniele D’Acquisto sculpts painting and draws sculpture, turning art into an experimental science. Paying special attention to the structural aspects of his own works, he has come to tackle iconological and formal issues, racking his brain about the notion of representation (viewed as empirical analysis of reality), through a process of cognitive abstraction that is, in itself, a representation of reality, whose truthfulness would only exist in the realm of ideas. Alberto Zanchetta
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.0 9
POPOPS TUDIO S , NA S S A U
HEINO SCHMID
POPO PSTU D I O S: HEINO SC HMID WEBS I T E www.popopstudios.com E- M A I L popopstudios @ gmail.com PHO N E +1 242 322 7834 CEL L +1 242 424 5879 CONTA C T N A M E John Cox
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Charles Campbell John Cox Marlon Griffith Kendall Hanna
COV E R Heino Schmid Landmines 2011-2012 Steel nails, dried coconut Dimensions variable INS I D E Heino Schmid Mien 2010-2011 Acrylic, graphite and ink on wood 185 × 108 in / 470 × 274 cm B AC K Heino Schmid Pssst! (This Means War) 2012 Acrylic, wood, cardboard, canvas with found ladders 96 × 112 × 50 in / 244 × 286 × 127 cm
Popopstudios is an independent art studio and gallery dedicated to the preservation and advancement of alternative Bahamian visual culture. The goal is to educate, promote, expose and defend new and challenging developments in contemporary art. Popopstudios exists to harbor both seasoned and developing artists interested in new media and mixed media processes, while projecting these efforts to a national and international audience. Popopstudios provides a platform that gives creative ideas and projects visibility. The gallery is open to artists from within the community, resident artists and international artists to exhibit. The curatorial philosophy is focused on designing invitational shows that provoke and challenge artists to address visual, cultural and conceptual strategies. The gallery also hosts solo exhibitions, seeking individual artists working on existing bodies of work or on projects designed to be site specific. The context of much of Heino Schmid’s work is concerned with narrative and the reconsideration of personal stories in the public forum. Using a variety of media such as video, drawing, installation and photography, he investigates the often simple, sometimes irrelevant encounters and collisions between people and their environments. “Although I strive for universal metaphors, I approach each body of work in a very personal way. Using self-referential experiences as an avenue to illuminating collective experiences I hope to reveal the subtle dramas that inform social dynamics and ultimately bring those realities to the forefront for discussion.”
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GALLERY POULS EN, C O P E NHA G E N
JADE TOWNSEND
G A LLERY POU LSEN: JADE TOWNSEND WEBS I T E www.gallerypoulsen.com E- M A I L info @ gallerypoulsen.com PHO N E +45 3333 9396 CEL L +45 4015 5588 CONTA C T N A M E Morten Poulsen
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Michael Anderson Daniel Davidson Debra Hampton Aaron Johnson Mi Ju Tom Sanford Alfred Steiner Vuk Vidor Eric White Barnaby Whitfield
COV E R Jade Townsend The Eight of Swords (detail) 2011 Graphite, charcoal, ink, prisma color on paper 122 × 107 cm INS I D E Jade Townsend Sick Sick Wind 2009 Installation, made of mixed media 457 × 762 × 457 cm B AC K ( L E FT ) Jade Townsend Underbelly 2010 70 lbs of solid aluminum, black wrap, and aircraft cable roughly 50.8 × 30.5 × 50.8 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Jade Townsend “The Lovers” Tarot Series 8 (detail) 2012 graphite, charcoal, oil pastel, Prisma Color, and ink on paper 35 × 45 cm
Jade Townsend pursues a conceptual route that falls in line with a reexamination of certain aspects of Sebastian Brant’s 1494 work The Ship of Fools. Calling on Brant’s humorous insights into human nature and brilliant use of allegory as a foundation, the artist has created a body of work that are individual drawings and a sculptural installation that investigates and re-contextualizes many of Brant’s original themes. One is captivated by Townsend’s universe and his cross-aesthetic practice, ranging from beautiful detail-oriented drawings to large theatrical installations. His installations engage the viewer to become part of what he builds in various exhibition spaces with a fascinating result. Entire worlds and universes are constructed and presented to us in his drawings. Townsend’s artworks have a universal nerve to them that transcend cultures, as he applies a universal visual language known from our earliest memories in literature and history. There is a use of materials and historical imagery that animates his artworks, with a hand-crafted expression that cause us to be captivated by them. His works are loaded with timber, ships, kings, hobos, death, tarot cards and mysticism, and they are keen to illuminate our existing systems and question their limitations and their flaws. The element of flaws of the system was also addressed in the collaborative drawing Hooverville done by Townsend and William Powhida in 2010. The artists caused quite a stir with their joint artwork, when they — in great detail, ingenuity and knowledge — interpreted the Art Basel Miami Beach fair humorously and critically, portraying the gallery owners, curators, and artists participating in this annual event as a shanty town. In 2012, the artists made a new, gigantic collaborative drawing Bellum Omnium contra Omnes (“a war of all against all”), depicting a battleground as it would look if the postmodern art world ever came to this. With Townsend the ship is loaded with drawings and a sculptural installation, where we are presented with a historical theme in a contemporary and hand-built setting from an artist we believe deserves full attention and recognition.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.47
LYLE O. REITZEL GALLER Y, S ANTO D O MING O
GERARD ELLIS
LYLE O . REI TZ EL GALLERY: GERARD ELLIS WEBS I T E www.lyleoreitzelgallery.com E- M A I L galeria.lyle @ claro.net.do PHO N E +1 809 227 8361 CEL L +1 809 519 9214 CONTA C T N A M E Lyle Reitzel
COV E R Gerard Ellis Paseo fuera del jardin (detail) 2009 Mixed Media on Canvas 92 × 70 in INS I D E Gerard Ellis Untitled 2012 Acrylic and crayon over wooden panel 30 × 30 in B AC K Gerard Ellis Portrait of a Tiger 2010 Mixed on panel 12 × 12 in
A painter and draftsman by calling and choice, Gerard Ellis establishes an interesting dichotomy between the practice of painting and social critique. His pictorial work is highly expressive for those who directly or indirectly participate in the multiple strata of the contexts of which this artist speaks. The violence, corruption, and lack of willpower characteristic of our times and everything that reveals human stupidity are central topics of his meticulous pictorial work. There is a studied connection and interdependence between what is his work and what constitutes his life experiences, which translates into a certain underlying politicization of life´s experience. His work reintroduces issues as to how a gaze articulated around reality at the same time shape areas of reflection in relation to each individual´s life experience…and conceal the most absolute rebellion. His are pieces that lead us to those delicious territories of sarcasm and irony that this artist knows how to create. Un pintor y dibujante por vocación y elección, Gerard Ellis establece una interesante dicotomía entre la práctica de la pintura y la crítica social. Sus obras pictóricas son muy expresivas para aquellos que directa o indirectamente participen en las capas múltiples de los contextos de la que este artista habla. La violencia, la corrupción y la falta de fuerza de voluntad característica de nuestro tiempo y todo lo que pone en manifestacion la estupidez humana son temas centrales de sus obras pictóricas. Hay una conexión estudiado e interdependencia entre lo que es su trabajo y lo que constituye sus experiencias de vida, lo que se traduce en una cierta politización subyacente de la experiencia de la vida. Su trabajo vuelve a introducir cuestiones en cuanto a cómo una mirada articulada en torno a la realidad en las áreas vez que forma de reflexión en relación a la experiencia de cada individuo…y ocultar la rebelión más absoluta. Suyas son las piezas que nos llevan a esos territorios deliciosos de sarcasmo e ironía que este artista sabe crear.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 20
GALERIE RÖMER APOTHE KE , Z U R IC H
PATRICK LO GIUDICE
G A LERI E RÖ M ERAPOTHEKE: PATRIC K LO GIUDIC E WEBS I T E www.roemerapotheke.ch E- M A I L gallery @ roemerapotheke.ch PHO N E +41 43 317 1780 CONTA C T N A M E Philippe Rey
COV E R Patrick Lo Giudice From the series Mafia Photo by Philipp Hor t, cour tesy the ar tist and Galler y Roemerapotheke INS I D E Patrick Lo Giudice From the series Mafia Photo by Philipp Hor t, cour tesy the ar tist and Galler y Roemerapotheke B AC K Patrick Lo Giudice From the series Mafia Photo by Philipp Hor t, cour tesy the ar tist and Galler y Roemerapotheke
Lo Giudice’s works attracted quite some attention from collectors, media and museums with his show “Mafia”. The story behind it: During a three-year stay in Graniti, Sicily, a traumatic experience inspired the artist to the “murder paintings”: The bored boy, whose father dealt with a wood trader, walked along a line of parked cars, staring through their windows, to see the dash boards. He wanted to know which car was the fastest one. But in one car, the boy detected a corpse. Possibly a victim of the Mafia. The Lo Giudice left the site without calling the police. They didn’t even speak about their experience at home, because the clans were very influential. Papa Lo Giudice, a former communist / socialist, had never paid protection money but now felt unsafe. After a dud (a defective bomb) was found, aimed at their home building, the Lo Giudice decided to live in Switzerland. Many years later, the show with Mafia paintings was a huge success in Zurich. Lo Giudice’s technique is unique, his subjects very emotional and many times loaded with artistic radicalism. Biography: Born August 20, 1959 in Zurich. Sicilian roots, lived from 1970 to 1973 in Graniti, Sicily (Taormina). 1983 first works, oil on canvas, later on experiments with underglass paintings, glass paintings. Cooperation led/glass-works with John Forbes (USA) and colaboration with Lino Tagliapietra in Murano. 1985 — 1988 studies, living in Murano / Venice, Italy. 1993 first works with Lexan, 1996 beginning to work with wax /encaustic paintings. Exhibitions: Kunsthaus Glarus (Switzerland), Galerie Marie-Louise Wirth, Hochfelden (Switzerland), Museum Amden, Amden/SG, Galerie Andy Jllien/Zürich, Haus zur Kunst Uri, Kunst Zürich, Galerie Ralph Schriever, Cologne (Germany), Mondejar Gallery Zurich, Galerie von Braunbehrens Munich, Galerie Lichtfeld Basel, Rigassi Berne, Python Gallery Herrliberg, Gallery Macelleria d’Arte St GallGallery Roemerapotheke Zurich. 2009 Retrospective show Maria am See Weesen.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 2 2
GALERIE STEFAN R ÖP KE , C O LO G NE
ALEKSANDAR DURAVCEVIC
G A LERI E S. RÖPK E: ALEKSANDAR DURAVC EVIC WEBS I T E www.galerie-roepke.de E- M A I L info @ galerie-roepke.de PHO N E +49 221 255 559 CEL L +49 172 230 3329
RO O M NO . 1 ( THING S A RE N O T WH AT T H E Y SE E M ) So called histories So called memories Beauty in devastation Silence of the aftermath Skin and surface Invisible stories Aleksandar Duravcevic
CONTA C T N A M E Stefan Röpke
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jordi Alcaraz Edward Burtynsky Jason Gringler Sharon Harper Robert Mapplethorpe Max Neumann Julie Oppermann Aitor Ortiz Bernardí Roig Keisuke Shirota
COV E R Aleksandar Duravcevic Untitled 2013 graphite on paper 28 × 40 in INS I D E Aleksandar Duravcevic Untitled 2013 graphite on paper 14 × 20 in
The subtle subject matter and images of Duravcevic’s works are rooted in his personal experiences of living through the changing political landscape of his native Montenegro. Growing up with a lineage of conflicting cultures and religions in what was then Yugoslavia, and having to experience war and emigration to America later on, the artist is interested in presenting duality in his work; a process of his own search for identity. Duravcevic uses his deep wealth of knowledge of all aspects of history and his astute observation of daily life for the metaphors that become the subject of his work. By working with graphite on black paper for example, or by using mirrored surfaces and glass, a ghostly quality is achieved, making the viewer have to look twice or pay closer attention. This is in the very heart of Duravcevic’s work. He draws objects of luxurious beauty that may at first attract but that raise thought as one investigates their histories, or portray something disturbing that may actually hold a fond memory. The constant tension of opposites is ever present in his work — between cultures, within history, and between life and death. Aleksandar Duravcevic was born in Montenegro. He attended the University of Montenegro (1990-1992) and the Accademia di Bella Arte, Florence (1993-1994), and received his MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He is currently a visiting professor at the Hunter College MFA Program. His works are in numerous private and public collections including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; and Museum of Fine Arts Boston; among others. Duravcevic lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.41
KIT SCHULTE CONTEMPOR ARY AR T, B E R LIN
KATRIN VON LEHMANN
K I T SCH U LTE: K ATRIN VON L EHMANN WEBS I T E www.kitschulte.com E- M A I L info @ kitschulte.com PHO N E +49 30 2100 5237 CEL L +49 171 190 8312 CONTA C T N A M E Kit Schulte
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Matteo Bergamasco David Buckingham Sara Christensen Max Diel Linda Karshan Juliane Laitzsch Werner Linster Nadja Poppe Susanne Ring Owen Schuh
COV E R Katrin von Lehmann Black Outs 6 2010 ink on paper, object 67.7 × 28.3 × 1.6 in INS I D E Katrin von Lehmann Quercus Pictus 2012 Installation, photographic weavings, twigs 106 × 158 × 20 cm / 42 × 62 × 7.9 in B AC K Katrin von Lehmann Ny Alesund 2, 3, 4 (detail) 2011 Ink on paper, thread, object 35.4 × 8.3 × 7 cm
HU NTING THE HID D E N D IM E N SI O N — N AT UR E ’ S R EPE T I T I V E PR O C E SS What is influencing us more? An image of nature or a direct experience in nature? What is the reciprocal action between an image illusion and an experience? How does this reciprocal action influence our behavior? Katrin von Lehmann has asked herself these questions for many years, while exploring the imitation of repetitive processes as her creative work process. Her technique of photo weaving expresses the ambivalence of inner and outer images in their complexity and explores the relationship between a real object and the copy or image of this object.
Lehmann’s photo weavings and drawing objects describe two characteristic properties within her artistic process: 1. Division and re-assembly of the divided with a third visual, which was not recognizable in the initial situation. 2. The systematic and intuitive procedural method that sets photo weaving and drawing objects into a relationship with each other.
Quercus Pictus The fragments of an oak tree represent the natural experience and is woven together with its photographic copy. The photo in general always shows a short moment. The real branches expose their age through the surface. In order to relate this natural object depicting a natural aging process adequately to its’ photographic counterpart, the images must exists of many photos taken over a period of time. Lehmann photographed the oak tree during two years, always from the same perspective. Then she weaved cut strips of the photographic image together with the real branches and twigs of an oak tree.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.16
S EASO N, S E ATTLE
IAN TOMS
SEA SO N : I A N TO MS WEBS I T E www.season.cz E- M A I L robert @ season.cz PHO N E +1 206 679 0706 CEL L +1 206 679 0706 CONTA C T N A M E Robert Yoder
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Lucas Blalock Sharon Butler Rachel Kaye Elisabeth Kley Scooter LaForge Allison Manch Glenn Rudolph Peter Scherrer Mike Simi Marius Wilms
COV E R Ian Toms Black Painting 2012 oil and enamel on canvas 16 × 12 in INS I D E Studio view B AC K ( L E FT ) Ian Toms Headstones X 2 2011 oil, tape and enamel on plexiglass with wood and bar towel 15 × 25 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Ian Toms Untitled (Spell Of) 2012 ink, enamel and tape on paper 30 × 22 in
I’m drinking espresso and stealing ideas when Serp bursts into my office; he’s totally geeked and chatting my ear off. Out front, a half-dozen businessmen and their escorts have just entered. They are purposefully loud in an effort to impress but they needn’t bother; Celeste, my world’s-best-employee, has discreetly texted me names and net worths before they are fully in the gallery. Serp is still crapping on about a show. I’m not listening but stay seated so it looks like he is more important than some oil rich Russians. Not a single one of them is remotely attractive until you imagine all the rubles spilling out of their pockets. Their escorts are young and generic — high hem, low neckline, high heels, low self-worth. I am certain at least one of them is a tranny. I tell Serp to shut up and sit still. I leave my office door open as I reach out my hand and say “Как поживаете?” — something else Celeste texted. Tomorrow she will find a bottle of Stoli Elit on her desk. The current show, YOUTHDEATH, has practically sold out — save for a few paintings by a young artist named Ashly. The Russians will understand her talent when I explain her work as “pulsating with an enigmatic morose virility.” Two Dimitris argue over who acquires ownership of the syllables. Dimitri number one wins with a cash offer. I envision his fist buried in the tranny’s ass in a suite at the Four Seasons and imagine my description offered a brief moment of self-reflection. Dimitri the Tranny-Fister heads back to my office and pays for the paintings out of an enormous wad of hundreds. I cringe as Serp introduces himself as one of my artists, but calm down slightly as he inadvertently reveals himself as my dealer and offers to share a small fortune in coke. Dimitri no longer cares about the rest of his group, shouting at them to leave, he will catch up later. They go and Celeste soon disappears — she has learned her lesson on getting high with groups of men. Dimitri vacuums up half a gram through a ridiculous 18 karat gold coke straw and goes on a rant. Nervous laughter drops into drugged-up silence. One muffled vibration and everyone instinctively reaches for their phone. The Russian extracts his blackberry from his ill-fitting Versace suit. “Business,” he apologizes, “I need to go.” I lock the gallery doors behind them, turn off the lights and text Celeste to take the afternoon off. I curl up under my desk covered in sweat. My nose is running and I can’t stop crying.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 3 0
GALLER Y SIMO N, S E O U L
HAE-SUN HWANG
G A LLERY SI MON : HAE-SUN HWANG WEBS I T E www.gallerysimon.com E- M A I L mail @ gallerysimon.com PHO N E +82 2 549 3031 CEL L +82 10 3798 7599 CONTA C T N A M E Young Bin Kim
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Hyung Kyung Bae Moon Beom Sunmyoung Choi Airan Kang Ji Eun Kim Joohyun Kim Shin il Kim Sowon Kwon Changwon Lee Sang-Kyoon Noh
COV E R Hae-Sun Hwang The Ballerina 2012 Etching on silver mirror 33 × 21 × 17 cm INS I D E Hae-Sun Hwang What the West Wind Saw 2012 Etching on silver mirror, aluminum Installation view, Galler y Simon B AC K Hae-Sun Hwang The Balloons and The Girl with Balloon 2012 Stainless steel, LED light Installation view Galler y Simon
Hae-Sun Hwang begins her work with a simple drawing, just like writing a journal. Sometimes it produces a situation, or a form, but what Hwang wants to capture is the moment in the happenings that took place. With neither a sense of weight nor mass, Hwang always expresses sculptural ideas. Works that involve the minimum sculptural units, works do not dramatically fill a space but that breathe through the Emptiness. In the Drawing Sculptures, Hwang draws the outlines of person from our everyday life by steel and shadow. The outlines are not from the people taking pose. She draws the sketches of person who is exposed without any preparation. She tries to show this unguarded moment and expression from each face and pose. Although the individual could not remember such a short period of time, this unguarded moment represents them firmly in exhibit spaces. Hae-Sun Hwang achieved a Master of Arts at New York University in 1995 and she lives and works in Seoul, Korea Gallery Simon, founded in 1994, has been at the forefront in representing the most current and significant tendencies in Korean and international contemporary art. Since its establishment, the gallery continues to preserve the aesthetic quality of contemporary art work. Also, the gallery remains to play an important role in promoting Korean artists as well as raising Korean art audience’s awareness of the international art scene. As part of Gallery Simon’s ongoing goal, we encourage artists’ active participation in exhibition while discovering young artists with new vision. To remain as the foremost foundation of its field, Gallery Simon continuously works as a mediator between artists and collectors in Korea and overseas. It seeks for renowned artworks to be shown to a variety of audiences. Gallery Simon will strive to become the most prolific gallery in Korea.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 3 8
SKOTO GALLER Y, NE W Y O R K
OSARETIN IGHILE
SK OTO GA LLERY: OSARETIN IGHILE WEBS I T E www.skotogallery.com PHO N E +1 212 352 8058 CONTA C T N A M ES Skoto Aghahowa Alix Du Serech
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Olu Amoda Osi Audu SoHyun Bae Fathi Hassan Aime Mpane Afi Nayo Uche Okeke Owusu-Ankomah Ibrahim El-Salahi Juliana Zevallos
COV E R Osaretin Ighile Portrait Study (detail) 2000 Ink, acrylic, charcoal on paper 49.5 × 37.5 in INS I D E Osaretin Ighile Oba Ovonramwen of Benin 2011 Plastic, metal and wood 84 × 66 × 66 in Installation, dimensions variable B AC K ( L E FT ) Osaretin Ighile Deities 2011 Rope on steel armatures 72 × 55 × 53 in Installation, dimensions variable B AC K ( R I G H T) Osaretin Ighile Obama 2010 Paper, glass, metal, leather, wood 36 × 65 × 52 in
A BO U T THE A R TIS T: Osaretin Ighile’s (b. 1965 — Benin City, Nigeria; lives and works in Brooklyn) recent sculpture employs strategies that consider artworks as conceptual totalities, multivalent narratives crafted from a variety of approaches, not just single images that express big ideas about humanity. His work is informed by a sophisticated discourse on traditional philosophical concepts, a deep understanding of the aesthetic and cultural character of the African continent as well as an invigorating inclination and facility with various materials and methods. By inventively handling his material within a formalist sculptural framework, combined with a highly developed experimental approach to making art, he creates work that is unorthodox, persistently innovative, and ignores boundaries between different cultural heritages and socially constructed constraints. A BO U T THE G A L L E RY “Two decades ago, when Skoto Aghahowa and his wife, Alix du Serech, opened a storefront gallery in SoHo devoted mostly to contemporary art from Africa, their enterprise looked like a long shot, to say the least. The gallery was way east on Prince Street, far off the beaten track. SoHo was already itching for what would become a mass move to Chelsea. And almost no one knew that Africa even had something called contemporary culture. But their long shot has held steady, through art fashion shifts and economic times when succeeding meant surviving. The art world, very gradually and very incompletely, came to see that Africa has always had contemporary art, that we just didn’t know enough to see it. And Skoto Gallery moved to Chelsea, where it is now celebrating its 20th birthday. The celebration is characteristically modest, far less a survey than a notebook-style reprise of some of the riches the gallery has brought us. A gleaming 2006 wall hanging by El Anatsui is a reminder that this artist, now an international star, had one of his first New York solos here, when he was still a woodcarver. Two very different paintings by Souleymane Keita recall fine exhibitions by this eminent, midcareer Senegalese artist. Four small, portraitlike faces scratched into boards by the Congolese sculptor Aimé Mpane distill some of the power of this artist’s installation at the National Museum of African Art in Washington a few years back. Finally, a suave, witty 1963 drawing by Uche Okeke from Nigeria is a souvenir of one of Skoto’s several historically minded shows, in this case the 1995 ‘Uli Art: Master Works, Recent Works.’ But then, all its shows are historical when a gallery is, like this one, making history.” Holland Cotter, New York Times, February 16, 2012
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.13
SLAG GALLER Y, B R O O KLY N
NAOMI SAFRAN-HON
SLA G GA LLERY: NAOMI SAFRAN-HON WEBS I T E www.slaggallery.com E- M A I L irina @ slaggallery.com PHO N E +1 212 967 9818 CONTA C T N A M E Irina Protopopescu
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Max Dunlop Dumitru Gorzo Ioana Joa Jason Clay Lewis Serkan Ozkaya Molly Stevens Mircea Suciu Marko Velk Shirley Wegner
COV E R Naomi Safran-Hon Wadi Salib: Interior Garden (window and trash) (detail) 2013 archival ink jet print, lace and cement on canvas 40 × 60 in INS I D E Naomi Safran-Hon Wadi Salib: Green Room (with 3 doors) (detail) 2013 archival ink jet print, lace and cement on canvas 40 × 42 in B AC K Naomi Safran-Hon Wadi Salib: Interior Wall IV (pink coat hanger) (detail) 2013 archival ink jet print, lace and cement on canvas 48.5 × 65 in
“Home. This past fall super-storm Sandy destroyed many homes along its path. The invasion and destruction of our home, the place we feel most secured at, is unbearable. Is home really safe? In my work I investigate the tension between domestic space and the invasion of outside forces, be it nature or human. In the region where I grew up, war and violence penetrate every aspect of our daily life; similar to the way Sandy brought life to a standstill.” By intermixing cement and lace Naomi Safran-Hon explores these moments of tension. Cement, an element of the external world, represents the forces that push into lace, a fabric that contains our domestic life. Interlaying these elements into a photographic image of dilapidated homes, where no one is allowed to dwell, pushes the reality of the picture. One is not sure where the images ends and the materiality begin. Safran-Hon visits through her photographs the decaying neighborhood of Wadi Salib, in her hometown Haifa. She then transforms these images in her studio in Brooklyn using lace and cement, which echo the factual world represented in the picture. Using this method she is able to stitch back together the suppressed narratives of the people who used to inhabit these homes. Born in Oxford, England, Safran-Hon grew up in Haifa, Israel. She received her BA Summa Cum Laude from Brandeis University, 2008, in Studio Art and Art History and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2012. Safran-Hon’s work has been featured in two solo shows in New York and Amsterdam. Her work was featured most recently in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum, and at Marianne Boesky Gallery, P.P.O.W Gallery, and Momenta Art. Her video work was included in the festival Handheld History, at Queens Museum of Art. She lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Slag Gallery New York.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.41
CHAR LIE S MITH LO ND O N
JOHN STARK
CH A RLI E SM I TH LONDON: JOHN STARK WEBS I T E www.charliesmithlondon.com E- M A I L direct @ charliesmithlondon.com
F IE L D W O RK Beneath his assured air, beneath his fanfares is hidden one who is besotted with Misfortune E.M. Cioran, ‘Thinking Against Oneself’
PHO N E +44 20 7739 4055 CEL L +44 7958 931 521 CONTA C T N A M E Zavier Ellis
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Emma Bennett Sam Jackson Sarah McGinity Alex Gene Morrison Gavin Nolan Dominic Shepherd John Stark Gavin Tremlett
INS I D E John Stark House of Misfortune 2012 Oil on wood panel 41 × 50 cm
Within this group of paintings there is a dialogue at work that is predominantly concerned with the field of ‘Misfortune’. The roles of field researcher and occidental tourist are played out to create a kind of chemistry that enables the artist to freely interpret the world on his own terms. This dialectical approach intends to formulate a unique theory of creativity capable of expressing deep universal truths based on a range of well defined, although variable methods: direct observation; research conducted into speculative theologies; trespassing on private properties; averse interactions with the natural environment; misguided self-analysis; hysterical outbursts; alchemical sexual encounters; and collection of data. The works presented here express these diverse methodologies, often veiling a secret light or a vital heat that might remain imperceptible to the viewer. In House of Misfortune we are presented with a makeshift hut constructed from cheap materials: scaffolding, a tin roof and plastic sheeting conceal gym (or prayer?) mats leaning against the interior walls, and a warm glow permeates the film, suggesting the presence of a life force. The Spiral (symbolic of the process of the dialectic) forms the crux of this exhibition, which might suggest a connection or portal to the divine abstract, the bridge between this world and the other — or the last. In Sick, Sex, Alchemic three figures are locked in a sexual act to form an ouroboros. Here the serpent eats its own tail allegorising the cyclic and the notion of human desire (or will), being the cause of all pain and suffering where the presence of the work itself is only a temporary antidote. The sublimation of this horror restlessly heaped upon horror never ends, ad infinitum. These works are a last resort of desperate measures or a shameful excuse to quantify the endless recycling of images and ideas and the delirium in striving for the immobile perfection of death. The pursuit of truth through the creation, or perception, of these works leads us through a gateway directly towards the hidden (occult) or that which can inherently never be known. By means of empirical investigation these works attempt to renegotiate the relationship between us and the world; that is, personal interpretation via the imagery that constantly inundates us. These paintings operate between immersion and reinterpretation, fragmentation and the whole, and confront the idea of the self through artistic endeavour in the age of digital technology whilst challenging preconceived notions of perception and conditioning. John Stark was born in the United Kingdom in 1979. He studied at the University of the West, Bristol from 1998 to 2001 and then Royal Academy Schools, London from 2001 to 2004. Stark has exhibited internationally in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, Klaipeda, Lausanne, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Naples, New York, and Zurich including Grieder Contemporary, Somerset House, Ana Cristea Gallery, John Hansard Gallery and Torrance Art Museum. Most recently he has shown at Galeria Cadaques with The Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, James White and others. Stark’s work is featured in private collections globally.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.12
M IND Y SOLOMON GALLERY, S T. PE TE R S B U R G FL
GENERIC ART SOLUTIONS
MI N D Y SO LOM ON GALLERY: G.A.S. WEBS I T E www.mindysolomon.com E- M A I L mindy @ mindysolomon.com PHO N E +1 727 502 0852 CEL L +1 727 409 9113 CONTA C T N A M E Mindy Solomon
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jeremy Chandler Einar and James De la Torre David Hicks Georgine Ingold James Kennedy Sungyee Kim Kate MacDowell Udo Noger William Pachner Christina West
COV E R Generic Art Solutions Marat 2009 archival digital print on photographic paper 30 × 41 in INS I D E Generic Art Solutions The Raft 2010 archival digital print on photographic paper 30 × 40 in B AC K Generic Art Solutions Liberty 2011 archival digital print on photographic paper 30 × 40 in
M A RAT ( 2009) David’s The Death of Marat depicts the murderous end of the artist’s dear friend and famed revolutionary. Generic Art Solutions revisits this crime scene, but in their version there appears to be no foul play, more of a personal tragedy with an unwritten suicide note in hand. Our victim seems to slide into his demise by way of being comfortably numb. THE RA F T ( 2010) Generic Art Solutions’ version of Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa is inspired by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster — drawing a parallel to Gericault’s time, when corporations flaunted safety for shareholders’ profits, sadly still common practice. The Raft is dedicated to the eleven men (Jason Anderson, 35; Dale Burkeen, 37; Donald Clark, 49; Stephen Curtis, 39; Gordon Jones, 28; Wyatt Kemp, 27; Karl Kleppinger Jr., 38; Blair Manuel, 56; Dewey Revette, 48; Shane Roshto, 22; and Adam Weise, 24) who died that day, abandoned like the sailors of the Medusa two centuries earlier, a case of déjà vu. L IBE R TY ( 2011) This work references Delacroix’ infamous painting of the French Revolution, Liberty Leading the People. 2011 was a year of revolution, in which the “Arab Spring” was a highly contagious belief that one could choose one’s own destiny, and that the future was undecided. G.A.S. believes that what is most inspiring about a revolutionary period, when the status quo is crushed and all futures are possible, is the moment of Liberty when all are equal and none have yet stepped into the political power void. The artists state: “These spirited events are always brief but worthy of celebration. We could call this state Anarchadia ― where the rules are unwritten and everyone’s utopia is possible.” M IND Y S O L O M O N G A L L E RY The Mindy Solomon Gallery (St. Petersburg, FL) is an international showcase for Modern and Contemporary art by both emerging, mid-career, and established artists in a variety of media.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2. 2 9
S PECTA, C O P E NHA G E N
CAMILLA THORUP
SPECTA : CA M I LLA THORUP WEBS I T E www.specta.dk E- M A I L specta @ specta.dk gitte @ specta.dk PHO N E +45 3313 0123 CEL L +45 2041 6733 (Else) +45 2963 5594 (Gitte) CONTA C T N A M ES Else Johannesen Gitte Johannesen
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Lars Arrhenius Eva Steen Christensen Peter Holst Henckel Jette Hye Jin Mortensen Ellen Hyllemose Nina Saunders Andreas Schulenburg Daniel Svarre David Svensson Svend-Allan Sørensen
COV E R Camilla Thorup Blue Choreography 2012 Oil on Canvas 80 × 45 cm / 31.5 × 17.7 in INS I D E Camilla Thorup Oneheaded 2013 Oil on Canvas 25 × 34.5 cm / 9.8 × 13.6 in B AC K Camilla Thorup Sunset 2012 Oil on canvas 40 × 62 cm / 15.8 × 24.4 in
Adolescent boys captured in poses requiring close physical contact and interactions are Camilla Thorup’s (b. 1976 — Denmark) trademark motifs. Human pyramids, human towers, acrobatic acts, wrestling maneuvers, and other similar activities are among her most recurring subjects. By depicting such activities, she addresses the question of balance not only physically and psychologically, but also visually. There is an ambiguity attached to her images and choice of subjects, as she explores the visual and psychological complexities of interrelations and interdependencies arising from whenever two or more units join and establish unity. Whatever the imagery — whether boys stacked upon each other in acrobatic acts resemble totems, or a mule carrying a house, or fingers of a hand joined to a wrist wearing a tie — the two common factors between these disparate subjects are their strong physical connection and link resulting to an invisible unity, as well as the balancing act involved in maintaining this unity. Visually, the athletic scenes that Camilla chooses provide her with a template to execute her pattern-like imagery and convey a sense of rhythm. The compositional rhythm is accentuated with application of earthy, toned-down and carefully considered colors. Nonetheless, there is vitality in her colors and her palette bears similarity to that of Old Masters. Perfect balance in composition and coloration is the key to Camilla’s works. Despite the paintings’ small scale, they feel solid, as if they were objects. This is achieved through earthy colors applied to grainy canvases and her highly controlled compositions. By not using basic elements such as time, space and context from her motifs, and concentrating on the poses and positions that these activities require, the artist creates scenes that are mysterious and irrational. The strong folk and tribal art references in Camilla’s paintings and drawings further support the surreal undertones of her works.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.0 8
STATIC GALLERY, LIVE R P O O L
PAUL SULLIVAN
STATI C G A LLERY: PAUL SULLIVAN WEBS I T E www.statictrading.com E- M A I L paul @ statictrading.com PHO N E +44 151 707 0770 CEL L +44 788 237 8463 CONTA C T N A M E Francis Gallagher
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Ross Dalziel Francis Gallagher Diane Guyot Paul O’Neill Frederic Pradeau
COV E R Paul Sullivan LaundryMen Drawings 1+2 2012 Ink on Film 40 × 60 cm INS I D E Paul Sullivan LaundryMen Drawing 6 2012 Ink on Film 40 × 30 cm B AC K Paul Sullivan LaundryMen Drawing 4 2012 Ink on Film 40 × 30 cm
On the Twinbrook Estate, Belfast, 2nd October 1972, a British Army undercover operation called the Four Square Laundry Service was ambushed by the Provisional IRA. Paul Sullivan uses this one incident during the Troubles in order to investigate a wider set of complex issues, in particular the military urban planning tactics that were developed and deployed in Northern Ireland in the early 1970’s, and the possibility that these tactics have been transferred and continue to be used in major British cities for the purpose of control. Through the use of doubling every drawing with slight variations — each one referencing either a Republican or a British version of events — the LaundryMen series mirror the immediate and long-term points of counter-claim evident from oppositional factions in any war situation, thus making the notion of what is truth and what is lie almost subservient to what needs to operate as myth within the cultural and media contexts of the given situation. The series also examines how the British Army successfully recruited large numbers of 1st or 2nd generation Irish Catholics in Liverpool, who in turn pretty quickly found themselves back in Ireland fighting a war. In examining this issue, the drawings depict the urban environments of the British Army’s recruitment grounds and by proxy, begin to examine the reasons of how and why a relatively recent Irish diaspora would lose such a connection with their immediate past. The drawings also speculate on the urban myth that the British Army built a replica Belfast housing estate in a major British City in order to recruit and train. The LaundryMen series is part of a wider set of works that will also include a film and a publication. Paul Sullivan (b. 1968) lives and works in Liverpool, UK.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 21
G ALERIE HEIKE STRELOW, FR ANKF U R T A M MA IN
MATHIAS KESSLER
G A LERI E H EI K E STRELOW: MATHIAS KESSLER WEBS I T E www.galerieheikestrelow.de E- M A I L info @ galerieheikestrelow.de PHO N E +49 69 4800 5440 CEL L +49 17 2676 9613 CONTA C T N A M ES Bernd Metz Heike Strelow
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Fides Becker Marco Evaristti Jáchym Fleig Florian Haas Julie Hayward Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt Eva Maria Kollischan Astrid Korntheuer George Steinmann Katrin Ströbel
COV E R Mathias Kessler Impact, CFCF034519, West Virgina, 2012 Inkjet print 78.7 × 118.1 in INS I D E Mathias Kessler Picher 09, Oklahoma 2011 Digital C Print, Diasec, gallery glass, alu-dibond Edition of 7 19.8 × 80.7 in B AC K Mathias Kessler Das Eismeer. Die gescheiterte Hoffnung 2012 fridge with freezer compartment, letters, 3D model Edition of 3 Dimensions variable
For nearly ten years Mathias Kessler has been exploring the concept and history of “nature” within the Western Eurocentric context of capitalism, humanism, and representation. In his works, he not only exposes the many interventions of human culture that have threatened, remade, and shaped what nature is, but plays with our longing for an apparently untouched environment. In his photographs, computer-generated landscapes, and installations, Kessler works within the historical interface between the private living room and the adjoining public room of the natural order; between memory and its image; authenticity and alienation. With nuance and subtlety, he exposes the way human intervention reconstructs the natural to the point that it is just another “fiction of the 18th and 19th century” as Robert Smithson put it. In particular, he investigates the complex movement of man and nature across two important notions: natura naturans (self-creating nature) and natura naturata (created nature) as explored by Dieter Buchart. He uses photography to abstract nature (as a condition of human perception) rather than document it, in order to draw an arc from visible topography to the social, economic, and cultural realities that underlie the seemingly blank surface of nature.
In VOLTA NY we will focus on Kessler’s interest in the ancient and ever-prevalent dream of expansion. This dream does not end today at the Pacific coast, but breaks fresh ground in our reach to distant spheres such as Mars and cyberspace. Galerie Heike Strelow focuses on art that redefines the meaning of nature and landscape, ethics and the human, the changing experiences and perceptions of the body, and the history of environmental issues. It does not limit itself to natural and geographic sites but includes cultural, medial and physical landscapes. The artists we present draw a thread from the social construction of art to the examination of the individual within the public realm of political relations.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1. 3 4
SULLIVAN+S TR U MP F, S Y D NE Y
DARREN SYLVESTER
SU LLI VA N + STRU MPF: DARREN SY LVESTER WEBS I T E www.sullivanstrumpf.com E- M A I L art @ sullivanstrumpf.com PHO N E +61 296 984 696 CEL L +61 400 840 032 CONTA C T N A M ES Ursula Sullivan Joanna Strumpf
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Tony Albert Sydney Ball Karen Black Penny Byrne eX De Medici Juan Ford Sam Jinks Sam Leach Laith McGregor Judy Millar
COV E R Darren Sylvester What Happens Will Happen 2011 lightjet print, ed 6 + 2 APs 120 × 90 cm INS I D E Darren Sylvester Alpha Arbutin 2012 bronze, ed 3 + 2 APs 31 × 23 × 13 cm B AC K ( L E FT ) Darren Sylvester Shiseido Aqualabel 2012 bronze, ed 3 + 2AP 31.5 × 17.5 × 11.5 cm B AC K ( R I G H T) Darren Sylvester Compass Point 2012 hardcover book, 72 pages 27 × 21 cm
Darren Sylvester (b. 1974 — Sydney) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He completed a Master of Fine Art degree at Monash University, Melbourne, in 2010 after previously gaining a Bachelor of Art, Fine Art Photography from Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, Australia. Well-known for his narrative-driven photography, Sylvester is continually expanding his multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates the mediums of photography, video, sculpture, and more recently, performing and recording music as a solo musician. His photographs are highly choreographed precise compositions which are both striking and direct. Sylvester’s intent to create an instant understanding of the unfolding scenario presents the photograph much like a pop song — as a universal story that although is direct and to the point, is inherent with levels of complexity. His work always relates to the universal complexities of human existence: love, loss and yearning. This presentation includes four bronze sculptures based on the imaginary ancient tribe-like designs invented by pharmaceutical companies for moisturizing and whitening masks, as well as his first book Compass Point, based on the famed recording studio of Grace Jones which closed last year. Sylvester has exhibited widely, both within Australia and internationally, and has been featured in many publications including Vitamin Ph (Phaidon) and reviewed in art journals such as Frieze. Solo exhibitions include Darren Sylvester — Take Me To You, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore; and the major survey exhibition Our Future Was Ours, Australia Centre for Photography, Sydney, 2008. Group exhibitions include Mortality, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2010); Wonderlust, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2008); Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, QLD (2008); and Artificial Supernatural which toured throughout major museums in South East Asia; plus the upcoming Balnaves Project We Used to Talk About Love, Art Gallery of NSW (2013). Sylvester recently won the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award for 2011 and received an Australia Council New Work Grant in 2010. His work is held in various public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Western Australia.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.0 5
F RE DERIEKE TAYLOR GALLERY, NE W Y O R K
LONG-BIN CHEN
FRED ERI EK E TAYLOR GALLERY: LONG-BIN C HEN WEBS I T E www.frederieketaylorgallery.com E- M A I L info @ frederieketaylorgallery.com PHO N E +1 646 230 0992 CEL L +1 917 402 4881 CONTA C T N A M ES Frederieke Taylor An Hoang
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Olive Ayhens Mel Chin [dNASAb] Jackie Ferrara Peter Hutchison Julie Langsam Mary Lum Raquel Maulwurf Kirsten Nelson Christy Rupp
COV E R Long-Bin Chen Renaissance Man I (DaVinci) 2012 Magazines 30 × 21 × 10 in INS I D E Long-Bin Chen Damoh 2012 Magazines 46 × 37 × 22 in B AC K Long-Bin Chen Renaissance Man II (Michelangelo) 2012 Magazines 30 × 22 × 12 in
Long-Bin Chen is a sculptor who works with books, phone books, catalogs, and magazines as his medium. Using traditional sculpting techniques, the artist handcarves the printed material into iconic and intellectual figures, as well as creates large installations and carved rooms. The sculptures resemble carved stone or marble and are constructed in such a way that the various parts fit together in a seamless manner. Long-Bin Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan and is based in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including The Museum of Arts and Design-New York, The Museum of Chinese in America/MOCA-New York, MassMOCA, the Holland Paper Biennial and the Taipei Cultural Center. His work was included in the group exhibition The Missing Piece, organized by the Dalai Lama Foundation, which traveled internationally.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.01
TEAPO T, C O LO G NE
SUSANNE ROTTENBACHER
TEA POT: SU SA N N E ROTTENBAC HER WEBS I T E www.weareteapot.com E- M A I L info @ weareteapot.com PHO N E +49 221 7894 0398 CEL L +49 177 580 9048 CONTA C T N A M ES Lutz Göbelsmann Petra Martinetz
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Oliver Czarnetta Christian Eisenberger Amir Fattal Christian Keinstar Robert Knoke Thomas Palme Rob Scholte Tina Schwarz Ward Shelley René Stessl
COV E R Susanne Rottenbacher Druckgrafik II 2012 LEDs, acrylic glass, acrylic colour, coloured foil ø 15.7 in INS I D E Susanne Rottenbacher shine a light 2013 LEDs, acrylic glass, acrylic colour, coloured foil approx. 87 × 157 in B AC K Susanne Rottenbacher my spectrum has nine pieces (detail) 2010 LEDs, acrylic glass, acrylic colour 94.5 × 27.6 × 7.5 in
Susanne Rottenbacher was born in Göttingen, Germany in 1969 and began her career studying stage and light design at Columbia University in New York and the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning in London. After working as a stage designer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, she has been focusing on light art since 2004. Rottenbacher’s sculptures breathe the spirit of the kinetic art of the 1960s. In the early stages of her career she used the elements painting, light, and time in her work with acrylic boxes, and in recent years transparent circles of light have become the Berlin artist’s trademark. Since this year, Susanne Rottenbacher´s work bursts out of its formal frame and is now able to appear in a much freer context. Inside the transparent plastic objects a filigree wire structure is trimmed with small, coloured LED-lamps. The outside is painted with stripes of differing colour intensity, widths and density. Rottenbacher’s installations also unfold their full potential in the public space, such as the Lichtparcours (light course) in Braunschweig, Germany in 2010. The rings exude a magical, almost psychedelic atmosphere at night when they shine as light- and colour-objects in the dark. Hanging freely and in groups or put up in fixed ensembles, the objects face the observer as figures that reach out into the space around them with varying direction, size and density.
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GALERIE TROIS POINT S , MO NTR E A L
MATHIEU LÉVESQUE
G A LERI E TRO I S POINTS: MATHIEU LÉVESQUE WEBS I T E www.galerietroispoints.com E- M A I L info @ galerietroispoints.com PHO N E +1 514 866 8008 CONTA C T N A M ES Emilie Grandmont Bérubé Jean-Michel Bourgeois
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Elmyna Bouchard Sylvain Bouthillette Olga Chagaoutdinova Mario Côté Michel Daigneault Evergon Mathieu Lévesque Alex McLeod Natalie Reis Max Wyse
COV E R Mathieu Lévesque Puzzle II (tableau avec du rouge) 2012 Spray paint and enamel on wood Dimensions variable INS I D E Mathieu Lévesque Puzzle November 2012 Installation view, Galerie Trois Points B AC K Mathieu Lévesque L’Aloès d’Amélie 2011 Acrylic and lacquer on wood 152 × 157 cm / 60 × 62 in
Mathieu Lévesque approaches painting as an object in which he enjoys disrupting the traditional stages of development and basic components, revealing its physical dimensions and traces of studio work as well as the way in which it takes place in the space — updating the definition of what is a painting. He has chosen to invest the canvas edges, reversing the usual roles of the front and the edges, the first usually the part receiving the painting material. Hence, he distorts the traditional function of the edge’s delimitation as it becomes a liaison. Lévesque is fascinated by the boundary areas between painting, sculptural and architectural disciplines, which led him to want to push the boundaries of painting while reducing as much as possible the possibilities to enter the painting. This approach has led him to use the in situ intervention as a mean to address the dependence of painting towards architecture. Therefore, he wonders what happens — or could happen — outside those boundaries, and the kind of expansion that painting can take in the space. Lévesque holds an MFA from UQAM. His work has been shown in Montreal (QC), Toronto (ON), Chicago (IL), Nashville (TN) and is part of numerous corporate collections, including Familiprix, Sun Life, Conceptis Technologies and Twentieth Century Fox. Since its very first days in 1988, Galerie Trois Points dares to present emerging artists and several of these young artists are now well renowned in Canada. In 1994, we were one of the first institutions to invest the Belgo Building, located downtown Montreal, an old textile factory now occupied by more than 25 exhibition spaces, being the very heart of the Montreal visual arts scene. Dynamic duo Emilie Grandmont Bérubé and Jean-Michel Bourgeois took over the gallery in 2009 and have vivified the spirit of the gallery, positively inscribing themselves in the Canadian art scene, defending and pursuing Galerie Trois Points’ mission and heritage.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.4 0
VANE, NEWCAS TL E U P O N TY NE
JOCK MOONEY
VA N E: J OCK M OONEY WEBS I T E www.vane.org.uk E- M A I L info @ vane.org.uk PHO N E +44 191 261 8281 CEL L +44 771 309 7852 CONTA C T N A M ES Paul Stone Christopher Yeats
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Héctor Arce-Espasas Kerstin Drechsel Jorn Ebner Mark Joshua Epstein Nick Fox Nadia Hebson Michael Mulvihill Stephen Palmer Josué Pellot Flora Whiteley
COV E R Jock Mooney Sigourney Weaver (detail) 2011 pen on paper 25 × 25 cm / 10 × 10 in INS I D E Jock Mooney Knots Landing (detail) 2010 pen on paper 25 × 25 cm / 10 × 10 in B AC K Jock Mooney Vom Shit Dog (pink jets) 2010 plastic modelling compound, enamel paint 13 × 8 × 21 cm / 5 × 3 × 8.25 in
Jock Mooney constructs a carnivalesque horror show that raises a distorted mirror to the modern world, one populated by grotesque, morphed effigies of historical, mythical and religious figures and weird animals. Informed by both high and low culture — from pop art, underground comic books and manga, to pastoral landscapes, Japanese prints and nursery rhymes — all Mooney’s work shares the same imaginative manipulation of materials, intensity of labour and quirky outlook that is equally disturbing and endearing. His pen and ink drawings are visions of apocalypse. Examined closely, we see the distorted skulls, figures and landscapes are composed of tiny fingers and hands — stretched out in apparent supplication. Fascinated by the ways in which societies visually memorialise death, Mooney’s own collaged wreaths consist of hand drawn and coloured images, cut from card. Dismembered body parts and the debris of everyday life swirl in a vortex, acting as both momento mori and doorways into some terrible void. His objects are exquisitely sculpted from plastic modeling clay and hand painted in high gloss. With their exaggerated features, they wave a satirical finger at the traditional sculptural portraits and icons of high art, as well as the ceramic ornaments lovingly arrayed in glass-fronted cabinets in domestic parlours. Jock Mooney (b. 1982, Edinburgh, UK; lives in London) studied at Edinburgh College of Art. His collaboration with animator Alisdair Brotherston as part of a contribution to the film based on A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI, the autobiography of the late Graham Chapman of ‘Monty Python’, was released this year. ‘The Eyes Turn’d Inward for the Nightmare was Real’, his third solo exhibition for Vane, was held in 2012. Recent group exhibitions include those at Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, Chapter, Cardiff, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, and Jerwood Space, London. Solo exhibitions include those at Galleri 5, Lund, Sweden, and Gimpel Fils, London.
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VIG O , LO ND O N
KADAR BROCK
VI GO: K A D A R BROC K WEBS I T E www.vigogallery.com E- M A I L pal @ vigogallery.com PHO N E +44 207 493 3492 CEL L +44 978 5401 2138 (Pia) +44 777 190 7069 ( Toby) CONTA C T N A M ES Pia Austin-Little Toby Clarke
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Biggs and Collings Leonardo Drew Howard Dyke Ayan Farah Marcus Harvey Heywood and Condie Henry Krokatsis Penny Lamb Oliver Marsden Zak Ové
COV E R Kadar Brock dnsi (detail) 2006 – 2012 Oil acrylic, flashe, spray paint, house paint on canvas 66 × 48 in / 167.6 × 121.9 cm INS I D E Kadar Brock dnsii, 2006-12 2006 – 2012 Oil acrylic, flashe, spray paint, house paint on canvas 66 × 48 in / 167.6 × 121.9 cm B AC K Kadar Brock dnsiii, 2006-12 2006 – 2012 Oil acrylic, flashe, spray paint, house paint on canvas 167.6 × 121.9 cm / 66 × 48 in
Kadar Brock makes iconic work that manifests universal processes. Every artist is confronted with the prospect of risking a work of self-selection, and of self-editing, and most artists have destroyed a work to repaint altogether or to attempt to delete it from their personal history. Brock’s work is compilations of negative spaces, stacked upon each other with little intervention beyond their physical combination. These negatives were once positives — the focus of emotional attention and intention. They were paintings, they were brush strokes and markings. They’re now paintings again. These chips and chunks are gestures undone, decontextualized and now reconfigured, scattered randomly. They’re layered on one another, and on tracings of the empty spaces they left behind. Holes upon holes — a double negative making a positive. These materials, all these donut holes, were culled from annihilating other paintings. Collected as sacred remains. Whatever potential within hopefully perseveres and is redistributed. Painting as a series of rituals performed with its own residuum.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.17
WESTERN EXHIB ITIONS , C HIC A G O
ELIJAH BURGHER
WESTERN EX H I BI TIONS: ELIJAH BURGHER WEBS I T E www.westernexhibitions.com E- M A I L scott @ westernexhibitions.com PHO N E +1 312 480 8390 CEL L +1 312 480 8390 CONTA C T N A M E Scott Speh
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Lilli Carré Ryan Travis Christian Nicholas Frank Richard Hull Miller & Shellabarger Rachel Niffenegger Paul Nudd Geoffrey Todd Smith Deb Sokolow Mark Wagner
COV E R Elijah Burgher Enclosure for undisclosed ritual action 2012 acrylic on 4 canvas drop cloths 6 × 9 f t each panel INS I D E Elijah Burgher With all the will in the world (for Roberto) 2012 color pencil on paper 24 × 19 in B AC K Elijah Burgher Scatology 2 2011 colored pencil on paper 14 × 11 in
Elijah Burgher makes modestly-scaled colored pencil drawings and large-scale acrylic stain paintings on unstretched canvas and drop cloths that utilize ideas from magick and the occult to address sexuality, sub-cultural formation and the history of abstraction. Citing early 20th century occultist, Austin Osman Spare’s system, he draws sigils — emblems to which magical power is imputed. By recombining the letters that spell out a wish into a new symbol, Burgher’s pictures of sigils literally encode desire while embodying it abstractly through shape, color and composition. The precise, repetitive marks in the drawings and arching roller lines in the large paintings endow the works with an all-over charge. His representational works often depict naked men conducting rituals in rented rooms or wooded landscapes. They draw the ritual circle, invoke the dead, or cut symbols into one another. Others portray counter-cultural queer icons or betray a prurient attitude towards art history’s storehouse of imagery. At stake are a concern with human relationality and a desire to close the gap between fantasy and reality. Elijah Burgher’s work in recent group shows at Carthage College in Kenosha and at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was written about on Hyperallergic and New City Chicago. Burgher was a contributor to AA Bronson & Peter Hobbs’ Invocation of the Queer Spirits publication in 2011, collaborated with Terence Hannum on the zine, A Cataract of Fire & Blood in 2010 and recently produced GAYHOUSE #5, a catalogue designed by Burgher featuring his work and studio photographs, published by Septembre Editions. In 2011, he was a resident artist at both the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. Burgher received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxeville, NY. He lives and works in Chicago.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 2.14
WI DMER+TH EODORIDIS CONTEMPOR AR Y, Z U R IC H
HUBER.HUBER
WI D MER+ TH EO D ORIDIS: HUBER.HUBER WEBS I T E www.0010.ch E- M A I L mail @ 0010.ch PHO N E +41 43 497 3970 CEL L +41 79 293 1852 CONTA C T N A M ES Jordanis Theodoridis Werner Widmer
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Erika Babatz Othmar Eder Andreas Fux Sybille Hotz Scanderbeg Sauer Ernst Stark Stefan Thiel Nicolas Vionnet Franz Wassermann Nadine Wottke
COV E R huber.huber Im Garten der Lüste 2012 Collage, varnish on paper 9.5 × 8 in INS I D E huber.huber Im Garten der Lüste (kleiner Tod) 2011 Collage, varnish on paper 6.1 × 10 in B AC K huber.huber Human-Made (Butterfly & Crystal) 2011 Trible hybrid butterfly (Japan), alum crystal, crystal glass rotary show, coloured plexiglass cube 9.5 × 6.7 × 6.7 in
Reto and Markus Huber (b. 1975) have worked since 2005 under the name of huber. huber. In the same year, they received the New York studio scholarship of the City of Zurich. In 2006 they won the ‘Kulturpreis Julius Baer’ and in 2007 the sponsorship award of the UBS Culture Foundation. In 2008, the Kunsthaus Glarus presented huber.huber’s first institutional solo show Vor der Vergangenheit, and in the same year, their large solo exhibition I cani non hanno anima was presented at the Cantonal Art Museum in Lugano. Various national and international shows followed. In 2011 Edition Patrick Frey published the monograph Universen in the form of an artist’s book. Their work has been acquired by the Kunsthaus Zürich, Aargauer Kunsthaus and Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen. Over the past years huber.huber have attracted attention chiefly with their collages and drawings, but also with their installations and sculpture. The main theme of their work circles around the ambivalent relationship between civilization and nature. huber.huber deal with current social questions like hope, fear, belief and failure of mankind as their central theme. They are inspired by the doing of mankind, which sometimes assumes absurd shapes. The animals they often use do not stand for themselves but in fact for the behavioural practice of men. The new series Garten der Lüste (The Garden of Earthly Delights) is inspired by the eponymous triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Just like in Bosch’s panels, huber.huber point in their collages to the perils of life’s temptations. Working on such topics automatically triggers questions of ethics that are closely affiliated to social norms and religious values. Contradictions just as science being qualified by the absolute non-scientific discipline of faith are what fascinate huber. huber. But most of all their work isn’t and shouldn’t be regarded as saddening or moralizing. It is rather playful and airy, concealing a lurking abyss behind the harmless idyll.
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MARK W OLFE CONTEMPOR AR Y, S AN FR A NC IS C O
TODD LANAM
MA RK WOLFE CONTEMPORARY: TODD LANAM WEBS I T E www.wolfecontemporary.com
TO D D L A NA M : NO THING GO E S AWAY
E- M A I L contact @ wolfecontemporary.com
In this series of paintings, Todd Lanam explores the process of painting as it relates to the cognitive process of memory formation and recall. The nominal subjects are interior and exterior spaces that remain prominent in the artist’s memory. The renderings of these spaces, however, reflect the constant shifting, omission, distortion, and re-creation of visual memories within the broader context of consciousness. They strive to highlight the inherently transient nature not only of actual places in the physical realm, but of our personal experiences of them that exist within us only in constantly morphing memory.
PHO N E +1 415 369 9404 CEL L +1 415 205 1479 CONTA C T N A M ES Mark Wolfe Alexis Mackenzie
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Jordan Eagles Shawn Kuruneru Alexis Mackzenzie Ryan Martin Jeremy Mora Sarah Thibault Jacob Tillman
COV E R Todd Lanam Park School Rail 2012 Oil on canvas 76 × 59 in INS I D E Todd Lanam Playground Mural 2012 Oil on canvas 16 × 20 in B AC K Todd Lanam Isaac’s Hallway (detail) 2012 Oil on canvas 69 × 48 in
Todd Lanam lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his BFA from the California College of the Arts and his MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University. VOLTA NY 2013 is his first exhibition in New York City. M A RK W O L F E CO NTE M P O R ARY Founded in 2003, Mark Wolfe Contemporary exhibits a range of local and international art with an emphasis on emerging and mid-career artists. We are proud to present a diverse roster of practitioners working in a wide range of media — from painting to video art — all sharing a commitment to conceptual rigor and a firm command of their craft. The gallery’s artists have garnered critical praise in local and national publications and media, including Artforum, art ltd, KQED Public Television, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. Bay Guardian, and Village Voice, and have exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design, SF MOMA, the Oakland Museum, and numerous other venues.
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WOLFS TÆDTER, FR A NKFU R T
INS A KROMMINGA
WO LFSTÆD TER: I NS A KROMMINGA WEBS I T E www.wolfstaedter.de E- M A I L info @ wolfstaedter.de PHO N E +49 163 632 9817 CONTA C T N A M E Jürgen Wolfstädter
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Petra Johanna Barfs Andreas Exner Zero Reiko Ishihara Thomas Kilpper Selena Kiimball Erling T.V. Klingenberg Michael Klipphahn Josef Lortan Benjamin Patterson Thomas Draschan
COV E R Ins A Kromminga Boy? Girl?? or Monster??? 2010 Collage, Acrylic, Crayon on Paper 21.5 × 37 cm / 8.5 × 14.5 in INS I D E Ins A Kromminga Once It Was Human 2012 Installation, Ormston House, Limerick, Ireland variable B AC K ( L E FT ) Ins A Kromminga Green Subject 2012 Pencil, Acrylic, Ink on Paper 21 × 29.5 cm / 8 × 11.5 in B AC K ( R I G H T) Ins A Kromminga Where No Man Has Gone Before 2011 Colored Pencil, Ink on Paper 28 × 33 cm / 11 × 13 in
In his/her work Ins A Kromminga is dealing with the question of norms and the circumstance of how our society is regulating these norms. One main focus within this concern is that of the regulation of bodies, in particular in regards to sex and gender. Based on personal experiences as an intersex person, Kromminga’s artistic practice is informed by the history of otherness and by the artist’s political activism for intersex human rights. The work examines the concept of the abject and its manifestation: that which always appears when boundaries are set and exclusions are created. Mutants, Monsters, Freaks and Misfits are incorporating the fears of a norm-constrained culture and represent the boundaries of the acceptable — reflecting the face of the regulators who made them. By the progressive and spontaneous nature of drawing Kromminga sets critical impulses in a very direct way, often integrating additional writing or text. Visual and conceptual material of transgression are becoming part of Kromminga’s vocabulary, while any political agendas are disrupted by ironic interventions, juxtaposed with ambiguous and abstract, more formal notations. In presenting the works on paper embedded in an overflowing wall-drawing, the viewer is invited to access apparently personal and private contents, and might follow the artist‘s understanding of the personal as inherently politically relevant. Ins A Kromminga (b. 1970 — Emden, Germany) received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Tulane University in New Orleans, USA in 2002 and since 2003 lives and works in Berlin, Germany. In 2005 Kromminga co-curated the exhibition 1-0-1[one ‘o one] intersex: The Two Sex System As A Human Rights Violation in the New Society of Visual Art, Berlin. In 2008, he/she participated in a six-month artist residency at Schloss Balmoral. His/her work has been exhibited internationally, including group shows at Ormston House Gallery, Limerick, Ireland 2012; Catalyst Arts, Belfast, Northern Ireland 2011; Galerie Nord, Berlin, Germany 2011; Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland 2009; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 2009; Goethe Institute, New Delhi, India 2009; Cobra Museum, Amsterdam, Netherland 2008; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany 2006.
VOLTA N Y 2013 | BOO TH N UM BER 1.07
GALERIE ZIMMERMANN KR ATOCHWILL, G R A Z
POKLONG ANADING
Z I MM ERMA N N K RATOC HWILL: POKLONG ANADING WEBS I T E www.zimmermann-kratochwill.com E- M A I L office @ zimmermann-kratochwill. com PHO N E +43 316 823 7540 CEL L +43 676 765 0866 CONTA C T N A M ES Birgit Zimmermann Barbara Pretterhofer
R EPR E S E N T E D AR T IST S Lena Cobangbang Gaston Damag Sofia Goscinski David Griggs Martin Krenn Otto Muehl Hermann Nitsch Manuel Ocampo Jayson Oliveria Isa Rosenberger
COV E R Poklong Anading Who´s afraid of pixels (detail) 2012 duratransprint, lightbox 30 × 20 cm INS I D E Poklong Anading Untitled (dwelling) 2012 Photographs Installation view Gwangju Biennale 2012 B AC K Poklong Anading Counter Acts 2004 Duratransprint, light box Edition of 3
Poklong Anading was once described as “an alchemist of the ordinary” and I have not found a better term so far. A respective body of his works relies on the discarded, unwanted object or — in a more human reference — on the irrational, from force of circumstances or inconsiderate behaviour. What he does is telling stories or conduct those within the field of media that is offered to a conceptual artist in this era; material and technique compliments sound and image, and the recipient or participant, respectively, is incorporated in the concept. Following the invitation to participate — and even if it is by observation only — leads to a notional world without gravity, without borders. It is not about defining the function of art, but art as social media provides the possibility to portray unconventional cohesions and creates utopias — not necessarily based on scientific backgrounds but on personal observation or fiction. I might claim that (the majority of) contemporary artists express contemporary issues. In the case of Poklong Anading, the contemporary is linked to the myths of the past and to the socio-political context of his geographical origin, Southeast Asia. Leaving the classification of his artistic practise to the next generation of classifiers, there is no more to say than that he works in a neo-conceptual tradition. Anading translates his methods and applies his concepts to his actual place of residence. This implements a heavy travelling that is anchored in the collective history of his home country. Therefore, his work series are often connected to places and time. They may be continued for years with re-appearing images or sequences, such as Anonymity and Between Intersections. A lateral entry to Anading’s work is unavoidable since the transition between one work, the previous and the forthcoming, is fluid. Though every story is self-contained, it seems to be a chapter of a book. Each work evolves from the previous, enriched with new impulses, and although the physical appearance of Anading’s artistic expressions vary remarkably in media, size, and material, the main thread jells clearly within the closer examination of the work.