Fernando Botero @ David Benrimon Fine Art, New York

Fernando Botero 
David Benrimon Fine Art, New York
March 28 - April 23, 2019

David Benrimon Fine Art presents the highly anticipated Fernando Botero solo exhibition in its brand new state of the art gallery in the Fuller Building. This show reinforces David Benrimon’s critically acclaimed thirty-year presence in the Botero market.

This exhibition focuses on masterworks from Fernando Botero’s career and includes a selection of impressive paintings, sculptures and works on paper. “Botero” reflects upon the scale of Fernando Botero’s career while also referencing his unique, recurring subject matter.

In his paintings, Fernando Botero synthesizes his own artistic vision by combining the world of contemporary Colombia with the aesthetics of the Italian masters, thus creating a distinctive world of his own. His imagined universe is peopled with various characters from Medellín from bullfighters and dancers to street musicians and lovers. Concierto Campestre, a gorgeous oil painting from 2017, features a romantic moment between a lounging couple as the gentleman serenades his sophisticated partner. Fernando Botero’s ballerina, a desirable and recurring theme referenced throughout his oeuvre, is also highlighted in the show. This sculpture portrays a rare irony – the rounded stomach and undefined limbs are hardly the first things associated with grace, yet his subject is striking and elegant.

Fernando Botero scoffs at new trends affecting the art world and continues to create his graceful, obese women and men, thereby challenging, if not mocking, popular Western culture. At 86 years old, Fernando Botero remains a living Master and it is David Benrimon Fine Art’s privilege to curate this exhibition.

DAVID BENRIMON FINE ART
41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022
davidbenrimon.com

Mel Bochner @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Mel Bochner 

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills 

March 30 - May 18, 2019

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents an exhibition of new works by MEL BOCHNER featuring his iconic Blah Blah Blah paintings and a series of large scale works on paper with the phrase Ha Ha Ha. This exhibition marks the first show of both series by the artist in Los Angeles.

One of the preeminent figures in the history of conceptual art, Mel Bochner has manipulated verbal, mathematical and geometric systems as the content of his work since the mid-1960’s. In his “Thesaurus Paintings,” which debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2004, Mel Bochner began to focus his conceptual experiments on the use and abuse of language. The repeating Blah Blah Blah text has been described by the artist as “an expulsion of breath which can mean anything, everything or nothing.” It could also be thought of as a digital “zero” in a binary system. On a broader level, Mel Bochner’s choice of text is a reflection of the current state of communication and political discourse in contemporary America.

The six richly painted oil on velvet works in the exhibition vibrate with bright, exuberant hues as the viewer’s mind goes back and forth between reading the text and experiencing formal compositions of color and shape. The use of velvet in these conceptual works is ironic, defying our preconceived notions about a medium often considered kitsch or commercial.

In the small gallery, Mel Bochner’s Ha Ha Ha paintings on paper are similarly devoid of content yet embody the dark side of humor. The white repeating Ha text is set against midnight blues and blacks, the result of layers upon layers of UV screenprint. It is unclear whether the viewer is laughing or an unknown person is laughing at the viewer.

MEL BOCHNER (born 1940) received his BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 and received an honorary doctor of fine arts in 2005. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. He currently lives in New York City and is a professor at Yale University.

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 902012

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Rwandan Daughters. Photographs by Olaf Heine, Hatje Cantz, 2019

Rwandan Daughters. Photographs by Olaf Heine
Hatje Cantz, March 2019

Olaf Heine

Rwandan Daughters, 2019

Text(s) by Matthias Harder, Olaf Heine, Antje Stahl

English, 208 pp., 70 ills., hardcover, 24.80 x 33.50 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-4547-5

© Olaf Heine

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda takes place in April 2019. The ensuing trauma is still deep, dividing Rwandan society. Nearly a million people were victims of the genocide in 1994, and around 250,000 women were raped. Today, victims and perpetrators live next door to each other. For Rwandan Daughters, Olaf Heine has created portraits of these women and the children who were products of these crimes.

In his moving images, the photographer Olaf Heine (*1968) has portrayed mothers and daughters, side by side at the crime sites, from a respectful distance, with a straightforward perspective. Olaf Heine’s photos show us the courage, strength, hope, dignity, and optimism radiating from these women, despite the suffering they have endured.

© Olaf Heine

Besides a travelogue by the Berlin-based artist, this volume of photographs contains brief statements from the women about how they dealt with their experiences, as well as informative essays by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung editor Antje Stahl, the curator Matthias Harder, and the journalist Andrea Jeska. This photo-book project was produced in collaboration with ora Kinderhilfe, an organization that provides psychological and financial support for the victims in Rwanda. Hatje Cantz will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to Rwandan mothers and daughters.

“Heine’s series of images brings this forgotten, collective human tragedy to the public eye, and he exemplifies it with very authentic, emotional, and individual portraits. We owe him our thanks for that,” says Matthias Harder, chief curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation, of Olaf Heine’s portraits.

© Olaf Heine

Although women in Rwanda have been steadily gaining influence in society ever since the genocide, the rape victims and their children are at the lower end of the social hierarchy. Many young women still manage to rescue their traumatized mothers and help them to free them from the stigma. The courage and optimism of these women in an authoritarian society scarred by trauma are exemplary.

Olaf Heine is a photographer and director. He studied photography and design at the Lette Verein in Berlin, and is mainly known for his portraits of artists, politicians, and athletes, such as Iggy Pop, Bret Easton Ellis, and T.C. Boyle.  

HATJE CANTZ
www.hatjecantz.de

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - The River That Was in the South

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji 
The River That Was in the South
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
Through 25 April 2019

SADIK KWAISH ALFRAJI

The River That Was in the South

Still image, 5 minutes, 2019

Courtesy the artist and Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

Ayyam Gallery presents The River That Was in the South, a solo exhibition of Sadik Kwaish Alfraji presenting his latest works. 

Artist Statement 

These are visions coming from afar, from a generation I haven’s seen, and a life I haven’t lived, yet I grew up in the arms of its legacy.

It is my grandfather’s generation who lived suspended between his own Southern heaven and the toll of its existence.

There, where the fistful power of feudalism and misery, where the beauty of life mixed up with cruelty bred an endless vortex of dreams and nightmares.

To overcome their wasted dreams and the phantoms of agony and loss; sorrow and grief would identify their world and encompass their perception of things, becoming a feature of their existence.

And with a devotion that is a mixture of lust for life and abstemiousness, they are to create songs of sorrow and tales where happiness takes the colour of grief and where anguish is replaced with joy, where reality blends with the myth with words of agony, love, yearnings, partings, desolation, death and the absence of justice.

A generation living in that paradise of the South, yet unable to own their life nor their fates, in spite of all the efforts and aspirations, ending up carrying their songs and stories, their dreams and fears, leaving behind the crops and reed houses to migrate. In hope of finding a better life.

The dream of migration always seems rosy.

And the paths of migration glisten like gold painting a bright horizon. It would be followed with devotion not knowing that they would end up living on the brinks of the cities.

A migration that would have lasted for three generations, burdened with the

same misery and loss.

Eternal migrants standing on the verge of cities carrying the same passion.

And I stand here with the same passion - on the side of the canals in Amsterdam - viewing the paths of departure, listening to the murmur of the streams stretching down to that southern land, carrying me to that slim snaky river of Rfayaah, wandering along the marshes and on its way watering the songs of love and hope, fading after a while, leaving but drought, absence and separation behind.

These works are an attempt to touch the vis ions of those migrants and those of us, “We” who are still on the move, driven by our everlasting yearnings to visualize a heaven we shall forever stand on its edges.

ABOUT SADIK KWAISH ALFRAJI

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji explores what he describes as ‘the problem of existence’ through drawings, paintings, video animations, art books, graphic art, and installations. The shadowy protagonist who often appears in Alfraji’s multimedia works represents a black void, a filter that allows him to explore the intricacies of life. By rendering his solitary character as a charcoal-coloured silhouette and minimising the formal properties of his compositions, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji captures the expressed movements and subtle inflections of the body in psychologically laden environments. The artist often records his own narrative in black and white scenes of this recurring figure, particularly the loss, fragmentation, and lapses in time that underline exile.

Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1960, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji lives and works in Amersfoort, Netherlands. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Plastic Art from the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghdad in 1987 and a High Diploma in Graphic Design from CHK Constantijn Huygens, Netherlands in 2000.

The artist’s solo shows include Casa Arabe, Madrid (2018), Maraya Art Centre (2017); Red Star Line Museum, Belgium (2016); Galerie Tanit, Munich (2016); Ayyam Gallery Beirut (2015); Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai (2015); Beirut Exhibition Center (2014); Ayyam Gallery London (2015, 2013); Ayyam Gallery DIFC, Dubai (2011); Stads Gallery, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2010); Station Museum, Houston (2008); Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch (2007). Selected group exhibitions include 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018); the Iraq Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); British Museum, London (2017); TRIO Biennial, Rio de Janeiro (2015); P21 Gallery, London (2015); the British Museum, London (2015); 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); Abu Dhabi Festival, Abu Dhabi (2015); Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2015); LACMA, Los Angeles (2015); FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2014); Samsung Blue Square and Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (2014); Ikono On Air Festival, online and broadcasted (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Institut du Monde Arabe (2012); and Centro Cultural General San Martin, Buenos Aires (2012).

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s works are housed in private and public collections including the British Museum, London; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Berjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Russia; Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Romania; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman; and The National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad.

A monograph on the artist edited by Nat Mueller was published in 2015 (Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam).

AYYAM GALLERY
B11, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al-Quoz, Dubai
www.ayyamgallery.com

Liliane Tomasko @ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin - The Red Thread

Liliane Tomasko: The Red Thread
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Through 13 April 2019

Kerlin Gallery presents The Red Thread, an exhibition of new paintings by Liliane Tomasko.

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour.  The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’  This new series of paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it.  Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Museo MATE, Lima 2018/19, a dream of, Blain|Southern (2018); 12 nights x dreams, Rockland Center for the Arts, New York State; Kunstwerk (two-person exhibition with Sean Scully), Sammlung Klein, Germany; Feeling Folding, PIFO Gallery, Beijing; Sean Scully + Liliane Tomasko, Fundación Bancaja, Valencia; Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami; In Visible World, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; dusk at dawn, Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock (all 2015); IVAM, Valencia, travelling to Casal Solleric, Palma, Mallorca and Herforder Kunstverein, Herford (2011); New York Studio School, New York and Zweigstelle, Berlin (both 2010).

Liliane Tomasko’s work is found in public and private collections worldwide, including: The Albertina, Vienna, AU; Bank Vontobel AG, Zurich, CH; Hilti Art Foundation, Schaan, LI; Hôtel des Arts, Centre Méditerranéen D’Art, Toulon, FR; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, IE; IVAM-Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, DE; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, CH; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, US; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, DE; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE; Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf, DE; Try-Me Collection, Richmond, Virginia, US; VMFA Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, US.

KERLIN GALLERY
Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin D02 A028, Ireland
www.kerlingallery.com

Mark Francis @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Ocean Light

Mark Francis: Ocean Light
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
March 22 - April 27, 2019

In his seemingly abstract paintings, Mark Francis (b. 1962) visualizes what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Springing from his scientific interest, Mark Francis’ oil paintings explore ideas related to the mechanisms of the universe. His irregular, luminously pulsating lines are reminiscent of wavelengths measuring the frequency of light coming from objects in the universe. The patterns in his paintings appear to lay down the order in a world of chaos, yet the strict regularity of his compositions is disrupted by a pervasive element of turmoil.

Although his visual approach is systematic, Mark Francis otherwise works very intuitively. The initial scientific idea might fade into the background as a subtle allusion while the painting process takes over. His style is characterized by subtle layering, rhythmic repetitions, and irregular disruptions of ordered patterns. The sharp colour contrasts are softened by the haziness of the lines. Mark Francis creates the sliding colour effects and blurred outlines by applying runny paint through pipettes of varied sizes; he then tilts and shakes the canvas to let the paints run freely across its surface.

Born in Northern Ireland, Mark Francis studied at Saint Martins School of Art and Chelsea School of Art in London. His work is represented in such acclaimed collections as Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Saatchi Collection. The artist is based in London.

GALERIE FORSBLOM, HELSINKI
Lönnrotinkatu 5 / Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki
www.galerieforsblom.com

Monet - Auburtin. Une rencontre artistique @ Musée des impressionnismes Giverny

Monet - Auburtin. Une rencontre artistique
Musée des impressionnismes Giverny
22 mars - 14 juillet 2019

MONET - AUBURTIN. Une rencontre artistique

Musée des impressionnismes Giverny

Affiche de l'exposition

En 2009, le nouveau musée des impressionnismes proposait une exposition inaugurale intitulée Le Jardin de Monet à Giverny : invention d’un paysage. En 2019, le musée fête les dix ans de son ouverture au public. A cette occasion, il a choisi de célébrer l’œuvre de Claude Monet (1840-1926), en la confrontant à celle de son contemporain, le peintre Jean Francis Auburtin (1866-1930). Réunissant un ensemble important de peintures et dessins d’Auburtin, ainsi que quelques-unes des œuvres les plus remarquables de Monet, l’exposition propose de montrer deux regards différents portés sur les mêmes paysages. Alors qu’il mène une carrière de grand décorateur pour les bâtiments publics qui durera jusqu’en 1924, Jean Francis Auburtin se révèle être aussi un peintre de chevalet qui excelle dans l’emploi conjugué de l’huile, de la gouache et du fusain. Pour composer le cadre idéal de ses fresques narratives, le peintre parcourt le littoral français, scrute inlassablement les paysages, qu’il finit par peindre pour eux-mêmes. Ainsi développe-t-il, en marge de ses grandes décorations, une peinture plus intimiste sur le motif, qui se construit au carrefour d’influence diverses entre impressionnisme, synthétisme, symbolisme et japonisme. Son admiration pour Claude Monet, qu’il rencontre vraisemblablement vers 1896-1897, transparaît dans le choix de ses motifs. Très certainement touché par les paysages de C. Monet, régulièrement exposés à Paris, vers 1889-1890, Jean Francis Auburtin s’initie également à la peinture de paysage sur le motif proposant une réponse très personnelle, empreinte d’une sensibilité fin-de-siècle. Tout comme lui, Jean Francis Auburtin pose son chevalet sur les rivages escarpés de Bretagne, de Normandie et de la côte méditerranéenne, là où ciel et mer se rejoignent. En 1894, il séjourne à Porquerolles où il se rend régulièrement. En 1895, un peu moins de 10 ans après Claude Monet, il découvre avec émerveillement Belle-Île où il revient à sept reprises. En 1898, il est sur les côtes normandes, à Etretat, à Pourville puis à Varengeville, où il choisit de représenter les sites peint par Claude Monet auparavant. Dans son approche intellectualisée du naturel, Jean Francis Auburtin n’est pas moins moderne que son aîné impressionniste. S’il pratique le travail en série, Jean Francis Auburtin s’attache moins à rendre les modulations atmosphériques et lumineuses chères à Claude Monet et préfère une construction solide, l’étagement des roches et le théâtre imposant de la nature.

De nombreuses œuvres de Claude Monet et de Jean Francis Auburtin exécutées durant les années 1880-1890 attestent d’une véritable convergence d’intérêts. Leurs vues respectives des côtes bretonnes, axées sur le contraste entre le ciel, la terre et l’eau traduisent cette confrontation, ce dialogue avec ce paysage. A Belle-Ile, alors que Claude Monet plante son chevalet au bord du vide, cherchant à traduire la sauvagerie de la nature, le temps sans cesse changeant, les surplombs vertigineux, Jean Francis Auburtin se laisse envahir par la monumentalité de ces roches millénaires. Alors que Claude Monet se concentre sur la bataille que se livrent les rochers et la mer, laissant peu de place au ciel, Jean Francis Auburtin exprime la pérennité de ces paysages maritimes sur cette île grandiose où tout semble échapper à l’homme.

Chez Jean Francis Auburtin, il y a comme une compréhension intuitive du paysage et une puissance d’expression qui se traduisent dans ses falaises, ses plages, ses ciels, ses nuages ou sa végétation. Les falaises d’Etretat, Pourville et Dieppe, les roches escarpées de Belle-Ile lui offrent ce qu’il affectionne tout particulièrement – la rencontre de l’eau et de la terre, l’affrontement de la paroi rocheuse verticale et de la vaste étendue marine, la permanence robuste des hautes falaises, balayées par le ballet continu des nuages. L’expérience de la nature se traduit également au travers d’effets spectaculaires de soleils couchants sur les falaises.

Ce n’est qu’en 1904, avec la découverte de Varengeville et la rencontre avec Guillaume Mallet (1859-1945), fondateur du Bois des Moutiers, que Jean Francis Auburtin trouve un souffle nouveau dans ses peintures et dessins. Il affirme alors son style et sa manière d’aborder, le paysage change. Il introduit, dans sa peinture de chevalet, les principes simplificateurs qu’il réservait jusqu’alors à la décoration murale. Il élargit l’horizon de ses compositions. Les couleurs savamment nuancées s’éloignent de l’imitation de la nature (roses et bleus phosphorescents) et témoignent d’un rapprochement avec le synthétisme hérité de Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898). Jean Francis Auburtin est désormais parvenu à élaborer un style résolument personnel.

Commissariat scientifique : Géraldine Lefebvre, docteur en histoire de l’art.

Exposition organisée par le musée des impressionnismes Giverny avec le soutien exceptionnel du musée d’Orsay, Paris, de Francine et Michel Quentin et de l’association les Amis et descendants de Jean Francis Auburtin.

MUSEE DES IMPRESSIONNISMES GIVERNY
99, rue Claude Monet, 27620 Giverny
www.mdig.fr

De l’immersion à l’osmose. Chaosmose #2 @ Frac île-de-france, le château / Parc culturel de Rentilly - Michel Chartier

De l’immersion à l’osmose

Chaosmose #2 

Frac île-de-france, le château / Parc culturel de Rentilly - Michel Chartier

17 mars - 21 juillet 2019

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Spiral Forest (Kingdom of All the Animals And All the

Beasts Is My Name), 2013 - 2015

Film 16 mm couleur, muet

Durée: 11 min

Collection IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes

© Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Dove Allouche

Désublimation_31, 2016

103 x 152 cm

Collection IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes

© Dove Allouche

Maria Thereza Alves

Chanson florale, 2018

Installation sonore, bancs, plantes

Dimensions variables

Courtesy de l’artiste et de la galerie Michel Rein

© Maria Thereza Alves

A partir de la collection de l’Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes. Avec Dove Allouche, Maria Thereza Alves, Berdaguer & Péjus, Hicham Berrada, Michel Blazy, Ann Veronica Janssens, Joachim Koester, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Ana Mendieta, Minot - Gormezano, Dane Mitchell, Nicolas Momein, Giuseppe Penone, Sigmar Polke, Linda Sanchez, Bojan Šarčević

De la perception à la fusion, de l’immersion à l’osmose, cette exposition interroge les bouleversements de notre inscription au monde, que l’on découvre dans un parcours expérimental et sensible fait de nombreux passages entre Terre et cosmos.

En convoquant la notion de « chaosmose »1 , cette exposition reconnaît la multiplicité du monde et des êtres et propose, par le biais du processus immersif, une vision non plus anthropocentrée du monde mais cosmomorphe. En étendant notre perception, les « oeuvres cosmomorphes2 » ne font plus référence au sujet qui les conçoit mais deviennent des captations directes du monde. Sensibles à la co-activité du cosmos où tout est mouvement, elles s’affranchissent des limites entre corps et esprit, corps et espace, humain et non humain.

L’importance accordée à l’expérience - expérience de l’artiste, expérience du visiteur -, introduit ce parcours. Le Cabinet en croissance d’Ann Veronica Janssens traduit ce principe de l’expérience comme leitmotiv. En constante évolution, ce cabinet contient des projets, essais et tests de l’artiste dont les effets viennent troubler et développer la perception. Véritable matière première, l’espace est ici un outil d’expérimentation  perceptuelle. A travers une expérience à la fois mentale et physique, les arbres de Berdaguer & Péjus offrent aux visiteurs une immersion intérieure, tout comme les films envoûtants de Bojan Šarcevic ou de Joachim Koester.

Par le biais de la spatialisation ou de la perte de repère, en immersion tant littérale que symbolique, c’est l’acuité perceptuelle qui est convoquée dans cette première partie de l’exposition, comme pour explorer le réel et cultiver la relation à soi et au monde. Ainsi, Voyage au centre de Michel Blazy nous fait passer de cet espace intérieur vers la matière organique.

Minot - Gormezano

Antres VI, 1, 10, 20/09/1985

Tirage sur papier baryté au gélatino-argentique

88 x 88 cm

Collection IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes

Photo Yves Bresson/Musée d’art moderne et

contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole

Dane Mitchell

Aeromancy (Sketches of Meteorological Phenomena),

2014-2017

Installation, sable, verre

Dimensions variables

Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Hopkinson Mossman,

Wellington

© Dane Mitchell

Linda Sanchez

Chronographie de robe de goutte d’eau n°6, 2014

Encre sur papier

92,2 x 298,5 x 3,6 cm

Collection IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes

Photo Blaise Adilon

© Linda Sanchez

De la perception de l’espace à la fusion avec l’environnement, les oeuvres rassemblées dans la deuxième partie du parcours interrogent les limites entre l’humain et le non humain. Avec Spiral Forest, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané fait muter notre perception en la décentrant de nous-même, menant de l’immersion à l’osmose, de la relation à soi vers la relation à la forêt, au cosmos. Sigmar Polke, comme Minot & Gormezano utilisent la photographie pour confondre formes humaines et minérales, alors que Giuseppe Penone s’empare du dessin à grande échelle pour mêler formes humaines et végétales.

Les artistes nous convient ainsi à ré-estimer notre rapport au monde et à la totalité des êtres visibles et invisibles de l’univers. Ils nous enjoignent à voir le monde comme relation, en dehors de toute dichotomie. Le monde cosmomorphe invite alors à entrelacer l’homme à la multiplicité des êtres qui le composent pour leur « redonner la parole », comme Linda Sanchez avec la goutte d’eau, dont elle observe et retranscrit finement la trajectoire.

Dans un univers en continuelle transformation, ces oeuvres-passages sont des outils d’exploration des pulsations du monde, en quête d’une possible continuité entre le proche et le lointain, entre passé, présent, futur.Ainsi, Aeromancy de Dane Mitchell ou les Désublimations de Dove Allouche cherchent à rendre perceptibles l’insaisissable de phénomènes naturels, l’indistinction des éléments et à capter le temps et la matière. Ces artistes expérimentateurs, à l’instar d’Ana Mendieta qui renoue notre corps à la terre, sollicitent  l’imaginaire pour dessiner des relations organiques entre l’Homme et le Cosmos, et tendre vers l’osmose avec notre environnement.

Nathalie Ergino

---------------

1. En résonance au chaosmos de James Joyce (mot-valise créé par Joyce dans Finnegans Wake, 1939) et par extension à la chaosmose de Felix Guattari (1992), et à Cosmogonies au gré des éléments sous le commissariat d’Hélène Guenin, MAMAC Nice, 2018. L’exposition fait acte d’une quête de continuité entre ordre et désordre dans un monde bouleversé par de permanentes mutations. Une première exposition Chaosmose a été présentée à l’Institut d’art contemporain à l’automne 2018, à partir d’une autre sélection d’oeuvres de la collection IAC.

2. Alternative au schéma anthropomorphe qui marque notre civilisation moderne occidentale, la pensée cosmomorphe se représente le monde comme relation, en dehors de toute dichotomie et catégorie. Elle se fonde sur la co-activité qui mobilise chacun des acteurs du cosmos, en décentrant et en élargissant notre perception. Un monde cosmomorphe est conduit par un processus en mouvement continu dont chaque terme est inséparable. Il entrelace ainsi l’homme à la multiplicité des êtres qui le composent, leur redonne la parole et repositionne l’humain comme acteur solidaire du milieu dans lequel il vit.

Commissaire de l’exposition : Nathalie Ergino, directrice de l’IAC, Villeurbanne

Parc culturel de Rentilly - Michel Chartier / frac île-de-france, le château

Domaine de Rentilly, 1 rue de l’étang, 77600 Bussy-Saint-Martin

www.fraciledefrance.com 

www.parcculturelrentilly.fr

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, Palo Alto, CA

Irving Penn
Pace Gallery, Palo Alto, CA
April 11 – May 26, 2019

IRVING PENN

Hell’s Angels, San Francisco, 1967 

© The Irving Penn Foundation

“In 1967 there was word coming out of San Francisco of something stirring—new ways of living that were exotic even for California. People spoke of a new kind of young people called hippies, and of an area where they had begun to congregate called Haight-Ashbury. They seemed to have found a satisfying new life for themselves in leaving the society they were born to and in making their own. … It grew on me that I would like to look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances. I suggested to the editors of Look magazine that they might care to have such a report. They said yes—hurry.”—Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, (Grossman, 1974, 50)

In 1967 armed with a Rolleiflex, Irving Penn came to San Francisco. He rented a building in Sausalito that allowed him to photograph under plenty of northern light, with beams strong enough to bear the weight of the Hell’s Angels’ motorcycles. This studio—like countless studios Irving Penn used over the course of his career—became a neutral space where the photographer and subject could focus on the task at hand to capture individual expression. Photographing them in his signature smooth pared-down style, Irving Penn brought equal consideration and expertise into his work with young hippie couples, motorcyclists, and radical nude dancers as he did with celebrated actors, artists, and luminaries of his time. Decades later, Pace Gallery brings the work of Irving Penn to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The exhibition at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto highlights Irving Penn’s work in the Bay Area while contextualizing these pieces in his larger oeuvre. Rare streetscape works from a 1947 visit to San Francisco are on view, including Lone Star Baptist Church, 99-Year-Old House, and House Front. The exhibit features over a dozen photographs from Irving Penn’s return visit to San Francisco for Look magazine in 1967. Highlights include Hell’s Angels, and Hippie Family (Kelley). The latter is a sensitive portrait where the mother looks directly into the camera lens with an open expression, while the father, in a quarter pose, looks at the lens from a side glance. He clutches the child tightly against his chest and away from the camera, as if in protection from the viewer’s watchful gaze. The complexity with which Irving Penn has photographed the family reveals his renowned gift in extracting the nuances of personality and social relationships.

Irving Penn was not only one of the most seminal photographers of the 20th century, but he was also a master craftsman and innovator in photographic printing. The exhibition will present works made in gelatin silver, cibachrome, and platinum-palladium. Until Irving Penn began using the process in the mid-1960s, platinum-palladium printing was regarded as a 19th century technique that had mostly gone extinct. Irving Penn’s method required incredible stamina and an alchemist’s touch as he hand-coated paper with a light sensitive solution of platinum and palladium, then exposed each sheet multiple times through his large-scale film negatives using ultra-violet lamps. This printing process would take days to complete but gave a delicacy to the photographs and infused them with a soft internal glow that can be seen in Bird Bones (Sweden), New York (1980) and Hippie Family (Ferguson), San Francisco (1967).

IRVING PENN (1917–2009) was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. From 1934–38, he studied design with Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. Following a year painting in Mexico, he returned to New York City and began working at Vogue magazine in 1943, where Alexander Liberman was art director.

Irving Penn photographed for Vogue and commercial clients in America and abroad for nearly 70 years. Whether an innovative fashion image, striking portrait or compelling still life, each of Penn’s pictures bears his trademark style of elegant aesthetic simplicity.

Irving Penn has had over 40 major museum exhibitions in his lifetime including shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and his Centennial opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2017 and toured at the Grand Palais, Paris, France; C/O Berlin, Germany; and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Brazil.

PACE, PALO ALTO
229 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301
www.pacegallery.com

Dominic Dispirito @ Annka Kultys Gallery, London - Pie ’n’ Mash

Dominic Dispirito: Pie ’n’ Mash
Annka Kultys Gallery, London
Through 13 April, 2019

Annka Kultys Gallery presents Pie ’n’ Mash, an exhibition of new paintings by the British artist Dominic Dispirito.  Pie ’n’ Mash is Dispirito’s second solo presentation with the gallery following his successful 2018 debut show In the Garden, Council Housed and Violent.

Ostensibly, the paintings in Pie ‘n’ Mash focus on Jackie, a figure renowned across the East End of London as the “Pearly Queen of Hackney” or simply “Pearly.”  Jackie is the latest in an illustrious line often referred as “London Royalty,” her forebears first being crowned pearly kings and queens of Hackney in the second half of the nineteenth century.  The pearly tradition, primarily associated with wearing clothes decorated with mother-of-pearl buttons, grew out of the habit of London costermongers or street traders wearing trousers decorated at the seams with pearl buttons found in the markets. The first pearly king (a gentleman called Henry Croft, 1861-1930) adapted and built on this practice to create an entire pearly suit to draw attention to himself and his charitable activities of collecting money for the poor of London’s East End. The charitable nature of pearly culture continues to this day and Jackie’s daughters and grandchildren will inherit the pearly title, maintaining and keeping strong the tradition of helping local communities through performance and song. But beyond the immediate focus on Jackie, the works in Pie ’n’ Mash bear witness to Dispirito’s continuing exploration of issues facing the working class culture he grew up in.

The show revolves around the dynamic created by the exhibition’s two largest works, Smokin’ (2018; 180cm x 150cm) and She’s lost her marbles (2018; 167cm x 213cm).  In Smokin’, Jackie can be seen sitting calmly enjoying a cigarette next to a fire place, on the mantel above which sit a pair of black and white porcelain dogs. The distinctive mother-of-pearl buttons that were the original eponym for pearly culture are visible clearly adorning Jackie’s dress at the seams on the dress’s neckline, arms and sides. The look of calm contemplation and the enigmatic smile gracing Jackie’s face may be a reference to the bittersweet pleasure smoking has become in the 21st century. What was once a commonplace pastime of the masses is now largely outlawed in the public space, its last vestiges being confined to the private sphere. As Orwell noted “No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.” Smokin’, in this light, can be seen as a commentary on the choices society makes when it elects to prioritise the public’s health over the individual’s pleasure, and the related but no less important question as to which individuals are most affected by such decisions.

In the largest work in the show, She’s lost her marbles, the figure of Jackie is presented in the same interior space of chimney and mantel, bent over and possibly literally looking for the said marbles referenced in the work’s title.  Less specifically however, Dominic Dispirito’s choice of title employs a common English colloquialism for mental illness, as in someone who has lost their marbles has lost their sanity or memory or may be both. Over half of adults in the UK aged over 55 experience mental health problems according Age UK and as demographics evolve and the average age of our society increases mental health issues will afflict more and more of the populace, as they may well be afflicting Jackie.

The aesthetic of Dominic Dispirito’s new works in Pie ‘n’ Mash represents a further refining of the tendencies identified in his first show.  Whereas In the Garden, Council Housed and Violent came out of the artist’s work with painting apps on digital phones and the saturated colours often associated with digital art (think neon pinks, bright blues and fluorescent yellows), the colours in Pie ‘n’ Mash are from an altogether more constrained palate: three tonal earth colours, the creamy bodies and faces, brownish dresses, and the red of the carpets, dress patterns and Jackie’s hair. Balanced against this development Dominic Dispirito nevertheless continues to display the simplicity of line and contour that won him the Bruce Maclean Prize and the Adrian Carruthers Studio Award in 2017. The pencil lines observable around the body and objects in his paintings remain consciously visible on the canvas, an effect enhanced by the identifiable brush strokes on the Jekyll linen canvas (a specialist linen Dominic Dispirito uses where only the back is primed) which reveal the artist’s process of painting, as the canvas greedily absorbs the paint to give the resulting paintings a washed elegance, not unlike the fading of that great working class clothing staple, denim jeans.

Four further smaller paintings round out the show. Each is a portrait of Jackie. The title of each is a references from Cockney rhyming slang, the vernacular of London’s East End.  In Sat ‘ere all on me jack jones (2019), Jackie is shown in close up with red hair and a hand hiding partially hiding her face. The title means ‘I sit here all alone’ and possibly alludes to the loneliness and social isolation that blight elderly lives. It’s all gone pet tong (2019) shows Jackie’s hand running through a thick mane of what appears to be not red but rather green hair, no doubt referencing the works title which is slang for ‘it’s all gone wrong.’ Tiny dancer (2019), in which Jackie looks up on her hand, and She’s a boat (2019), in which Jackie’s profile with green hair looks beyond the confines of the canvas, complete the sequence.

Drawing on his working-class upbringing, as well as his personal battles with drug and alcohol addiction, Dominic Dispirito’s paintings in Pie ‘n’ Mash (the show’s title is a reference to the traditional working class dish, pie and mash, which originated in the East End in the nineteenth century, while pie and mash shops are still common in the east and south of the city) continue his wry and sophisticated exploration of British working class life.

DOMINIC DISPIRITO (b. 1982) was born in London where he currently lives and works. Dominic Dispirito earned his MFA in 2017 from the Slade School of Fine Art, London.  In 2017, Dispirito was awarded the Bruce Maclean Prize and later that year won the Adrian Carruthers Studio Award.  In 2018, he was nominated for the Dentons Art Prize.

Dominic Dispirito joined Annka Kultys Gallery in January 2018. June 2018 saw Dispirito present In the garden, Council Housed and Violent, the artist’s first solo show and the first with the gallery.  In the garden, Council Housed and Violent presented a selection of the artist’s paintings, manually-3D-printed sculptures and animations in an immersive installation that explored working class experience mediated by popular contemporary digital technologies.

Works by Dominic Dispirito have been included in solo and group exhibitions including: Pie ‘n’ Mash at Annka Kultys Gallery, London; Pearly Party at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; In the Garden, Council Housed and Violent at Annka Kultys Gallery, London; i’m sorry, i didn’t quite catch that at Arebyte Gallery, London; Candy alongside Cristina BanBan, The Dot Project, London; and Cacotopia 02 at Annka Kultys Galley, London.

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY
472 Hackney Road, Unit 3, 1st Floor, London E2 9EQ
www.annkakultys.com

Dominic Dispirito @ Steve Turner, Los Angeles - Pearly Party

Dominic Dispirito: Pearly Party
Steve Turner, Los Angeles
March 30 - May 4, 2019

Steve Turner presents Pearly Party, a solo exhibition by London-based Dominic Dispirito that celebrates the British working class and his upbringing in the heart of Cockney London. He presents paintings that depict “Pearly Queens,” Cockney characters who originated in Victorian London, who evolved from the Coster Kings and Queens, the elected leaders of London’s street hawkers. Benevolent societies developed to aid the less fortunate, and parades were staged in which the “Pearlies” dressed in elaborate clothing that they adorned with rows and rows of mother-of-pearl buttons.

Dominic Dispirito has updated his Pearly Queens by using new technologies and materials. He begins by using various iPhone apps to create drawings and animations that he transforms into actual paintings. In some, he uses plastic 3D modeling paste to build up thick textures on small panels. In others, he applies thin layers of acrylic on stretched linen.

DOMINIC DISPIRITO (b. 1982) earned a BFA from Middlesex University, London (2013) and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2017). He has had a solo exhibitions at The Dot Project, London and Annka Kultys Gallery, London. Pearly Party is Dominic Dispirito’s first exhibition with Steve Turner and his first outside Great Britain.

STEVE TURNER
6830 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90038
steveturner.la

Jason Middlebrook @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Jason Middlebrook
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Through 13 April 2019

JASON MIDDLEBROOK

The Line Where an Object Begins and Ends, 2018 

Acrylic on walnut, 102 x 26 x 1 1/2 inches, 259.1 x 66 x 3.8 cm

Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an exhibition of new paintings by JASON MIDDLEBROOK for his inaugural solo show with the gallery. The exhibition is on view at 520 West 21st. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, featuring an essay by Mary-Kay Lombino.

Jason Middlebrook’s bold and glossy, yet surprisingly nuanced sculptures are a representation of man’s relationship with nature. Trees transformed into wooden planks with sliced cross-sections depict painted patterns comprised of geometric abstractions. Using three-dimensional constructions, Jason Middlebrook challenges viewers to think below the surface and invites them to reflect on nature as a work of art—calling attention to, how above any human activity, the natural world continues to prevail.

The three-dimensional works leaning against the walls of Miles McEnery Gallery embrace elements of both botany and geometry. Influenced by an aversion to wastefulness and a fond admiration for the natural world, Middlebrook’s pieces respect and acknowledge nature while simultaneously celebrating form through the artist’s brushwork. To create his intriguing planks, Middlebrook first meticulously studies the shape of the wood and lets it guide his next steps. Using the smooth side of the surface, Middlebrook paints the wood while taping off the margins of the patterns that in some cases completely cover the surface, and in others operate more as a net or a screen. This process allows the imperfect qualities of the wood to show through from the background, reminding viewers of the fundamental properties of the material itself. Through this process Middlebrook creates a juxtaposition between the artificial geometric patterns of the painting and the natural patterns of the grain. Additionally, the colors of the paint are purposely bright and striking to highlight the tension between man and nature. Using these techniques, Middlebrook draws attention to the tree and its form, making a statement with a delicate hand.

The natural world has played a central role in Jason Middlebrook’s work from the beginning. In this series of planks, Jason Middlebrook highlights the human interaction with nature, and emphasizes that art needs to reach beyond the space in which it is shown. As Mary-Kay Lombino describes, “For Middlebrook, abstraction is more than a preoccupation with line, form, color, and composition. In Middlebrook’s work, abstraction serves as a framework for his ideas about man’s degradation of nature’s resources and about the planet’s cycle of growth, decay, and regrowth.”

JASON MIDDLEBROOK (b. 1966 in Jackson, MI) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1990 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1994 from the San Francisco Art Institute. He also participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY in 1994-1995, and completed an Iaspis Residency in Stockholm, Sweden in 2009-2010.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY; “My Grain,” Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy; “Drawing Time,” David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO; “The Small Spaces in Between,” Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA; “Your General Store,” New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM; “Gold Rush,” Peters Projects, Santa Fe, NM; “Jason Middlebrook: Mosaic Tree Stumps,” Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; “There is a map in every tree,” Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; “Line over Matter,” Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; “Submerged,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; “The Line That Divides Us,” Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; “My Landscape,” Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; and “Underlife,” Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Recent group exhibitions include “Arboreal,” Moss Art Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; “New Acquisitions / Nuevas Adquisiciones: UAG Permanent Collection 2015-2017,” University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM; “Wood as Muse,” The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA, curated by Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein; “Maker, Maker,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, curated by Paul Laster and Renée Riccardo; “Taconic North,” LABspace, Hillsdale, NY, curated by Susan Jennings and Julie Torres; “Cortesie per gli ospiti,” Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy; “Casa Futura Pietra,” Parco Archeologico di Siponto, Siponto, Italy; “Painting @ The Very Edge of Art,” Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; “The Big Show 9,” Peters Projects, Santa Fe, NM; “Painting is Dead?!, Figure One, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL; “Misappropriations: New Acquisitions,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; “Geometries of Difference: New Approaches to Ornament and Abstraction,” Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY; “Into The Woods, ” Morris-Warren Gallery, New York, N Y; “NO W-ISM: Abstraction Today, ” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; “My Landscape, abstracted,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; “SITElines,” SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; “Jason Middlebrook / Letha Wilson, ” Retrospective, Hudson, N Y; “Painting: A Love Story, ” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; “Second Nature, ” Albany International Airport , Albany, N Y; “ Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition, ” Benning ton College, Benning ton, V T; “Expanding the Field of Painting,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and “Pattern: Follow the Rules,” Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, which traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO.

His work is included in the permanent collections of Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Altoids Collection, New York, NY; Arthouse, Austin, TX; British Airways Art Collection, Waterside, United Kingdom; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Marte Museum, San Salvador, El Salvador; Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, N Y; NASA Art Program, Washington, D.C. ; New Museum, New York, N Y; Pacific Bell, San Francisco, CA; Progressive Art Collection, May eld, OH; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Jason Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, NY.

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
520 West 21st Street, New York, NY
www.milesmcenery.com

Wolf Kahn @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Wolf Kahn
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Through 13 April 2019

WOLF KAHN 

Bright, but not too Bright, 2018 

Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, 76.2 x 76.2 cm

Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an exhibition of works by WOLF KHAN, on view at 525 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by Martica Sawin.

Including paintings dating from the 1960s as well as a selection of recent works, this exhibition illustrates the evolution of Wolf Kahn’s prolific career and his continuing exploration of the relationships between color and form. Wolf Kahn’s earlier, more densely painted canvases often feature darker, tonal hues, while his works from the late ‘60s represent a transition to an increasingly vivid palette. Illuminated by brilliant bands of color, his vigorously painted landscapes possess a captivating rhythm and alluring vibrancy. By juxtaposing bolds tones with the muted shades of the natural world, Wolf Kahn produces a kind of contrast that energizes the surface of the canvas while simultaneously creating a sense of balance. After decades of painting, Wolf Kahn’s masterful use of color remains his primary subject.

While Wolf Kahn’s subject matter remains rooted in reality, his abstract methods of representation reveal a unique dynamic between representational painting and abstract principles. As Martica Sawin suggests, “The significance of his contribution to the panorama of contemporary American art lies in the way his works preservecertain values of modernism, pay homage to the nature that surrounds us, embody the highest level of painterly performance, and take cognizance of changing ways of thinking about and producing art, while not letting go of what has gone before.”

Wolf Kahn works intuitively, letting the painting guide his next movements. With over 70 years of experience, he continues to challenge himself, painting nearly everyday, and his work remains ever evolving. “I have to keep my innocence of spirit,” Wolf Kahn says. “You have to allow for failure. If you can’t grow at 91, when can you grow? I’m striving for the moment where the painting starts giving me a hard time.”

WOLF KAHN was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927. He immigrated to the United States by way of England in1940. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, and graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After completing his degree in only one year, Wolf Kahn decided to return to being a full-time artist. He and other former Hofmannstudents established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his rst solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the GraceBorgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department.

Traveling extensively, he has painted landscapes in Egypt, Greece, Hawaii, Italy, Kenya, Maine, Mexico, and New Mexico. He spends his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968, but his primary residence is in New York City.

Wolf Kahn’s work is set apart by his masterful synthesis of artistic traits—the modern abstract training of Hans Hofmann, the palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. The fusion of color, spontaneity and representation has produced a rich and expressive body of work.

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibits at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.milesmcenery.com

Lee Mullican @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Cosmic Theater

Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater
James Cohan Gallery, New York
Through April 20, 2019

LEE MULLICAN

Kachina, 1959

Oil on canvas, 25 x 20 in.

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

James Cohan presents Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater, curated by Michael Auping at the gallery’s Chelsea location.

The exhibition Lee Mullican: Cosmic Theater explores the late artist’s sustained interest in the universe as source material for his creative voice.  Lee Mullican was a seeker and tirelessly pursued a form of abstraction that connected nature and spirituality. Pulling from a wide range of influences he created works that found new meanings through formal explorations of composition, color, and mark making. In his conversation with Joanne Phillips from 1976, he recalled the push and pull between abstraction in the purest sense and what he explained as his “need for some kind of image.” Through a close examination of his paintings and drawings we begin to understand that these patterns, shapes, and figure-like forms reflect his deep and abiding interest in the cosmos. Lee Mullican’s enduring quest was to create through his art a new perspective. In his richly textured world, the bird’s eye and the mind’s eye are one, with outer space and inner space conflating and commingling on the striated surfaces of the picture plane.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Auping, who first met the artist in the early 1970s. They shared a fascination and knowledge of pre-Columbian and Native American art and mythology. Their long discussions often involved the melding of modern and ancient art. Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of a “collective unconscious” found its way into the conversations, a shared belief that connections can exist between vast distances in time and space.

The paintings and drawings chosen for the exhibition, some being shown for the first time, map a revealing path through much of Lee Mullican’s career, ending with paintings from his last series, The Guardians. Bringing together work spanning fifty years, the exhibition surveys key themes running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridization of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond.  

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color illustrated publication, featuring an essay by Michael Auping and published by Scheidegger & Spiess.

LEE MULLICAN was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1919 and died in Los Angeles in 1998. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute after transferring from the University of Oklahoma in 1941. Upon his graduation from the Institute in 1942, Lee Mullican was drafted into the army, serving for four years as a topographical draughtsman. Lee Mullican traveled to Hawaii, Guam and Japan before ending his tenure in the army in 1946, when he moved to San Francisco. After winning a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, he spent a year painting in Rome before returning to Los Angeles where he joined the teaching staff of the UCLA Art Department in 1961, keeping his position for nearly 30 years. He divided the later part of his life between his homes in Los Angeles and Taos, traveling internationally and co- organizing exhibitions at UCLA. Lee Mullican’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in numerous other institutions.

MICHAEL AUPING is an independent curator and writer based in California and Texas and a specialist in the international developments of Post War art. Over his 40 year career, he has organized numerous exhibitions that have focused on Abstract Expressionism and related movements. As Chief Curator of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, his 1987 exhibition Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments was considered the most thorough survey of that movement in over three decades, and the book of the same title redefined the movement from both new European and American perspectives. He also curated major surveys of the work of Clyfford Still and Arshile Gorky. As Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Auping organized Philip Guston: Retrospective. He has also organized exhibitions of the work of John Chamberlain, Susan Rothenberg and Richard Serra.

JAMES COHAN
533 West 26 St, New York, NY 10001
www.jamescohan.com

Simon Evans™ @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - Passing through the gates of irresponsibility

Simon Evans™: Passing through the gates of irresponsibility
James Cohan Gallery, New York
Through April 14, 2019

Simon Evans™

The city of lists, 2019

Mixed media, 52 1/2 x 74 3/4 in.

© Simon Evans™, Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

James Cohan presents Passing through the gates of irresponsibility, an exhibition of new work by Simon Evans™ at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan.

Simon Evans™ is the artistic collaboration between Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan. Together the New York-based artists create dense text-based collages brimming with poetic handwritten phrases, drawings, and images often scavenged from the detritus of everyday life both inside and outside the studio. The works depict and describe a universe suspended between the poles of earnestness and irony. With deft wit and a wry brand of melancholy, ambiguously personal and fictional narratives are woven into diagrams, charts, maps, taxonomies, advertisements, diary entries, inventories, and cosmologies that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope.

The works in Passing through the gates of irresponsibility demonstrate the continuous evolution and versatility of the artists’ distinctive visual language, reflecting their long-standing interests in concrete poetry, surface treatment, personal branding, and memory and historical narrative, both individual and collective. The stream-of-consciousness, elliptical prose layered throughout their work creates surprising—and occasionally startling—juxtapositions that produce moments of lyrical profundity and accidental poetry.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Sky are contemporary ruminations on the work on 18th century English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, 2018, takes its title from a line from Wordsworth's famous poem, “Daffodils,” yet the artists play against the romantic poet’s sentimental ode to bucolic pleasures. Their cumulus cloud is an expansive accumulation of the noise of the world today—the chaotic oversaturation of text and picture information enabled by the digital cloud—that hints at the anxieties and feelings of isolation often engendered by such omnipresent inundation. Sky, 2018, offers a distinctly serene counterpoint. As Evans notes, “I wanted to make a calm piece but I wanted it to be very much about the constant flux everything exists in. I wanted to construct a clear sky as a shield against the one we have, which to me seems loud and terrifying and constant, with noises and words and images...I saw it as a challenge as a word person to make something of satisfaction without them.”

All that potential energy, 2019, is a large-scale mixed media work on paper covered in layered gold leaf. The gilt surface of the work is a consideration of both the material’s elemental qualities—gold is a highly conductive metal and has been used in electrical wiring since the days of the telegraph—and its historical use in art and architecture, as suggested by the beautifully-sculpted hand that centers the composition. Into the grey night we go, 2019, is also an exploration of surface and material, in which delicate graph paper cut-outs represent fragile infrastructures and rich passages of orange poster board and pigment recall the gleam of construction signage under the headlights of passing vehicles at night. There is an ambiguous darkness to the composition that proposes both an end and a renewal. These works are preoccupied not just with the surface of the pictures but also, ultimately, the process of art making. They invite the viewer into a space suffused with possibilities for revelation and continued exploration.

In a tomb, 2017, Evans replicates his childhood bedroom in a shoe box. The impetus for the work was his parents’ sudden and dramatic split after forty years of marriage the previous year. As he recalls, “Now I was getting to know my mum, and I remembered this one time she helped me make an Egyptian tomb in a shoe box for school. I was big into ancient Egypt like many children were, and through it I began to look back before I was born down the long road of history.” The work is a nod to the rare special moment Evans and his mother shared in his childhood, as well as a way of mourning the demise of his parents’ marriage. It touches upon both intensely personal pasts and the broader strokes of world history. The microcosm of the personal and the macrocosm of the universal are also syncretized in The World Again, 2017, a map of the world filled up with other worlds—and other planets—all hand-drawn and labeled. Its title recalls a 2002 piece in which the artist imagined the world as a giant, man made island. With The World Again, Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan represent the world as it is today using the archaic language of cartography. The seeming condensation of the universe into the palm of the hand—achieved by smartphones and tablets—is reflected in the densely layered worlds that fill the composition.

Several other works in the exhibition continue the play between past and present. The city of lists, 2019, is an abstracted landscape of a city of cities, both ancient and modern, in which a length of classical meandros is juxtaposed with a contemporary wall clock. Relic, 2019, is—like a tomb—a work inspired by ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphic illustrations are interspersed with layered lists and phrases at turns profound (dear god i miss the old dark ages when your face was the sky/ in this new one all we have is money and whatever we want to think) and profoundly silly (Photographing your salad turns it in into a ghost). It is a picture that attempts to capture the flux of time through naming and listing, with small everyday acts and thoughts reflecting the movement of human civilization through history.

Simon Evans™ (Simon Evans, b. 1972, London and Sarah Lannan, b. 1984, Phoenix) has exhibited extensively, both in the US and internationally. Significant solo museum exhibitions include  Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2013); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg (2012); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2005); and White Columns, New York (2005). Simon Evans™ was featured in the 12th International Istanbul Biennial in Turkey and the 27th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Work by Simon Evans™ is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY
291 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
www.jamescohan.com

Nolan Simon @ 47 Canal, New York

Nolan Simon: Other People
47 Canal, New York
Through April 7, 2019

The toes of a New Balance sneaker touch a studio floor. The figure’s foot is extended, but without strain. The body rests outside the frame. Another painting depicts a similar step, but this foot wears a semi-brogue. The floor is a dark, celestial speckle, and blends with the pattern of a curiously weightless sock. Thin black shoelaces arc downwards like the ears of a young dog.

A hand, sporting a gold wedding ring, holds the style section of a Sunday broadsheet. Splashed across the front page is a photograph of another hand, which fastens the laces of a brown shoe. A headline declares “Life an…,” but the rest of the text cannot be read. Split down its middle, the scene is modeled like an unbuttoned garment that frames the soft shadows of a naked torso. Dotted by a few small moles, the torso intrudes into the painting’s foreground.

A face, withdrawn in contemplation, is reflected in a window. Transparency, in this image, is a trap. Head tilted, and eyes directed at the ground, the subject evades the viewer.

Phrases are repeated in Nolan Simon’s paintings, but with strange misalignments. The brushwork is careful yet subtly disobedient. There is a process of translation, but it is impure. A foot is washed in tea. A teacup catches the liquid. There is a sense that a spillage is only just contained.

Feet, hands, chests and backs populate Simon’s gaze, but we see less of the limbs that conjoin these. At once objective and unfixed, each painting takes a found photograph as its source. The connections that surround the original images are difficult to trace, their context shedded in the oceans of visual information that submerge the everyday world. A person becomes a pair of hands lifting an iPhone, and its unbearable mass, above purplish, lukewarm bathwater. In these detached, fragmentary portraits, questions about intimacy are posed. Privacy is staged. Spontaneity is contested. Meaning builds like waves rippling against the side of a tub as the body, gliding gently downwards, rests.

47 CANAL
291 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
47canal.us

Sam Gilliam @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Starting: Works on Paper 1967 - 1970

Sam Gilliam

Starting: Works on Paper 1967 - 1970

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

March 16 - April 27, 2019

David Kordansky Gallery presents Starting: Works on Paper 1967 - 1970, an exhibition of never-before-seen works by SAM GILLIAM from a highly formative moment in his development. 

In the late 1960s, as he was engaging in the experiments that led to his breakthrough Beveled-edge and Drape paintings, Sam Gilliam was also honing methods of working on paper with watercolors and ink that constitute an important facet of his practice 50 years later. Starting includes over a dozen important examples of these early works, which can be divided into three typologies: folded and stained works; works in which thicker, expressionistic application of medium dominates; and calligraphic ink and wash works created in response to, and as documents of, the architectural compositions of the Drape paintings. The exhibition provides a remarkably personal and intimate portrait of an artist discovering the full breadth of his powers. (It also features a typewritten manuscript of one of his poems from the era.) Its stylistic variety reflects the changing contexts and circumstances in which Sam Gilliam was working, as well as his preternatural curiosity and fierce commitment to his practice.

The earliest works in the show, from 1967, feature dense arrays of blue, brown, and yellow applied in series of overlapping splatters. Their energy belies the scale of the compact sheets of sketchbook paper on which they are made, and their density of color allows Sam Gilliam to maximize the potential of these small surfaces, resulting in works that hint at a surprising sense of monumentality. The natural rhythms that animate them come directly from the source, as they were produced by the artist en plein air. Gilliam would bring his baby daughter to Rock Creek Park, located near the family's home in Washington, D.C., and work while she slept alongside him. He experimented with the relationship between color and movement, responding to the visual textures of the trees and the moods of the landscape, as well as encounters with then-contemporary paintings by Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, which he was seeing in galleries in New York.

A selection of works from 1968 and 1970, meanwhile, are directly related to the vocabulary Sam Gilliam was also developing in the Beveled-edge and Drape paintings, though the difference in their materials yields an altogether different sense of touch. By folding sheets of paper according to schemes derived from origami or playful forms like paper airplanes or cat's cradles, and then dipping them into watercolors, he could create complex staining effects, Rorschach patterns, and crystalline combinations of hues with a great sense of optical depth. The pigments are never fully controlled, but coaxed and guided according to Sam Gilliam's manipulation of the support. As a result, the movement of water is captured in bracingly direct form, and the sculptural tendencies that animate much of his project come to the forefront; indeed, Sam Gilliam continues to make works on paper in this way today.

A series of ink and wash works from 1969 demonstrate a third and dramatically different set of formal concerns. Because the largest of Sam Gilliam's Drape paintings actively respond to the architecture in which they are installed, each installation gives rise to its own three-dimensional composition, and each Drape is in fact given new life whenever it is hung. Photographs can record the outward manifestation of the Drapes, but for a period Gilliam would also produce works on paper, like those included in Starting, that captured their spirit and inner force. Though they could be used during subsequent installations to guide the hanging of the Drapes, they are standalone artworks in their own right, providing fresh insights into the artist's approach to line. They also seem to reflect, in particularly direct and condensed fashion, the art historical modes and cultural phenomena that had nourished Sam Gilliam's formation: improvised music, in particular the structured freedom of jazz; the then-recent advances of Abstract Expressionism and Washington, D.C.-based Color School peers; fluidity between scales, mediums, and genres that evokes the scope of the Renaissance and the multi-disciplinary ethos of the Bauhaus; and the urgent social and political issues that were rapidly transforming American life.

And yet, as is always the case for Sam Gilliam, these influences are less important as reference points than they are as indicators of his faith in the sheer power of abstraction, as a visual language and a way of life, to move the viewer and precipitate change. "Time leaves memoirs playing," reads a line from a typewritten poem, produced by the artist contemporaneously with the works in Starting. It is an apt summary of Sam Gilliam's unflagging allegiance to the present moment and his maverick sense of both art history and his own evolution, which has seen him pay heed to the polymathic nature of his imagination by refusing to settle into a single style, and by treating every body of work, and every individual artwork, as an opportunity for renewal and reinvention.

In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971); among many other institutions. A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam's paintings will open at Dia:Beacon in Summer 2019. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com