Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
February 27 – May 2, 2020

CATHERINE OPIE

Untitled #3 (Swamps), 2019

Pigment print, 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4 cm)

© Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects debuts a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Opie. Titled Rhetorical Landscapes, the exhibition presents a series of animated political collages and landscape photographs. This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at the gallery.

For over thirty years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles' freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. 

Rhetorical Landscapes continues Catherine Opie’s examination of the current American political landscape and the moving image, a visual technology that she utilized in her first film, The Modernist. In the center of the gallery eight monitors form a closed circle. Life size in height and resembling oversized iPhones, each monitor features a screen that displays an animated film Opie calls “political collages.” Comprised of numerous magazine cuttings culled by Opie over the course of Trump’s reign, each collage represents themes articulated in the news cycle embodying contemporary political issues spanning topical subjects like nationalism, climate change, immigration, gun control, and the diminishment of natural resources. Arranged on hand-painted blue grids that reference modernism with their simplistic structural form, each animation develops over time, slowly building and integrating images until it forms a coherent collage. Although their subject matter communicates a sense of urgency, each collage is imbued with humor that references the political satire of Monty Python, whose films were a sense of inspiration for the artist.

Over the course of her career, Catherine Opie has traveled extensively across the American continent documenting its diverse communities of people and the landscapes they inhabit. Encircling the monitors, nine framed photographs are installed along the gallery walls. In juxtaposition to the digital worlds created in the political collages, this new series of photographs turns Catherine Opie’s camera to the verdant wilds of the American South, depicting a sort of pause and longing for this particular place in the American imagination. A play on words, the swamps evoke the political metaphor manipulated by Trump, yet they also remain one of the last undeveloped ecosystems facing the effects of climate change and human development. Catherine Opie’s swamps image the vulnerability of this contested land awaiting interference, presenting unadulterated views of seemingly uninhabitable terrain that are virtually devoid of human presence.

CATHERINE OPIE was born in Sandusky, OH in 1961 and received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She holds an endowed position in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has been a professor of photography since 2001.

Her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. Selected solo exhibitions include Keeping an Eye on the World, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); 700 Nimes Road, MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2016); Portraits, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Portraits and Landscapes, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2015); Empty and Full, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Figure and Landscape, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); American Photographer, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006); and Skyways and Icehouses, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); among others.

Catherine Opie has received numerous awards, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2016); Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award (2013); Women’s Caucus for Art: President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999); and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997).

Work by the artist is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; among others.

Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

Martin Schoeller @ NRW-Forum Düsseldorf

Martin Schoeller
NRW-Forum Düsseldorf
February 28 - May 17, 2020

MARTIN SCHOELLER is one of the most famous and sought-after photographers in the world. Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Angela Merkel have all stood before his camera. But he has also taken portraits of homeless people, drag queens, and bodybuilders. The NRW-Forum Düsseldorf presents the most comprehensive exhibition of his work in Germany to date, featuring works from his new series Drag Queens for the first time alongside the series Close Up and Female Bodybuilders, as well as new works from a series on acquitted death row inmates.

Martin Schoeller was born in Munich and lives in the USA since 1993. He became famous with Close Up, a series of extreme close-ups. He photographed hundreds of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Brad Pitt, politicians such as Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, as well as completely unknown people, all in exactly the same style. He always uses the same equipment and lighting and takes the photographs from similar angles and distances, treating the unknown and the too-well-known with the same level of scrutiny and attention. For him the close-up is the purest form of portraiture, because it confronts the viewer with a single and isolated impression.  Despite the series’ identical structure, he seeks to bring out the subject’s personality in every portrait he creates. He is interested in the subtle moment between performed gestures, the instant in which someone reveals something about themselves without knowing it. As a result of the extreme proximity and the use of typical bright fluorescent lighting, no expression, detail, or wrinkle can remain hidden from his camera. The images sidestep the subject’s conscious self-expression and focus on a moment of vulnerability and integrity.

The series Female Bodybuilders features some of the best female bodybuilders in the world. The method used is similar to that of Close Up, but the works are captured from a slightly greater distance. Martin Schoeller took his first Polaroid picture of a female bodybuilder at a competition in 2003 and was so struck by the complexity of the portrait that he began a whole series. He is interested in the contradictions in the images of these female athletes who work on their sport and their bodies with extreme dedication without receiving any public adulation or financial reward. On the contrary, they come up against the pervasive and merciless limits of beauty standards and feminine ideals. The powerful effect of his images lies in the close observation of these contradictions and the respectful and careful examination of the individual. “We all operate within narrowly constructed ideals of the good, the right, and the beautiful, all subject to the countless influences that swirl around us. The athletes presented here are no different; they are as vulnerable as any other person standing in front of a camera,” explains Martin Schoeller.

Hollywood is a series of works about homeless people and Martin Schoeller’s most sociopolitical work. He has photographed hundreds of people struggling with devastating configurations of personal and social injustices. Taken in the studio, the photographs depict women* with trans* identity, including many sex workers whom Martin Schoeller met on the streets of Hollywood. For him, they represent the most vulnerable and most denigrated group in American society. Many of them must overcome a seemingly impossible combination of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, as well as intolerance toward women*’s sex work, trans* identity, and poverty.

The exhibition is the most comprehensive in Germany to date and offers an insight into Martin Schoeller’s multifaceted work. The exhibition also presents additional series and subjects; alongside humorous portraits of celebrities, such as Brad Pitt playing croquet in the Portraits series, there is also the series Identical, for which Martin Schoeller photographed sets of twins, as well as his new series, Drag Queens. Martin Schoeller began this ongoing large-format series in New York and Los Angeles in 2018 and has published part of it in New York Magazine. The series—including new works—is presented in an exhibition for the first time at the NRW-Forum.

For his new ongoing series Death Row Exonerees, Martin Schoeller interviewed and filmed fifteen acquitted death row inmates in a collaboration with the organization Witness to Innocence, which campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty in the USA. Seven of the interviews are shown in a video installation in the exhibition. Over the next few years, Martin Schoeller would like to photograph more of the 166 people who have been sentenced to death and then acquitted in the USA to date.

The exhibition is presented in cooperation with Crossover/Anke Degenhard.

NRW-Forum Düsseldorf
Ehrenhof 2, 40479 Düsseldorf
nrw-forum.de

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Carter @ Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco - Didn’t We Almost Have It All

Carter: Didn’t We Almost Have It All
Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco
February 13 - April 4, 2020

CARTER

Portrait (bouncing ball), 2016-2017

Mixed media, 53 x 42 in.

(c) Carter, Courtesy Anglim Gilbert Gallery

Anglim Gilbert Gallery presents Didn’t We Almost Have It All, a solo exhibition of mixed media works by CARTER (b. 1970).

Carter’s works on canvas form vibrant patchworks of personal symbolism. Informed by a decades-long interest in the tropes of traditional portraiture, Carter punctuates his multitextural pieces with facial expressions divorced from the physical body. Twisted, lolling tongues hang from acid colored mouths, coupled with piercing sets of mismatched eyes. The effect is a visceral sensation that bridges the fine line between pleasure and repulsion.

His hallucinatory palette is tempered by the incorporation of coffee-stained terrycloth, glossy tea towels, doilies, appliqués, and other needlepoint embellishments. Familiar domestic materials, often verging on the feminine, are a nod to Carter’s critical interest in suburban Americana. In certain images, faceless nudes and tract homes are tucked into the composition, alluding to the social and cultural weight of narrowly-defined gender ascriptions.

CARTER received his MFA from the University of California, Davis (1997) and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1992). His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He wrote and directed the 2012 film Maladies, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013.

ANGLIM GILBERT GALLERY
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
anglimgilbertgallery.com

Romare Bearden @ DC Moore Gallery, NYC - Abstract

Abstract Romare Bearden
DC Moore Gallery, New York
February 13 – March 28, 2020

DC Moore Gallery presents Abstract Romare Bearden, featuring rarely-seen stain and collaged paintings from 1958-1962 by one of the most renowned visual artists of the 20th century. Also on view, will be selected works from earlier and later periods. The abstract paintings shed light on Romare Bearden’s continual interest in experimental techniques. They also provide new context to the influence his earlier work had on this period, and how these seminal paintings contributed to the development of his later well-known collages.

After painting and drawing for nearly two decades, the noted African American artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988) turned to songwriting for a few years in the early 1950s. When he began painting again in earnest around 1955, his work was more abstract than previously, as he explored new modes of expression. At first, he layered paint thickly, in abstracted figural works that were increasingly less representational than what he had been doing in the 1940s.

By 1957, Romare Bearden had moved to pure abstraction. His dynamic new canvases were larger, all-over paintings of organic, atmospheric forms, merging and coalescing. A critic noted in an exhibition review, “they are full of suggestions of stratified earth, subaqueous suspensions and clear auroras of atmosphere.”[i] As with Heart of Autumn (c. 1960), he created active surfaces and rich tonal effects with paint that flows across the canvas or is worked in several different ways. In others, he began to use collage elements of painted, torn paper or applied canvas. The underlying canvas plays an important role in many of the works, too, as the paint is often thinly applied, resulting in lyrical abstractions of distinctive beauty.

In most cases, Romare Bearden painted unstretched canvas rolled out on the floor, like some of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. He frequently worked from all four sides, sometimes lifting the canvas so that paint flowed freely. He rubbed turpentine onto a freshly painted surface as well, thinning it so that only a few stains remained. Repeating the process two or three times, he gradually built the composition. Spatters, slashes, and drips were another aspect of his method. 

Not only was Romare Bearden well aware of contemporary practice, but he had also been involved with some of the artists of the evolving Abstract Expressionist group since his return to New York from military service in the mid-1940s. He joined the Kootz Gallery in 1945 and had three consecutive solo shows there. At the time, Samuel Kootz also represented Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and William Baziotes, among others, and showed the work of Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann. Kootz had group meetings with the artists on a regular basis, so Romare Bearden would have had many opportunities to discuss their current work as well as his own.

In light of this, it is not surprising that when he started painting again in the mid-1950s after his brief excursion into songwriting, Romare Bearden largely set aside his earlier figural modernism and turned to abstraction. Foregoing thematic content—except what is suggested by the evocative titles that he and his wife, Nanette, gave to the works—he began painting freely and on a larger scale, embracing a more intuitive approach based on improvisation and chance. 

For the most part, though, he chose not to pursue the subconscious probing and automatic drawing of the Surrealists that inspired many of the Abstract Expressionists. Instead, his new method resonated with the Zen Buddhist concepts of no-mind and emptiness, which focus on a state of awareness and flow of attention beyond the ego, and, in the case of painting, beyond any conscious effort to create a predetermined composition or result. Merging with his other interests, Romare Bearden’s increasing involvement with Zen and some of the arts related to it created a powerful new current in his art.

Soon after he and Nanette moved to a loft on Canal Street in 1956, Romare Bearden met a calligrapher and scholar of Chinese art named Mr. Wu who had a bookstore in the neighborhood. For the next few years, he studied informally with him, meeting about once a week for discussions of Chinese painting and the principles of calligraphy. He also explored the Buddhist philosophy that underlies them. Bearden discovered that, in his words, “underneath the seeming simplicity was a great, long tradition, and a very complex one, in which so much had been taken away to find the essence of the landscape.”[ii] And, as he later recalled,

“I was also studying…the techniques which enable Chinese classical painters to organize their large areas, for example: the device of an open corner to allow the observer a starting point in encompassing the entire painting; the subtle ways of shifting balance and emphasis; and the use of voids, or negative areas, as sections of passivity and as a means of projecting big shapes. … As a result, I began to paint more thinly, often on natural linen, where I left sections of the canvas unpainted so that the linen itself had the function of a color.” [iii]

His abstracts were featured in two solo New York exhibitions in 1961. Both shows were well received, as critics welcomed his return to painting. One noted that it was good to see an artist “once as well regarded as Romare Bearden exhibiting again.”[i] Elsewhere, Romare Bearden was characterized as “a virtuoso of texture and of sumptuous and subtle color if there ever was one.”[ii] The Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his 1959 abstractions, Silent Valley of the Sunrise, in 1960, after his first show, and in 1997, the Studio Museum of Harlem added a major example to its collection, North of the River (1962).

Romare Bearden continued painting abstracts until 1963, which was a momentous year for the artist and the nation. That summer the massive March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, marked a new stage in the ongoing struggle for civil rights. In New York, Romare Bearden and several artists, including Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis, formed the Spiral group in order to promote the work of black artists and explore ways in which they could contribute to the civil rights movement. This led directly to Romare Bearden’s return to figurative art in his collages and his celebrated black and white photostat enlargements, which he called Projections.

In all, though, this turn of events was not so much a dramatic break as an adjustment of focus. Writing in the late 1960s about his abstractions and use of collage, Romare Bearden noted that,

“Then in a transition toward what turned out to be my present style, I painted broad areas of color on various thicknesses of rice paper and glued these papers on canvas, usually in several layers. I tore sections of the paper away, always attempting to tear upward and across on the picture plane until some motif engaged me. When this happened, I added more papers and painted additional colored areas to complete the painting.”[iii]

While his collages after the mid-1960s consisted mainly of figurative elements cut from photographs and magazine illustrations, along with areas of solid color and surfaces worked in various ways, the technique that he used to construct them was one with which he had been experimenting for some time.

The same is true of his increasing emphasis on improvisation. Romare Bearden’s lifelong involvement with jazz and blues gave him a deep appreciation and understanding of its potential, and it had played a part in his art since at least the early 1940s. He often credited the modernist artist, Stuart Davis, with helping him recognize the relationship between certain jazz techniques and his artistic process.

Later in life, Romare Bearden told an interviewer that, “I now don’t ‘do’ a collage in the sense of rational, predetermined composition, I just invite some of the people I knew to come into the room and give it an ambiance.”[iv] While this is classic Romare Bearden commentary, it also reflects what he once recalled as Mr. Wu’s tendency to humanize every aspect of their conversations. As such, it highlights the ways in which Romare Bearden’s engagement with Abstract Expressionism merged with other aspects of his life experience and artmaking. His abstracts of the late 1950s and early 1960s stand as a singular achievement, a highly personal body of lyrical, poetic painting that continued to support and strengthen his work for years to come.

In 2018, Mary Schmidt Campbell authored An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden, published by Oxford University Press. Recognized as one of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden has work in public collections across the country, and has had a number of major retrospectives. The Neuberger Museum presented new Bearden scholarship in their 2017 exhibition and publication, Romare Bearden: Abstraction. The American Federation of the Arts will travel a large version of this exhibition to American museums starting in 2020. In 2011, The Studio Museum presented a groundbreaking exhibition The Bearden Project, exhibiting over 100 artists, to showcase the vast influence Romare Bearden has had for generations, and in 2003 The National Gallery of Art presented The Art of Romare Bearden, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art, CA, the Dallas Museum of Art, TX, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, and the High Museum of Art, GA.

[i] Brian O’Doherty, “Art: O’Keeffe Exhibition…Bearden and Resnick Works on View,” New York Times (April 17, 1961).

[ii] Quoted in Myron Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 197.

[ii] Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (January 1969), p. 12.

[iv] Carlyle Burrows, “Bearden’s Return,” New York Herald Tribune (January 24, 1960).

[v] New York Times (January 23, 1960).

[vi] Bearden, p. 12.

[vii] Quoted in Schwartzman, p. 187.

DC MOORE GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.dcmooregallery.com

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Katja Tukiainen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Delacroix & moi

Katja Tukiainen: Delacroix & moi
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
February 14 – March 15, 2020

In her new exhibition, Katja Tukiainen (b. 1969) draws inspiration from the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. She painted her first Delacroix study in 2014 based on the famous painting La Liberté guidant le Peuple. In her new works, she takes greater liberties adapting Delacroix’s structures, figures, and atmosphere to suit her own ends. As a tribute to Eugène Delacroix, the exhibition includes a portrait based on an old photograph of the artist.

The girls and other female figures that typically populate Katja Tukiainen’s art also take center stage in her new exhibition. The idea is not to emphasize their femininity, but to show how universal humanity can be portrayed through women and girls. Too often, female figures are reduced to embodying the attributes of their gender, but Katja Tukiainen refocuses our gaze simply on what it is means to be and behave human.

Letting chance join the game, Katja Tukiainen – an admirer of Delacroix’s flighty brushwork – has allowed her intuition to take her recent paintings in a more expressive direction, reveling in the fun of contemplating how pictures painted long ago might continue their story today, over 200 years later.

Both painter and comic artist, Katja Tukiainen holds an MA in Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. She debuted in the Artists' Association of Finland’s the Young Artists Exhibition in 2001, and she has held solo exhibitions at Rome’s Museo D’arte Contemporanea, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA, and at the Lönnström Art Museum. Her work is found in major collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Finnish State Art Collection. Katja Tukiainen was the first comic artist to receive the State Art Award in 2007, followed by the William Thuring Award in 2011. She received the Finnish Comics Society’s Puupäähattu award in 2003. The artist lives and works in Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM
Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki
galerieforsblom.com

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Paloma Bosquê @ Blum & Poe, Tokyo - Dark Matter

Paloma Bosquê: Dark Matter
Blum & Poe, Tokyo
Through February 29, 2020

Blum & Poe presents São Paulo-based artist Paloma Bosquê’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo, and her first with the gallery. Paloma Bosquê creates compositions of various formats and scales that freely associate materials which are not typical of sculpture. Experimenting with the texture, weight and balance of a wide variety of materials—from brass to felt, bronze, coal, gum rosin, bee’s wax, beef casing, craft paper, coffee sieves and wool—she creates extremely delicate visual landscapes. 

Dark Matter refers to a form of matter whose existence has been hypothesized since the beginning of the twentieth century but has never been empirically proven. It is thought to consist of elementary particles that hardly ever interact with other known forms of matter and also do not emit light, which makes them exceedingly hard to detect. Although the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology calculates that these particles constitute twenty-seven percent of the universe, there is little agreement on how to characterize them. Paloma Bosquê is interested in how the visible appearance of the world results from such immense, instantaneous and vibrant interactions among elements that are not readily perceptible—countless atoms in constant cycles of attraction, repulsion, fluctuation, and charge-shifting. Interactions occur in the empty spaces within atoms, in areas between one energy level and another. She has been searching for a horizontal approach towards matter as a means to connect this emptiness and enable a reciprocal relationship of transformation and exchange between herself and the material she forms into an artwork. Furthermore, Paloma Bosquê considers this approach to be a political position in terms of understanding the human being as a single actor negotiating and interacting with a myriad of other different, sometimes mysterious beings. 

This exhibition presents a new body of wall and floor pieces, including freestanding compositions that incorporate hanging elements. In the wall-mounted Plates series, images emerge from juxtapositions of matter. Their compositions originate in the fabrication of the structure, which combines galvanized wire mesh with cotton fiber with glue. The torsion, the removal of material, and the overlapping of different layers of vegetal fiber and everything else that compounds the image are at the same time the actual body of the work. The title of Sea Tube—a wall-mounted tube of dark cotton fiber—refers to a sound effect generated inside of the object due to a combination of its materiality with its form, reproducing the noise of the sea that one hears in shells. For Paloma Bosquê, its inner empty space is a potential channel of connection between different spaces and times. Black Sun consists of an irregular black circle hanging over a metallic structure overlaid by a thin tangle of golden lurex threads. The shape of the lurex yarn is dictated by the metal structure over which they are superimposed, imbuing them with a "liquid" appearance. The round form hanging above serves as a center of gravity within the composition, exerting magnetism, as if it were the element that pulls the wires upwards. This work rests in opposition to the “black hole" where the structure of greatest gravitational force is on the ground bringing down the lurex wires. Through her practice of exploring and cultivating interchange between herself and the materials she composes into final forms, Paloma Bosquê’s work results from what she calls “an agreement which could transform both of us, and the space surrounding us.”

PALOMA BOSQUE (b. Garça, Brazil, 1982) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include O Oco e a Emenda, Pavilhão Branco, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon (2017) and O Incômodo, Pivô, São Paulo (2015). Her work has been included in museum group exhibitions such as Brasile. Il Coltello Nella Carne, Pac - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2018); Bienal de Coimbra, Coimbra (2017); Mycorial Theatre, Pivô, São Paulo (2016); Projeto Piauí, Pivô, São Paulo (2016); Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist, The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); United States of Latin America, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit (2015). Paloma Bosquê was awarded the Nigel Greenwood Art Prize in 2017.

BLUM & POE
Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F
1-14-34 Jingumae
Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0001
blumandpoe.com

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Sebastiaan Bremer @ Edwynn Houk Gallery, NYC - Nocturne

Sebastiaan Bremer: Nocturne
Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
February 13 - March 21, 2020

Edwynn Houk Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new work by Sebastiaan Bremer (Dutch, b. 1970). Nocturne marks the debut of several series of portraiture that Sebastiaan Bremer has been developing over the course of the past two years, culminating in the monumental triptych, Storm Breaking Over a Valley, 2020. Each unique image in the exhibition is characterized by Sebastiaan Bremer’s meticulously hand painted white pointillist dots, however these three new series are distinct in the evolution of the techniques used, as he continues to push the bounds of his hybrid creative process. 

In Veronica, Sebastiaan Bremer furthers his investigation into personal memories, a common thread throughout his oeuvre, by reinterpreting a series of candid pictures of his mother Veronica, taken by his father when she was the same age as the artist. He engages with the silver gelatin prints by altering the surface through hand painting as well as incorporating elements of collage and layering, lending a sculptural quality to the prints. These images are a meditation on family history and relationships, but also function as a vehicle for self-reflection for Sebastiaan Bremer, who sees himself in the expressions of his mother.

The series of five portraits inspired by the work of Rembrandt are a collection of exquisitely detailed character studies, hand painted onto black gloss paper. In a departure from his earlier work, Sebastiaan Bremer has eliminated the underlying source material, revealing his technical mastery in delicately rendering the chiaroscuro faces that emerge from darkness, to create what he describes as “an impossible photograph.” Sebastiaan Bremer is particularly drawn to the work of his fellow Dutchman because of the panoply of facial expressions Rembrandt was so brilliantly able to capture, and his ability to illustrate honestly, but with a subtle sense of humor, the wear and tear that human existence takes on each person’s face, regardless of gender, age, or social standing.

These portraits as well as the Veronica series can be interpreted as studies of the expression of human emotion, ranging in both mood and tension. Sebastiaan Bremer’s exploration of the human condition reaches a crescendo with the triptych, Storm Breaking Over a Valley, an incredibly elaborate opus on the state of the world and the position of humankind throughout history, illustrated through an outpouring of humanity, eras, and souls emerging from the waterfalls and richly textured landscape. The deluge of swirling rapids rushing through the tableau is palpable, as it envelops the cast of figures taken from the pages of history. Sebastiaan Bremer again employs stylistic references to the etchings of Rembrandt, as well as Leonardo da Vinci’s depictions of water, evoking the heightened sensibility of an Old Master painting. Painstakingly hand painted over a two-year period, the triptych is a symphony of visual information and a feat of obsessive dedication and curiosity. Invoking the sense of wit that he so admires in the work of Rembrandt, Sebastiaan Bremer reminds us with this imagined scene that predicting the end of time is as old as history itself, and it is our hubris that allows us to believe that the times we live in are really it.

Sebastiaan Bremer studied at the Vrije Academie, The Hague and Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture, Maine. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been the subject of three major catalogs: Monkey Brain (2003), Avila (2006), and To Joy (2015), and has been exhibited in such venues as the Tate Gallery, London; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut. Sebastiaan Bremer’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151
www.houkgallery.com

Vicken Parsons @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Breath

Vicken Parsons: Breath 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

13 February - 14 March 2020 

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents a new body of paintings and painted objects by VICKEN PARSONS (b. 1957). Breath, her largest solo exhibition in the UK in over three years, unveils twenty-five new works.

Best-known for her small-scale paintings which evoke architectural spaces Vicken Parsons uses thin layers of oil paint on thick plywood panel. The title of the exhibition, Breath, refers to the artist’s use of painting as meditation and as a contemplative counterpoint to global concerns. Paintings are shown alongside new three-dimensional works, which Vicken Parsons describes as ‘painted objects’. In the catalogue conversation, artist David Batchelor describes these works; “To some extent they look like extruded paintings, pulled into 3D.” Parsons does not view the three-dimensional works as sculptural in their concerns; they are about painting and colour. Painted steel wire and blocks cast shadows and reflections on to their horizontal base, which is the same plywood she uses for her paintings. In both bodies of work the trace and warmth of the wood is often exposed through the transparency of the paint.

A new group of paintings by Vicken Parsons feature prominent yellow elements. Within a careful confusion of yellow planes, lines and marks, the eye of the viewer is engaged in continuous movement between an illusory deep space and the picture plane. Parsons says; “Yellow is also very important to me. The yellow I am using is a lemony-lime colour: it’s a slippery beast and comes out of and goes back into grey. Yellow is usually thought of as a warm colour but this one has a coolness about it.”

Slightly darker, shadowy environments are painted with a palette of subtle greys and several more paintings give eminence to one colour such as a vivid orange, red or blue. Through the careful blending and applying of pigment, one meticulous layer after another, the colours bleed into each other. It is not clear where the source of light is and what is reflection, illusion and reality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a conversation between Vicken Parsons and artist David Batchelor. 

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON 

www.cristearoberts.com

Kim Gordon @ 303 Gallery, New York - The Bonfire

Kim Gordon: The Bonfire
303 Gallery, New York
Through February 22, 2020

303 Gallery presents its second solo exhibition of new work by KIM GORDON.

In a series of new works on canvas, Kim Gordon presents a world of safety and familial intimacy surreptitiously undermined by insidious, unseen forces. Photographs of a group of revelers huddling around a beach bonfire are softened and overlaid with digital framing marks around the human figures, suggesting surveillance technology or facial recognition software. These images are emblematic of a new reality where no moment goes uncaptured, and where even the most ordinary events are packaged and sold, like an Airbnb listing promising a branded experience of intimacy. Kim Gordon amplifies this phenomenon, referencing iconography from the world of music as it dovetails with youthful rebellion. The various crops and crosshairs allude to the logos of both Black Flag and Public Enemy, two groups emblematic of questioning authority and rising above structural oppression. Kim Gordon's emphases seem to echo their animosity, drawing the very same lines as our tyrannical tech overlords, yet with the express purpose of reasserting control of our own dominions.

Also on view is "Los Angeles June 6, 2019," a film in which Kim Gordon walks around Los Angeles with a guitar, utilizing handrails, plants, traffic implements, public sculpture and light poles as various accomplices in a performance that quite literally uses the city as a sounding board. Gordon assumes the role of interloper, unfazed by her happenstance audience while navigating the corporate territory of public spaces. Ironically, these scenes were surely also recorded by the various mechanisms of surveillance on the streets of LA, adding another layer of undisclosed viewership into the work's dissemination. We may know we are being watched, but it is up to us to transcend.

KIM GORDON studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. Recent solo exhibitions include "She Bites Her Tender Mind," Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin (2019); "Lo-Fi Glamour," The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2019); Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); and "Noise Name Paintings And Sculptures Of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up," Deste Foundation, Athens (2015). A two-person show with Rodney Graham was presented at Dijon's L'Académie Conti in 2017. For the past thirty years Kim Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director). Her first solo album "No Home Record" was released earlier this year on Matador Records.

303 GALLERY
555 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
303gallery.com

Moira Dryer @ The Philipps Collection, Washington DC - Back in Business

Moira Dryer: Back in Business 
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC
February 8 – April 19, 2020

MOIRA DRYER

Untitled (1985)

Flashe on panel, 24 x 48 in. and 11 x 15 in.

Collection of James Keith Brown and Eric Diefenbach 

© Estate of Moira Dryer

The Phillips Collection presents 24 three-dimensional abstract paintings by MOIRA DRYER (b. 1957, Toronto; d. 1992, New York). Marking the first comprehensive survey in almost 20 years, the exhibition considers the works Moira Dryer created from 1985 to 1990.

“This exhibition will highlight the thoughtful development of Moira Dryer’s work over a short period of time and the references from which she pulled. Dryer used abstraction as a language to express her everyday experiences to elicit emotion in her viewers. The works are full of humor, pain, nostalgia, and criticality,” says Lily Siegel, guest curator of the exhibition and Executive Director and Curator of the Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) in Reston, Virginia.

“During her life, Moira Dryer had a dedicated group of admirers and she continues to influence artists today,” says Klaus Ottmann, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection. “The sculptural quality of her paintings, which were among the first to combine figuration and abstraction, embodied the independence of spirit, innovation, and experimentation that Duncan Phillips championed—and paved the way for many artists working today.” 

From her artistic beginnings in the early 1980s until her death, Moira Dryer pursued a line of work in dialogue with Modernist painting and abstraction while in consideration of more contemporary themes. Before devoting herself full-time to painting, Dryer worked as a set designer for the avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines. The theater continued to influence her painting and the way she spoke about her work. In a conversation with Ottmann in 1988, she described her paintings as props that put on plays. Similar to Mark Rothko who famously spoke of his mature paintings as performers in an emotional drama, for Moira Dryer, “the paintings are the performers. It’s really up to the audience at that point to say what the specific production is. The pieces evolve from a very personal, emotional point, but then they become entities in themselves. I give them life and then they become their own.”

Moira Dryer: Back in Business considers Moira Dryer’s development vis-à-vis her participation and interest in theater production, specifically the use of her paintings to define space. Her work progresses from recognizable theater references such as curtains and spatial representations to abstract portraits that begin to move toward sculpture. Moira Dryer infused her works with a level of pathos that brought her paintings to life, creating abstract images with biographical elements that responded to her life in New York. The exhibition title is taken from a newspaper clipping found in the artist’s archive.

“Moira Dryer was a dynamic and innovative artist of her time,” says Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, Vradenburg Director and CEO of The Phillips Collection. “Museum founder Duncan Phillips was drawn to rich textures and bold colors, and her work, with its full-color saturation, strikes up dynamic conversations with pieces in our collection by artists like Mark Rothko and Pierre Bonnard.” 

In addition to the presentation of paintings and sculptures, the exhibition includes a collection of notes, drawings, and photographs from the artist’s archive. Moira Dryer’s position in New York and connection to established artists such as Elizabeth Murray (her mentor) and Julian Schnabel (to whom she was a studio assistant), as well as representation by Mary Boone Gallery, provided exposure of her work to her contemporaries and younger artists. Ephemera from previous exhibitions provide a historical context firmly placing Moira Dryer at the center of the conversation regarding painting in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lily Siegel has also organized a satellite exhibition of Moira Dryer’s work at the Greater Reston Arts Center, on view since January 18 through April 18, 2020. The exhibition, Moira Dryer: Yours for the Taking, provides a more intimate look at the works the artist left in the collections of friends and family, most of which have never before been shown publicly. The title, again, is taken from the artist’s archive in recognition of her generosity, confidence, and singular voice. 

The exhibition catalogue includes an introduction by Klaus Ottmann, essays by Lily Siegel and writer and curator Valerie Smith, a bibliography, exhibition history, and an illustrated checklist.

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection with guest curator Lily Siegel. With lead exhibition support and a Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
1600 21st Street NW Washington DC
phillipscollection.org

Alexandre da Cunha @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo - Portal

Alexandre da Cunha: Portal
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
February 4 — April 30, 2020

Galeria Luisa Strina presents Portal, a solo show by the artist Alexandre da Cunha, the artist’s sixth in the gallery. Presented in the two exhibiting rooms, it is possible to say that da Cunha exhibits simultaneously two separate and distinct solo shows. In the main space, the artist shows sculptures based on the structure of room dividers made of several materials and objects, such as parachutes, cleaning mops or aluminum trays. In room 2, dating from 1987 and 1998, Alexandre da Cunha shows two series of drawings that highlight themes and concerns present in his earlier production.

Most works structured as folding screens are shown for the first time. There is only one piece from this new body of works that was already shown in 2017, in the artist’s exhibition at Pivô. “It was a kind of door that came to be, as a matter of fact, as an appropriation from the daily labor work in the iron industry; they are sheets of iron primarily used to cut small stencils shapes in order to make repairs and, after having holes dug into them, are discarded.”

This kind of involuntary aesthetics or found eloquence is one of the artist´s work main leitmotifs and is also present in the sculptures made of concrete mixers which dent marks were not made by the artist, but seen by him as a material expression of interest. In the work shown at Pivô, named Portal, another of Alexandre da Cunha’s leitmotif was highlighted: the aesthetics appropriation of the metal modernist sculpture, as in Anthony Caro, William Tucker or Phillip King. With the latter, Alexandre da Cunha had a show in 2018 (Duologue, The Royal Society of Sculptors, London).

In the exhibition Portal, Alexandre da Cunha´s set of works is shown aligned, some of the pieces fastened perpendicularly to the walls and, others, self-supporting on the floor, with no diagonals: one thing after the other. The pieces are made of materials that are placed together and composed with gaps or holes; allowing the viewer to see one work through another. “Many people talk about the environment created in my exhibitions, which is not something that I aim at, as I think of each piece as an individual one, I make sculptures, not installations”, he claims.

Another aspect in this new series is the idea of borders, divisions, frontiers, which was previously explored by the artist in different ways. This seems to reappear here in a special manner because of the inversion that Alexandre da Cunha proposes: instead of creating a series of works which would be recognizable because of the choice of the materials used, a more recurrent practice in his work; in the exhibition only the structure is repeated, as the materials and objects used in the making of the pieces are different. “I have decided to play with this friction between one kind of material ‘against’ the other. This is a group defined by the piece’s typology. They are sculptures that cut through the space”.

Once in the space, the new sculptures develop a dialogue with architecture. The two pieces made of aluminium trays evoke the modernist architecture adapted to tropical weather. At the end of the 40s, the French architect Jean Prouvé designed an easily reproducible modular home in order to solve the housing problem in the French colonies in Africa; two of his Maison Tropicale prototypes were built, one in Nigeria and one in Congo, but the utopic social impact design wasn’t produced in large scale. However, the idea of the pre-fabricated object that is transformed in work of art is still alive in Alexandre da Cunha’s silver dividing frames: light and airy, they are made of inverted patterns (from horizontal to vertical, from table or oven to an elegant group piled inside a white cube), its social function (ready-made plate, industrial kitchen) hidden so that the materials can support themselves vertically as a sculptural presence.

About the drawings, Alexandre da Cuhna clarifies that he was surprised when revisiting these two work groups: one of the groups that deliberately emphasizes the figurative and narrative drawing lines; the other consisting of drawn volumes, something that could be considered closer to the research for which he has become known for. What he is interested in sharing from this (re)discovery is the presence of themes and gestures in those drawings that continue to star in his work: eroticism, for example.

ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA

“My working pro­cess is based on my observation of objects. I have always been intrigued by the massive amount of stuff one needs to live and the roles of objects in our surroundings. I am interested in the processes of design, man­ufacture, and distribution of them among ourselves. A great deal of my work consists of forcing myself to learn about the struc­tures of ordinary objects and the narratives behind them, their cultural uses and their im­plications in society. The method of transfor­mation or play with their appearance often happens through very subtle alterations; I believe this process has more to do with tim­ing than physical intervention, though. It is about creating a platform and allowing the viewer to see something familiar from a priv­ileged point of view.” [Alexandre da Cunha, in an interview to Jochen Volz for the magazine Mousse, 2017]

Recent solo shows include: Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples (upcoming, 2020); Duologue – collaboration with Phillip King, The Royal Society of Sculptors, London, England (2018); Boom, Pivô, São Paulo (2017); Mornings, Office Baroque, Brussels (2017); Free Fall, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2016); Amazons, CRG Gallery, New York (2015); Real, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2015).

Among Alexandre Da Cunha’s public intervention are works commissioned by Art on the Underground for Battersea Subway Station, Northern Line Extension, London (2021); for the Berkley Square, London (upcoming, 2020); by Samuels & Associates, Pierce Boston Collection, Boston (2017); MCA Chicago, part of the Plaza Project (2015), and Rochaverá Corporate Towers, in São Paulo (2015).

Important group shows include: Inaugural exhibition of The Box, Plymouth, UK (upcoming, 2020); Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Buckinghamshire village of Fulmer, UK (2019); Abstracción Textil, Galería Casas Riegner, Bogotá (2018); Soft Power, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2016); ‘Brazil, Beleza?! Contemporary Brazilian Sculpture’, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016);  British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds (2015); Cruzamentos –Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2014); ‘When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes’, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2013); Decorum: Tapis et tapisseres d’artistes, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012).

His work is part of the following collections: Tate Collection, England; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; CIFO Cisneros Collection, USA; Zabludowicz Collection, England; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; FAMA, Itu, Brazil.

GALERIA LUISA STRINA
Rua Padre João Manuel 755 Cerqueira César
01411-001 São Paulo SP
galerialuisastrina.com.br