Friederike Feldmann @ Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Friederike Feldmann: Printemps 2020
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
March 14 – April 18, 2020

Galerie Barbara Weiss presents a solo exhibition with new works by Friederike Feldmann. The title Printemps 2020 cites fashion, but it is not as a metaphor of the ephemeral that fashion figures in this exhibition. Rather fashion figures as a language with its own syntax and lexis. In detailed studies, Friederike Feldmann compares the constitutive elements of drawing—form, color, line, shape—with the rhetorics of fashion, its codes, patterns and processes. It is an analogy by means of which the artists invites the viewer to reflect on the structuality of her medium, a reflection that opens onto questions of temporality, materiality and plasticity: Is there something like a rhetoric of drawing, comparable to the language of fashion?

In Collection, 2020, Friederike Feldmann explores the margins of her medium. The works only show the outer edges of drawings, which appear to lie on top of each other like sheets of paper spread out on the wall. This effect, which may be read as a reference to the prominence of illusionism in the history of mural painting, is achieved through a shading of the sheets’ edges, resulting in an impression of stratification. Phenomenologically, the artist relies on another illusionist device to interrogate the threshold where passive perception merges with active projection, where reconstruction turns into construction. For just as the eye only reads the first letters of a word to compose a signifying unit, Friederike Feldmann zeros in on the margins of drawings to interrogate a mechanism of perception that resembles an art historical form of pattern recognition. Yet the works are situated on the medium’s margin in a broader sense as well, insofar as Friederike Feldmann not only includes artistic idioms in her collection. She covers a disparate spectrum: the gestural stands besides the geometrical; the architect’s drawing next to the doodle. What appears in this comparison, however, is not a confrontation of high and low, but rather something like an artistic and playful exploration of drawing as a cultural praxis.

If the mural painting interrogates the characteristics that allow for the recognition of different languages of drawing, the smaller drawings shift the focus to specific Looks, 2017 - 2020. They explore those features that individuate a personal style. All of these works—traces and documentations of very personal encounters—emerged from the engagement with portrait drawings of selected artists. With their strict economy of means, the drawings reduce a personal style to its essence while simultaneously translating it. Beyond citation and appropriation, the artists familiarizes herself with a selected body of work, in order to distill and translate its style, working not with a specific model, but solely on the basis of this practiced proximity. Deliberately, Friederike Feldmann’s translation of highly personal styles into her own artistic idiom moves between difference and repetition to pose a fundamental question about what constitutes style, influence and translation in art. 

GALERIE BARABARA WEISS
Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43 - 10999 Berlin
galeriebarbaraweiss.de

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Florian Eymann @ Avant Gallery, NYC - Interpretation

Florian Eymann: Interpretation

Avant Gallery, New York

March 5 - April 19, 2020

FLORIAN HEYMAN

Avant Gallery presents Interpretation, the gallery’s fifth New York exhibition and the American solo premiere with master painter FLORIAN EYMANN. The exhibition unveiling a new body of paintings at the gallery’s Hudson Yards location.

The deadly kiss of fuel and oxidant is the pivotal moment of combustion. Imploding and exploding at once, Florian Eymann’s paintings exist within this transcendent moment of violence. Matter is suspended in a cannonade of hard-edged geometry, abstraction, as well as keenly applied figurative realism. Frantic, raw brushstrokes, like the reflective shards of a thousand broken mirrors, dissolve into sumptuous, inky voids.

Florian Eymann’s work exhumes the crypts of the canon, with both studied and irreverent homages to the likes of Lucian Freud or Gustav Klimt. Edouard Manet’s “The Fifer” lingers on the verge of recognizable through a composition in which both horizon and figure run amok, disembodied limbs scattered across a battlefield, askew. Francis Bacon’s own 1973 self-portrait is duly dissected, the former’s cubist influences reduced to swathes of color. The suite of still lifes glisten through the thick impasto, accumulations of fragments coaxing premonitions of memento mori.

In the past, Florian Eymann has dwelled in the caves of the existential, probing the dark recesses of the psyche. This most recent body of work deconstructs the mind and spirit of the very medium of painting itself, trading pretension for the carnal. Like Bacon painting on the raw underside of another work, or the serpent, Ouroboros, devouring its own tail in perpetuity, here Eymann offers, perhaps, another interpretation.

Florian Eymann, (b. 1980, Auxerre, France) lives and works in Orléans, France. Solo shows include those held at Schwab Beaubourg (Paris), Rembrandt Gallery (Netherlands), Affenfaust Galerie (Hamburg, Germany), Oxholm (Copenhagen) and Rhodes Gallery (London). Art Fairs include participation with Avant Gallery at Art Miami, Art New York, and Scope Basel in Switzerland.

AVANT GALLERY

20 Hudson Yards, level 1, New York, NY 10001

avantgallery.com

William N. Copley @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - The New York Years

William N. Copley: The New York Years
Kasmin, New York
March 11 — April 22, 2020

Kasmin presents William N. Copley The New York Years, a comprehensive look at the evolution of the artist’s painting during three pivotal decades in New York City. The exhibition, on view at 509 West 27th Street, traces this central period through key paintings from multiple series and a corresponding presentation of photographic, publishing, and research materials drawn from the archives of the William N. Copley Estate. This is Kasmin’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2010.

“I’d been born in that town but didn’t remember it,” William N. Copley said of New York in his memoir Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer. Copley’s decision to move to the city—when the artist was 44—marked a return to the American scene after twelve years living in France. Copley’s early career had been one of a self-taught outsider working in Paris, where, under the influence of Surrealism, Copley developed a unique personal iconography. This “private mythology,” as he would call it, explored sexual politics and his culturally repressive upbringing. Copley’s eccentric style and his humorous, amatory themes led to commercial success and exhibitions throughout Europe in the 1950s. William N. Copley returned to the US in 1963, at a time when the Paris scene had grown quiet and New York was enjoying a period of explosive artistic activity.

Included in the exhibition are major works originally exhibited at William N. Copley’s first shows as an artist based in New York. These works, such as Tomb of the Unknown Whore (1965) and What’s Your Hurry (1965), reveal Copley’s shift to working at a larger scale and utilizing line drawing as a technique in his paintings. Copley’s switch from oil paints to acrylics, which allowed him to work faster and gave him new freedoms, coincided with a prolific series of colorful, narrative paintings adapted from the works Robert W. Service and other folk balladeers popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. These paintings are represented in The New York Years with Then In Meandered Deep-Hole Dan Once Comrade of the Cup (1967). Of special note in the exhibition is the large painting I Am Awarded My Handbag and Declared a Professional (1986), which was displayed in the artist’s immersive New Museum installation Tomb of the Unknown Whore in 1986. It is exhibited here for the first time in New York since the original exhibition.

Beginning in 1970, William N. Copley started rendering items from old Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs in a loose, suggestive manner. Dubbed the Nouns, these everyday items were paired with geometric background patterns in a style similar to, or quietly critical of, Hard-edge and Op-style painting. William Copley at once further developed this painterly language and consummated his interest in erotic subject matter with the X-Rated series, which he began two years later in 1972. Indebted to the adult magazines sold along 42nd street and Times Square, the works feature figures in various stages of sexual congress and are marked by bold contour lines and lyrical color palettes. Speaking of the X-Rated exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center William Copley remarked, “I am attempting to break through the barrier of pornography into the area of joy.” Works from the Nouns and X-Rated series are presented in dialogue in William N. Copley The New York Years.

New York also provided William N. Copley an ideal setting for his non-painting activities. In 1967, Copley founded The Letter Edged In Black Press, Inc., which published the groundbreaking art periodical S.M.S. for six issues in 1968. S.M.S. featured facsimile multiples from an intergenerational group of artists, many of whom Copley met in New York and who would congregate at the artist’s publishing office on the Upper West Side. (Among the friends and contributors were Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Christo, Lee Lozano, John Cage, and Copley’s close friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp.) S.M.S. publications will be on view in the exhibition along with associated artworks and ephemera.

In the 1980s, William N. Copley began dividing time between New York and homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Key West, Florida. Though he began to withdraw from New York’s art world, he maintained a prolific focus on painting and his work grew in complexity and ambiguity. The late gallerist Phyllis Kind—known for her patronage of outsider art and directive support of the Chicago Imagists—became Copley’s primary New York dealer, staging five solo exhibitions at her Greene Street space in Soho between 1982 and 1991. Untitled (Apples & Oranges) (1986) dates from this period and is exemplary of Copley’s late style, employing multilayered compositions and collaged textiles such as lace fabric.

In addition to the key works on view, William N. Copley The New York Years presents a timeline of the artist’s numerous activities during his tenure in New York. Visitors will encounter an in-depth picture of his consequential return to the New York scene, where Copley forged his mature identity as an artist and painter.

William N. Copley, (1919–1996), known by his signature name CPLY, (pronounced 'see-ply'), was a painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur. In his lifetime, Copley was the subject of multiple European retrospectives, including Stedlijk Museum (1966), Kunsthalle Bern (1980), and Kestner-Gessellschaft (1995). Recent major institutional exhibitions have been held at The Menil Collection, Houston, and Fondazione Prada, Italy. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Stedelijk Museum and many more.

The New York Years completes a trio of coordinated international exhibitions that presents major series of works by William N. Copley in the first part of 2020. See The Ballad of William N. Copley at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, William N. Copley: The Temptation of St. Anthony (Revisited) at Nino Mier, Los Angeles, and The New York Years at Kasmin, New York.

KASMIN 
509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
kasmingallery.com

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Joanna Pousette-Dart @ Lisson Gallery, NYC

Joanna Pousette-Dart 
Lisson Gallery, New York
29 February - 18 April, 2020

Lisson Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by New York based abstract painter Joanna Pousette-Dart. This is the gallery’s first solo presentation with Joanna Pousette-Dart, following the recent announcement of representation.

Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, and having studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont amongst the likes of Greenbergian Formalists Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. However, despite this traditional modernist background, her paintings remain anything but conventional. Joanna Pousette-Dart’s shaped paintings are unique in their melding of formal and poetic concerns, and take their inspiration from many sources: Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself, to name a few.

The presentation at Lisson Gallery’s Tenth Avenue space features four large-scale multi-panel paintings, each composed of curved canvases, a format Joanna Pousette-Dart has explored since 1990 while working in Galisteo, New Mexico. The dynamic configurations of these works evoke the constantly shifting light and form, the vastness of the spaces, and the sense of the earth’s curvature that she experienced there. Works in the exhibition such as Plateau (2019), measuring more than 11 feet across, and 2 Part Variation #3 (After Pierrot) (2015) evoke the earth’s curvature, as well as the characteristically dramatic light experienced in the Southwest.

The shape of Joanna Pousette-Dart’s canvases are loosely based on parts of hemispheres, and created as an exploration of scale. Early studies into the landscape in New Mexico began by taking photographs and stitching them into 360-degree compositions, exploring the continuous flattened terrain and the dramatic changes in light. Joanna Pousette-Dart noted, “In taking photographs I could see the light changing the interrelationship of all the elements from frame to frame as I was shooting. I began making drawings with the photos in mind, cutting shapes and putting them together and these drawings ultimately led to the shaped panels.”

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s paintings take many forms, each with their own dynamic sense of expansion and compression, buoyancy and gravity. The painted contours of the interior shapes create an added complexity, sometimes echoing the contours of the canvas, and at other times challenging them. While the paintings are considered whole within themselves, the rhythm and light of the painting is intended to reverberate beyond its curved edges.

JOANNA POUSETTE-DART was born in New York, NY in 1947, where she still lives and works. She has a BA from Bennington College, Vermont (1968). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wiesbaden Museum, Wiesbaden, Germany; Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Texas Gallery, Houston, TX, USA; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, USA; and Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, NY, USA, as well as a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Locks Gallery in Philadelphia will open a solo exhibition in April 2020 of new work. Joanna Pousette-Dart has been featured in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, among others. Her work is included is held in public collections around the world including Albright Knox, Buffalo, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, USA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA. 

LISSON GALLERY
138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
lissongallery.com

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Douglas Melini @ SOCO Gallery, Charlotte - Into the Woods - Paintings and Collages Exhibition

Douglas Melini: Into the Woods 

SOCO Gallery, Charlotte 

March 11 – April 24, 2020

DOUGLAS MELINI

Image courtesy of Douglas Melini and SOCO Gallery

SOCO Gallery presents “Into the Woods”, an exhibition of new works by artist DOUGLAS MELINI. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery. 

Influenced by an unlikely combination of Minimalism, pattern, and decoration, Douglas Melini investigates color, space, and the “abstract and pictorial nature of making an image”. He challenges how the audience views his works by opening up the visual space and distorting horizon lines. Adhering to the Bauhaus maxim “form follows function”, his artwork creates a pause for the viewer, allowing and encouraging a moment of contemplation.

For his exhibition, “Into the Woods”, Douglas Melini has created six paintings and twelve collage pieces. Inspired by the history of the lush tree and mushrooms grown in New Jersey Pine Barrens, the collages celebrate the cyclical and symbiotic relationships within the forest. The mushrooms, sourced from a dizzying array of field guides, are personified and presented larger than life. The vibrant and transparent watercolor connects the mushrooms to each other and to the surrounding world.

The colorful abstract paintings are constructed with reclaimed wood sourced from tobacco barns in North Carolina and feature layers of oil on linen and a textured build-up of acrylic stain and sealant. The natural material contrasts with the foraged wood to create two vastly different ways of interpreting visual spaces, one natural and one assembled. This theatrical juxtaposition further captures the viewer’s attention, establishing a portal to another world. Together, the paintings and the mushroom collages create one harmonious, natural biosphere.

DOUGLAS MELINI (b. 1972, American) received his BA from the University of Maryland in 1994 and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1997. Douglas Melini has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon (2018); 11R Gallery, New York, New York (2017); Feature Inc., NY, NY (2009-2014); Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York (2009); Ursula Werz, Tubingen, Germany (2005); Rocket Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2004, 1999); and Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, California (1998); among others. In 2008, Douglas Melini was awarded a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Douglas Melini’s work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Time Out New York, and Artcritical, and is included in private and public collections worldwide. He is represented by Van Doren Waxter, NY, NY and SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC. The artist currently lives and works in New Jersey. 

SOCO GALLERY

421 Providence Road, Charlotte, North Carolina 28207

socogallery.com