Artist Char Jeré @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - "Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress" Exhibition

Char Jeré

Remembering the Mind:

A Study in Progress

Andrew Kreps, New York

January 10 - February 1, 2025

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress, an exhibition of new works by the New York-based artist Char Jeré.

In layered installations, Char Jeré draws on Afro-fractalist theory, her own autobiography, and a background in data analytics to examine the ways in which the built networks of our world enact a complicated relationship between race and technology. Remembering the Mind: A Study in Progress expands upon Jeré’s project Genuflect Symphony, which redefines the concept of “Black Noise,” (as opposed to white noise, which is traditionally positioned as a neutral sound), not as an absence, but as an assertion of the identities that history has sought to erase.

Char Jeré, who has experienced night terrors since childhood, is interested in how real-world anxieties manifest in psychological spaces and how these fears can be rendered in image. In the exhibition, paintings that draw on memories ranging from the intimacy of the artist’s grandmother cradling her brother, to the monsters of dreams, appear throughout the installation, alongside repurposed satellite dishes. Picking up on found radio signals, these collected feeds are disrupted by the consistent noise of Marsona sound machines, pointing to their intended function as sleep aids, to combat or allay unwanted noise. The fragile, technological network created between these devices is furthered by the presence of a polygraph machine, an antiquated device initially developed for medical purposes such as sleep studies. Later utilized to conduct lie detector tests, a purpose for which it was subsequently debunked, the device still carries a legacy as a tool for oppression. Woven together into a field of sound, image, and association, these elements form a meditation on how technology’s promise of neutrality, and knowledge, can disguise its use as a tool of harm, as well as the often disquieting ways in which our lived experiences intertwine with our inherited history.

In 2023, Artists Space presented Zoo or Orchestra, Char Jeré’s first exhibition in New York. In 2024, Jeré was included in the gallery’s group exhibition, Eighteen Painters, and additionally included in Peripheral Belonging, at GhostMachine, New York. She received a MFA in Sound Art from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University in 2023. Additionally, Char Jeré earned an MS in Data Analytics and Visualization from Pratt Institute in 2021.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

394 Broadway, New York City

www.andrewkreps.com

Roe Ethridge @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - "Shore Front Parkway" Exhibition

Roe Ethridge: Shore Front Parkway

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

January 10 – March 1, 2025

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Shore Front Parkway, an exhibition of new photographs by Roe Ethridge.

Rainbow over Shore Front Parkway, a photograph of a section of the two and a half mile stretch of beachfront road of the same name, locates the exhibition in Rockaway Beach, the neighborhood in which Roe Ethridge now lives and works, as well as a filmic canon of storied drives and boulevards. Depicted with a certain romanticism, a rainbow is suspended in the dusky sky above the parkway’s banal apartment blocks. The beach dunes below belong to an in progress, major coastal resilience project, which echoes the Parkways own incompletion, as it was initially conceived to connect the shoreline from New York City, to the Hamptons. This spectre of failed and renewed ambition finds a natural parallel with artistic practice, as Roe Ethridge narrativizes his own role, and identity as a photographer in the process.

Moving from the intimacy of daily life to the professional tone of studio set ups, Roe Ethridge creates unexpected combinations of images, often leading the viewer to question the degree to which they have been altered, or predetermined. Traditional categorizations of photographs as documents, or constructions seem to fall away. Through his lens, the happenstance still life on a coffee shop table in Others Pick-up Counter Still Life, becomes a studied composition, broken down into a series of decisions - from the mishmash accumulation of objects, an ombre fabric that reads as a placed backdrop, to a sun-faded c-print of Kate Bush, carefully, and deliberately inserted into an oversized frame. These varying layers of intentionality lead Ethridge’s works to resist synthesizing into a singular story. Instead, their meanings splinter outward, building distinct rhythms among pairings or groups to examine the ways in which images generate abstract feelings like nostalgia and longing. This becomes most apparent in Ethridge’s works that appear to revel in their own artifice, like This is Not a Cigarette, a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of Surrealism’s most storied compositions. Imbued with wit and humor, a gleeful model leans back, hoisting a pvc pipe, painted to resemble a cigarette. Seen together, these strategies suggest the increasingly murky relationship contemporary images maintain to truth. After all, they’re all real to the extent in which they happened, at least in Ethridge’s world. 

ROE ETHRIDGE

AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC

MACK

Embossed paperback with folded jacket

25 x 27.5 cm, 480 pages

ISBN 978-1-913620-65-3

October 2022

Shore Front Parkway is Roe Ethridge’s eleventh exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery, and is accompanied by a new catalog of the same title. Earlier this year, 10 Corso Como, Milan presented a survey exhibition of Ethridge’s work titled Happy Birthday Louise Parker, curated by Alessandro Rabottini. In 2022, Mack Books published AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC, the most comprehensive catalog of Ethridge’s work to date. His work was also featured in Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2022. Additionally, he participated in The Triennial for Photography and New Media, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway, 2020. From 2016 to 2017, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati hosted the first comprehensive survey of Ethridge’s work in the United States, titled Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor. Other solo exhibitions include Shelter Island at Foam, Amsterdam, 2016, and Roe Ethridge, curated by Anne Pontégnie, at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, 2012, which traveled to Museum Leuven in Belgium later that year. Ethridge’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY 10013

www.andrewkreps.com

Henry Shum @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - Hex

Henry Shum: Hex

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

November 4 – December 21, 2022

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Hex, an exhibition of new paintings by Henry Shum at 55 Walker.

Henry Shum’s work mirrors the experience of contemporary daily life, and the constant mediation of various streams of imagery and information. In his paintings, Henry Shum distills disparate references culled from physical and digital sources, as well as his own imagination into psychologically-charged compositions. Dynamic spatial effects emerge from thin veils of paint, as architectural space collides with natural forms and abstract geometry. Achieved through a chemical manipulation of oil paint, rich areas of saturated pigment sit against faint washes, creating forms that hover between the real and imagined. This interplay between opacity and transparency extends to the works’ subjects. While Henry Shum employs a highly personal language, he maneuvers through collective, and individual experiences, building emotive resonance through lurid and atmospheric color. Throughout, Henry Shum positions his work within a liminal space where memory, and history can flow freely to shape a distinct view of the present.

Hex is Henry Shum’s (b.1998, Hong Kong) first solo exhibition in the United States. Shum lives and works in Hong Kong, and received his BA from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2020. Empty Gallery, Hong Kong presented Henry Shum’s first solo exhibition in 2020.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

55 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.andrewkreps.com

Corita Kent @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC – "heroes and sheroes" Exhibition

Corita Kent: heroes and sheroes

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

July 8 – August 13, 2021

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents heroes and sheroes, an exhibition of artworks by CORITA KENT at 22 Cortlandt Alley. Centered on Corita Kent’s series of the same title made between 1968 and 1969, the exhibition marks the first time heroes and sheroes has been exhibited in New York in its entirety.

In the summer of 1965, following the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles, Corita Kent reproduced the front page of the Los Angeles Times within her work my people. While in previous years, Corita Kent had appropriated text from consumer and mass culture, my people is the first example of Kent using appropriation as a direct response to the socially charged events of her time. The paper’s headlines were rotated and partially obscured by a swath of red, in which Corita Kent handwrote a text attributed to Maurice Ouellet, a priest and civil rights activist who participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches earlier that year. Ouellet’s words form a rebuttal to the paper’s racially charged headlines describing the Uprising as a “Blood Hungry Mob.”  In response, Ouellet’s quote reads: “Youth is a time of rebellion. Rather than squelch the rebellion, we might better enlist the rebels to join that greatest rebel of his time-Christ himself.” 

In the years following, Corita Kent continued to create singular compositions, in which bold and colorful text promoted messages of faith, acceptance, and love. Simultaneously, Kent rose to national prominence as a public figure - she was named Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1966 and featured on the December cover of Newsweek in 1967. With this exposure came increased scrutiny of Kent’s outspokenness as the conservative Archdiocese of Los Angeles mounted intense pressure on both Kent and her order, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, over the changes they were making under the directives of Vatican II. In the summer of 1968, Kent would take a sabbatical from Immaculate Heart College, subsequently leaving the order and seeking dispensation from her vows.

This would mark a key turning point in Carita Kent’s work, as she began heroes and sheroes later that same year. Reflecting on the social and political movements of the time, much like my people before it, heroes and sheroes demonstrates not only Kent’s advocacy but also her acute awareness of how these events were framed and disseminated through mass media. Collaging images appropriated from newspapers and magazines with poetry, song lyrics, quotations from figures within the religious left (such as Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine), and Carita Kent’s own writings, heroes and sheroes addresses issues such as the civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements, nuclear disarmament, and the political assassinations that defined the 1960s. Works like the cry that will be heard reflect the urgency of the moment, imploring the viewer to “give a damn about your fellow man.” Other works, notably american sampler, position themselves as acerbic critique. Utilizing the colors red, white, and blue, Kent riffs on the tradition of the “sampler”, a piece of embroidery used to demonstrate a variety of needlework techniques. Here, Corita Kent’s sampler repeats the words AMERICAN, ASSASSINATION, VIOLENCE, and VIETNAM in stacked lines that resemble the stripes of the flag, using shifts in color to highlight different combinations of words such as SIN, I, and NATION. Prompting the viewer to consider their own individual and moral responsibility, the work’s last line poses the question “WHY” next to the answer: “WHY NOT.”

Filling the main gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley, the twenty-nine prints comprising heroes and sheroes reflect the enduring spirit that gave rise to Corita Kent’s nickname—“Joyous Revolutionary.” The series simultaneously highlights the potential of new life, a belief in the power of collective action, and the joy that exists in the everyday. Shying away from optimism, Kent instead emphasized the importance of hope in works like a passion for the possible, employing the image of an energetic crowd of demonstrators, arms extended upwards in peace signs. Positioned above the photograph is a text from activist and clergyman William Sloane Coffin, which still resonates over fifty years after its making: “...hope demands that we take a dim view of the present because we hold a bright view of the future; and HOPE AROUSES AS NOTHING ELSE CAN AROUSE A PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE.”

CORITA KENT (1918–1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. Earlier this year, Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to designate Corita Kent’s former studio at 5518 Franklin Avenue as a Historic-Cultural Monument. Corita Kent’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; mumok, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Frac Ile-de-France, Paris; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, among others. Notable exhibitions include: Corita Kent: Get With The Action, Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft (2019); Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (2015); Someday is Now, Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013); People Like Us: Prints from the 1960s by Sister Corita, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2007).

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY 10013

www.andrewkreps.com

Raymond Saunders @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, San Francisco - 40 Years: Paris/Oakland

Raymond Saunders 

40 Years: Paris/Oakland 

Andrew Kreps Gallery, San Francisco 

Through June 12, 2021 

Casemore Kirkeby and Andrew Kreps Gallery presents 40 Years: Paris/Oakland, an exhibition of works by RAYMOND SAUNDERS. 

Since the 1960s, Raymond Saunders has developed a singular practice defined by an improvisational approach, as he culls eclectic ephemera, signage, detritus, and other materials from his daily life which reflect his living environment. A cult-like figure in the Bay Area art scene, Saunders’ paintings and installation-based works are loaded with rich swaths of paint, interwoven with found materials and his own notational marks, and white-pencil drawings. 

Blackboard surfaces, left visible through a heavy accumulation of marks and material, tie Raymond Saunders’ works inextricably to his role as an educator, as he handwrites simple equations, lettering, and childlike notes onto the work’s surface. Like jazz, dissonant at first, yet upon closer view, Saunders uses these diverse elements which seem to address the dualities present within life - plight and renewal, lack and abundance, innocence, and despair, as well as the individual and the community. Interweaving his own personal experience and anecdotes, Raymond Saunders aims to teach this full reality of the modern environment, the losses and victories, as well as the splendor that exists within the everyday.

Spanning four decades of Raymond Saunders’ remarkable career, 40 Years: Paris/Oakland spans two locations (657 Howard Street, and 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco) and features rarely-exhibited works on canvas from the 1980s and installation-based works from the 1990s. Focusing on his activities outside of the Bay Area, the exhibition highlights previously unexhibited works created in Raymond Saunders’ Paris studio from the 1990s and 2000s, where he would spend each summer. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition additionally includes recent works from Raymond Saunders’ Oakland studio.

RAYMOND SAUNDERS was born in 1934 and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He obtained his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, before moving to Oakland, California, where he earned his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Saunders joined the faculty of California State University East Bay, Hayward, in 1968, eventually becoming an arts professor at California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Raymond Saunders currently holds the title of professor emeritus from Cal State East Bay in Hayward. In 1967, he published his seminal essay Black is a Color, which challenged the perceptions of identity-focused art. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and is a two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984). His work was recently included in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963 – 1983, organized by London’s Tate Modern. He was also included in the traveling exhibition Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 – 1980, organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Raymond Saunders works are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Howard University in Washington, DC, Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, SFMOMA in San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, and the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, among others.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

657 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.andrewkreps.com

_______________

Corita Kent: Works from the 1960s @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Corita Kent: Works from the 1960s

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

April 26 – July 3, 2019

“It is a huge danger to pretend awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep on going. I am trying to make hope. And you have to grab it where you can.” – Corita Kent

Andrew Kreps Gallery and kaufmann repetto, New York present an exhibition of works by CORITA KENT (b. 1918, Fort Dodge, Iowa, d. 1986, Boston) at 55 Walker Street.

Corita Kent was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. In 1936, CoritaKent  joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, taking the name Sister Mary Corita. She began teaching in the Immaculate Heart College art department by 1947 and produced her first serigraphs in the early 50s. While her first prints consisted of dense, figurative compositions with religious themes and iconography, by 1962—after seeing Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—her work evolved into a singular mode of Pop art. Reflecting a wide breadth of disciplinary interests, her bright compositions were not limited to the staple imagery and language of consumer and mass culture but also integrated philosophy, literature, street signage, scripture, and song lyrics in bold text and abstract forms.

The exhibition focuses on the years following 1962, displaying works that combine themes of faith, acceptance, and politics. Taking a celebratory approach to the everyday, Corita Kent combined texts from newspapers, supermarkets, and advertising, alongside passages from figures such as Daniel Berrigan, e.e. cummings, Martin Luther King Jr., and others. These vibrant calls to arms encouraged the viewer to work towards mutual respect and dignity for all people. As tensions surrounding the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War escalated in the late 60s, so did Corita Kent's response to current events as she asked: "Why not give a damn about your fellow man?" Following mounting pressure from the conservative Archdiocese of Los Angeles, as well as exhaustion from her increasingly public profile, Corita Kent ultimately left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston where she continued to pursue her work.

Corita Kent’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and others. Notable exhibitions include: ‘Corita Kent: Get With The Action,’ Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft, Ditchling, England (2019); ‘Corita Kent and the Language of Pop,’ Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (2015); ‘Someday is Now,’ Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013); Yes ‘People Like Us: Prints from the 1960s by Sister Corita,’ Museum Ludwig, Ludwig, Germany (2007).

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

55 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.andrewkreps.com

Robert Overby, Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - Persistence. Repeated - Curated by Alessandro Rabottini

Robert Overby: Persistence. Repeated

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

September 10 - October 31, 2015

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Persistence. Repeated, an exhibition devoted to the work of ROBERT OVERBY (1935–1993).

This exhibition follows the travelling retrospective, Robert Overby. Works 1969–1987, which in 2014 and 2015 was staged at four European institutions: the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, the Bergen Kunsthall and Le Consortium in Dijon. Curated by Alessandro Rabottini, this survey was accompanied by the most complete publication to date on the California artist’s work.

Robert Overby: Persistence. Repeated explores the themes of referencing, copying and repetition in the artist’s work, and the way in which certain operations rooted in Robert Overby’s profession, graphic design, were expressed on a formal and conceptual level throughout his practice. Robert Overby was an immensely prolific artist in terms of formal results, but consistent from a thematic standpoint. He enacted a varied and eclectic ensemble of styles and techniques, while demonstrating an obstinate resistance against the very concept of “style.” Robert Overby demonstrated great interest in the subject of time and the fragility of human existence in works that explore materials, images, and architecture in their impermanence.

Employing tools such as photography, architectural castings, and appropriation paintings, Robert Overby consistently analyzed the concepts of originality and authorship. Through adapting the same visual information to different supports, he investigated its material nature, and the gradual loss of quality inherent in its transmission. Blue Screen Door (1971) is presented within the exhibitions in the three successive formalizations generated by the initial visual information: the architectural cast, in resin, of a door (Robert Overby viewed the casting technique as a cross between sculpture and photography,) followed by the neon outline of that door (Blue Door Edge, 1971) and the final outcome, a canvas map that is the final trace of the original object (Blue Screen Door Map, 1972). 

At the exhibition’s heart are the numerous variations of lithographs executed by Robert Overby between 1973 and 1975. The image is a copy of Overby’s Durer Head on Fake Wood Panel (1973), which in itself is an altered copy of an isolated detail from Albrecht Dürer’s 1506 painting, Madonna with the Siskin.The motif of the virgin’s head was subjected to a series of repetitions both object based—as in the case of WAXY LADY and CARUMBA (both from 1975)—and print based—such as R.R.O.S.E. (1974) and FADING LADY (1975). CARUMBA explores the iconographic variation and ironic drift of the mechanism of appropriation, whereas R.R.O.S.E. and FADING LADY are symptomatic of formal and conceptual preoccupation with chromatic variation, and the processes of printing and repetition. Nevertheless, all these works share the same concentration on the material nature of images and of the supports that convey them, emphasizing the process of progressive deterioration that is inherent in the device of repetition.

The artist’s longstanding fascination with the works of the Old Masters also led to the series of Restoration Paintings, three of which dating from 1973 are included in the exhibition: Princess Restoration c. 1850 anon., St. Cecilia c. 1590 and Venus 1600 c. In these works, the concept of the copy is structural, as Robert Overby purchased cheap, anonymous imitations of these works at street markets, which he then proceeded to clean and restore. Well ahead of research conducted in the late Seventies and early Eighties on the art of appropriation, here Overby not only emphasizes the ambiguity inherent in the concept of artistic originality but, in a more radical and intimate way, he considers the pictorial object a living organism that deteriorates over time and may disappear.

The concept of the image as surface information is confirmed by the two examples of Rubbing Drawings, executed in 1972 while the artist spent time in New York. These works were made in the studio of photographer Ralph Gibson, where Robert Overby applied the Surrealists’ beloved frottage technique to architecture by placing sheets of paper on the floor, translating its texture into marks. His latex cast titled Loft Window (1971), included in the exhibition, was also taken from Gibson’s studio. The simultaneous presence of these works confirms that Robert Overby’s exploration of processes and materials moved in an unorthodox direction, favoring instead a discussion focused on simulation and representation. 

Robert Overby’s architectural cast works, for which the artist coined the term “Baroque Minimalism,” constitute inescapable testimony within the history of postwar American art. As demonstrated by Loft Window, Corner Piece Unlimited Multiple (1973), as well as Blue Screen Door (all included in the exhibition), they are part of a current of research that, from Eva Hesse to Paul Thek, explores the transitory nature of materials within more sweeping reflections on individual sentiment and finiteness. These latex and resin mappings of space are juxtaposed with canvas works, all of which were produced in 1972. Blue Screen Door Map, Two Window Wall Map, Broken Window Map, and Corner Piece Map are canvas copies of their corresponding sculptures, constituting a meditative counterpoint to the more dramatic latex works.

ROBERT OVERBY (1935–1993) was born in Harvey, Illinois, and educated at the Art Center School of Design and the Chouinard Art Institute, both in Los Angeles, where he spent most of his life. Robert Overby created a multifaceted body of work that ranged from painting to installation art that was rarely exhibited during his lifetime. Many of these works created between 1969 and 1973 were documented in his self-published “red book” titled Robert Overby: 336 to 1, August 1973–July 1969. In 2000, Robert Overby was the subject of a retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which paved the way for his recent major solo museum survey, Robert Overby: Works 1969–1987, curated by Alessandro Rabottini (Centre d’Art Contemporain [Geneva, Switzerland]; travelled to Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo [Bergamo, Italy], Bergen Kunsthall [Bergen, Norway], and Le Consortium [Dijon, France]). Robert Overby: Works 1969–1987 was accompanied by a major publication of the same title, with texts by Andrea Bellini (Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva), Martin Clark (Director of the Bergen Kunsthall), Robin Clark (art historian and Director of the Artist Initiative, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Alison M. Gingeras (art historian and independent curator), and Terry R. Myers (art critic, Professor and Chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). The catalogue, published by Mousse Publishing, also includes the most complete chronology on the artist’s life and works, edited by Marianna Vecellio, curator at Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Rivoli, Turin.

ROBERT OVERBY 

WORKS 1969 – 1987

Mousse Publishing

294 pages, English, Softcover, 24 x 31,7 cm

Alessandro Rabottini, Andrea Bellini, Martin Clark, eds.

Texts by Andrea Bellini, Martin Clark, Robin Clark, Marianna Vecellio,

Alison M. Gingeras, Terry R. Myers, Alessandro Rabottini

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

537 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

andrewkreps.com

Andrea Bowers @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - The New Woman’s Survival Guide

Andrea Bowers: The New Woman’s Survival Guide
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
October 29 – December 17, 2011

The Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Andrea Bowers’ second exhibition at the gallery entitled, The New Woman’s Survival Guide.  Consisting of drawings layered over wallpaper made up of handbills and protest signs collected by the artist, the show contrasts previous tropes of feminism with current ones.

The show’s title and subject matter uses this 1973 feminist zine as its nexus and impetus to consider the evolution of women’s issues and feminist activism today.  The original publication’s intent was to catalogue and document activities aimed explicitly at developing an alternative woman’s culture.  The original DIY book served as an encyclopedic collection of women’s organizations and services that existed throughout the United States during the second wave of feminism in the early seventies.  The artist’s discovery of the New Woman’s Survival Guide led Bowers through a process of questioning and investigating the progression and possibility of an alternative woman’s culture almost 40 years after the this tome was published.   

The exhibition continues her use of archival strategies in art making, which includes drawing, photography and graphic materials.  Bower’s belief in the importance of the partnership between art and politics is at the forefront of this exhibition and she celebrates a 40-year history of feminist political graphics highlighting specific images as homage or political focal points creating moments of humor, celebration, memorialization and rage. Twenty drawings hang on a huge wall installation, made of contemporary political placards and graphics combined with reproductions of the 1973 zine.  All the contemporary political graphics were collected by the artist through donations to feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood, NOW, NARAL, Radical Women, 9to5, Codepink, Another Mother For Peace, etc. 

The drawings comprise three bodies of work: text drawings, figurative drawings, and black and white feminist graphic drawings.  The text drawings, Make My Story Count are hand-drawn copies of letters written recently to Planned Parenthood by women in the Los Angeles area expressing their appreciation for the organization’s invaluable healthcare services.  The figurative drawings use as their source photos taken by the artist at 2011 May Day March in Los Angeles.  All of the drawings are of women and reflect the complexities of gender, race and global migration that must be confronted in today’s woman’s movement.  The graphite black and white drawings appropriate graphics from the 1970’s but become playful and contemplative 40 years later. 

By juxtaposing the historical and contemporary tropes of activism the artist foregrounds not only the trajectory and evolution of the feminist dialogue, but also it’s difficulties maintaining pertinence and purity in an ever-growing complex political environment.

A percentage of sales from the exhibition will be donated to Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

Andrea Bowers received her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Solo exhibitions include: Secession, Vienna, Austria; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Sammlung Goetz, Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
andrewkreps.com

Andrea Bowers @ Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC - Mercy Mercy Me

Andrea Bowers: Mercy Mercy Me
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
October 24 – December 5, 2009

The Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Andrea Bowers’ new exhibition, entitled Mercy Mercy Me. Released in 1971, this influential Marvin Gaye song was, and still is, one of the most popular songs of all time that addresses the degradation of the environment, and other pressing social and political issues.  Bill McKibben, American environmentalist, recently wrote about Mercy Mercy Me., “For a brief moment. . .it made perfect sense for the civil rights and environmental movements to be singing the same tune. Tragically, those movements soon diverged - diverged so far that some people still find it odd that activists are working side by side again on issues like global warming and poverty.”

In her current exhibition Andrea Bowers investigates the complicated politics of dealing with the contemporary idea of landscape and the problematic relationship of predominantly Eurocentric environmentalist’s attempts to collaborate with locals to fight against climate change.  Almost without exception the most endangered locales are populated with people of color and those with low income. And despite their intrinsically humanistic attempts to help, human rights organizations, corporations interested in sponsorship and the Green Movement struggle with compatibility. This exhibition began with a trip that Andrea Bowers took with a small group of activists to the Arctic Village in Northern Alaska in the summer of 2009.  It is a village of about 150 Native Americans, called Gwich’in, and is located in the southern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  

The exhibition includes a group of 4 video projects, several drawings, books, beading and ephemera from past protests. Circle is a video that combines panoramic landscapes with interviews and footage of four generations of women from the Arctic Village. These women, some of whom are part of the activist organization, The Gwich’in Steering Committee, eloquently express the urgent needs of their people for the prevention of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the protection of their lands from global warming.

Interview with Betty Ann continues Andrea Bowers’ interest in storytelling but for the first time she turns the camera on herself to tell a story about her correspondence with a woman bead artist that she met at the Arctic Village. A third video, which was recorded this summer, documents a tree-climbing lesson given to Andrea Bowers by environmental activist, John Quigley.  This piece, focusing on the metaphor of ascension, encapsulates the good intentions and hopes of the environmental movement and continues Bowers’ interest in choreographic movements resulting from political action.  Also part of this exhibition are works that reference the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and Alaskan beading traditions layered with environmental activism. 

Andrea Bowers received her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Solo exhibitions include: Secession, Vienna, Austria; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY; Sammlung Goetz, Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
andrewkreps.com

Hayley Tompkins, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC

Hayley Tompkins

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

October 11 - November 15, 2003

My street's very, very quiet, and no-one brings anyone in here - it's very private.

But there are these motor homes and

20 people in black suits,

standing in the middle of my street, So I pull up.

In my car and I've got my hair pulled back - and he

starts to take pictures. No make-up, no nothing.

So I said, "Fine" I see myself like that every day.

I think I'm very free. On + on.

Once you overcome an obstacle,

You springboard into the future.

Borrow it.

His / her / it's life activity. Conscious life activity.

Find it.

Life is interesting and short

It's not supposed to be easy, and if it is

You're probably just in denial and you're existing here

Like a zombie.

No zombies.

That's what I love about -

-Sue Tompkins

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Hayley Tompkins. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Hayley Tompkins has recently participated in exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria and at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. This is her second solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery.

The exhibition features Hayley Tompkins' trademark watercolors on paper as well as paintings on wooden board, a new medium for her. Hayley Tompkins sees these paintings on board as an "attempt to retrieve images of other paintings in my mind. Like remembering. The paintings feel aged to me already, like I am making ready-made objects and inserting them into history straight away."

In this exhibition, a number of works are hung on a large cubical structure built in the center of the gallery space. As viewers navigate around the structure, Hayley Tompkins' installation unfolds. The artist sees encountering the structure as "a gestalt, 'unwhole' experience" because only one part of the exhibition is visible at a time. The four walls of the box-structure provide a stage of sorts, where the paintings are installed to express their distinctive qualities. Some of the works contain references to stage or costume design. Hayley Tompkins cites Malevich, Sonia Delaunay and Oskar Schlemmer as influential for their work, as well as for their holistic approaches as artists-cum-stage designers. Other works in the exhibition are hung to emphasize their surreal content.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

516 wEST 20th Street, New York City

www.andrewkreps.com