Chico da Silva @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - "Amazônico" Exhibition

Chico da Silva 

Amazônico

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

March 13 - April 26, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery presents Amazônico, the first solo exhibition of CHICO DA SILVA’s work in Los Angeles.

“I feel the animals, the jungles, the fantastic worlds, entering the phase of other worlds.”

—Chico da Silva, 1972

Over a prolific career spanning four decades, Chico da Silva devoted himself to depicting the celestial, otherworldly realms within his imagination. His work, which spans a rich and varied body of paintings, drawings, and performance, encapsulates a profound engagement with the intersection of personal mythology, cultural history, and collective creativity. Amazônico brings together exemplary paintings from the 1980s—an often-overlooked phase of Chico da Silva’s career—alongside works from the 1960s, offering a comprehensive look at his practice and insight into the evolution of his distinctive artistic vision.

Born in Alto Tejo, Brazil, Chico da Silva’s early years in the Amazon deeply influenced the development of his cosmology of fantastical creatures and environments. As a teenager, he moved to Pirambu with his mother. It was only a few years later that Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz saw him drawing on some neighborhood buildings and quickly became a key supporter, launching Chico da Silva’s international career. By the early-to-mid 1960s, Chico da Silva had honed his unique style, working primarily on paper and depicting creatures—both real and imagined—in suspended states of conflict. The 1964 and 1966 works featured in this exhibition both feature stippled lines and dots that define his bichos (creatures). In the 1966 example, fish surrounding a tree share the same intricate patterns, dissolving the boundary between flora and fauna in Chico da Silva’s invented world.

Chico da Silva continued to garner significant attention, culminating with an invitation to participate in the 1966 Venice Biennale, where he received an honorable mention. A work from this pivotal year is included in Amazônico. The only painting in the original artist frame, this work offers critical insight into Chico da Silva’s process: the painting’s frame bears marks from the artist, who constantly wiped his brush onto the frame’s border to ensure precision in every stroke. His refined technique later became the foundation for the Pirambu School. Originally conceived as an arts workshop for children and local artisans to learn directly from Chico da Silva, the school quickly evolved into a collective. Members of the Pirambu School began to create their own works, expanding Chico da Silva’s visual language and contributing to a shared, imaginative universe. 

Throughout his time teaching at Pirambu, Chico da Silva continuously reinterpreted and evolved his compositions. Two works from disparate parts of his practice, 1966 and 1981, exemplify this sustained reinterpretation. Both of these works feature a large, central fish surrounded by smaller ones swimming around its open mouth. In the earlier of the two paintings, an eel swims into the fish’s mouth, while in the later version, Chico da Silva replaces it with a slim fin extending from the fish’s head, subtly shifting the composition and drawing in the smaller fish. Moreover, Chico da Silva’s use of color and pattern shifts from a moody, dark tone in the 1966 work to a vibrant, eclectic style in the 1981 piece. Fifteen years apart, these works highlight Chico da Silva’s endless ability to reinvent his fantastical world and the characters that inhabit it.

Chico da Silva’s Venice Biennale recognition brought both fame and scrutiny to the Pirambu School. European audiences struggled to make sense of the school’s collective approach. Meanwhile, Chico da Silva’s worsening alcoholism led to extended inpatient treatment. While hospitalized, Chico da Silva continued to paint and by the late 1970s, he had returned to the studio. An untitled painting from 1980, created in the last few years of Chico’s life, presents a notable departure from his earlier style by omitting the patterned gradient backgrounds that had defined much of his previous work. Here, a vibrant grid serves as the backdrop for two dueling dragons. Each square is composed of creatures and scenes amassed throughout his decades-long body of work. The snakes, trees, birds, and fish familiar from his 1960s pieces are reimagined in smaller forms, subtly obscured by the dramatic presence of the two dragons. Through this grid, Chico da Silva synthesizes the rich cosmology he had developed over many years. 

Chico da Silva’s deployment of Amazonian flora, fauna, and mythical iconography has had a lasting impact on international audiences. By presenting regional narratives on an international stage, Chico continues to play a key role in shaping the conversation around Latin American art, challenging conventional views and highlighting the relevance of art practices from outside traditional art centers in global movements.

CHICO DA SILVA (b. circa 1910, d. 1985) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the major, traveling retrospective Chico da Silva e o ateliê do Pirambu, presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023) and the Pinacoteca do Ceará (2023). Other solo exhibitions include Chico da Silva: Sacred Connection, Global Vision, Museu de Arte Sacra, São Paulo (2022); Chico da Silva – O Renascer 100 Anos, Espaço Cultural Correios, Fortaleza, Brazil (2010); Retrospectiva Chico da Silva: do delírio ao dilúvio, Espaço Cultural do Palácio da Abolição, Fortaleza, Brazil (1989). Group exhibitions include Uma história da arte brasileira, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2024–2025); Patrimônios, Memórias, Artes e Ofícios, Museu da Cultura Cearense, Fortaleza, Brazil (2024); The Sacred in the Amazon, Centro Cultural Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro (2023); Fantaisies brésiliennes, Musée International d’Art naïf Anatole Jakovsky, Nice, France (2016); Brasileiro, Brasileiros, Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2005); and 33rd Venice Biennale, Italy (1966). His work is in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro; and Fundacão Edson Queiroz, Fortaleza, Brazil.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY LOS ANGELES

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com  

Maia Cruz Palileo @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - "SATOR ROTAS" Exhibition

Maia Cruz Palileo

SATOR ROTAS

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

March 13 - April 26, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery presents SATOR ROTAS, its first exhibition of new work by MAIA CRUZ PALILEO. The exhibition occupies two spaces at the gallery’s Los Angeles location, and includes paintings, ceramic sculptures, and works on paper, shedding light on the multi-faceted nature of the artist’s project and their poetic engagement with the Filipino diaspora. 

Maia Palileo looks at their own Filipino heritage to better understand the routes by which their family arrived in the United States, but also as a way of entering into deeper communication with their own psychological and imaginative responses to the contemporary world. In each phase of Palileo’s work, they give shape to otherwise invisible forces that animate landscapes, drive historical change, and enrich—and complicate—human lives.

SATOR ROTAS features work Maia Palileo has made since their visit to the Philippines at the beginning of 2024, when they were able to have firsthand experiences of environments that, as someone born in the US, they had predominantly encountered through archival documentation and secondhand family accounts. A whole new set of sense impressions has therefore transformed the raw material available to them on both conscious and unconscious levels, lending increased physicality to a practice already notable for its attunement to the sculptural qualities of paint.

Such impressions are not limited, however, to the visual or even the tactile. They also include more intuitive perceptions that arose when Maia Palileo was able to connect myths, legends, and folklore shared by their family with the natural landscapes of the Philippines, resulting in an expanded, multi-dimensional sense of place. Several paintings are informed by time spent around Mount Banahaw, a slumbering volcano long considered a holy pilgrimage site in the Philippines. Maia Palileo renders images of dense forest scenes, root systems, and branching forms of trees, providing opportunities for intricate layering and the creation of suggestive, mystery-laden openings where the unruliness of life bursts forth, seemingly of its own accord.

The exhibition’s palindromic title draws attention to ideas of reflection and mirroring that appear throughout the works on view. In the horizontally oriented work, Like a Shadow That Cannot Walk (2025), Maia Palileo bisects the painting so that when viewed in one direction, orange and pink swaths appear as water atop which a boat is floating. When viewed in the other direction, however, the orange and pink become a sunset sky, with its boat and figures reflected in the dark waters beneath. Similarly, the painting Revir (2024), whose title is the word “river” spelled backwards, draws connections to sinister ideas of the “upside down world” as it relates to colonialism, prompting the viewer to interrogate what it is they’re seeing and to not be easily fooled by a first impression.

In Springtime Again (2024), a monumental diptych, Maia Palileo establishes an optical rhythm in which vertical striations create an effect akin to double vision. Like vintage stereo cards, Palileo creates two nearly identical spliced landscapes that, when presented side-by-side, allude to a third, imagined landscape. This work also exemplifies the ways in which collage, as a process and typology, influences Palileo’s approach to image-making. Here, a repeated pattern of dark, tree-like vertical impressions approximates the negative space that results when cutting out strips of paper. Springtime Again, like several other works on view, pulls imagery directly from postcards—objects that have historically represented, or misrepresented, faraway places from a colonially skewed perspective. Postcards and stereo cards have an inherent relationship to both image and experience, which makes them an ideal reference for Maia Palileo, whose work considers the motivations behind historic documentation and image-making, just as much as they consider the physical embodiments of one’s senses.

Understanding the invisible, like travel or other sensorial events, plays a large part in Palileo’s project, prompting questions around what experiences are invisible and what can be rendered visible. As a whole, the works in this exhibition offer a parallel understanding from both lived accounts—touching trees, walking down a street you’ve mostly seen in photos—and flattened images in an archive. It’s through this parallel approach that Maia Palileo creates paintings that appear mirrored, spliced, or otherwise bifurcated to approximate the experience of understanding a place and people through indirect methods, thereby gaining a closer understanding of their own family history and of themself.

MAIA CRUZ PALILEO (b. 1979, Chicago) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (2023); Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah (2022); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2021); and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (2019), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (2024); Seven Rooms and a Garden, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm (2023); Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2023); The Outwin: American Portrait Today, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2022); A Point Stretched: Views on Time, San José Museum of Art, California (2022); and Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water, Seattle Art Museum (2022), among many others. Their work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida; San José Museum of Art, California; TANG Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Fredriksen Collection, National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Chapman University, Orange, California. Palileo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY LOS ANGELES

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Ivan Morley @ David Kordansky Gallery, NYC - "Tragegedy, [sic]" Exhibition

Ivan Morley: Tragegedy, [sic]

David Kordansky Gallery, New York

March 6 - April 26, 2025

David Kordansky Gallery presents Tragegedy, [sic], a solo exhibition of new works by Ivan Morley. 

Ivan Morley has continued to build on a decades-old typology where form, color, and material layer to create paintings that are as much object as they are rendered image. Each piece is produced by painting an underlayer in watercolor and slowly building onto the canvas with thread, focusing on small, embroidery-ring-sized sections at a time, so that the completed work isn’t revealed to the artist until the end of the embroidery process. Looking therefore becomes secondary to the act of building or constructing an image on a micro scale.

Inspired by the title of a Bee Gees song, Tragegedy, [sic] alludes to the way a musician may elongate or alter the pronunciation of a word to better match the rhythm of a song, and so too can a painter modify an image to better meet the needs of a composition. In this sense, painting, or the creation of a visual image, is flexible in the way a written narrative or other methods of storytelling can’t be. Language and narrative are consistent elements in Morley’s work, whether through the inclusion of letter-like forms such as those present in Tehachepi, [sic] (2024), or by grouping the artworks with serialized titles. Ivan Morley continues to develop what he calls a “narrative baggage,” where each work is building onto the last and therefore, the meaning behind each painting gets multiplied over time.

While Ivan Morley has a deep understanding of painting as a discipline, he’s able to engage in more rigorous and physical production methods that exist outside of two-dimensional space. By prioritizing seemingly “lower” materials such as thread and reverse glass painting, his paintings enter into conversation with more sculptural and conceptual practices, bridging a gap between the constructed and the depicted.

Even in his more traditional compositions, experimentation remains at the core of Morley’s project. Tragegedy, [sic] (2024), from which the exhibition gets its name, is featured alongside several studies created by Morley. Each of the four studies was produced using the same elaborate methods as Morley’s other artworks, prompting questions about what constitutes an artwork and how to confront the hierarchy that may exist between things that would be considered studies versus completed paintings. For Morley’s practice in particular, the development and presentation of an image over time is crucial to his own understanding of the meaning behind a work.

Some of Morley’s most radical works in this exhibition are also his most conventional. Tehachepi, [sic], A True Tale (2024), for example, depicts two distinguishable figures situated amongst the rippled marks and textured swaths of color for which Morley has become known. The work also incorporates x’s, arrows, and other remnant notes the artist has left for himself throughout the production process. Morley opts to incorporate these notes into the artwork because of the additive nature of embroidery, where once thread is added, it can’t easily be edited or removed. Even in more abstract versions from the same series, like Tehachepi, [sic], (After Cappiello) (2024), Morley utilizes the same scale and vertical orientation commonly associated with portraiture to not only connect this work to others in the series, but also to a larger art historical lineage of portraiture. Throughout the exhibition, Morley’s paintings highlight how an image can hold a story or multiple histories on a single plane, and how those histories are connected to the history of painting as a whole. Like language, the paintings on view are strung together in such a way that it requires multiple works, created over many years, to provide the necessary context.

IVAN MORLEY (b. 1966, Burbank, California) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2021 and 2016) and Kimmerich Galerie, Berlin (2014). Group exhibitions include Abstract America Today, Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); Painting Expanded, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2011); The Artist’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); DAS GESPINST, Die Sammlung Schürmann zu Besuch im Museum Abteiberg, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2009); Imagination Becomes Reality, Part IV: Borrowed Images, Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2006); and Painting in Tongues, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2006). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and University Museum of Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2020, the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Morley was published by David Kordansky Gallery and Bortolami Gallery. Morley lives and works in Los Angeles and Big Sur, California.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY NEW YORK

520 W. 20th St., New York, NY 10011

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Jason Fox @ David Kordansky Gallery, NYC - Old Wrld

Jason Fox: Old Wrld

David Kordansky Gallery, New York

March 10 – April 22, 2023

David Kordansky Gallery presents Old Wrld, an exhibition of new paintings by JASON FOX. 

Since his paintings first appeared in New York galleries in the 1990s, Jason Fox has consistently worked against the grain of prevailing stylistic modes and aesthetic pieties. The resulting works are not contrarian for the sake of being so but avail themselves of disparate painterly strategies to constellate pictures of life’s inside-out, ever-surprising tendency to conflate the personal with the collective and the transcendent with the mundane. Here, in a group of recent paintings that exemplify his range, humor, and invigorating openness, Fox develops new motifs and revisits themes and characters in new, intensive ways.

Jason Fox’s recent “list” paintings, for example, find him incorporating informal text, doodle-like images, and improvisatory brushwork to create complex, intercut visual layers. Each inch of these large works is filled with unexpected turns and a richness of detail that unifies the varied nature of their content. Born equally from the artist’s everyday life and his deep engagement with conundrums set out by modernist painters as disparate as Agnes Martin and Edvard Munch, the paintings ultimately tell broader stories about a world stuck perennially in transition—one in which old forms of knowledge crumble, yet new ones can never emerge.

The recognizable figures that show up in other paintings in the show—Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell—have a life of their own that goes beyond both their status as famous personalities and their function as containers for Jason Fox’s formal inventiveness. In Can You Hear Me (2022), the artist overlays Marley’s visage with a skull wearing a porkpie hat, thereby paying homage to recent death-infused works by Jasper Johns and channeling their frank, invigorating attitude toward mortality. The being who stares through the skeleton’s eyes seems to do so from a place in the immediate foreground—the place, in other words, where the viewer’s eyes meet the painting and press it for information about its genesis, reasons for being, and aesthetic intentions. Disarmingly straightforward, Jason Fox’s images neither wholly conceal nor wholly reveal such information, but rather demonstrate how familiar conditions often give rise to deeply unfamiliar experiences.

A painting of a bus stop, with its now-iconic Calvin Klein advertisement featuring Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg, is another case in point. Fox renders the advertisement’s photograph in washy liquid greys and rough pencil lines, lending it an organic informality. Though the naked legs extending out from the bus stop and ending in Santa Claus boots introduce a blatantly absurdist element, they also provide clues about the off-handed rigor that suffuses the picture with a Matissean sense of order in which color supplies both structure and emotional charge. The painting is a study in modulated textures and contrasting moods; its nervy compositional logic brings together interlocking shapes and perspectival dissonances, weaving depth from apparent flatness and repeatedly focusing attention on the movement of pigments across the support.

Throughout Old Wrld, Jason Fox utilizes improvisatory approaches as well as more methodical ones. But even in works where the materiality of painting is on full display—as in a vibrant canvas whose radiant sunset threatens to visually obliterate the patterned geometry of a chain link fence, which otherwise defines the scene—an increasingly classical clarity of vision carries the day. If Fox’s vision is trained on the contemporary world’s penchant for fabricating ever more elaborate ways of bringing about its own doom, it is also attuned to the generative properties of imaginative freedom. He locates gems in the mixed ashes of once-dominant art historical movements and pop-cultural phenomena, relying upon his own interests and passions, however idiosyncratic, to guide him to subjects that subsequently take on new lives of their own. Faith and weariness meld into a pervasive curiosity that propels the artist, doggedly devoted to his project but somehow free of attachments, returning to existing motifs in some instances and authoring entirely new ones in others. Old Wrld represents a concentrated distillation of this curiosity. But it also shows Fox at his most expansive, looking beyond the precipice of painting—and of art—into voids that threaten to extinguish life and voids that supply life with meaning.

Jason Fox has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at CANADA (2021); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2018). Recent group exhibitions include The Drawing Centre Show, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2022); Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2020); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2019); and Animal Farm, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017). His work is in the collection of the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont. Jason Fox lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

520 W. 20th Street, New York, NY

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

________________

Will Boone @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Hell is Wet

Will Boone: Hell is Wet 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 

March 18 – April 22, 2023 

David Kordansky Gallery presents Hell is Wet, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Will Boone. In this exhibition, Boone showcases his recent experimentations on canvas with enamel, bar top resin, and auto body paint—known as “candy paint” in Houston—and considers his personal connection to place and storytelling through the accumulation of found objects. 

Generating content from an unlikely array of sources, Will Boone makes works with graphic power matched by their palpable physicality. His technical processes are informed by vernacular languages of numerous American subcultures, from the DIY ethos of punk to the precision of industrial manufacturing, typically reflective of the area in which the artist lives. In Hell is Wet, Boone makes visible the localized nuances associated with the American South and Southwest.

The paintings in this exhibition incorporate found relics that chart Will Boone’s physical and experiential trajectory. A lucky rabbit’s foot, a black Stetson hat, and a splayed Santa Claus suit appear embedded and crystalized in vibrant red and yellow canvases, forming a visual biography of the artist’s interactions, travel, and residences over the past five years. Since his return to Texas in 2020, Will Boone has shifted his focus to chronicle Gulf Coast ephemera. His practice of collecting and inserting physical objects into the canvas foregrounds the connection of the painting to a specific place and emphasizes the relationship painting has to drawing and sculpture.

Over the last decade, Will Boone has lived in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Canyon Lake, and Houston, between which lies an open landscape of discarded materials. When transitioning to a new place, Boone typically edits out the cumbersome items he’s accumulated, saving space for the unusual souvenirs he’s collected that memorialize past events in the artist’s life. These souvenirs find their way into Boone’s new work, forming a material map of his past and distilling life into a series of objects. The works are akin to curio cabinets typically found in homes, where vital family heirlooms and kitschy artifacts are neatly arranged on display shelves, or like religious reliquaries or fereters that contain holy remnants such as the clothing and bodily fragments of saints.

For Will Boone, objects act as proof of life and myth, often spinning a counternarrative tied to the specific region in both the objects’ materiality and the geographic context in which they were found. Literary and music sources also texture Boone’s process. Drawing inspiration from Texan songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt and Billy Joe Shaver, and authors like Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor, Boone’s approach to storytelling develops not just by the collecting of things but also through the narrative tropes associated with each region. The open highway explored across generations of country and western singers and the Southern grotesque of Crews’s characters are foundational references for the preliminary research Boone embarks upon to make his work. In his visual storytelling, Texas is a swampy, damp, and humid environment, and the items sourced from this wet landscape are warped and discarded, revealing a gothic darkness evocative of the rural places he frequents. In Wet Weather Creek (2023), a lucky rabbit’s foot keychain found in a nearby dry limestone creek bed forms a lump at the center of the composition. Resin and paint physically pull marks further into the depths of the accumulating surface, creating voids that can subsequently be loaded with more material.

While he begins with the traditional painter’s support of stretched canvas, Boone quickly departs from the standard painterly procedure, relying instead on an instinctual feel for his materials. The embedded objects nested within the bar top resin disrupt the standard flatness of the picture plane, creating a slightly protruding silhouette of each form and introducing a texture that will continue to inform the painting as it evolves. Industrial-grade bar resin is used not simply as a sealant but also as another type of paint. The material itself calls to mind the range of bars and roadhouses that populate the Lone Star State, which are fundamental touchstones to its mythology and folklore.

The artworks on view emerge in both two- and three-dimensional terms, creating a finished relief that shows Boone pushing the materiality and sculptural possibilities of painting in equal measure. The recurring Saturn yellow and candy apple red paint colors, layered with viscous bar top resin, form an indestructible amber-like vessel that connects these paintings both to car culture in Houston and more art historical references such as Donald Judd’s Cadmium Red works, which Boone likens to the color of driving at night. In Hell is Wet, Boone displays these otherwise unassuming and unexpected objects in a manner that simultaneously distorts them and turns them into objects of wonder.

Will Boone (b. 1982, Houston) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Karma, New York (2022); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); and Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2014). A major installation was featured in Desert X 2017, Coachella Valley, California (2017). Other group shows include Zombies: Pay attention!, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019); White Trash, Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York (2017); Prototypology, Gagosian, Rome (2016); Fétiche, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2016); In Different Ways, Almine Rech, London (2016); and Love For Three Oranges, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2015). Boone lives and works in Houston and Comal County, Texas.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

______________

Richard Tuttle @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Calder/Tuttle:Tentative

Richard Tuttle 

Calder/Tuttle:Tentative 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 

January 21 – February 25, 2023 

David Kordansky Gallery presents Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, an exhibition featuring work by RICHARD TUTTLE inspired by the seminal American artist, Alexander Calder. Concurrently, Pace Gallery, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, presents an exhibition of Alexander Calder works from 1939 selected and installed by Richard Tuttle. 

Calder/Tuttle:Tentative comprises several parts. At David Kordansky Gallery, Richard Tuttle presents a series of wall-based sculptures entitled Black Light and a group of works entitled Calder Corrected. Informed by an ongoing engagement with Calder’s work, aesthetic philosophy, and observational temperament, both series find Tuttle exploring a range of phenomena that are among the fundamental features of visual art: the visual and physical experience of color, the perception of geometry and mass, and the associative communications between abstract and natural forms. The works are not so much meditations on Calder as they are responses to—and from—the contexts in which Calder’s project emerged. In this sense, Richard Tuttle employs his own artistic vocabulary to refresh the contemporary take on Calder’s, shedding clarifying light not only on the abiding presence of modernist abstraction in art today, but on timeless facets of art’s presence in human lives.

This approach also guides Richard Tuttle’s curatorial process at Pace, where he has installed works by Calder in an attempt to foreground the intentions with and conditions under which they were made. While Tuttle has taken formal and historical considerations into account—focusing, for instance, on works made on the brink of World War II and reflecting on aesthetic and philosophical crosscurrents in Europe and the United States—he also creates space for foundational concepts of verticality, horizontality, light, and shadow to appear with bracing clarity. There are cases in which this process disrupts long-held ideas about why Calder’s work has made such an impact on viewers, and especially other artists, over the decades.

In the Black Light works, Richard Tuttle transposes these concerns into multivalent constructions that reveal craft and concept to be inseparable, if distinct, modes of understanding how art connects to its viewers and the world. The exhibition’s title serves as a waypost: if every aesthetic proposition or material experiment puts into motion a cascading series of effects and counter-effects, the experience of an artwork is always a tentative affair. Richard Tuttle’s objects address this condition by posing questions about how and where color appears, and reveling in its propensity for simultaneously containing, occupying, and portraying space. The Black Light works constitute a continuation of Tuttle’s reflections on the possibilities inherent in beams and beam-like forms, which found recent expression in a series of large- and small-scale sculptures the artist produced in 2022. However, they also provide a forum in which the artist can directly address the choreography of visible and invisible elements which provides a through-line in Calder’s project. In both cases, they find Richard Tuttle reframing concerns, particularly about art’s paradoxical relationship to dematerialization, which have preoccupied him for decades. Many of the works’ compositional details, including the pencil-drawn letters, numbers, and arrows that guided their making, as well as their varied brushwork, highlight the impossibility of separating surfaces from interiors. These two-dimensional elements carry palpable weight, leaving room for the planar paper elements that define their silhouettes to function as a kind of three-dimensional drawing.

The Calder Corrected drawings, meanwhile, are also sites where three-dimensional effects occur in what are ordinarily considered two-dimensional places. The vertical line that bisects each work, and that results when Tuttle removes facing pages from a sketchbook, is both a distinct physical presence and a felt void where lines, shapes, and colors seem to momentarily hide from view. In their gaps, the drawings harbor possibilities, prompts for the imagination to invent alternate readings even as it concedes the limitations of the physical world. Here too, Tuttle brings a variety of materials together, showing how ideas translate into facts—and vice versa—and how colors and shapes adhere to—and resist—the intentions according to which they are manipulated. For all of these reasons, and like the curatorial orientation Tuttle brings to rethinking Calder’s legacy more broadly, the works on view in this exhibition place emphasis on the processes by which artistic potentials become actualized. In so doing, they offer precise, and therefore tentative, representations of phenomena like gravity, language, emotion, and change that are as pervasive as they are abstract.

In 2022, Bard Graduate Center presented What Is the Object?, an exhibition co-curated by Richard Tuttle and Peter N. Miller from Tuttle’s collection of objects, which was presented alongside a series of never-before-exhibited artworks by the artist. Since the 1970s, Tuttle has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums throughout the world, including M WOODS, Beijing (2019); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2018); Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium (2017); Museo de Arte de Lima (2016); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); and Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern, London (2014). In 2005–2007, a retrospective exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art traveled to five additional institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work is included in over sixty permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Richard Tuttle lives and works in New York and Abiquiú, New Mexico.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

_______________

Jennifer Guidi @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - In the Heart of the Sun

Jennifer Guidi: In the Heart of the Sun

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

November 5 – December 17, 2022

David Kordansky Gallery presents In the Heart of the Sun, an exhibition of new work by JENNIFER GUIDI at its Los Angeles gallery. The show features paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. 

Jennifer Guidi brings meditative vision, methodical practice, and a nuanced perceptual understanding of light, color, and landscape to works that are as immersive as they are finely detailed. Radiating networks of small marks, saturated hues, and tactile surfaces, generated through Guidi’s use of sand, have become characteristic components of a vocabulary in which an expansive sense of scale exists in large and small works alike. In the Heart of the Sun features a group of painted bronze sculptures installed in a rock-garden-like setting, new Universe Mandala and Sand Mandala paintings, and focused works on paper in which experiments with color and pattern reveal an endlessly shifting array of moods and inner vistas. Throughout the exhibition, Guidi shows how each individual mark, gesture, composition, and artwork—indeed, each observable phenomenon in the natural world—is part of an encompassing totality that is always in the process of creating itself anew.

Jennifer Guidi’s approach is both methodical and fluid. Her works arise from a rigorous attention to process even as she makes space for emotion and intuition to suffuse each aspect of their making. The South gallery is dedicated to new sculptures, for instance, that begin as actual rocks and crystals before undergoing several stages of casting, enlargement, and painting. The early stages of their development require heightened precision as naturally occurring mineral forms are subjected to industrial transformation. Guidi then engages in an open-ended state of experimentation, applying colors and optical patterns that alter the way their bronze surfaces receive and reflect light, and revisits modes of feeling and non-linear observation that guided her to choose these particular forms in the first place. The installation of the finished works in a large rectangular garden of dark pebbles allows viewers to encounter them with a sense of spaciousness, and to reflect on ways in which particles—whether grains of sand, dots of paint, or actual pebbles—come together to constitute unified visual fields.

Each of the Universe Mandala paintings on view in the North gallery also foreground relationships between the whole and its parts. Characterized by notable painterliness and a balance between order and organic freedom, these works are the results of several additions Jennifer Guidi has made to her technical repertoire. They are made with the canvas hanging on the wall, rather than on the floor, using handheld brushes as opposed to the stick-mounted ones she sometimes employs. Sand frequently plays an important textural role in the ground that supports subsequent gestures, though in the new Universe Mandalas, Jennifer Guidi cultivates a lightness of touch that evokes a broadened array of light- and color-based effects, as well as an associated range of other naturally occurring phenomena, like the movement of air through plants and flowers, or the way the sun reflects off rippling water at different times of day.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, Jennifer Guidi is interested not only in the centrality of light in painting, but also in exploring how the center of any given experience can be defined. If each sculpture, painting, and work on paper in the show represents its own light-emitting center, so, too, each mark or each shift in hue can be seen as a center around which every other element can be said to orbit. The works on paper in particular find Guidi focusing on intimate compositions that constitute both discrete worlds and units of an expansive, overarching solar system of images. Here too, marks arranged in mandala-like patterns orient the gaze while complex combinations of colors and surprising foreground-background relationships resist easy categorization. As viewers move from one work to the next, the familiar and the new appear to repeatedly exchange places.

This effect can be found throughout In the Heart of the Sun, which functions in many ways as a single immersive statement. Major new Sand Mandala paintings on view, however, serve as reminders that individual works are themselves immersive experiences in which perception of the world can be transformed. In one large-scale work, over six feet tall and twelve feet wide, Guidi has placed an encompassing white rectangle—one that echoes the format of the black rock garden in the adjacent gallery—atop a prismatic field of color whose rainbow-like luminosity becomes a vivid frame. Unlike the majority of her previous mandala works, in which the mandala’s center can be found to the upper left of center, here the geometrical center of the canvas is the point from which the indented marks radiate. Metaphorical possibilities abound as light is shown to be the heart of color, and color emerges as a life-giving symbol for feeling, imagination, and change.

Jennifer Guidi has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2022); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy (2017); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include A Possible Horizon, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2020); One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Generations: Female Artists in Dialogue, Part I, Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2018); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2016) and Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015); and The Afghan Carpet Project, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015). Her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Guggenheim Museum, New York, among other institutions. Jennifer Guidi’s book 11:11, documenting the artist’s 2019 solo presentation at FIAC (Foire Internationale d’art Contemporain), was published in 2020 by David Kordansky Gallery. Jennifer Guidi lives and works in Los Angeles.

DAVID KORDANSKI GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

_____________

Tobias Pils @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Balancing & Coupling - Online exhibition

Tobias Pils: Balancing & Coupling

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Through February 12, 2021

David Kordansky Gallery presents Tobias Pils: Balancing and Coupling, an online solo exhibition featuring two new paintings by the Vienna-based artist.

Tobias Pils produces paintings that are bracingly contemporary. The two paintings featured in this in-depth look at Tobias Pils’ work—Balancing and Coupling 1—speak in both metaphoric as well as concrete terms to the fullest range of issues animating the medium. This includes the irresolvable tensions between figuration and abstraction and the ongoing dilemmas about where and how painting functions on individual and collective levels. But the two works also focus attention on the contemporary moment in even more immediate ways, since they arise from a heightened sense of how a painting emerges in real time, brushstroke by brushstroke, thought by thought, and feeling by feeling. The paintings exemplify Tobias Pils’ approach to each aspect of his process as an opportunity for inquiry. They demonstrate, for instance, how Tobias Pils, through confining himself to a grisaille palette, is able to evoke subtleties that get to the core of what it means to paint with color. Balancing, with its dark background and looming lunar presence, is a "night" painting while Coupling 1 may be considered a "daytime" one with its frank depiction of bodies engaged in acts of communion that could be physical, spiritual, or ritual. Full of hybrid beings and allegorical landscapes, as well as passages of dissonant abstraction and subtle brushwork, Tobias Pils’ new work evokes the paradoxes that characterize life, consciousness, and art as vital, unpredictable phenomena.

David Kordansky Gallery will show a solo presentation of new works by Pils at Frieze New York, May 5 – 9, 2021.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

____________________________

Betty Woodman @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Shadows and Silhouettes

Betty Woodman: Shadows and Silhouettes
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
June 27 – August 24, 2019

David Kordansky Gallery presents Shadows and Silhouettes, an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by BETTY WOODMAN (1930-2018). The artist’s first solo show in a gallery since her death, the exhibition features works made between 2008 and 2016, and focuses on thematic and formal issues––creative use of negative space, two- and three-dimensional representations of vessels, the hybridization of vessel and human figurative forms––that were central to her project throughout her career.

Over the course of a career that spanned than 50 years, Betty Woodman revolutionized the use of clay and glazes in contemporary art. The sheer variety of her work, the range of her references, and the vitality and curiosity that appear throughout her oeuvre all help posit her as one of the most ambitious and singular American artists of her time, especially given the oft-marginalized status of her primary medium. Her synthesis of modernist syntax with a truly global array of cues from art, architecture, and design led to objects that are, in the words of critic Peter Schjeldahl, "beyond original, all the way to sui generis."

Shadows and Silhouettes features 12 works Betty Woodman made over the last decade of her life, when she was executing some of her most radical experiments. The exhibition juxtaposes varied works in which painted and sculpted forms are repeated and reversed, and in which outlines of objects carve out negative spaces that re-appear as pictures either on canvases or glazed onto the objects themselves. They range from classic pedestal-based sculptures like the diptych His and Hers Vases: Life Drawing (2008)––whose standing and reclining female nudes are painted with black and white glazes on vertically- and horizontally-oriented vases––to the Cubist complexity of Aztec Vase & Carpet: Mariana (2015), whose canvas "base" and dynamic, four-winged vessel provide surfaces for a continuously painted and glazed composition of alternating dark and light squares, among other motifs.

For Betty Woodman, pictorial and sculptural versions of space were in constant conversation with one another. These conversations could be harmonious, dissonant, humorous, or soaring and poetic, depending on their context. The Chapel, a large painting with ceramic relief elements from 2011, is in the latter mode: flat ceramic elements, glazed a brilliant white, are arranged on the wall so that they resemble tall, multipart vases. The canvas on which they hang has been painted with slashing white brushstrokes against a black background. This optically dynamic play of two-dimensional volumes is accentuated by the dramatic three-dimensional composition defining the work's upper third, where a vessel with bright red glazing sits on a white shelf and another group of relief objects hover over the illusionistic, painted rendition of a room characterized with an intense red floor and yellow walls.

Works like these reflect the increasingly daring ways that Betty Woodman employed architectural imagery, harnessing both its perspectival richness and emotional resonances. Summer Tea Party (2015-16) is another example of this thrust in her work. An interior scene suffused with joyful light––and lightness of spirit––is divided into two main sections. A painting of a provocatively sloped table covered with a blue gingham cloth occupies most of the lower half of the canvas; affixed to it are ceramic representations of plates, pitchers, and a basket of fruit. Whimsy is met with mystery, however, in the form of five unglazed ceramic forms installed in a balustrade-like row over a painted window; the negative spaces between them take the shape of vessels. Such moves break with the already elastic visual logic Betty Woodman establishes with recognizable images and ceramic "pictures" of real-world objects, suggesting ghostly presences that flirt with pure abstraction.

In other cases, however, it is the presence of the figure that leaps out of Betty Woodman’s sculptures and paintings. As her project began to move beyond the constraints of functional ceramics in the 1970s, she began to explore––and explode––archetypal associations between the vessel and the human body. She envisioned her objects, as well as the pictures of vases she painted on and around them, as players in theatrical scenes. Each work became a domestic drama (or comedy) whose narrative is told in colors, shapes, textures, and patterns. Late in her career such narratives took on uncanny dimensions, especially in the paintings, with the silhouettes of three-dimensional vessels repeated on canvases behind them. In Tuesday Afternoon (2016) this effect takes center stage. A white-glazed vessel stands on the floor, its arms arranged like those of a posing model; on the canvas, a brushy, semi-transparent image of a similar object hovers in space, as if the vessel had dreamed itself into a sun-filled parallel reality.

Recent solo exhibitions of Betty Woodman's work have been presented at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (2018); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2015); Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2011); American Academy in Rome (2010); Palazzo Pitti, Giardino di Boboli, Florence (2009); Denver Art Museum (2006); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2006). Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions include Lessons in Promiscuity: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (forthcoming, 2019); Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (forthcoming, 2019); Pattern, Decoration and Crime, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2019); In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (2018); the Liverpool Biennial (2016); Playing House, Brooklyn Museum (2012); and Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011). Her work is featured in over fifty public collections worldwide, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019
www.davidkordanskygallery.com

John Armleder @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash

John Armleder: Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
June 27 – August 24, 2019

David Kordansky Gallery presents Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash, a solo exhibition of new work by John Armleder. Featuring paintings of several different kinds, as well as wall-mounted mirror objects and installation-based elements, the show highlights the artist’s use of painting––and the tropes associated with it––as a playfully experimental vehicle for posing questions, provocations, and aesthetic quandaries. 

John Armleder consistently rewires presumptions about what art can be in the wake of the modernist and postmodernist revolutions of the last century. His early association with the Fluxus movement has provided the springboard for an ever-evolving array of projects and conceptual approaches––he has produced performances, music, sculptures, and installations as well as paintings––each of which leaves room for the operation of chance and the eruption of humor and pathos alike. These qualities posit John Armleder as one of the most representative artists of his generation, and as a key figure in the story of Swiss art.

John Armleder’s second solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery is organized around a central motif, a stylized splash of paint that is found in several different kinds of works, rendered in several different materials. Splashes and puddles have been defining characteristics of many of the paintings the artist has made over the last few years, so that this sharp-edged, graphic iteration alludes to––and symbolizes––a significant portion of his recent work, one in which he detaches the idea of the action-based splatter from the movement of the hand, undermining preconceptions about authenticity and the subjectivity of the heroic individual artist.

Even when it comes to the paintings with “actual” splatters and pours––several of which are included in this show––he proceeds less with specific compositional ideas in mind than with a curiosity about the interactions between different materials. In his Puddle Paintings, for instance, he often combines large quantities of paints made from contraindicated mediums that react in unpredictable ways, and throws glitter, toys, and other bric-a-brac into the still-wet puddles that accumulate. As they dry, visual and sculptural incidents emerge out of what seems like the materials’ own volition, exceeding the artist’s intention and placing him, like any other viewer, in a position where he can stand back and observe formal relationships between textures and colors.

John Armleder’s Pour Paintings, meanwhile, focus attention on the movement of paint across the canvas as it is thrown. In each he privileges sweeping, calligraphic arcs (complete with the drips that fall from them), channeling the energies of abstract expressionism and action painting. And yet, as is often true of his work, these paintings somehow replace the solemnity of their modernist predecessors with a light-hearted appreciation for the ingenious nature and innate visual interest of their materials, not to mention the very act of creating and looking at energetic splashes of color. In Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash he includes examples of the Pour Paintings that have also been emblazoned with a stenciled splatter. Symbol overlays gesture, and two seemingly competing ways of including a splatter in an artwork exist side-by-side, as if prodding one another into states of mutual admiration––and skepticism.

The splatter threatens to break entirely free of its relationship to painted abstraction in a series of new wall-based mirror sculptures, each of which shares the same silhouette. Fabricated in mirrored glass in a variety of colors and in two sizes, these objects exemplify John Armleder’s propensity for engaging viewer participation in implied and literal ways, as well as his tendency to activate the spaces in which his artworks appear. The mirrors not only reflect the other artworks in the show and the bodies of the viewers before them; they allow for perspectives in which the exhibition as a whole appears inside the shape of a splatter, so that this caricature of a specific kind of painting also becomes an optical container for other kinds of artmaking strategies.

These approaches include two paintings, each titled Suit, in which the splatter has simply been screened onto a canvas, where it stands on its own like an emblem or aesthetic coat of arms. These works are reminders that John Armleder’s art is as straightforward as it is complex, and that what you see really is often what you get. Embedded in this notion, of course, are any number of philosophical, visual, biological, and language-based subtleties. Over and over again throughout the course of his multi-staged and varied career, he has demonstrated how such openness sheds light not only on foundational principles of art itself, but on the ways in which people interact with the artifacts of the physical world.

This summer, John Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva) is the subject of two museum solo exhibitions, at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (opened June 7) and the Aspen Art Museum (opened July 4) . He has also been the subject of solo shows at institutions that include MUSEION, Bolzano, Italy (2018); Museo MADRE, Naples, Italy (2018); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2017); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014); Fernand Léger National Museum, Biot, France (2014); Dairy Art Centre, London (2013); Swiss Institute, New York (2012); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2011); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2010); Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2006); Tate Liverpool, England (2006); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2006); among many others. Recent group exhibitions include A Time Capsule Continued, Parkett Exhibition Space, Zurich (2019); Abstraction: Aspects of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Art, Osaka (2019); THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Brand New. Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2018); Sanguin. Luc Tuymans on Baroque, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Inaugural exhibition: The Bunker, The Bunker, West Palm Beach (2017); The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2017); and L'Oeil du collectionneur. Neuf collections particulières strasbourgeoises, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2017). He lives and works in Geneva.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019
www.davidkordanskygallery.com

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

Sam Gilliam

Starting: Works on Paper 1967 - 1970

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

March 16 - April 27, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Nicolau Vergueiro, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - A Thousand Openings

Nicolau Vergueiro: A Thousand Openings
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
February 11 — March 18, 2006

David Kordansky Gallery presents A Thousand Openings, Nicolau Vergueiro's second solo exhibition of new, vibrant sculptures and wall works.

Nicolau NiVergueiro's new tapestries and sculptures are reminiscent of ceremonial blankets and totems. Such objects, originating from a mundane source, gain a divine function and accumulate a force beyond themselves. He incorporates elements of the ritualistic and adds Pan-African religious and voodoo flourishes. Bones and voodoo beads commingle with vinyl, nylon and fabric. 

Each piece has an artisan touch; they are hand-made and sewn using a range of found and altered materials from Brazil and Los Angeles. Colorful fabrics are flocked, silk-screened and quilted and combined with plastic, resin, wood and glass pieces. Mirrored boxes look like multi-faceted diamonds and refract light suggesting endless possibilities and multiple openings. Nicolau Vergueiro creates lush opulence from simple scraps of material. This neo-folkloric excess of piecemeal materials evokes a reversal; an alternate sense of post-colonial decadence. Instead of a trickle-down effect, from the waste come the riches. 

Nicolau Vergueiro (b. 1977) lives and works in Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, Brazil. His work was in Follow Me: A Fantasy, curated by Malik Gaines, Arena 1, Los Angeles, CA. He also was a part of New Balance Frontier, curated by Aimee Chang, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN. Nicolau Vergueiro has shown at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York, NY, and John Connelly Presents, New York, NY. He will exhibit at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo, Japan during the summer of 2006. 

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
510 Bernard Street, Los Angeles CA. 90012
www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Updated 26.06.2019