Ian Mwesiga @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - "Ian Mwesiga: Beyond the Edge of the World" Exhibition

Ian Mwesiga 

Beyond the Edge of the World 

FLAG Art Foundation, New York 

Through May 4, 2024 

The FLAG Art Foundation presents Ian Mwesiga: Beyond the Edge of the World, the Ugandan artist’s debut institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Comprised of eleven oil paintings created between 2021 and 2023, Ian Mwesiga’s recent works embrace the mystery, fantasy, and possibility of the unknown.

Ian Mwesiga’s canvases begin with the figure—fictional characters formed from the artist’s imagination—around which he constructs surreal environments, pairing seemingly familiar landscapes with quietly bizarre atmospheres. This contrast is achieved through Ian Mwesiga’s manipulation of the proportion and setting of quotidian objects. In Tales of the Moonlight Boy, 2023, a bare-chested man reclines on a crinkly, pink satin sheet draped over an ornate balustrade, while a striking, orange bird perches atop a globe-sized passion fruit; in Lady in a Blue Dress at a Bus Stop, 2023, a woman in a brightly patterned dress waits in anticipation on a desolate sidewalk while a figure holding an umbrella dissolves into a grisaille fog. 

Within the composition, Ian Mwesiga’s figures appear as if they are situated at the intersection of a parallel dimension that, whether solitary or coupled, suggest isolation. His world consists of ephemeral reflections, refractions, and shadows; like symbols in a dream, imagery recurs throughout the exhibition. In these sequences, order is expressed through tiles and bricks and abstraction is realized through overgrowth and mist—the natural world brought into high contrast. Here, seemingly disparate elements like falling leaves, partially-eaten apples, and black-headed gonolek birds occupy a familiar universe where seasonal, temporal, and lunar cycles are suspended.

A striking spectrum of blue unites the works in Beyond the Edge of the World, gracing glistening pools, abandoned stairwells, and Pepsi billboards with brilliant hues. Ian Mwesiga welcomes the color’s inherent dichotomies, capable of underscoring a sense of calm or melancholy. With blue, he melds the sky, land, and sea, creating a mirroring effect that connects unfathomably vast nature with the landscape in and around Kampala—interwoven with visions from his personal life, experiences, and travels. 

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. As the author describes and the artist depicts, “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.” 

A commissioned text by Dr. Darla Migan, art critic, philosopher, and professor at The New School, New York, NY, accompanies Ian Mwesiga’s exhibition.

IAN MWESIGA (b. 1988) is a painter living and working in Kampala, Uganda. Mwesiga graduated with a BA in Industrial Fine Art & Design from Makerere University, Kampala, in 2014. Solo exhibitions include Theater of Dreams, Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago, IL (2022), and Who am I?, AKA Gallery, Kampala (2014). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Un Abrazo, Mariane Ibraham, Mexico City, Mexico (2023), La Vie en Rose, Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago, IL (2022), J’ai Deux Amours..., Mariane Ibrahim, Paris, France (2021); African Culture and Design Festival (ACDF) Lagos, Nigeria (2017); Young Guns, Circle Art Agency, Nairobi, Kenya (2017); East African Modern and Contemporary Art Auction, Circle Arts Agency, Nairobi, Kenya (2016); among others. Ian Mwesiga’s work has been featured in Art Basel, Expo Chicago, The Armory Show, and Paris+ Art Basel. Ian Mwesiga participated in Asiko Art School residency, Lagos, Nigeria, in 2015.

FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.flagartfoundation.org

Ian Mwesiga @ FLAG, NYC - February 23 - May 4, 2024

Graham Little @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Sixteen gouache and colored-pencil artworks created between 2000 and 2023

Graham Little 

FLAG Art Foundation, New York 

Through May 4, 2024 

The FLAG Art Foundation presents an exhibition of works on paper by GRAHAM LITTLE, marking the Scottish artist’s debut institutional solo presentation in the United States. Created between 2000 and 2023, these sixteen gouache and colored-pencil works are meticulous portals into Graham Little’s complex and mysterious universe. 

Graham Little begins each composition by scouring artist monographs and stacks of weathered spreads in fashion magazines from the 1970s and 1980s. With a reverence for reference, his scenes infuse late-twentieth century advertising aesthetics with lush art-historical motifs, such as in Untitled (Bedroom), 2021, in which decorative flourishes—reminiscent of the late British designer Terence Conran—furnish a mantle beneath a couple depicted in the stiffened style of Etruscan funerary art. Graham Little’s palette radiates warmth, and yet, his exacting handiwork and needlelike ornamentations are also coolly imperceptible, pristine, and smooth. In Graham Little’s world not a hair is out of place; each refined figure is a custodian of the quietly immaculate interiors and exteriors they inhabit.

Layering the aesthetics and ideals of Western advertising culture and art history, Graham Little’s out-of-time characters are positioned with an air of remove. Born out of commercial photography, the men and women inhabiting these uncanny scenes are meant to be looked at and are conscious of it—participants in their own objectification. In Untitled (Ballroom), 2013, a young woman in a backless midnight-blue gown, matching opera gloves, and architectural gold jewelry feigns surprise as if someone has just walked in the room; her attentive gaze causes the viewer to contemplate their own. In offering idealized portrayals of a privileged lifestyle, the artist hints at the fragility of yearning for luxury when none is for sale.   

The intimate scale of Graham Little’s work further reinforces its conceptual foundations; as if peering through the window of a miniature model, viewers are encouraged to physically lean in and absorb the nuance of each detail. Despite their physicality, the ambiguous contexts of his subjects inspire endless curiosity: What is the man in the wine-colored robe and slippers reading while he sips his morning coffee? Who is the woman in an elaborate white and red-hearted apron—which matches her tablecloth and starched napkins—entertaining for tea? How did the mangy fox die? Graham Little’s compositions are keepers of their secrets, endlessly flexible to viewers’ imaginations.

A commissioned text by Hettie Judah, chief art critic at the British daily paper The i, accompanies Graham Little’s exhibition.

GRAHAM LITTLE (b. 1972, Dundee, Scotland) is an artist living and working in London, United Kingdom. Graham Little earned an BA in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, in 1995, an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1997, and was a research associate at Goldsmiths College, London, in 1998. Recent solo exhibitions include dépendance, Brussels, Belgium (2023); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); and Alison Jacques, London (2021); among others. Graham Little’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); V&A, Dundee, Scotland (2020); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); among others. Graham Little’s works are part of the permanent collections of institutions including the British Council Art Collection, UK; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. 

FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.flagartfoundation.org

Graham Little @ FLAG, NYC - February 23 - May 4, 2024

Nicole Eisenman & Keith Boadwee @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC

Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

December 12, 2020 - March 13, 2021

The FLAG Art Foundation presents Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, on view on its 9th and 10th floors. The recipient of The Contemporary Austin’s 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Nicole Eisenman created thematically-linked solo exhibitions for The Contemporary (Sturm und Drang, at the museum in Austin, Texas, February 27 - November 15, 2020) and FLAG. Nicole Eisenman expanded the exhibition at FLAG to include artist Keith Boadwee; their shared use of humor and critical observation questions both real and imagined power structures, upends art history, and lampoons notions of “good taste.”

Nicole Eisenman employs a plurality of styles and visual references in her drawings, paintings, and sculptures to give shape to the many forms of the human condition. At FLAG, Eisenman’s cast of characters are emblematic of the patriarchy—frat guys, paunchy businessmen, and bald eagles—the foundations of which she gleefully undermines through absurdity, caricature, and gallows humor. A concurrent exhibition of upwards of 250 abject drawings by Keith Boadwee dovetails with Eisenman’s presentation. Installed en masse, Boadwee’s works depict a near infinite variety of scatological scenes that assert one’s agency over their body, its functions, messiness, and pleasures.

What unites Keith Boadwee and Nicole Eisenman, in addition to a thirty-year-long friendship, is their mutual exploration of representations and sensations that challenge conservative, heteronormative notions of cleanliness, decency, and identity. Keith Boadwee’s relation to such subject matter is career-spanning; in the mid-1990s, he began making paintings by performatively expelling paint from his anus onto canvas; rudimentary floral designs and/or tartan patterns were largely determined by gravity and splatter. As Nicole Eisenman wrote in her essay[1]on Boadwee, “[…]The artist is painter/is painting, finally is a tube of paint! Boadwee is subject and object, maker and the made, a self-reflexive circle is complete.” The enema paintings operate beyond shock (and relish in it) and challenge the history of painting and the primacy of the heroic gestural mark. Successive bodies of Keith Boadwee’s work explore similar thematic territory; in photography, the artist and his genitals regularly play dress-up as popular cartoon characters and/or art historical tropes. Though explicit, Keith Boadwee’s imagery created from and/or inspired by his body is never overtly sexualized.

At FLAG, Keith Boadwee’s scatological drawings, all created between 2016-20, are presented in grids, vitrines, and wall-sized vinyls and feature a multitude of characters engaged in absurd situations. Ranging from the everyday to the fantastical to the overtly political, Boadwee’s scenes overwhelmingly employ slapstick humor to diffuse, confront, and demystify this inescapable and universal bodily function. A litmus test of viewers’ personal limits, the cumulative effect of the presentation coupled with the serial exploration of defection cannot be easily dismissed. While Keith Boadwee hammers the same nail repeatedly, Nicole Eisenman’s toolkit is a bit broader and examines larger systems that impact an individual’s identity and their perceived public and private boundaries. Her work elucidates awkward, impolite moments with a tenderness that allows her subjects to transcend a punchline.

Nicole Eisenman’s practice blends the influence of Western art history and traditional figuration with elements of music, activism, queer sexuality, and humor. Works on view, from 1993-2020, many never exhibited in New York, include recent paintings of lovers and friends, globby plaster sculptures of men at rest, and a selection of drawings that range in subject matter from schticky (Charlie the Tuna and See Saw Sex, both 1993) to apocalyptic (World War Me, 2001, and Suicide, 2004). Nicole Eisenman subverts stereotypical gender roles throughout the works at FLAG, from deflating the traditional, heroic bust in a pair of Sleeping Frat Guy sculptures, both 2013, to Cubist Female Innards 1 and 2, both 2019, paintings which place tangles of disembodied intestines and stomachs on pedestals, elevating them to the status of artwork. Nicole Eisenman’s full frontal portrait of Keith Boadwee further flips gendered roles by way of the odalisque trope. Here, Nicole Eisenman’s depiction of her longtime friend is resplendent; in nothing but red socks, Keith Boadwee is in complete command of his body, his sexuality, and its objectification.

“The design intervention on The FLAG Art Foundation logo,” says Nicole Eisenman, “is an acknowledgment of the reality that when an institution mounts an exhibition by queer artists, that institution takes on the responsibility of the stewardship of the artist’s queer ideals. To show an artist’s work is not a passive act, but one that can have meaningful and lasting change if the action is taken to allow for that change. The fallen “L” design represents the ongoing struggle that queer people live with—of making a world that is actively not made for them accessible, livable, and enjoyable. This design is as much about queering the name of the foundation as it is queering an article of hate speech. By turning the word “FLAG” into “FAG,” we are taking a word that people have used against us our whole lives to cut and we are using it now with pride.”

NICOLE EISENMAN (b. 1965, Verdun, France) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Nicole Eisenman’s work was included in both the 2019 Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley. Recent solo exhibitions include Baden Baden Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany (2018); Dark Light, Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA (2018); Dark Light, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2017); Al-ugh-ories, New Museum, New York, NY (2016); Magnificent Delusion, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; among others. Nicole Eisenman received the Carnegie Prize (2013); the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (2015); The Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize (2018); and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018.

KEITH BOADWEE (b. 1961, Meridian, MS) is an artist living and working in Emeryville, CA. Boadwee earned an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 2000, and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA, in 1989; there he studied under artists Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden. Recent solo exhibitions include God’s Eye, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Atelier 34zero Muzeum; Brussels, Belgium (2017); Deborah Schamoni Gallerei, Munich, German (2016); Shoot the Lobster, New York, NY (2015); among others. His work has been featured in thematic exhibitions, including Float in a Dark Tank, Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); AA Bronson’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria (2015); Prospect 1.5, New Orleans, LA (2010); Into Me / Out of Me, MoMA PS1, Long Island, NY and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2006); among others. His works have been the subject of reviews and articles in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Village Voice, among others.

Exhibition Catalogue: A fully illustrated catalogue co-published by Radius Books, Santa Fe, was designed by Tiffany Malakooti to be read in two directions, reflecting the separate but related exhibitions at The Contemporary Austin’s and The FLAG Art Foundation. Contributors include artists Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, writers Alhena Katsof and Litia Perta, and essays by Heather Pesanti (Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin), and Jonathan Rider (Associate Director) and Stephanie Roach (Director) at FLAG.

[1] Nicole Eisenman, “Inside Out, Boy You Turn Me,” Keith Boadwee 1989-2013 (Zurich: Micronaut and Hacienda Books, 2014): 30.

Due to precautions surrounding the spread of COVID-19, The FLAG Art Foundation is open to the public by appointment only.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

__________________

Richard Pettibone @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Endless Variation

Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

October 27, 2018 - January 19, 2019

“I wished I had stuck with the idea of just painting the same painting like the soup can and never painting another painting. When someone wanted one, you would just do another one. Does anyone do that now?”  -Andy Warhol, 1981 [1]

The FLAG Art Foundation presents RICHARD PETTIBONE: Endless Variation, on view on its 9th floor. A prominent figure in the Pop, Post Pop, and Appropriation Art movements, Richard Pettibone creates small-scale replicas of iconic masterpieces by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol. The intimately-sized works, some as small as two by two inches, speak to themes of reproduction, originality, and authorship—ideas as relevant in today’s art world as when he began painting in the early 1960s. Richard Pettibone’s work continues a line of questioning that began with Duchamp and ran through successive generations of artists: What does it mean to appropriate an image of an image of an image?

The exhibition features work that spans 1964 to 2018, focusing on self-portraiture, seriality, and photorealism—three major themes within Richard Pettibone’s oeuvre that the artist continually, and often humorously, critiques and reinterprets. The artist’s facility with representation is particularly evident in his photorealistic paintings and “combine” works, which feature multiple canvases collaged together. Presented en masse, this rarely seen part of the artist’s practice sheds light onto Richard Pettibone’s interest in the intersection of style, pastiche, and art history. Juxtaposed with fine art reproductions of the satin ballgowns from Jean-August Dominique Ingres’s Princess de Broglie, 1853, and the rigid geometry of Frank Stella’s Union Pacific, 1950, are testosterone-fueled images of dirt bikes, race cars, and playboy center-folds.

FLAG’s south gallery is dedicated to the artist’s recurring and career-spanning recreations of Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, with more than 150 canvases on view. Richard Pettibone he first encountered in the artist’s seminal 1962 Soup Cans exhibition at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. “I remember that show so clearly,” Pettibone recounts, “The 32 cans were shown in two rooms, and when you walked into this room, all the paintings were all the same. And then you walked into the second room, and it was more of the same; it was the craziest show I’ve ever seen! But slowly I realized, ‘oh my god, they’re all different flavors.’”

Richard Pettibone’s self-portraits place the artist as subject matter, revealing more about his life and influences, all laden with humor and poetic wit. Installed chronologically, these works take shape in various forms, ranging from the artist’s own fingerprints, to paintings based on and scaled to candid polaroids, to series inspired by Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward, 1923, posters and Coeurs Volants (Fluttering Hearts), 1936. The latter nods to Richard Pettibone’s recent heart attack, the date of which, “October 16, 2016,” is inscribed at the top of the painting. Like Marcel Duchamp, Richard Pettibone believed everything was a readymade and up for grabs, and his work is infused with a reverence for the artists that he was appropriating – often simultaneous with the artists creating their works—offering an inventive commentary on 20th-century art.

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works is concurrently on view at Castelli Gallery from September 12 - November 21, 2018.

RICHARD PETTIBONE (b. 1938, Alhambra, CA) is an artist living and working in Charlotteville, NY. A pioneer of appropriation art, Richard Pettibone has dedicated his career to creating miniature replicas of artworks by iconic contemporary artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Initially constructed to match the size of images of the original works he found in Artforum magazine, Richard Pettibone’s small-scale facsimiles address themes of reproduction, seriality, and authorship. In 1962, Richard Pettibone received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute, CA. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Richard Pettibone: Recent Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Richard Pettibone: 64 Paintings, 9 Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Richard Pettibone (1964-2009), Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, France (2014); Richard Pettibone-Paintings and Sculpture: 1964-2003, David Nolan Gallery, New York,  NY (2013); among others. Recent group exhibitions include Miniatures by Master Artists, Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd., New York, NY (2018); Very Appropriate, Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2017); Marcel Duchamp Fountain – An Homage, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY (2017); The Natural Order of Things, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); The Appropriationnist (Against and With), Villa du Parc, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2015); among others. Several institutions have honored him with significant retrospective exhibitions, including The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2005, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2005, and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, in 2006.

[1] Shaar, Elisa. “Richard Pettibone: Painting the Same Painting Then and Now,” Richard Pettibone, September 10-October 26, 2013, published in 2013 by Castelli Gallery.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

Ashley Bickerton @ The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Ashley Bickerton
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
September 23 – December 16, 2017

The FLAG Art Foundation presents the first U.S. survey of Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton.

Ashley Bickerton’s vibrant and often dystopic vision of contemporary culture has been at the center of his four-decade-long practice, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, and every possible combination therein. The survey demonstrates the extraordinary visual range of Bickerton’s oeuvre, which oscillates between playfulness and brutality, extreme beauty and the grotesque. Works from the artist’s signature series from the 1980’s to present, including Susie, Logos, Blue Man, and new Water Vector and Wall-Wall works, highlight his subversive and self-aware critique of identity, consumerism, and cultural artifice.

Ashley Bickerton rose to prominence as part of the 1980’s New York East Village art scene, with works that layered the reductive formalist aesthetic of minimalism with signs, symbols, and logos, as a means to examine commodity and value. In 1982, Bickerton concocted Susie, a personal trademark, which would be stamped onto his work for much of the next decade. Subverting the authority of the signature, Susie reduced the artist to a brand, alongside his use of logos and symbols such as Nike, Samsung, TV Guide, dollar signs, and skulls. As Bickerton stated “maybe somewhere in this circumscribed liberty of obvious, eccentric, contradictory, and choiceless choices we can pinpoint an individual. ‘Yes, I am a macrobiotic birdseed-swallowing disciple of the Marlboro Man, I like my liquor ‘rot gut’ and my TV highbrow, I wear American yokel underwear in icy Bauhaus furniture and I drive a crappy French car. Who am I?’”

The artist’s preoccupation with the end of the world (perhaps foreshadowing the end of his time in New York), was evidenced in Ashley Bickerton’s work from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, which included flotation devices, portholes, ropes, carabiners, and biosphere escape hatches. These time capsules/idiosyncratic survival kits contain a variety of materials – cigarette butts, cheese puffs, alcohol, an Elvis costume, “Smoked Sturgeon, Salmon and Scallops With A Mild Horseradish Flavored Oil,” etc. – all preserved for an eventual apocalypse.

Ashley Bickerton decamped from New York in 1993, eventually settling in the surfer’s paradise of Bali, which resulted in a dramatic shift in his practice and style. Working in an increasingly figurative and self-reflective mode, the artist used himself, his family, fellow expats, and prostitutes as models for hyper-realistic paintings, which depicted an increasingly acerbic view of humanity. Bickerton parodied do-gooding society types, contrived and idealized self and family portraiture, western fantasies of island expat life, and the mythological role of the artist. This led to the creation of bizarre, composite alter egos, such as Blue Man and Snake-Headed Man, as well as a tongue-in-cheek version of himself in the likeness of Paul Gauguin. In seeking further freedom to create his maximalist compositions, Bickerton began staging elaborate sets, painting directly onto people and objects that he would photograph and digitally alter. Local, artisinally-crafted frames, inlaid with mother of pearl and hand-carved coconut shells, complete these complex satires.

Whereas Ashley Bickerton’s early works tackle form, function, and communication, with sometimes single words acting as the entire painting, his later figurative pieces are visually deafening, with bright color and cluttered objects mirroring the over-the-top excess featured as the work’s subject. Newly created Wall-Walls refer to an earlier series from the 1980’s, and attest to Bickerton’s continued interest to mine and recontextualize a cohesive cadre of themes over time. He states “in a long and often breathless career, I feel I’ve pursued every reckless tangent with utterly no fidelity to any stylistic cohesion, but nevertheless in this tangle I knew inherently there was a larger overarching language that was distinctly my own. The project of the last several years has been to try to come full circle and in the process unearth that language, to give it shape and cadence, and understand how it has run through the work, clear and unadulterated from the beginning. The Wall-Walls turned out to be the key that unlocked it all.”

Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959, Barbados, West Indies) is an artist living and working in Uluwatu, Bali. Bickerton graduated from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA, in 1982, and continued his education in the Independent Studios Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, in 1985. Bickerton has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions, including The Newport Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2017); Almanach 16, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2016); among others. His work has been featured in major institutions, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012); Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom (2011); New Museum, New York, NY (2010), among others. Bickerton’s work has been included in prominent international biennales, including the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1992); the 44th Venice Biennale (1990); and the 1989 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; among others.

Additional support provided by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org

Roy Lichtenstein: Intimate Sculptures, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Roy Lichtenstein: Intimate Sculptures
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
June 26, 2014 – January, 31, 2015

"Lichtenstein is an artist who makes barely thick works, highly intellectualized, contextually odd, infinitely nuanced and shaped, which are curious open screens of polychrome imagery. Their physical elements make real shadows but their cartoon sentiments cast strong intuitive ones"

–Jack Cowart, Pop Up [Art]: Lichtenstein Sculpture, 1992

Following the success of  Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors, curated by artists Hilary Harkness and Ewan Gibbs, The FLAG Art Foundation presents Roy Lichtenstein: Intimate Sculptures, an exhibition of fourteen sculptures, organized in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. This exhibition marks a year long engagement with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, allowing FLAG the honor of presenting two rarely-seen bodies of work by one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists.

Roy Lichtenstein: Intimate Sculptures presents a selection of the artist’s sculptures and maquettes, works that playfully and pointedly blur the boundaries of drawing, sculpture, and painting. Comprised of everyday and mass-produced objects – a mirror, water glass, and coffee cup – as well as the artist’s signature brushstrokes, the works highlight Roy Lichtenstein’s ability to elevate the everyday to the iconic. Presented in a gallery space populated with furniture, the exhibition encourages engagement, inviting audiences to view historic works in an intimate setting. Maquette for House I (1996) inspired the domestic context for this environment, a later work wherein Lichtenstein reduces the structure of a cookie cutter suburban house to black outlines and primary colors – yellow siding, a blue roof, and red to accent the shutters and chimney.

Often overlooked but routinely used, commercial subjects become monuments in the artist’s hand, wherein shadow, contour, and highlight are rendered in patinated bronze. In Mirror II (1977), Roy Lichtenstein transforms a vanity mirror into a static, unchanging reflection – focusing on the form of the object while negating its intended function. Mobile III (1990) directly references Alexander Calder’s archetypal mobiles, “freezing” [1] an item whose sole purpose is to respond to movement. Rather than condense volume and function into a linear still life, these sculptures become intimate metaphors for the disposable society in which they exist.

Nodding to the physicality of the Abstract Expressionist movement and its influence on Western art, Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstroke sculptures democratize mark-making and painterly authority through isolation and reproduction. Roy Lichtenstein describes his desire to separate the brushstroke from the canvas and distill it to its purist form: “…my latest interest is probably in some way a reaction to the turn of contemporary painting back toward an expressionist path, toward the revealing of the brushstroke in the surface of the painting. Still, I am doing it my own way.”[2] Lichtenstein’s modern approach to the brushstroke continued to incorporate his signature Ben-Day dots in new and substantial forms, most evident in the figurative works Maquette for Brushstroke Head Red and Yellow (1992) and Maquette for Brushstroke Nude (1992). Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstroke sculptures are emblematic of his lifelong exploration of representation and abstraction, form and function, and high and low culture, and continue to pose the question “what constitutes art?”

Concurrent with the exhibition at FLAG, Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental sculpture, Tokyo Brushstroke I & II (1994) is on view as a long term loan by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, made possible by The Fuhrman Family Foundation.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

A leading figure in twentieth-century American art, Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923.  He studied at New York’s Art Students League in the summer of 1940 before enrolling at Ohio State University where he received his B.F.A. in 1946 and his M.F.A. in 1949.  There, Roy Lichtenstein began his career-long intrigues with ideas about visual perception, the odd signs and symbols of our modern culture and an overarching desire to achieve compositional unity.  In 1951, Lichtenstein had his first one-person show in New York. In 1962 he had his first solo show with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and soon became an internationally recognized leader of American Pop art with paintings using dramatically isolated images selected from serial war and romance comics and generic products, all depicted in primary colors and Ben Day dots, techniques and subjects borrowed from mass media. In the succeeding decade, he moved to Southampton, New York and expanded his use of reproductions beyond advertising, postcard clichés and comic books to 1980s, Lichtenstein returned to work in the city part-time bringing with him an emphasis on expressive brushstrokes and artistic introspection. The decade also witnessed his completion of a number of public and private large-scale sculptural and painting projects. Lichtenstein’s investigations of illusionism, abstraction, serialization, stylization and appropriation continued in every media in the 1990s.  As a distinguished painter, sculptor and printmaker he received numerous honorary degrees and international prizes.  He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1995. At age 73, he was investigating another new fabricated reality, so called “virtual paintings.” About to embark on a series of works based on Cézanne’s bathers, the artist’s explorations were cut short by his death from pneumonia in 1997.  Two years later, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was established to advance the scholarship on his work.

Beginning operation in 1999 in accordance with the wishes of the artist and his immediate family, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation’s mission is to encourage and support a broader understanding and experience of the art of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and of the contemporary art and artists of his time. The Foundation aspires to carry forward the artist’s interests and legacy to many subsequent generations of art audiences and the general public. The Foundation focuses not only on expanding the roles and development of artist-endowed foundations but also on the broader implications of Roy Lichtenstein’s art with its global relations to historical process, critical fortune, museums, galleries, collectors, critics and students, young and old.

[1] Cowart, Jack. 1992. “Pop Up [Art]: Lichtenstein Sculpture.” Roy Lichtenstein: Three Decades of Sculpture. Guild Hall Museum (proof citation)

[2] Cullen, Arthur Barrett. Roy Lichtenstein. November 1984. p. 49.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org

Richard Patterson: I’m Walking Here! - The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Richard Patterson: I’m Walking Here!
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
February 8 - May 17, 2014

I’m Walking Here! is a mini-survey and the first comprehensive presentation in New York of Richard Patterson’s career to date. It chronicles the British-born, Dallas-based artist’s many painterly innovations and pop-cultural inspirations and highlights new directions in his work. A veteran of Damien Hirst’s seminal 1988 exhibition Freeze and a leading light in the influential YBA, or Young British Artist, group, Patterson developed an exuberant and sumptuous style he dubs “hyperabstraction.” Made with outrageous skill and humor, his meticulously constructed images combine elements of photorealism and gestural abstraction in an attempt to update the brushy breakthroughs of modernist painting for an era when images travel at the speed of light. They are loaded with countless references -- art-historical, cinematic, historic, and Freudian. To enter the pictorial and psychic space of one of Patterson’s images is to tumble into a fantastical realm in which distinctions between form and symbol, surface and depth, and the sublime and the absurd are lovingly blurred. 

Its title is inspired by a painting "The Kennington Years" that references the 1969 film "Midnight Cowboy" as well as the artist’s own down-and-out early years in a pre-gentrified pocket of London. The exhibition maps Patterson’s intricately interlocking visual universe-one populated by beautiful women, British motorcycles, and outré industrial design objects. In addition to paintings and digital sketches, the installation includes a vintage Matchless Typhoon track bike, a Johansson triplex extending lamp designed in 1919, and, for the first time ever, a selection of the paint-daubed figurines and studio maquettes on which he bases many of his best-known compositions. 

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the artist by Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection, Houston. 

Richard Patterson was born in the UK in 1963 and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1986. He is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, UK. Richard Patterson was included in Damien Hirst’s Freeze, Surrey Docks, London (1988); as well as Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA (1997-00) among other notable exhibitions. He has had solo exhibitions at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London (1997); James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA (1999 and 2002); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, USA (2000), Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2005, 2008 and 2013); and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, USA (2009). Richard currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas, USA. 

Toby Kamps is the curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection. Previously, he was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He has organized solo exhibitions by artists such as Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Vanessa Beecroft, Martin Kersels, Adi Nes, Danny Lyon, Torsten Slama, and the collaborative team of John Wood and Paul Harrison. He also has produced numerous thematic survey projects including Silence, The Old, Weird America, Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art, and, with a curatorial team, Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art. A graduate of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute, Kamps has written on extensively on contemporary art and artists.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org

Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
February 8 - May 17, 2014

The FLAG Art Foundation presents Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors curated by artists Hilary Harkness and Ewan Gibbs organized in cooperation with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.  The exhibition includes 37 works by Lichtenstein including drawing, collage and sculpture as well two original works created by the curators in conjunction with the exhibition.

In Drawing from Inspiration and A Nude of One’s Own, the essays prepared for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Ewan Gibbs and Hilari Harkness reveal themselves to be artists meditating on the creative process with Lichtenstein in the foreground.  What does it mean to make art through time; what does it mean to pay homage; what does it mean to create an artistic space that can accommodate one’s cognitive and passionate impulses?  Their reflections are as artists who have been at work for over a decade and who share a vantage point that is both of their time and of artists throughout time.   

Ewan Gibbs and Hilari Harkness note a number of influences shared with Roy Lichtenstein, including paying homage to artists such as Matisse and Picasso - artists whose works (and lives) have sustained and nourished the curators’ creative processes.  The preparatory works featured in the show resonated with both curators for the clues the works leave behind with respect to Lichtenstein’s efforts, his fervor, and his passion. Clues sometimes overlooked in the fully realized collages and paintings that would follow.   

Hilari Harkness finds Roy Lichtenstein’s ability to assimilate high and low visual influences into a language that was his own inspiring. For this show, she has chosen to feature Lichtenstein’s late nudes, many of which were painted when he was in his seventies at a time when Harkness observes, he no longer had anything to prove and nothing to lose and which results in works laced with a palpable joie de vivre. 

Ewan Gibbs approaches Roy Lichtenstein’s interiors from a place of comfort and familiarity, having worked directly from photographs of hotel rooms taken from holiday brochures since 1993.  It was Lichtenstein, with his use of pictures from comics, phone books and advertisements, who provided Gibbs with a feeling of artistic freedom and confidence to use mass-produced advertising images as source material.   

As Hilari Harkness observes, painting grows out of the personal. There are times when we have to fight it, sometimes we submit to it, sometimes we let go of it.  But always – it is there and we have to figure out what we’re going to do about it. 

In this exhibition, Ewan Gibbs and Hilari Harkness invite us to take a glimpse into the world of Lichtenstein’s interiors and his nudes. A world packed with the indelible marks of a career that spanned decades and integrated a variety of artistic influences.   

Ewan Gibbs was born in 1973 and graduated from Goldsmiths College of Art in 1996. He is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, UK and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas.  Gibbs was commissioned by the SFMOMA as part of their 75th anniversary celebrations and has been featured in notable group exhibitions including Drawn from Photography, The Drawing Center, New York (2011); Making a Mark: Drawings from the Contemporary Collection, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2011) among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Ewan Gibbs: America, Davidson College of Arts, North Carolina (2010); Ewan Gibbs, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2008). Ewan lives and works in Oxfordshire, UK. 

Hilary Harkness was born in Michigan in 1971 and is a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. She exhibits with the Mary Boone Gallery, NY. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, and the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum. In 2013, The FLAG Art Foundation hosted a retrospective of her cross-section paintings. Harkness has been featured in publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview magazine, Esquire and blogs for The Huffington Post. She has taught painting and sculpture as Artist in Residence at Yale Summer School of Art and Music, and lectured widely at institutions such as Columbia University, Yale University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Hilary lives and works in Brooklyn. 

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org