Roy Dowell at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - New Work

Roy Dowell: New Work

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

4 October - 1 November 1997

The Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by ROY DOWELL (b. 1951). The exhibition, which marks the artist’s second one-person show at Margo Leavin Gallery, includes nine mixed-media paintings on wood panel and sixteen mixed-media collages on paper.

With a background in photography from Oakland’s College of Arts and Crafts and painting from the California Institute for the Arts, Roy Dowell has been able to unite these two seemingly disparate mediums. Roy Dowell’s work combines collage elements from printed video images and advertisements with abstract painted forms to create a coherent overall composition.

Roy Dowell’s imagery refers to the abundance of visual information disseminated through television, outdoor media, printed matter, and commercial products. In Roy Dowell’s work, however, specific images are distorted or altered so that no one reference is necessarily identifiable. The layering and juxtaposition of the collage elements with the painted elements in Roy Dowell’s work create patterns and colors that function similarly to brushstoke passages found within more traditional abstract painting.

Roy Dowell’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions across the country and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica; Otis College of Art and Design, Pasadena; and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

John Baldessari at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - New Work

John Baldessari: New Work

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

19 April – 24 May 1997

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of new large-scale works on canvas by John Baldessari. 

A leading and highly influential conceptual artist, John Baldessari has produced work incorporating photographic images and, on occasion, text since 1960s. Through a careful process of editing, selection, repetition, and re-combination of images, John Baldessari creates works that are at once narrative, wry, provocative and poignant.

In contrast to much of his recent work, which has used images appropriated from film stills and popular media, the works in this exhibition use images taken from photographs by the artist. These works re-introduce John Baldessari’s examination of the dialogue between imagery and text which he first explored in his seminal works on canvas made in National City, California, during the first years of the 1960s. Reductive in palette and uniform in scale, each of the works in this exhibition (which also reflect the artist’s return to working on canvas) consists of a single photographic image, often juxtaposed with titles derived from Francisco Goya’s ground-breaking 19th century etching series, Los Caprichos (The Caprices).

John Baldessari’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including major recent shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Kunstverein, Stuttgart, and the Cornerhouse, Manchester, England. The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, presented John Baldessari’s early works on canvas from National City in an exhibition during the summer of 1996, and in 1990-92 a retrospective of the artist’s work was seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. This is the artist’s seventh one-person exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Tony Oursler at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - Colors, Heads, and Organs

Tony Oursler: Colors, Heads, and Organs

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

1 March - 12 April 1997

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by TONY OURSLER. The exhibition, entitled Colors, Heads, and Organs, includes three separate bodies of work incorporating video, sound, sculpture and installation art.

Tony Oursler's diverse and provocative art has consistently challenged the mechanics of contemporary American culture, specifically the way in which popular media (particularly television and film) have shaped society's perceptions of itself. Tony Oursler's work reflects society's obsession with media, while simultaneously investigating the struggle between humanity and technology, the trafficking of cultural lore, and the transference of ideas from the vernacular to the universal. Informed by the vocabulary of Surrealism, late 20th century performance and video art as well as cinema verité, Tony Oursler has produced a body of work that is engaging, entertaining, wry and metaphorically loaded.

This exhibition includes projections onto body organs; faces reciting urban folk tales projected onto ceramic and glass spheres; and a three part installation based on the primary media colors of red, blue and green incorporating found objects, sculpture, light and sound.

Tony Oursler's work has been recently seen in one-person exhibition at the Stedlijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, California. His work was included in the 1995 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany; and the 1989 Biennial Exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is currently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and will also be included in the upcoming Documenta 10. This is the artist's first exhibition with the Margo Leavin Gallery.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Dan Flavin at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - A Tribute Exhibition

Dan Flavin: A Tribute 

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

18 January – 22 February 1997

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of work by DAN FLAVIN (1933 - 1996). The exhibition has been organized in tribute to the artist, who died in December 1996, and includes signature works dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Dan Flavin’s ground-breaking work used commercial fluorescent lights to create environments exploring light, color and space. Included in the exhibition is an example from Dan Flavin’s seminal 1960s body of work, Monuments to V. Tatlin, which paid homage to Vladimir Tatlin, the turn of the century avant-garde Soviet artist and architect. In addition, the exhibition features other important works from the 1960s through the 1980s, including a 1987 work created in honor of Donald Judd.

Dan Flavin: A Tribute marks the third exhibition of Flavin’s work at Margo Leavin Gallery.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Sherrie Levine at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - New Works

Sherrie Levine: New Works

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

13 November - 21 December 1996

The Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of recent works by Sherrie Levine. The exhibition, which marks Levine’s second one-person show at Margo Leavin Gallery, includes sculpture and works on paper. 

Sherrie Levine’s work has consistently questioned the notions of authorship and originality in the production of art. Taking from the concepts developed by Marcel Duchamp, who used found and “ready-made” objects, Sherrie Levine uses repetition and appropriation of signature works of modern art and design to create a sense of ambiguity within her work and her role as an artist. Sherrie Levine’s images are recognizable and already known, having been re-cast, re-photographed, re-painted, or re-drawn. In her work using the ready-made, Sherrie Levine lifts a found object from its original context and transfers it to one of her own construct.

This exhibition includes a series of bronze castings after Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 porcelain urinal ready-made, Fountain. Sherrie Levine’s work, titled Buddha, was cast from a urinal very similar to Duchamp’s original ready-made. By presenting this work in a series of six, Sherrie Levine focuses on the serial nature and repetition inherent to Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made.

Also included are six wood sculptures after a 1934 side table by seminal modernist architect and designer, Gerrit Reitveld. Titled Small Krate Table, Sherrie Levine’s sculpture increases by 50% the scale of Reitveld’s side table—one of the first pieces of furniture sold as kit to be assembled by the buyer—highlighting its sculptural form.

In addition, the exhibition is included a group of ready-mades titled Chimera: After a Broken Leg. The reference to titles of works by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp alludes to the mask-like appearance of these works, which consist of plywood leg splints designed by Charles Eames in 1941 for use by the U.S. Navy. The last body of work in the exhibition is nine Iris print images after Claude Monet’s studies of the Rouen Cathedral. These computer-generated images suggest the underlying compositional, color and light qualities of Claude Monet’s works in wholly abstracted form.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Rudolf Stingel at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - New Works

Rudolf Stingel: New Works

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

7 September – 5 October 1996

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of recent works by Rudolf Stingel. The exhibition, which marks Rudolf Stingel’s first one-person show at Margo Leavin Gallery, includes paintings, sculpture, and a large-scale installation. 

This exhibition is an experience of vibrant color. The viewer is initially encounter a large-scale installation of hand-dyed and hand-seamed carpet. It is the artist’s intention for the viewer to pass through the overwhelming color installation into a more traditional gallery space where a selection of new paintings is installed. The

paintings are follow the artist’s published technique of employing thick oil paint, a compressed air gun, a spatula, and gauze fabric to create beautiful, monochrome fields of aggressive color on canvas.

Rudolf Stingel’s work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle in Zurich and has been included in exhibitions at the Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria; the 1993 Venice Biennale; and the Museum Friedericianum, Kassel, Germany.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Allen Ruppersberg, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

Allen Ruppersberg

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

30 March – 27 April 1996

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Allen Ruppersberg. The exhibition includes recent sculptures and drawings as well as two large-scale installations. In addition, there is a selected of earlier drawings and collages.

Throughout his career, Allen Ruppersberg has chosen language and the act of reading and looking as the focus of his art. The scope of his interest has ranged from High literature and its popular opposite to newspaper articles, movie posters and the world of advertising. The works presented in this exhibition evolved from his continued study of reading: the way society responds to the presentation of news and books, what constitutes a best seller, how society assigns a value to writing and the continuing need to reread and reinterpret history.

The subject of Allen Ruppersberg’s two large-scale installations in this exhibition is literature and its history. The first piece, Good Dreams, Bad Dreams, What was Sub-Literature?, addresses the mythology of the lost languages of both pulp literature, and its visual equivalent, the handlettered sign. This installation is a collection of signs hand-painted by local sign-makers, who have been given only the title of a book and the author’s name with which to make a sign. A fictional, visual lecture on the art of “dead signs” accompanies the hand-painted signs. The second installation is Low to High, which is an arrangement of books upon a hand-built staircase. Allen Ruppersberg has republished a set of books that were the five most popular novels read during 1920-40 in Britain, The Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Those four countries were involved in the 1944 Battle of Arnhem, which was one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II. In republishing exact replicas of books dating from 1920-1940, Allen Ruppersberg’s installation acts not only as a historical marker, but also as a possible glimpse into the psyche of the soldiers and their countrymen before the onslaught of World War II.

In addition, this exhibition includes two recent bodies of work, Study for Bookmarks, and Study for Gravemarkers. Study for Bookmarks is a series of drawings of newspaper obituaries of men who died from complications of the AIDS virus. Study for Gravemarkers consists of bronze casts of pieces of rope tied into various nautical knots. These knots are intended to function as memorials and are installed randomly on the floor near the Bookmark drawings. Themes of memory and history connect these two seemingly disparate bodies of work.

This exhibition marks Allen Ruppersberg’s first one-person exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery. The work of Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of a recent exhibition at the Stichting De Appel in Amsterdam, and included in the “Cocido y Crudo” at Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain and Dialogues of Peace at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. In Los Angeles, Allen Ruppersberg’s works were recently exhibited in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 – 1975 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Important upcoming exhibition include one-person exhibition at Magasin in Grenoble, France and Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany as well as the important 1997 sited sculpture show in Münster, Germany.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Sarah Charlesworth / William Leavitt at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

Sarah Charlesworth / William Leavitt

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

24 February – 23 March 1996

Margo Leavin Gallery presents recent work by Sarah Charlesworth and William Leavitt in two concurrent, one-person exhibitions. 

Sarah Charlesworth’s work has evolved out of her readings and interpretations of philosophy and art history. Her works are laden with historical references, chosen for their relevance to perception. This exhibition will consist of a series of richly colored prints depicting allegorical still-lifes as seen in Old Master paintings and early photographs. Each photograph employs props, such as Greek sculpture, musical instruments, a bouquet of flowers, etc., arranged in a manner to suggest the act of seeing itself in historically embedded.

For the past twenty-five years, William Leavitt has created a diverse body of work including painting, photography, performance and installation. For this exhibition, William Leavitt has produced a group of photographs, each containing three of four views of an outdoor site taken in succession. The adjacent frames form a unified, sequential image that suggests – through the variation in camera angle – movement in time. These carefully edited views of urban environments create essays of often-overlooked aspects of common sites.

Sarah Charlesworth’s work was included in the exhibition Forest of Signs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center for Photography, New York, and the Venice Biennale, Italy. This is Sarah Charlesworth’s second one-person exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery. 

William Leavitt’s work has recently been seen in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 – 1975 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in addition to exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This marks William Leavitt’s first one-person exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

Stephen Prina at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles - Retrospection Under Duress

Stephen Prina

Retrospection Under Duress

Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

20 January - 17 February 1996

Margo Leavin Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Stephen Prina. The exhibition, titled Retrospection Under Duress, consists of three projects: a series of thirty-five photographs combined with computer graphics, a sculpture that incorporates drawing and bookbinding procedures, and the three most recent examples from the ongoing project Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet.

Retrospection Under Duress marks the artist’s second one-person show at the Margo Leavin Gallery. Stephen Prina’s work was recently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam titled “It was the best he could do at the moment…,’ as well as solo shows at P.S. 1, New York, and the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park. His work has also been included in important group exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago, the 8th Biennale in Sydney, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Aperto in the Venice Biennale XLIV, Documenta IX in Kassel, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Stephen Prina’s music has been featured in concerts in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Düsseldorf, Dijon, Athens and Helsinki. Since 1994, he has been a member of the musical group The Red Krayola, appearing on the recordings The Red Krayola, 1994, and Amor and Language, 1995, under the Drag City label, Chicago.

MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY

812 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069