Paulina Olowska @ Metro Pictures Gallery, NYC - Haus Proud

Paulina Olowska: Haus Proud 

Metro Pictures, New York

Through December 11, 2021

PAULINA OLOWSKA

Ester Krumbachová in her office, 2021 

Oil on canvas

86 5/8 x 63 inches (220 x 160 cm)

© Paulina Olowska, courtesy of Metro Pictures

Paulina Olowska presents a new series of paintings and a video work in Haus Proud, the final exhibition at Metro Pictures before its permanent closure at the end of the year. Paulina Olowska considered the special context of the exhibition while producing the works. Informed by her research into women-run exhibition spaces and schools, such as the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture in the United States and the Zakopianska Szkoła Koronkarska (“Zakopane Bobbin Lace School”) in Poland, the paintings adapt imagery from her ever-increasing collection of vintage fashion advertisements and photographs to continue her longstanding interest in expanding the representation of women in art history.

The portrait Ester Krumbachová in her office is an homage to the eponymous stage and costume designer, screenwriter, and director. Paulina Olowska is drawn to Krumbachová not only for her many contributions to Czech New Wave cinema but also for her influential position behind the scenes, a position typical of women whose labor has often gone underappreciated and unrecognized throughout history. Paulina Olowska paints Krumbachová standing in the middle of an office surrounded by posters for the films she worked on in the 1960s. 

 

The School of Archery is one of two paintings based on images by American fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. Reminiscent of Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Paulina Olowska’s painting shows a group of elegantly dressed women in bowler hats lounging in a field, their bows and arrows resting on the grass beside them. The title painting Haus Proud celebrates the professional technical schools of the Soviet Union, which provided specialized, non-academic vocational training across the Soviet republics. The sgraffito depicted on the wall behind the women alludes to the instruction these schools provided in a wide range of artistic mediums, including mosaics and mural painting. 

 

Together, the paintings imagine a fantasy educational community starring fabulous renaissance women of all stripes—lecturers, students, custodial staff, and a principal with her pet. The video collage work foregrounds the historical basis of this narrative, featuring photographs and documentation from the women-run art schools and institutions that served as the artist’s inspiration. These parallels form the artist’s tribute to her longtime gallery Metro Pictures and the community it has established over its forty-year history. 

 

Paulina Olowska’s own practice includes sculpture, installation, and performance. It also extends to collaborative projects such as the Artist House Kadenówka, a grand 1930s mansion in a bucolic corner of rural Poland where Paulina Olowska hosts artist-led events and happenings. Since 2015 she has served as artistic director of Pavilionesque, a magazine dedicated to art and theater published by the Centre for Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor CRICOTEKA in Kraków, the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the University of Geneva, and for the upcoming fourth issue the University of Zurich. (Olowska has taught at the latter three institutions.) Earlier this year she presented a newly commissioned performance titled Grotesque Alphabet (After Roland Topor) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Kitchen in New York premiered her ballet Slavic Goddesses in 2017, and it was subsequently performed at Milan’s Museo del Novecento in 2018 and again at the 2020 Biennale Gherdëina in Italy. Her performance commission Naughty Nymphs in the Courtyard of the Favorites will debut at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022.

 

She has had major one-person exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She received the prestigious Aachen Art Prize in 2014, with an associated exhibition at the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany.

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Cindy Sherman @ Metro Pictures, NYC

Cindy Sherman

Metro Pictures, New York

September 26 – October 31, 2020

For her latest body of work, Cindy Sherman has transformed herself into an extraordinary cast of androgynous characters, expanding her career-long investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation. The enigmatic figures pictured in the ten new photographs on view are dressed primarily in men’s designer clothing and are posed gallantly in front of digitally manipulated backgrounds composed from photographs Cindy Sherman took while traveling through Bavaria, Shanghai, and Sissinghurst (England). Each character draws the viewer in with their unique style, immediate eye contact and steely gaze.

Renowned for her depictions of female stereotypes, Cindy Sherman has played with masculinity and gender expression before. In a series referred to as "Doctor and Nurse,” Cindy Sherman became both a male and female character, embodying stereotypical mid-century professional archetypes. In the “History Portrait” series, Cindy Sherman became both male aristocrats and clergymen. In her more recent clown series, the artist donned layers of face paint and shapeless costumes, eliminating the question of gender for many of the characters.

One of the most influential artists of her generation, Cindy Sherman will be the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris that runs from September 23 through January 3, 2021, following major retrospective exhibitions in 2019 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Additional recent exhibitions include Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; the inaugural exhibition at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo. Sherman has participated in four Venice Biennales, co-curating a section at the 55th exhibition in 2013. Her work has been included in five iterations of the Whitney Biennial, two Biennales of Sydney, and the 1983 Documenta. She is the recipient of the 2020 Wolf Prize in Arts and has also been awarded the Praemium Imperiale, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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Isaac Julien @ Metro Pictures, New York - Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass

Isaac Julien 

Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass
Metro Pictures, New York
Through April 13, 2019

ISAAC JULIEN 

A Chattel Becomes A Man (Lessons of The Hour), 2019

Matt archival paper, backmounted face on aluminum 

43 5/16 x 28 3/4 inches, 110 x 73 cm

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Isaac Julien’s visionary ten-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour explores the incomparable achievements of America’s foremost abolitionist figure. After escaping slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass gained celebrity on the abolitionist circuit as an extraordinary orator, becoming the most photographed American of the 19th century. Julien’s project is informed by some of Douglass’s most important speeches, such as “Lessons of the Hour,” “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?,” and “Lecture on Pictures,” the latter being a text that connects picture-making and photography to his vision of how technology could influence human relations. Isaac Julien's immersive work gives expression to the zeitgeist of Douglass’s era, his legacy, and the ways in which his story may be viewed through a contemporary lens.

Created in consultation with Douglass scholar Celeste-Marie Bernier of the University of Edinburgh, Isaac Julien’s film imagines the person of Frederick Douglass through a series of tableaux vivants and gives life to his relationships with other cultural icons of the time. Mostly women, these characters were chosen for being representatives of ideals of equality and include African-American photographer J.P. Ball; Douglass’s wives Anna Murray and Helen Pitts; Anna and Ellen Richardson, the English Quakers who allowed Douglass to return to the United States as a free man; Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist and Douglass’s longtime friend; and Ottilie Assing, German intellectual, activist, and Douglass’s lover.

Employing both 35mm film and the latest 4K digital technology, the film was shot in Washington, D.C., where Douglass lived late in life and where in 1894 he gave his final speech, “Lessons of the Hour,” which addressed the shocking phenomenon of lynching in the post-Civil War American South. Additional filming took place in Scotland and England, where Douglass delivered over four hundred anti-slavery speeches––several of which Julien had reenacted inside the period rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The presentation at the gallery includes four tintype portraits of characters who are featured in Lessons of the Hour–– Frederick Douglass, J.P. Ball, and Anna Murray Douglass. The series is titled Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow after a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Douglass once said was “the most promising colored man in America.” To create the works Julien had a tintype camera and developing facility on the film set provided by photographer Rob Ball, who produced the tintypes for the Lessons of the Hour project. Additionally, the exhibition will feature a selection of color photographs from Lessons of the Hour, a number of found archival images that appear in the film, and an assemblage of black and white analog photographs related to Julien's film Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983). Reflecting upon the death of Colin Roach, a 23-year-old black man who was shot dead at a police station in London’s East End, this early work meditates on the continued quest for equality that was Douglass’s life-long ambition, while also evoking the current Black Lives Matter movement.

An original score for the film was created by composer Paul Gladstone Reid. This is Isaac  Julien’s first work made in the United States since Baltimore (2003). Lessons of the Hour was commissioned and acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, where it is on view through May 12, 2019.

ISAAC JULIEN lives and works in London and Santa Cruz, California. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Saint Louis Art Museum; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; SESC Pompeia, São Paulo; and Aspen Art Museum. His acclaimed film installation Ten Thousand Waves has been exhibited in Shanghai, Sydney, Madrid, Helsinki, São Paolo, Gwangju, Gothenburg, Moscow, New York, Miami, and London. Isaac Julien has participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; the 8th Shanghai Biennale; 2012’s La Triennale at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the 56th Venice Biennale. His films have been included in renowned film festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Venice Film Festival. Most recently Julien received the Charles Wollaston Award (2017) for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 2018 he was made a Royal Academician. He was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honors, 2017. Isaac Julien is Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he and Professor of the Arts Mark Nash are establishing the Isaac Julien Lab. The newly conserved director’s cut of Julien and Nash’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1996) has just been released by Film Movement Distributors, New York.

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Eric Wesley Exhibition, Metro Pictures, NYC

Eric Wesley 

Metro Pictures, New York 

December 14, 2002 – February 1, 2003 

Metro Pictures presents Los Angeles-based artist Eric Wesley's first New York exhibition

Eric Wesley is producing, packaging, and distributing his own brand of black market tobacco products, "New Amsterdam," created from tobacco plants that he has cultivated in various locations. The main sculpture is a compact, operational system of cigarette-producing components, comprised of a germination unit, growing tables, and drying boxes for tobacco plants. One room is devoted to the rolling and packaging of the cigarettes, and to the promotional ephemera of Wesley's brand. The system is designed to be broken down, and its elements stored and transported within the back of a U-haul trailer, a sculpture of which is also on view.

ERIC WESLEY was born in 1973 in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. He received a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been included in the recent exhibitions "Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles," at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, "Freestyle," at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, in Santa Monica, California, and "Purloined" at Artists Space in New York. His recent exhibitions at Galleria Franco Noero in Torino, Italy and Meyer-Reigger Galerie in Karlsrue, Germany involved comparably complete productions processes — one a bomb factory cum paint store, the other a burrito factory.

METRO PICTURES

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Andreas Slominski at Metro Pictures, NYC

Andreas Slominski

Metro Pictures, New York

11 September - 16 October 1999

His sly wit and prankster behavior mask an undercurrent of serious cultural criticism...

...rich and complex art...

- Nancy Spector, curator,

Guggenheim Museum, New York

The German artist Andreas Slominski's first one-person exhibition in New York provides an opportunity to see his diabolical animal traps and absurdly counter-intuitive actions that have been presented in many European art venues since the late 80s.

Andreas Slominski's traps can be crude and brutal like the Trap for Birds of Prey or deceptively charming and crafty like the Rat Trap in the form of a church. Inviting metaphor, the traps suggest the obsessed backwoods trapper, the kitschy handmade garden ornament or the nasty business of pest control.

Andreas Slominski's actions, episodic processes of excessive difficulty and comic contrivance, reference formal sculpture and result in a physical art work of some kind. The visitor to the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, saw Andreas Slominski's piece titled Golf Ball, ostensibly a lone golf ball sitting on the floor of the museum. Getting the ball in place, however, required a crane to lift a dump truck over the roof of the museum to the back of the building; a local golfer to hit a ball over the front of the museum and into the dump truck so that it would roll off the truck and through the previously removed glass window of the museum. Then the glass was replaced, the truck and crane removed, the golfer departed, leaving only the inanimate golf ball. Andreas Slominski's actions, absurd, ironic and humorous as they may be, possess a poignancy and dumb purity and reflect on the serious accommodation granted to art and artists.

Andreas Slominski was born in Meppen, Germany in 1959 and lives in Hamburg. His work has been the subject of one-person museum shows at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Museum fur Modern Kunst in Frankfurt, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle Zurich, Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld and at galleries including Produzentengalerie in Hamburg, White Cube in London, Jablonka Galerie in Koln and Wako in Tokyo. The magazine Parkett featured his work in the Summer 1999 issue.

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Ronald Jones at Metro Pictures, New York

Ronald Jones

Metro Pictures, New York

14 March - 11 April 1998

Ronald Jones' exhibition at Metro Pictures features sculptural versions of furniture with historical associations: the bed Neil Armstrong slept in his first evening back from the moon, the bed Jack Ruby slept in the night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the chair where Dorothy Kilgallen sat as she interviewed Jack Ruby shortly before she mysteriously died, and the bed that Ethel Rosenberg slept in the night before she was executed. All of the objects have been scaled for toddlers and produced from photographic documentation.

Ronald Jones has used furniture throughout his work as abstract form, familiar functional object and symbol of a specific context. His first exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1987 presented a set of tables from the proposed designs for the Vietnam peace conference. Other such works include a bookcase from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a table from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, and the chair where a death row inmate sat to eat his last meal.

Ronald Jones has written of the current exhibition: 

"Innocence, starkly juxtaposed to the inevitability of tragedy and whimsical madness are among the ensemble of themes told by a nursery rhyme written for the exhibition that begins:

Newspaper reporters are the curious type.

They will look from here to there-

just about anywhere

to dig up the news we should know about!"

In addition to exhibitions at galleries and museums, Ronald Jones has conceived garden projects including the design and execution of Pritzker Park in Chicago, the Rethymnon Centre of Contemporary Art in Crete, and the Botanical Gardens in Curitiba, Brazil. Jones writes art criticism and lectures extensively.

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Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures, New York - Paint, Wall, Pictures: Something Always Follows Something Else She Wasn't Always a Statue

Louise Lawler

Paint, Wall, Pictures: Something Always Follows Something Else She Wasn't Always a Statue

Metro Pictures, New York

February 1 – March 15, 1997

Metro Pictures presents an exhibition by Louise Lawler. This is the gallery's inaugural exhibition at it's new 9,000 square foot location at 519 West 24th Street in Chelsea. The new location features two main exhibition rooms on the street level as well as two smaller gallery spaces, one on the main level and another on the second floor. This provides Metro Pictures with the opportunity to present smaller, informal exhibitions in addition to its regular program.

The centerpiece of Louise Lawler's show is a series of large-scale (roughly 48 x 60 inches) photographs taken at the gallery's new premises before and during renovation. The lushly abstract new images are reminiscent of Color Field paintings. These, as well as the other works exhibited, continue the artist's involvement with artworks, their presentation and treatment. Louise Lawler's photographs of artworks in museums, galleries, private homes, auction houses and storage areas track the art object through various situations and comment on the relationship between the object and the worlds of commerce and consumption, as well as the museums and collectors who own and present it. As always, Louise Lawler exhibits humor and an appreciative eye for the art depicted. 

The exhibition also includes Fixed Intervals, a collaboration with artist Allan McCollum which consist of series of brass plated steel "ding bats" which are placed (either on the wall or a pedestal) as a surrogate to mark the absence of a work of art. 

Louise Lawler is also show a work from 1995 consisting of 80 drinking glasses placed on shelves on the wall. Each glass is etched with the word "Word."

Louise Lawler has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Wadsworth Antheneum, Hartford (1984); The Museum of Modern Art, New York ("Projects," 1987); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1990); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1993); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (1994); Munich Kunstverein, Munich (1995). Louise Lawler collaborated with Douglas Crimp on the book On the Museum's Ruins published by MIT Press in 1993. The artist is based in New York City and has exhibited at Metro Pictures since 1982.

On The Museum's Ruins

Douglas Crimp with photographs by Louise Lawler

MIT Press, September 1993

368 pp., 7 in x 9.5 in

© The MIT Press

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Upadated 02.12.2021

Gary Simmons at Metro Pictures, New York

Gary Simmons

Metro Pictures, New York

March 9 – April 13, 1996

Gary Simmons exhibits chalkboard wall drawings at Metro Pictures. Using his trademark erasure technique, Gary Simmons will execute three large-scale chalk drawings directly on the black, chalkboard-surfaced gallery walls.

A companion project to Gary Simmons' 1995 installation at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, these works will expand on the artist's familiar vocabulary mined from cartoon imagery laden with racial stereotypes. Gary Simmons, who is himself an African-American, removes the central cartoon characters and focuses on details and architectural images from the same cartoons. By removing these figures, Simmons seeks to expand the work's meaning to larger, more open-ended concerns of class and social structure.

The installation combines the seductive beauty of Gary Simmons' previous chalk drawings with the power and scale of his well-known installations. During the course of the two-week drawing process Gary Simmons will first paint the gallery walls with a black, slate-like paint and then dust the walls with chalk applied by hand with the aid of an eraser. After projecting his computer-manipulated sketches directly on the walls and drawing them in white chalk, Simmons sets upon the drawings, again by hand, to smear and smudge them. The drawings become a manifestation of this arduous process and are infused with the intense physical presence of the artist.

The exhibition's two largest drawings depict familiar images of Americana: a garden gazebo (off-center and spinning out of control on a 53 foot wall), and a rollercoaster (twisting and stretched to 45 feet). Between the two, on the rear wall of the gallery, is an archetypal cartoon explosion. This cliché comic book image both comments on the fascination with violence in our culture and plays with the telling comic book notion that when things become too complicated they explode.

Gary Simmons has had one-person exhibitions at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, The Whitney Museum's Phillip Morris branch, White Columns in New York, and numerous galleries in the U.S. and Europe. His work was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the Whitney's "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art" and will be in "Defining the 90's: Consensus Making in New York, Los Angeles and Miami" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami and "Under Capricorn: Art in the Age of Globalization" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in June. He is doing a special project for the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in June of 1996. This is the artist's third exhibition with Metro Pictures.

Gary Simmons attended The School of Visual Arts in New York City and The California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, as well as The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Gary Simmons, who was born, lives and works in New York City, was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, Interarts Grant in 1990.

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