James Welling @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles - Archaeology

James Welling: Archaeology
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Online Exhibition - Through June 20, 2020

JAMES WELLING

Erechtheion. Western facade. Sacred olive tree, karyatids 

and old temple of Athena Polias in foreground, 2019.

© James Welling. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents Archaeology, an exclusive online exhibition of new photographs by James Welling. The works in this exhibition reflect James Welling's long-standing interest in the history and technological processes of the photographic medium, propelling forth a decades long career driven by relentless experimentation. Through a series of distinct printing processes, Welling employs his findings to create images that revive the ancient world.

In describing the genesis of this project, James Welling said:

"I first photographed Greek and Roman antiquities on a fateful visit to the Metropolitan Museum in 2018. The most haunting of the photographs I took that day was of a defaced bust of Julia Mamaea, a third-century Syrian noblewoman, the mother and regent of Emperor Alexander Severus. Her face and head had been violently damaged but her eyes still seemed to shine and she appeared to address me directly. 

I had been researching early photographic processes for a number of years and I decided to print 'Julia Mamaea' using a modified nineteenth-century printing process, collotype, in which I substituted colored dye for lithographic ink. This technique produced aqueous tints ranging from turquoise to lavender to salmon. I printed over 200 'Julia Mamaeas' from the same negative and due to variables of the process, and the fact that I printed some of them backwards, each image was different. The cumulative effect of these multiple Julias was uncanny. It seemed that her clothing, her gaze, even her gender were fluid, changing dramatically from image to image. 

Last summer I visited Athens, where I became fascinated by Greek architecture and sculpture. I took scores of photographs while I was there. When I returned to my studio I adjusted the digital files so that the photographs would mimic black and white nineteenth-century film. The earliest film was not sensitive to blue light and skies were rendered a uniform white while red and yellow tones read darker. In doing this I felt that I was turning photography into a veritable time machine. 

I began printing the Athens work as photolithographs. As I ran the plates through my press, I noticed that the richly inked surfaces were more interesting in themselves than the impressions I was getting. So, I began to think of the inked plate as the final work. Initially I printed the Athens work in black and white but I soon began working in color. Like many photographers I came to the medium through books, and these lithographic plates that I am exhibiting recall the intense black and white, and strange color, photogravures found in my first photography books. 

'Cento' is what I call this part of Archaeology. A cento is a poem made up of quotations and I think of these photographs of Athenian architecture, sculptures, and objects as articulate fragments of the material culture of Greece. 

For 'The Earth, the Temple and the Gods,' the third component of Archaeology, I used multilayered digital filters to color photographs of architecture and sculpture. In antiquity, statues and significant buildings were commonly painted using intense hues and covered with gold leaf that emphasized textile, hair and skin. Modern approximations of these objects are jarring; viewers still accustomed to the blanched surfaces of neoclassic art are repelled by the intense polychromy. I was not interested in recovering the precise colors of antiquity with 'The Earth, the Temple and the Gods'; my hope is that the 'unnatural' colors in which I clothe these works, will seep into the ancient stone and take on a life of their own. 

What have I learned in making this work? The brute violence evident on Julia Mamaea’s head and the horrific disfigurements on almost every Greek and Roman sculpture brought me face to face with the history of intolerance that nearly obliterated the science, literature, and philosophy of antiquity. With Archaeology, I am hoping to restore the spirit and vivacity of the ancient world in all its beauty and complexity." 

James Welling
New York City, 2020

JAMES WELLING (b. 1951) studied Fine Art at Carnegie-Mellon University and Modern Dance at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974. Over the past 40 years he has lived in New York and Los Angeles, where he was a professor in the Department of Art and Area Head of Photography at the University of California Los Angeles from 1995 – 2016. Since 2012 he has been a Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Visual Arts Program at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.

Surveys of James Welling’s work have been held at museums throughout the United States and Europe including the George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2020); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2017); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2016); Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford (2015); Art Institute of Chicago (2014-2015); Fotomuseum Winterthur (2013-2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013-2014); Cincinnati Art Museum (2013); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2000); The Baltimore Museum of Art (2000); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998-1999); Kunstmuseum Luzern (1998); and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (1992).

James Welling’s work has also been included in major museum exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013, 2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012-2013, 1988); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (2012); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012, 2003-2004); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002, 1987); Kunsthalle Bern (1997, 1990); Denver Art Museum (1994); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987).

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
February 27 – May 2, 2020

CATHERINE OPIE

Untitled #3 (Swamps), 2019

Pigment print, 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4 cm)

© Catherine Opie. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects debuts a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Opie. Titled Rhetorical Landscapes, the exhibition presents a series of animated political collages and landscape photographs. This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at the gallery.

For over thirty years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles' freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. 

Rhetorical Landscapes continues Catherine Opie’s examination of the current American political landscape and the moving image, a visual technology that she utilized in her first film, The Modernist. In the center of the gallery eight monitors form a closed circle. Life size in height and resembling oversized iPhones, each monitor features a screen that displays an animated film Opie calls “political collages.” Comprised of numerous magazine cuttings culled by Opie over the course of Trump’s reign, each collage represents themes articulated in the news cycle embodying contemporary political issues spanning topical subjects like nationalism, climate change, immigration, gun control, and the diminishment of natural resources. Arranged on hand-painted blue grids that reference modernism with their simplistic structural form, each animation develops over time, slowly building and integrating images until it forms a coherent collage. Although their subject matter communicates a sense of urgency, each collage is imbued with humor that references the political satire of Monty Python, whose films were a sense of inspiration for the artist.

Over the course of her career, Catherine Opie has traveled extensively across the American continent documenting its diverse communities of people and the landscapes they inhabit. Encircling the monitors, nine framed photographs are installed along the gallery walls. In juxtaposition to the digital worlds created in the political collages, this new series of photographs turns Catherine Opie’s camera to the verdant wilds of the American South, depicting a sort of pause and longing for this particular place in the American imagination. A play on words, the swamps evoke the political metaphor manipulated by Trump, yet they also remain one of the last undeveloped ecosystems facing the effects of climate change and human development. Catherine Opie’s swamps image the vulnerability of this contested land awaiting interference, presenting unadulterated views of seemingly uninhabitable terrain that are virtually devoid of human presence.

CATHERINE OPIE was born in Sandusky, OH in 1961 and received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She holds an endowed position in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has been a professor of photography since 2001.

Her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. Selected solo exhibitions include Keeping an Eye on the World, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); 700 Nimes Road, MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2016); Portraits, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Portraits and Landscapes, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2015); Empty and Full, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Figure and Landscape, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); American Photographer, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006); and Skyways and Icehouses, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); among others.

Catherine Opie has received numerous awards, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2016); Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award (2013); Women’s Caucus for Art: President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999); and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997).

Work by the artist is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; among others.

Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

Liz Larner @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles - As Below, So Above

Liz Larner: As Below, So Above
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
May 17 – June 22, 2019

LIZ LARNER

Firestone, 2019. 

Ceramic and glaze

21 1/2 x 38 x 32 inches (54.6 x 96.5 x 81.3 cm)

(c) Liz Larner, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents As Below, So Above, the seventh solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liz Larner. On view will be a selection of new works that demonstrate her ongoing examination into sculpture, painting, drawing, and ceramics. The environment – the personal and the entrenched – are set together in these artworks that reach for an understanding of vulnerability through what is and has been considered low and directed, made capital of, and endangered.

Illusion and reality are intricately intertwined in Liz Larner’s work. At first glance Firestone appears as a large enigmatic composition of stone placed in the center of the gallery. Upon closer inspection the corporeal structure of the three dimensional form reveals its construction through numerous ceramic pieces in the shape of tessellated hematite crystals. Referencing the art historical trope of the Odalisque, this is an eco-feminist interpretation of the supine figure and the hexagonal crystal always found with iron.  

Liz Larner’s interest in fragility and nature in the anthropocene is further manifest in Reef, an open ended, cay-shaped large format sculpture that snakes along the gallery floor. Free formed around and with deposits of stone and mineral, the work appears to float just above or slightly below the surface of the imaginary water that surrounds it. The illusory perception of its totality engages the viewer to circumambulate its contours and navigate the constantly shifting movements of light and color imbued on its craggy surfaces. Completing the axiological triad of low lying sculptures in this exhibition are a group of multi-scaled anthropomorphic floor works, Animal Vegetable, spreading out and over like a herd. 

Hovering on opposing walls, two seemingly identical ceramic works both titled Horizon, feature bold swathes of blue glaze separating telluric registers from their empyrean skycapes. A wall mounted ceramic slab sculpture provides a recent example of an ongoing series that considers the poetic qualities of geological formations. The palette of its richly polychromatic surface is achieved through the application of epoxy mixed with pigment and arrived at in reference to a Pierre Bonnard self-portrait from 1889. Environmental factors implicit in the construction of the piece determine its final material state, and are physically rendered in the work, resulting in fissures, ruptures, and breaks along its textured expanse. 

Further references to cultural history appear in a graphite drawing on paper of two women reclining on opposing armchairs, depicting a domestic interior scene from Marguerite Duras’s film Nathalie Granger (1972). While another ceramic wall work Volitant Solids’ color and form reference a graphic from Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film Red Desert (1964), set during the rapid industrialization of post war Italy.

LIZ LARNER (b. 1960) received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Liz Larner’s work will be the subject of a solo museum exhibition at SculptureCenter in the fall of 2020, which will travel to The Contemporary Austin and the Walker Art Center. A European solo presentation of her work will be held at the Kunsthalle Zurich in the summer of 2020. She will also be featured in The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (May 19, 2019 – January 13, 2020). Selected solo museum exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2015); Two or Three or Something: Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner, Kunsthaus Graz, (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001-02); MAK, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1998); and Kunsthalle Basel (1997). Group exhibitions include Damage Control, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2013-14); Blues for Smoke, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012-13); Under Destruction, Museum Tinguely, Basel (2010-11); and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Seville (2006-07). She was featured in two Whitney Biennials (2006, 1989). 

She has been the recipient of numerous awards including Mutina’s This Is Not a Prize (2018); the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2014); Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2002); Anonymous Was a Woman (2000); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999). 

Work by the artist is held in prominent international collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Collecion Jumex, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

REGEN PROJECTS

6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038

www.regenprojects.com

Elliott Hundley @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles - Clearing

Elliott Hundley: Clearing
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
May 17 - June 22, 2019

ELLIOTT HUNDLEY

Clearing II (detail), 2019

© Elliott Hundley, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents Clearing, an exhibition of new work by Elliott Hundley. Forgoing an explicit narrative structure, Elliott Hundley furthers his investigation into the language and material process of abstract painting, collage, and sculpture. This is his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Clearing, referring to a spatial opening or a meditative clearing of the mind, marks a decisive development in Elliott Hundley’s practice. Known for his wide use of media and quotidian objects, the works in the exhibition privilege time and artistic practice over control and intention. Culling over 20 years of archival material from the studio, Elliott Hundley embraces the degradation and resuscitation of imagery throughout his practice to create constellations of new meaning imbued with his personal sensibility and methodology via collage and painting. 

There are five panel works in the exhibition. Clearing III features four rows of automatic drawings, photographed and reprinted at different stages of completion in chronological order. Fluid gesture and rhythmic process give rise to form, perceptible through a yielding of narrative restraint in favor of materiality. The dichotomy of the rigid lines and supple drawings create a fixed emotional tension – visceral and captivating – yet meditative. Corporeal fragments from his photographs, found mechanical renderings, and other signifiers punctuate the surface of the work transforming it into a poetic landscape that is representative of Elliott Hundley’s distinct visual language. The panels’ lyrical compositions demonstrate Elliott Hundley’s expansive knowledge of history, literature, and theater thereby coalescing new relationships and oppositions.   

Three benches with accompanying sculptures will anchor the gallery space. Finished in bronze, Elliott Hundley renders an aura of permanence and artificiality in the objects. Accrued patina left behind by handling leaves an ephemeral gesture, reiterating the body as an instrument of performance. 

“Under Hundley’s meticulously improvisational direction, the formal and pictographic elements collide, combine into molecular configurations of meaning, disintegrate, and recombine, in a process that is analogous to the way our churning human consciousness constantly makes sense out of the flood of phenomena with which it’s confronted.” Doug Harvey, Cut Up or Shut Up: The Unspeakable Narratives of Elliott Hundley, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae, 2011

In addition to his artistic practice, Elliott Hundley is the inaugural curator of Open House, a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles that features works drawn from the permanent collection. The exhibition furthers his exploration into the visual and material language of collage and is on view through September 16. 

Elliott Hundley (b. 1975) received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1997) and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2005). He lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Selected solo exhibitions include The Bacchae, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2011); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2012); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006). He has been featured in numerous group shows, including the 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017-2018); A Journey That Wasn’t, The Broad, Los Angeles (2018-2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017-2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); and the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2015); among others.

Elliott Hundley is a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship (2019). 

Work by the artist is held in prominent museum collections, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.Hundley is a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship (2019). 

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

Glenn Ligon @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Glenn Ligon: Untitled (America)/Debris Field/Synecdoche/Notes for a Poem on the Third World
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
January 12 – February 17, 2019

GLENN LIGON

Notes for a Poem on the Third World (chapter one), 2018. 

Neon and paint, 84 x 155 inches (213.4 x 393.7 cm)

© Glenn Ligon, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents Untitled (America)/Debris Field/Synecdoche/Notes for a Poem on the Third World, an exhibition of new work by Glenn Ligon. For this exhibition, Glenn Ligon presents a new series of silkscreen paintings based on abstracted letter forms and several neon installations. This marks the artist’s sixth solo presentation at the gallery.

Glenn Ligon’s wide-ranging multimedia art practice encompasses painting, neon, photography, sculpture, print, installation, and video. Perhaps best known for his monochromatic and highly textured text paintings that draw their content from American history, popular culture, and literary works by writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Genet, among others, his work explores issues of history, language, and cultural identity.

Titled Debris Field, the silkscreen paintings are made using a new process for the artist. Rather than generating from a specific text, Glenn Ligon focuses on letter forms, using images of his own etchings and stencil-and-ink drawings to create large silkscreens, which are then printed in black etching ink on red canvases, some with additional passages of hand-stenciling. Each screen is overlapped to create a dense pattern of letter-based shapes, resulting in an improvisatory, cumulative painting technique.

Over the years, Glenn Ligon has created neon sculptures that illuminate various phrases or words in charged and animated ways. Notes for a Poem on the Third World, Ligon’s first figurative sculpture, is comprised of a large neon based on a tracing of the artist's hands that takes its inspiration from an unrealized film project by Pier Paolo Pasolini that was to be shot in India, Africa, the Arab countries, Latin America, and the "black ghettoes of the United States." Pasolini claimed that it was the "discovery of the elsewhere" that drove his identification with the struggles of non-Western peoples and people on the margins of the West. Glenn Ligon's neon, with its ambiguous gesture of greeting, protest, or surrender, is the first of a series of works inspired by Pasolini’s project.

Also featured in the exhibition is Untitled (America), 2018, a black-painted red neon in which the word “America” is displayed upside down, and Synecdoche (For Byron Kim), a neon showing the date of the next presidential election that will be lit on that day.

GLENN LIGON (b. 1960) lives and works in New York. His solo exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, London (2014-15); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); The Power Plant, Toronto (2005); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001); Kunstverein, Munich (2001); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1998). His work was included in Documenta XI (2002); in two Whitney Biennials (1991, 1993); and in All the World’s Futures at the 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2015). Recent curatorial projects include Blue Black at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2017) and Encounters and Collisions, done in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015).

Glenn Ligon has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Archives of American Art Medal (2017); the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award (2016); the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2009); the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2006); a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003); and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997).

Recent monographs and publications on his work include Debris Field/ Notes for a Poem on the Third World/ Soleil Nègre (Galerie Chantal Crousel/Is—Land édition, 2018); Untitled (I am a Man) (Afterall Books, 2018); Blue Black (Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2017);  A People on the Cover (Ridinghouse, 2015); Encounters and Collisions (Nottingham Contemporary and Tate, 2015); Come Out (Ridinghouse, 2014); Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011); Yourself in the World: Selected Writings and Interviews (Yale University Press, 2011). 

Glenn Ligon’s work is held in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Broad, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; among others.

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

Dan Graham @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Dan Graham: New Works By A Small-Town Boy 
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
July 7 – August 18, 2018

Regen Projects presents an exhibition of works by Dan Graham. This marks his second solo presentation at the gallery.

For over fifty years, Dan Graham’s expansive multidisciplinary practice has encompassed video, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, and a prolific body of writing on religion, music, art, architecture, garden design, and popular culture. Forming a central theoretical thread throughout the course of his career, his work has examined the function and role of architecture in contemporary society, and how it frames and reflects public life. Since the 1970s he has produced what he refers to as pavilions, hybrid constructions that are part architecture and part sculpture. Inspired by ornamental buildings found in 17th and 18th century European pleasure gardens, Dan Graham’s sculptural pavilions are comprised of simple geometric forms and constructed using materials associated with corporate architecture like metal, aluminum, transparent and/or two-way mirrored glass, and sometimes juxtaposed with natural elements like hedges. Functioning as built environments, the pavilions create unusual optical and physical experiences for the viewer – blurring the lines between public and private space – and making apparent that our material surroundings structure the very core of our societies by determining the form of our vision and sight.

A selection of photographs relating to his seminal magazine artwork, Homes for America (1966), and taken by Dan Graham during a 2006 visit to his native suburban New Jersey, feature images of diverse architectural styles punctuated with lawns, topiaries, and shrubs. Displayed in a sequenced formation on the gallery walls, each image highlights Dan Graham’s interest in serial structures, topology, and systems of information as evident in the peculiar color ranges, materials, and repetitive geometries of the suburban American landscape. A series of architectural models and video works provide further context for his ongoing exploration of the built world.

Dan Graham (b. 1942) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009). His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com