Artist Armen Eloyan @ Timothy Taylor, New York - "Green Grass" Exhibition

Armen Eloyan: Green Grass 

Timothy Taylor, New York

14 March — 20 April 2024

ARMEN ELOYAN 

Green Grass 5 (detail), 2023 

Oil on linen, 53 ⅛ × 59 ¼ in. (134.9 × 150.5 cm) 

© Armen Eloyan

Timothy Taylor presents Green Grass, an exhibition of new paintings by Armen Eloyan in New York. This presentation, the artist’s eighth with the gallery, features eight canvases that exemplify his integration of wry, cartoon-related imagery and anarchic abstraction. 

Armen Eloyan’s recent paintings teem with explosive energy; each mark recalls the vigorous physicality of the artist’s process. Eloyan works intuitively and fiercely, generating dense fields of abstraction characterized by collisions and contaminations of gesture and form. His engagement with color and nuanced use of a cartoon illustrator’s line trace back from Willem de Kooning to Arshile Gorky, whose work likewise played with pastiche, imitation, and an authentic exploration of the terms of painting. Across the works on view in Green Grass are suggestions of imagery—in particular, the head of a dog that simultaneously recalls Disney’s Pluto, George Herriman’s comics, and the rabbit-duck illusion used in psychology to query aspects of perception and interpretation. This head recurs, often in profile; its eyes—stimulated, vertical ovals—are mirrored by the creature’s chiclet teeth and by various echoing loop forms that suggest flowers in places and phalluses in others. Another motif threads through the paintings: outstretched arms that seem to gesture wildly. Armen Eloyan builds up a visual language through repetition and intuitive mark-making, warping and obscuring his figuration with volatile pictorial events. 

Verdant green hues connect the canvases on view, seemingly citing the chaotic compositions in nature. In some canvases, luminous chartreuse evokes manicured grass, and in others, umbral tangles of mulchy green reads like thick woodland. Armen Eloyan is interested in the way formal elements respond to each other, the way a dog head, for example, will signify differently when placed among varied environments. With these heavily worked canvases, he decontextualizes familiar figures, offering up a satirical yet impassioned reflection on questions of influence, appropriation, and presentation.

ARMEN ELOYAN

Armen Eloyan (b. 1966, Yerevan, Armenia) is a Zurich-based figurative painter and sculptor whose absurdist work hints at sinister narratives. Eloyan’s practice is informed by his childhood in Soviet controlled Armenia and by years working as a studio assistant to the renowned Armenian animator Robert Sahakyants. This early exposure to animation would leave its mark on the artist’s vernacular, and Armen Eloyan is now best known for heavily impastoed paintings populated by cartoon figures lifted from comics and other popular illustrations. The artist’s instantly recognizable figures also make appearances in cast bronze sculptures. “Cartoons parody the culture; they reflect it in a way that’s entertaining but also profound,” Armen Eloyan has said of his lifelong fascination. “How humans behave like animals sometimes—how ridiculous politics can be.” 

Armen Eloyan has mounted solo exhibitions internationally, at such venues as Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; Kunstparterre, Munich; Passerelle Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brest, France; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. His work resides in the collections of Frac des Pays de la Loire; Kunstparterre; M HKA, Antwerp; AMC Collection, Amsterdam; Zhiguan Museum of Fine Art, Beijing; Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; Deutsche Bank Collection, London; Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy; University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine; Olbricht Collection, Cologne; By Art Matters, Hangzhou, China; among others.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR

74 Leonard Street, New York, NY 10013 

www.timothytaylor.com

Bridget Riley, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London - New Paintings, Wall Paintings and Gouaches

Bridget Riley 

New Paintings, Wall Paintings and Gouaches 

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 

7 November - 23 December 2009 

Timothy Taylor Gallery and Karsten Schubert present the second exhibition in the gallery by the internationally acclaimed painter Bridget Riley. Working specifically to the cool and elegant proportions of the gallery space, Bridget Riley premieres two specially created wall paintings, as well as new paintings and gouaches.

Bridget Riley’s art is one of continual discovery and exploration, of testing the limits and of uncovering new challenges: “You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter: ‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes” (Work, Bridget Riley, Flashback, Arts Council catalogue 2009).

After the success of Bridget Riley’s colourful stripe paintings of the 1980s, the artist sought new challenges and a way to move the eye in different ways over the canvas. The result of her subsequent investigations with collage and drawing was the creation of a lively new form, a patch of colour similar to a brush mark, which was free of any associations with the square, the stripe, or other recognisable forms. This particular shape, refined and developed in recent years, offers the opportunity for an incredible melding of form and colour. Bridget Riley uses its inherent curves to create works of great energy and movement, building up complex layers of interlocking vertical and diagonal planes. In her most recent paintings, these dynamic, layered forms interrupt and threaten to break out from the picture plane – overhanging the frieze-like frame, they jostle and strain to escape, demonstrating Riley’s consummate creation of a ‘supple plastic space’ within the fictive realm of painting.

Bridget Riley’s work is a compelling and complex study of how form and colour are interwoven, and the complexities and joys to be had from that co-mingling. Commenting in Frieze magazine on Riley’s major exhibition in Paris last year, Michael Bracewell observed that over the past 50 years, Riley has been engaged in “an epic excursion into the consciousness of time, place and memory, refined from an infinity of elements into a universal and symphonic text, open to all”. As the artist herself observed, “Pure perception – untrammelled perception – is surprising: startling, exciting, powerful and beautiful” (Bridget Riley in conversation with Lynne Cooke, 2005).

Bridget Riley’s lifelong achievement and contribution to the history of painting is widely recognized. This year, she was awarded the prestigious Kaiser Ring of the City of Goslar with previous recipients including Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Joseph Beuys and Jenny Holzer amongst others. She is also the first subject in a new series of retrospective exhibitions entitled Flashback. The show opened at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool this September celebrating significant early purchases by The Arts Council Collection and will also travel to three additional venues in the UK.

Bridget Riley was born in London in 1931. She studied at Goldsmiths College, 1949 – 1952 and the Royal College of Art, 1952 – 1955. In 1969, she was the first woman to win the International Prize for Painting whilst representing Britain at the 34th Venice Biennale. Bridget Riley was made a CBE in 1974, and in 1998 was awarded the Order of the Companion of Honour. Major exhibitions have included the Hayward Gallery, 1970 and 1992/94; a British Council touring retrospective in the USA, Australia and Japan, 1979; and retrospective exhibitions at Tate Britain, 2003; Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, Australia, 2005; City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, 2005; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2008.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY

15 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EX

www.timothytaylorgallery.com

Jean-Marc Bustamante at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Jean-Marc Bustamante

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

6 September - 6 October 2006

Timothy Taylor Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Jean-Marc Bustamante. For his third solo exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, Jean-Marc Bustamante exhibits a series of jewel-like, sculptural plexiglass objects which were first shown earlier this year in the ground-breaking exhibition -beautifuldays- at KUB Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Jean-Marc Bustamante has also created ‘Contraposto II’, a previously unseen sculpture of galvanized steel with ink on plexiglass.

“The elements cut out of the material also form impediments or passages for the obstructed gaze that collides…with printing inks on Perspex, that throws light back at us like a delicious pain. The paradox of the reflecting materials, the sand-blasted steel, perspexy-sexy with its transparency and curved highlights.” Jean-Marc Bustamante

A series of ‘Trophées’ form a major part of the exhibition. Operating simultaneously as painting and relief sculpture, free-hand forms are cut out of steel plates, opening up to reveal a brilliant surface of underlying coloured Perspex, creating deep pools of reflection. Diverse materials are used to capture light to be either reflected or absorbed. Further works titled ‘Panorama’ and ‘Perfect Dream’, utilise the same method of silkscreen printed on plexiglass to achieve bold, abstract yet familiar images. ‘Panorama Okinawa’, (2005), evokes a tropical landscape and ‘Panorama Lion’, (2005) suggests the mane of a lion. Surfaces vacillate between being opaque and transparent. Colours entice, yet remain intangible.

In the late 1970’s Jean-Marc Bustamante changed the perception of photography in French art with his monumental ‘Tableaux’ blurring the boundary between painting and photography. Following his 1983-87 collaboration with Bernard Bazile, his practice became yet more complex with an exploration of the relationship between photography and sculpture, and between photography and painting. When chosen to represent France at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Jean-Marc Bustamante explored these three media in more depth with his Sérigraphiés on plexiglass, juxtaposed with photographs and sculpture. For this solo exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in 2006, the artist continues to push the boundaries between the three disciplines which fascinate him and challenge the viewer.

This exhibition is part of ‘Paris Calling’, a season of Contemporary art from France initiated by the French Embassy and the Afaa/ Culturesfrance. 

TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY

24 Dering Street, London W1S 1AN

www.timothytaylorgallery.com