Gareth Nyandoro @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - MAWORKS

Gareth Nyandoro: MAWORKS

Van Doren Waxter, New York

Through August 6, 2021

GARETH NYANDORO

Kubatana Fence Makers (detail), 2021 

Ink on cut paper mounted on canvas

320 x 260 cm

© Gareth Nyandoro, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents an exhibition of new mixed media works by Zimbabwean artist GARETH NYANDORO. Titled MAWORKS, this is the artist’s second exhibition in New York, and features four large-scale pieces (measuring over 100 inches) mounted on canvas alongside recent small panel pieces. The artist is appreciated internationally for his vivid, sensitive compositions. 

The foundation of Gareth Nyandoro’s imagery remains anchored in the observation of daily life in Harare and its surroundings -its storefronts and markets, its street life and outskirts, which are all meaningful sites of labor, production, and commercial exchange. The artist pictures these essential scenes using sharp blades in his signature and painstaking ink and cut paper technique (‘kucheka-cheka’, after the Sona verb ‘to cut’), which are mounted on raw cut canvas; these unstretched works often spill out of their two-dimensional format onto the floor, which conveys openness and accessibility in connecting with the space of the viewer. 

Gareth Nyandoro’s distinctive practice – which negotiates printing, drawing, painting and installation techniques – is stimulated by the energy and liveliness of Harare’s commercial activity, and his sensitive portrayal of its workers and laborers. In these recent works, Gareth Nyandoro presents images of everyday scenes observed during the past year’s pandemic. He has titled the show MAWORKS – which is a colloquialism; in street language, it roughly translates to mean working or producing for the everyday, and making what you need to survive, and to be able to carry on.

In the panoramic work Kubatana Fence Makers (all works dated 2021), two workhands wearing safety-yellow garments are seen carefully clipping a metal wire fence; one figure is wearing a mask while the other has it pulled down to around his neck as he cuts with a pair of carefully held scissors. In another, titled Nyange, Gareth Nyandoro depicts a worker as he walks with a large shovel carried over his shoulder, next to a sign advertising river sand. The artist focuses on scenes of informal labor, in which people do what is necessary to earn and make a daily living, and to continue to work with grace and dignity - what the artist has described as “a series of artworks that tell a story of struggle and persistence to survive.”

GARETH NYANDORO (b. 1982, Bikita, Zimbabwe) lives in and works in Harare. His recent solo exhibitions include “RUWA” at Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2020) and “JUGGLING SKILLS” at SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2019). Gareth Nyandoro co-represented Zimbabwe at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and is the winner of the Emerging Voices Award in Art from the Financial Times / Oppenheimier Funds, London. The artist studied at Harare Polytechnic College and the Chinhoyi University of Technology (Zimbabwe). Gareth Nyandoro was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2014 - 2015) and SAM Art Projects, Paris (2016). Other previous solo exhibitions include: “Stalls of Fame” (2017) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; “Gareth Nyandoro”, Galerie 23, Stichting Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam (2015); “Weaving Life”, Gallery Delta, Harare (2013); and “Mutariri”, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2012). The artist is represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

www.vandorenwaxter.com

Volker Hüller @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - Birds

Volker Hüller: Birds

Van Doren Waxter, New York

May 6 – July 2, 2021

VOLKER HULLER

Black Moon, 2021

Oil on canvas, 52 x 42 in (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

© Volker Hüller, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents Birds, a solo exhibition of a brand-new series of oil on canvas paintings by Brooklyn-based, German artist VOLKER HULLER. The artist creates an immersive and color-saturated installation as a backdrop for the paintings on the 3rd floor of the gallery’s 1907 townhouse. The show presents a suite of recently completed works (all 2021) which Volker Hüller began in 2020, as the artist and his wife welcomed the birth of their first child during the middle of a pandemic. “Hope,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “is a thing with feathers / That perches in the soul” – and these images of birds allude to a contemplative and hopeful view of the world. The artist, noted for his intricately layered canvases characterized by their multidimensional surfaces and materiality, has painted several of these birds in the presence of the moon, and as pictures, they act as moody ciphers of nature, of travel, and of renewal. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition in New York.

In a practice that often reveals scenes from the artist’s personal life, as well as misadventure and mythology, Volker Hüller’s work always vacillates between representation and stylized abstraction; and in these new paintings, the bird image becomes a poetic – and even humorous – image for the artist to communicate ideas about contemplating ways of being and the act of painting. Akin to previous bodies of work by the artist, his loaded, compressed worlds are filled with symbols, the subconscious, and allusions to art and history.

As with most natural creatures, birds are all around us, appearing and disappearing; yet they are also messengers of spring and symbols of migration, landing gracefully, and perhaps perching awkwardly, before us after a long sojourn. Like the act of painting, they convey universal ideas about searching and looking, while also alluding to place and travel, such as the work titled Rockaway Beach, 2021. The light of a distinct sun or moon (seen here as orange, black, and blue orbs) helps to define the weather and the surrounding atmosphere, lushly painted with short, dappled strokes and delicate line work in the blue-tinged In the Still of the Night, 2021, in which a pair of raptors with sharp, pointed beaks sit prone as if on a high perch in the darkness. The birds in Volker Hüller’s new pictures help to locate the viewer – and painter - to stand in place to look out and imagine and picture a site beyond our current condition.

VOLKER HULLER was born in 1976 in Forchheim, Germany and currently works in NY, where he has lived in Brooklyn since 2014. Hüller currently has a solo exhibition at Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (Spring 2021) and has a forthcoming one at Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2022). The artist studied under the late Norbert Schwontkowski at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Past solo exhibitions include Timothy Taylor, London (2010, 2013); Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2009, 2012, 2017); 11R - Eleven Rivington, NY (2009, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2009, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2019); and group shows at Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London; the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg; and Weserburg Museum, Bremen. The artist’s work has been featured and reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters, among other publications. Hüller’swork is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the Israel Museum.

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

www.vandorenwaxter.com

John McLaughlin @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - Linocuts

John McLaughlin: Linocuts

Van Doren Waxter, New York

Through May 1, 2021

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 8, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm) 

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

John McLaughlin

Linocut - Title # 3, c. 1973

Only state, Linocut, 12 x 18 inches (30.5 x 45.7 cm)

© Estate of John McLaughlin, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents John McLaughlin: Linocuts, a special presentation of rare, intimately scaled geometric prints by the late modernist. A seminal figure in West Coast Abstraction, JOHN McLAUGHLIN (1898-1976) was a midcentury innovator of perception whose hard, clean edged paintings anticipated California art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including West Coast Minimalism and Light and Space.

A disciplined, self-taught artist admired among postwar Abstractionists and Minimalists for his precision and clarity of vision, John McLaughlin’s oeuvre is characterized by elegant, rectangular forms. His work evolved from an interest in Sesshu Toyo, a 15th Century Japanese artist and Zen monk, whose approach to ink painting introduced the concept of “emptiness” or the “marvelous void” into Japanese painting. “In McLaughlin’s work,” art critic and curator Michael Duncan wrote on the occasion of an acclaimed retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016), “the placement of two black forms on a white field becomes a metaphysical event.”

The eight linocuts were planned in the artist’s studio in Dana Point, Laguna Beach in his late 70s, a year prior to a solo show at The Whitney Museum of American Art (1974). These never before shown or reproduced richly textured works on paper are the result of a long-distance project conducted via postal mail.  The works were printed and cut at the French atelier of the legendary printer Hildago Arnéra, known for collaborating with Pablo Picasso. Each of the poignant works evince the artist’s interests in contemplation, silence, and nature.

An untitled linocut (all c. 1973), pictured, features a layering of two black vertical rectangular bars atop a bright expanse; while in another, also pictured, two black bands hover horizontally over a white form. In each, all measuring uniformly 18.1 x 11.9 inches, serene and solemn bars, blocks, and volumes bisect open, large fields, suggesting serenity and the natural world. The American art critic Phyllis Tuchman recently asserted that a green field in John McLaughlin’s paper constructions, also made in 1973, suggests “that such black and white forms exist in a landscape…the rest of the sheets literally traverse states of light and dark.” Likewise, the linocuts invoke the sensuous and the divine, a presence and a void.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN was an American abstract painter born in Sharon, MA in 1898 and died in Dana Point, CA in 1976. In 1935, John McLaughlin and his wife Florence Emerson (descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson) moved to Japan where they lived for three years. Upon their return in 1938, John McLaughlin established a business dealing Japanese prints. It was around this time that he decided to start painting, which was brought to a halt just a few years later with the start of the War. Fluent in Japanese, John McLaughlin was recruited as a translator by the Army during WWII. After the war, McLaughlin settled in Dana Point, California, where he started painting full time in 1946. Entirely self-taught, the artist continued to paint, with considerable success in his later career, until his death in 1976. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016-2017).

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com

Joshua Nathanson | Erin Jane Nelson @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC

Joshua Nathanson | Erin Jane Nelson 
Van Doren Waxter, New York
Through July 12, 2019

JOSHUA NATHANSON

Birth of Geometry, 2019

Oil on canvas

73 x 64 1/2 in (185.4 x 163.8 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles / Seoul

Van Doren Waxter presents a two-person exhibition of new works by JOSHUA NATHANSON and ERIN JANE NELSON, on view at 23 East 73rd Street.  The exhibition features oil paintings by Joshua Nathanson and ceramic sculptures as well as textiles by Erin Jane Nelson, both of whom deploy hybridity and humor as a lure and a tool for exploring complex personal, social, and ecological vulnerabilities.

Joshua Nathanson’s human-scaled paintings draw from diverse visual sources to bridge digital, physical, and psychological realms. In a multi-valent process of transcription across media, Nathanson uses iPad drawing apps, Photoshop, and inkjet printers to form digital studies of stream-of-consciousness sketches. These studies are then translated again, forming the basis for paintings on canvas aimed at extending the experience of viewing the vibrant studies on-screen. Nathanson uses handmade oil sticks and paint to achieve this effect, producing vivid palettes, lush compositions, and layered surfaces whose material origins are difficult to ascertain. His incorporation of both traditional and digital techniques embraces the promise and the anxiety of converging synthetic and natural realities; his paintings’ protagonists—anthropomorphized plants, fruits and vegetables—are disarming allegories for daily life in all its pleasure, banality, and uncertainty.

JOSHUA NATHANSON (b. 1976) received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. He has held solo exhibitions at Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Downs and Ross, New York, NY; Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy; Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan and at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Other venues which have recently hosted Nathanson’s work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Yokohama Museum, Yokohama, Japan; ARNDT, Singapore and 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, CA. Nathanson’s work has been written about in Frieze magazine and Artforum and is part of the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China. Nathanson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

ERIN JANE NELSON

The Water is Vast and Tart, 2018

Pigment print, shells, stickers, and resin on glazed stoneware

34 x 29 x 3 in (86.4 x 73.7 x 7.6 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Chapter, NY

Atlanta-based artist Erin Jane Nelson often works in series; artworks on view draw from photographs the artist took of sites with fraught cultural histories along coastal regions and barrier islands of the Southeast, which are rapidly changing and disappearing due to climate change. These photographs and others of her surroundings and lived experiences throughout her upbringing in the American south serve as starting points for the collaged elements in her sculptures. Drawing from vernacular southern craft tradition, Nelson suspends pigment prints and other found objects amidst layers of resin and glazed stoneware. The resulting wall-mounted ceramics suggest other-worldly souvenirs, documenting vanishing landscapes and proposing altered narratives for their conflicted legacies and futures.

ERIN JANE NELSON (b. 1989) received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2011. Her work has recently been exhibited in “Between the Waters” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and “Photography Today: Public Private Relations” at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Nelson’s solo exhibition Her Deepness is currently on view at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA. Recent solo exhibitions include Psychompompopolis at Document, Chicago, IL (2017); and Dylan at Hester, New York, NY (2015). Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Chicago Tribune, and Cultured Magazine, among others. The artist has contributed to publications including BURNAWAY, The Creative Independent, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Art Papers, and has curated exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary, and elsewhere. Nelson lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

VAN DOREN WAXTER
23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com

Brian Rochefort @ Van Doren Waxter, New York

Brian Rochefort: 2030
Van Doren Waxter, New York
Through February 16, 2019

BRIAN ROCHEFORT

Tulipe, 2018

Ceramic, Glaze, Glass Fragments 

18 x 17 x 13 inches (45.7 x 43.2 x 33 cm)

© Brian Rochefort, Courtesy Van Doren Waxter, New York

Van Doren Waxter presents an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist BRIAN ROCHEFORT, on view at 23 East 73rd Street. Titled 2030, this is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and features recent ceramic sculptures as well as a new group of wall-based works. Brian Rochefort’s arresting and highly activated glazed stoneware and glass works suggest forms or phenomena in the natural world; his new efforts highlight his technical experiments in color and texture revealing his progression towards a larger scale. Brian Rochefort’s works have been included in recent museum survey exhibitions such as From Funk to Punk: Left Coast Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY and Regarding George Ohr at Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL, where his work was shown alongside pioneering artists working in ceramics such as Ron Nagle, Ken Price, and Kathy Butterly – artists whom Brian Rochefort names as prominent influences in his own practice.

Brian Rochefort’s deep interest in nature and the environment continues to stimulate his evolving practice, inspiring him to play and further experiment with ceramic, glaze, and glass. The title for the exhibition – 2030 – refers to the year that a United Nations panel has stated is the final year by which humans can effectively combat extreme climate change. In the past 16 months, the artist has traveled twice to the Amazon rainforest, as well as the outer reaches of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru. These intense and fragile ecosystems encompass tropical rainforests, volcanic topography, and host myriads of natural creatures and aquatic life, which the artist carefully observes, studies, and takes photographs of.

In his new series of wall-based objects he experiments with sand-like texture and color gradients, which he mixes himself, evoking imprints made on washed over beach or riverbed.

The iridescence of tropical bird feathers, the crackling shells of rock formations, and the slippery surfaces of humid nature make their appearance in Rochefort’s series of ceramic ‘craters’ – vessel like formations covered in optically charged glazes and finishes, often with touches of molten glass which seem to be caught in mid-drip movement. Each work is built up of layers of mud and slip clay, which the artist repeatedly breaks and builds back meticulously over a period of time, and then fires, airbrushes, and glazes - over multiple firings, or as the artist enthuses, “as many glazes as possible until I can’t fire anymore.”  

Coral, measuring 18 x 16 x 12 inches, is a striking production of milky and opalescent pink, violet, and sky blue that evinces an intensely physical and tactile studio process and high skill in colorants and gradients. His remarkable fluency and delight in airbrushing was developed during a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Montana in the late 2000s when the artist was introduced to visiting technicians and colorists from DuPont. Likewise, Tulipe, with its oozing outer lip, is all over the result of the artist repeatedly “drying, cracking, and spraying” the mottled surface; in this case, the artist pushing the material not only in color to an otherwordly tropical green, but in scale—the work to date  is one of his largest creations.

BRIAN ROCHEFORT (b. 1985) was educated at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In January 2019, he participates in The Mistake Room artist residency and project in Guadalajara, Mexico. Rochefort recently had a solo exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Belgium. Recent group exhibitions include The Cabin, Los Angeles; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; and Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY.

VAN DOREN WAXTER
23 East 73rd Street  New York, NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com

Douglas Melini @ Van Doren Waxter, New York

Douglas Melini: Starry Sky
Van Doren Waxter, New York
Through January 12, 2019

Douglas Melini 

Starry Sky #7, 2018 

Oil and acrylic on canvas with artist’s frame 

20 x 22 ½ inches (50.8 x 57.2 cm) 

Courtesy of the artist and Van Doren Waxter, New York

Van Doren Waxter presents paintings by Douglas Melini as the inaugural exhibition in the gallery’s new gallery space at 23 East 73rd Street; this newly renovated public exhibition space is an expansion on the building’s 3rd floor, adjacent to the gallery’s private viewing room. Douglas Melini: Starry Sky is the artist’s third show with the gallery. It follows the artist’s solo institutional exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art, OR.

For this exhibition, Douglas Melini debuts a new series of paintings that merges his densely textured abstractions with the representation of a field of stars. In these chromatically charged works, pattern and saturated color become night skies, strewn and illuminated by stars. Formally rigorous, the canvases emerge from a meticulous collage process made entirely of paint; first layers of thin, nearly transparent acrylic are laid down in a lattice-like structure followed by gestural smears of oil impasto applied with a palette knife, or by hand. These thick tangles of paint become landscapes themselves transforming the work into a study of landscapes both within its materiality and its content. The paintings are then custom framed by the artist, presenting the works as deliberate objects.

Douglas Melini’s new Starry Sky paintings thoughtfully examine the abstract, pictorial, and conceptual nature of image making. In these paintings, he examines several modernist ideas about painting, including the use of the grid, the painterly surface and the painting’s objecthood. The artist also proposes ideas about light and space, both depicted and physical. The artist alludes to varied art historical references and inspirations, in particular the iconography of the night sky, including Italian frescoed ceilings depicting the heavens; saturated stained-glass windows which are illuminated from the back; the image and idea of a star as a symbol and pattern – often used as decoration and background throughout art history; and to gauge and mark the condition of night. 

Van Doren Waxter
23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com