Nabil Nahas at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE

Nabil Nahas 
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai 
Through January 9, 2014 

NABIL NAHAS brings his inimitable sense of scale, opulence, and sheer sumptousness back to Dubai this November with a second solo exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi. Focusing this time on his three-dimensional paintings, as tactile as they are optical, the exhibition leads on from his previous show at the gallery, which comprised his starfish paintings and landscapes. The forthcoming solo presents Nahas’ two other areas of production- Fractals, his best-known series, and his Galactic paintings.

Nabil Nahas’ heavily encrusted Fractals are built up of ground pumice and acrylic and finished in psychedelic tones. The name Fractals refers to Benoit Mandelbrot ‘s theory of fractal geometry, formulated in the mid-1970s, and describes random events in nature deviating from the ideal Euclidean geometry and rough or fragmented geometric shapes which can be split into parts, each of which is at least approximately a reduced size copy of the whole. Mandelbrot said that things typically considered to be "rough", a "mess" or "chaotic", like clouds or shorelines, actually had a "degree of order. Thus Nahas’ Fractals represent a kind of asymmetrical equilibrium, a relationship between order and disorder that is a recurrent theme in his work.

Ostensibly abstract at first sight, imperceptibly Nabil Nahas’ paintings sidestep the parameters of abstract art. His paintings are literal- his images are always taken from something and often infer movement and refer to a moment in time.

Varying considerably in size and colour, his Fractals evoke a variety of scales and moods. The smallest of them are like windows into an underwater world of coral reefs, whilst the larger works overpower the viewer like the encrusted surface of a leviathan. Subtle variations in tone and colour ripple across their mottled surfaces like the dappled light of tropical waters along the seabed. Their surfaces imitate the encrustations seen in the natural world. The extraordinary Kind of Blue, a large-scale canvas in deep blue is composed of layer upon layer of protruding biomorphic shapes fringed with bright blue edges.

Whilst Nabil Nahas sees his Fractal paintings as representations of the phenomenal world on a microcosmic scale, his Galactic paintings engage with it on more of a scale that seems more macrocosmic. Rather than the all-over effect of the Fractals, the Galactic paintings are both three-dimensional and graphic, with fluid forms and sinuous lines moving around their surfaces. The lines and shapes on the one hand suggest the interactions and repulsions between heavenly bodies, and on the other they also resemble amoebic life forms. This series incorporates paint chips, a by-product of making Nahas’ larger paintings. The vividly coloured concentric rings are detritus recycled from the studio floor- they are ready-made objects of the artist’s own making, revealing the previously unseen process through which he makes his larger paintings- the built-up under-surfaces of his acrylic-pumice mix.  Scale is important in Nahas’ universe, but always ambiguous- what is grandly architectural is also microscopic. This is especially apparent in Inka Dinka Doo, the largest work in the series, which form the centre piece of the exhibition.

This series incorporates paint chips, a by-product of making Nahas’ larger paintings. The vividly coloured concentric rings are detritus recycled from the studio floor- they are ready-made objects of the artist’s own making, revealing the previously unseen process through which he makes his larger paintings- the built-up under-surfaces of his acrylic-pumice mix.

NABIL NAHAS is Lebanon's most renowned artist, having established himself before the current heightened interest in contemporary art of the Middle East, first in New York art circles as a master of colour, texture and atmosphere. Although thoroughly schooled in Western abstract painting, Nahas takes his inspiration from a diverse range of influences, most significantly nature, and occasionally Islamic art, in particular its abstract geometric and chromatic qualities.

His works can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Vorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey,  the Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the Flint Institute of Art, Michigan, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Mathaf, Doha and the Michigan Museum of Art UMMA. In July 2013 he was awarded the honour of the National Order of the Cedar, for services to Lebanese culture.

Lawrie Shabibi 
Al Serkal Avenue, unit 21, Al Quoz
Dubai, UAE
www.lawrieshabibi.com

Amir H. Fallah, The Third Line, Dubai

Amir H. Fallah, The Collected 
The Third Line, Dubai 
Through January 23, 2014 

The Third Line presents AMIR H. FALLAH with his third solo show in Dubai, The Collected, which investigates the complex relationship between patronage and art making, collector and artist, and the dynamics of the creative process in today’s art world. All the paintings in the show are pre-sold, commissioned portraits, where the artist exercised complete artistic authority to manipulate the image according to his own interpretation. The process involved initial collaboration with the commissioner, a performative component in the staging, and the element of surprise in the reveal of the works to the patrons for the first time during the show preview. 

In his new body of work, Amir H. Fallah explores classical and renaissance portraiture traditions employing a critical approach by subverting the mechanisms of control. Art history boasts of countless examples of commissioned portraiture, where images conceal the patron’s physical identities and instead feature material possessions as a sign of stature and wealth, and solely the patron determined the final depiction of their identity. In this case, the artist exerts control over aesthetic and conceptual decisions, with the process relying heavily on trust and a powerful agreement to hand over creative authority back to the artist. The paintings will be revealed to the patrons for the first time at the exhibition opening.

Amir H. Fallah visited collectors’ residences in Dubai more than a year ago and staged the portraits by gathering various material belongings from within their homes as markers of their identity, particularly gravitating toward those mundane objects that seem loaded with sentimental meaning - a worn afghan, an idiosyncratic plant, a figurine or running shoes. After carefully assembling the composition through collaborative efforts with the subject, he photographed the setting and used the image as a starting point. The works further changed in his studio when transferred onto the canvas and evolved through his personal interventions and stylized interpretation, telling the patrons’ personal histories through his eyes.

The surfaces are layered with collage and paint and the imagery often reflects the artist’s own cultural alliances: references to Persian miniatures may appear in the form of careful borders along the edge of a canvas and blankets may start to resemble the long veils associated with Eastern cultures. Images are embellished and details introduced or omitted based on extemporaneous decisions, and the initial source photographs are completely obscured. Sometimes, subjects appear in dramatically neoclassical poses, lounging across a wooden table or perched on a pedestal. Faces and other obvious markers are concealed and the only identification is through personal elements that surround them. For example The Triangle In The Shattered Square includes a skateboard, a bottle of spray paint, a digital camera, and geometrical patterns picked from ceramic tiles at the collectors residence.

Amir H. Fallah approaches his current paintings as an investigative and analytical historian. Aside from unraveling a different perspective to art historical portraiture traditions and the dynamics of modern day art collection and art making, he also reflects upon concerns of identity and representation that are central to his practice. 

The Third Line
Street 6, Al Quoz 3, Dubai, UAE
Gallery's website: www.thethirdline.com

Michael Sailstorfer, Carbon 12, Dubai

Michael Sailstorfer, Try to reach the goal without touching the walls 
Carbon 12, Dubai 
Through January 7, 2014

This is the kind of ride you take Saturday afternoon, weary from the night before, where everything seems to be going wrong. The video you’re recording is upside down (Welttour, 2003), the steering wheel isn’t turning the way it should (Lenkrad, 2012)… this journey seems like one giant endless maze-like track (Maze, 2012-13). The absurdity is laughable. But at least your partner-in-crime is entertaining you with song (Welttour).

Michael Sailstorfer’s wabi-sabi (1) aesthetic often deals with space, motion and how we function in the world. He is resourceful: he utilizes the day-to-day, decrepit, oft-overlooked functional objects as his materials. He is also naughty: he decontextualizes these materials, reassigning them physical qualities that simultaneously incite wonderment and fear while keeping the palette of decay in the shiny new-ness of his incarnations. Sailstorfer uses his mind through his hands (a tendency since his childhood), deconstructing, tinkering, reassembling with a youthful curiosity, “what happens if…” The results are playful, pure in form… but functionally useless. Yet their wabi-sabi nature does not take away from the works, rather, it reinforces the poetry within the purity (albeit mischievousness) of his latest exhibition, Try to reach the goal without touching the walls.

This may be a game with Sailstorfer egging us on, but this is serious play.

Michael Sailstorfer is making his debut solo exhibition in Dubai exclusively at Carbon 12 Dubai.

Berlin-based German artist (b. 1979) active since 2001. Michael Sailstorfer is represented by multiple international galleries and exhibits in the Americas and heavily across Europe, with works in private and public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), and S.M.A.K. (Gent).

(1) Japanese aesthetic philosophy of beauty with the acceptance that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect in the natural cycle of growth, decay and death.

Text by Katrina Kufer

Upcoming exhibition at Carbon 12: Rui Chafes & Ralf Ziervogel, Black Rainbow, January 11 - March 10, 2014

Carbon 12 Dubai
Unit D37, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1
Dubai, UAE
Gallery's website: http://carbon12dubai.com

Hassan Sharif, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

Hassan Sharif, Approaching Entropy 
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai 
Through 2 January, 2014 

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai, presents the work of Emirati artist Hassan Sharif in a solo exhibition entitled Approaching Entropy.

HASSAN SHARIF (b.1951, United Arab Emirates) came of age during a formative period in the history of the United Arab Emirates. As he matured as an artist in the 1980s and 1990s he developed an oeuvre that moved beyond the limits of discipline or singular approach, encompassing Performances, Experiments, Objects and Semi-Systems. Since the late 1970s, he has maintained a practice as a cultural producer and facilitator, moving between roles as artist, educator, critic, and mentor to contemporary artists in the United Arab Emirates.

Approaching Entropy considers how two seemingly opposed trajectories, Objects and Semi- Systems, can exist within a single philosophical approach to art. While Objects are constructed via impulse, improvisation and widely available materials, Semi-Systems are governed by numerical equations that are open to chance and error and whose outcomes are not predetermined.

Hassan Sharif constructs his objects from mass-produced materials made up of rubber, plastic and cloth that he twists and ties together into assemblages and piles. Once he becomes bored or too comfortable with a particular technique he will abandon the project and consider it complete. By contrast his Semi- systems comprise works on paper that include line drawings and color studies and interpret, among other things, the artist’s relationship to time and space.

One significant new work, Cotton, combines video with an object for the first time to explicitly share his process. In the eight-minute video the artist grasps clumps of raw cotton, dips each handful into a bowl of glue, and then methodically builds a pile on his lap. His attentiveness to the task at hand masks the utter fecklessness of the project, which simply introduces a binding agent to turn one pile into another slightly modified pile. At the conclusion of this video Hassan Sharif slowly looks up and casts a satisfied glance at the viewer.

This gesture typifies an element rarely discussed in his work, the affective give and take between the artist, his materials, and his conceptual tools. The artist’s experience of pleasure and boredom govern his creative process and drive him towards a depiction of what an object is and what it could be. What is possible is not yet defined.

It invites viewers into an aspect of Hassan Sharif’s process, the leap from the beginning to the end state of an Object or Semi-System. Entropy holds order and disorder in tension with one another and acts as a measure of the latter and an indicator of the former. A system of random aleatory elements will reach an unsteady balance in much the same way that 

Hassan Sharif’s piles of matter begin to take form as art objects. This exhibition knits together the economies of labor embedded in Sharif’s materials, and reveals systems that are set up to fail, yet sustain a potential for completion and a capacity to perpetuate indefinitely.

Hassan Sharif’s gestures, whether in Semi-Systems or Objects, create works that capture the barely- contained potentiality of their constitutive parts. It reveals that each piece within these two trajectories toggle between containment and eruption depending on the calculus embedded in that work. More often than not a single work will hold both in hand, albeit uneasily, allowing us to continue our inquiry and participation in Hassan Sharif’s life work.

What emerges in this show are striking new works that represent significant evolutions in Sharif's obsessive processes.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Street 8 - Alserkal Avenue, Unit 17 - Al Quoz 1
Dubai, UAE
Gallery's website: http://ivde.net

William Pope.L @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

William Pope.L, Colored Waiting Room
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
September 12 - October 26, 2013

Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents Colored Waiting Room, the third solo exhibition of WILLIAM POPE.L at the gallery and his second in the Chelsea space.  This show’s incorporation of drawing, painting, sculpture, and projections display the artist’s versatility and use of various media in his practice. 

The show’s title, Colored Waiting Room, interpolates an excess, an aberration of intentional language which seeks to qualify division by defining identity.  The show’s title evokes a very particular historical moment, specifically American racial segregation against blacks in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries.  However, a literal examination of the phrase opens the space to ‘nosier’, more flexible readings of color, words and proximity in the context of art, science and culture.

In this exhibition, William Pope.L addresses a lack within language with a playfulness which is both enigmatic and astute.  As evident in his Skin Set drawings, Pope.L collaborates with society’s use of color terminology to characterize notions such as ontology, gender, race and social value.  The current exhibition includes a large group of Skin Set works as well as two new, large-scale diptychs with a ‘cousin’ focus. In addition, through sound and olfactory pieces, the viewer is invited to contemplate the exhibition through an almost synesthetic dialogue with color. 

By creating an exhibition space that is both structurally and ideologically a puzzle, Pope.L seeks to reconstruct the viewer via his or her own boundaries. 

WILLIAM POPE.L was born in 1955 in New Jersey.  He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.  He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Kunsthalle Wien.  The MIT Press published a monograph to accompany The Friendliest Black Artist in America, his 2002-2004 traveling survey exhibition.  His work has been exhibited and performed at Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The New Museum in New York and the Renaissance Society in Chicago.  Recent exhibitions and performances include Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; Flux This! With Pope.L and Special Guests at Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; and The Long White Cloud, Te Tuhi Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th st, New York, NY 10001
www.miandn.com

Artist Yu Fan, Amy Li Gallery, Beijing

Yu Fan: Floating Wall, Moving Sound 
Amy Li Gallery, Beijing
Curator: Liu Libin
Through September 3, 2013

Amy Li Gallery, Beijing, presents YU FAN Floating Wall, Moving Sound. As Yu Fan's first solo exhibition in Amy Li Gallery, it showcases five sculpture works including two very recent works Black Cats and Sitting Girls, which represent Yu Fan's new exploration of sculpture language. The exhibition is curated by Liu Libin - PHD of China Central Academy of Fine Art, well known art critic. 

The main difference of “Sculpture” as an art form from other artistic expressions is that: the sculptor reflects and creates on the basis of “physical form”, and the public sees it and perceives it on that same basis. The reality and fiction are two extremities of the “physical form”, and behind that lies the fascination of Yu Fan for extremities. If we consider “volume” as a straight line, reality and void are each at one end of that line. Take one point on that line, apply a rotation, and the two extremities are bound in a circle. Several “straight lines” then make a round surface, and that is three dimensional Yu Fan. These many lines could be internal questions about the art of sculpture, They could also be clues to Yu Fan's life, like career, ideals, etc. Each of these lines has two ends, the combination of which forms the borderline of the round surface. Yu Fan has a special predilection for this, and he touches it lightly, carefully. This “light and careful touch” is related to the atmosphere of vigor or pounding, sensitivity or morbidity that transcends his works.

Relief sculptures represent a large proportion of Yu Fan's works, and in this exhibition four works have been selected: Arthur in uniform, Leifeng Pagoda and Lily, Black Cats and Sitting girls. One can say that the first two still exudes the familiar characteristic of Yu Fan – namely freshness and purity, Black Cats and Sitting girls materialize Yu Fan's perspective, Black Cats shows a cat on a pedestal, and fixes seven positions of the cat falling to the ground. Chinese people believe that black cats can chase away evil spirits and sent them down South, making generations safe. But the fall of Yu Fan's black cat, its fear of falling, makes it seem closer to the Western interpretation. Sitting girls is composed by 16 girls’ relief sculptures. These girls are fashionably dressed, and are all in a reserved but desiring position, seemingly eager for something, to a certain extent, however keeping it in unspoken modesty. This again reminds me of Yu Fan “light and careful touch” towards the circumference. There are another two sculptures in this exhibition: Crane No.1 and Crane No.2. One is looking down, the other up, which corresponds precisely to what I was mentioning above, the reality and the void.

Place Yu Fan's works in an exhibition hall, and not only the relief sculptures will float, so will the walls; not only will you hear the sounds of nature, very clearly, these sounds will begin to move.

YU FAN is one of the most important artists leading the trend of chinese sulpture art. He was born in 1966 in Qingdao (Shandong province of China)，graduated from the Sculpture Department of CAFA, currently works and lives in Beijing as vice director and professor of CAFA's Sculpture Department. His works have participated in numerous important exhibitions and art fairs in China and other countries, many of them have been collected by important art institutions.

AMY LI GALLERY - 摘自
54 Caochangdi (old airport road, Caochangdi Art District), Chaoyang District
BEIJING 100015, CHINA
Gallery's website: www.amyligallery.com

Dennis Lee Mitchell, Alexey Titarenko, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore MD

Dennis Lee Mitchell: Smoke Drawings + Alexey Titarenko: Venice
C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, MD
Through July 6, 2013

On view at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, USA,  two concurrent solo exhibitions: ALEXEY TITARENKO: Venice, and DENNIS LEE MITCHELL: Smoke Drawings. 

DENNIS LEE MITCHELL

Untitled, 2010 

Smoke on paper, 30 x 30 in.

Image courtesy C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore

Smoke Drawings is DENNIS LEE MITCHELL’s first solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery. In his current body of work, Mitchell uses smoke as a drawing tool, delicately applying carbon from a lit torch, depositing the soot from the smoke onto paper. While the resulting images evoke human forms or body parts, his imagery remains abstract, striking a balance between the representational and the ephemeral. For the artist, “carbon is both essential for life and the essence of the ephemeral. In my work, it is the result of heat transforming materials. The smoke becomes a vehicle to capture the elusive moment where chance and idea meet…. The images become metaphor for the human condition.” (Cassidy, Victor M., Dennis Lee Mitchell, Olivia Petrides and Lisa Sambor. Dennis Lee Mitchell, Olivia Petrides, Lisa Sambor. Ukranian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, 2012)

DENNIS LEE MITCHELL earned his MFA in Ceramics from Arizona State University at Tempe in 1971, and his MA and BA from Fort Hays Kansas State University in 1969 and 1968, respectively. He has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including the Meijer Sculpture Garden in Michigan, the Dubuque Museum in Iowa, the 5th World Contemporary Ceramic Biennale in Seoul, South Korea, and recently at the Ukrainian Institute for Modern Art in Chicago. His artwork resides in many public collections including the Illinois State Art Museum in Chicago, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, the Daum Museum of Fine Arts in Missouri, and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 

ALEXEY TITARENKO

Gondolas, 2001 

Edition 2/10, silver gelatin print, 16 x 16 in.

Image courtesy C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore

Venice brings ALEXEY TITARENKO's recent photographic achievements of one of Europe’s most iconic settings to Baltimore at C. Grimaldis Gallery. Alexey Titarenko’s photographs of Venice were created from 2001-2008 and employ the unique stylistic approach found in his iconic work of St. Petersburg, Russia and Havana, Cuba. Evocative of ghosts in the landscape, blurs of tourists and the diminishing residential community heavily populate instantly recognizable shots of Plaza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, and the ubiquitous Venetian canals. The resulting effect is a feeling of timelessness and familiarity, enhanced by the use of photographic film shot through a medium-format Hasselbad camera and traditionally printed as silver gelatin prints. 

ALEXEY TITARENKO has received numerous awards from institutions such as the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, Soros Center for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the National Audiovisual Centre in Dudelange, Luxembourg. He has participated in many international festivals, biennales, and projects and has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. His works are in the collections of major international museums including the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman house in Rochester, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts

C. GRIMALDIS GALLERY
523 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201, USA
www.cgrimaldisgallery.com

Golnaz Fathi, The Third Line, Dubai: Falling Leaves

Golnaz Fathi, Falling Leaves
The Third Line gallery, Dubai, UAE
January 22 - March 7, 2013

The Iranian artist GOLNAZ FATHI returns to The Third Line gallery in Dubai with a new body of work Falling Leaves. Using traditional Iranian calligraphy and the epic poem Shahnameh by Persian poet Ferdowsi as a point of departure, Golnaz Fathi interprets the work through a contemporary lens that breathes new life into an ancient practice and story.

GOLNAZ FATHI

Untitled 4, 2012

Mixed Media on Canvas, 150 x 200 cm

Courtesy Golnaz Fathi and The Third Line, Dubai

A trained calligrapher, Golnaz Fathi has the ability to skillfully transform known language into form and composition. Shifting from the stringent rules of the calligraphic discipline, she soon found artistic solace in a new form of expression in her paintings: an imaginary language deeply rooted in Persian tradition while simultaneously hinting at a social renaissance.

This new series revolves around the seminal Iranian text of the Shahnameh as its central theme. The Shahnameh or Shah-nama (Book of Kings) is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies.

The work represented branches out from her usual approach, incorporating instead figurative elements that were inspired from a lithographic illustration of the poem. This distinct departure from her original text based exploration demonstrates Fathi’s inner visual dialogue and interpretation of the poem. The artist relates to the book themes of futile wars as still relevant today in her native Iran, and in the Middle East in general – confirming the notion of history repeating itself.

GOLNAZ FATHI

The Iranian artist Golnaz Fathi has exhibited in a number of international shows, including at The Art of Writing, Art Forum of Wiesbaden, Germany (2011); Transvangarde, Contemporary Art from Around the World, October Gallery, London, UK (2011); Ride Like the Wind, Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2010) and participated in the International Woman Artists’ Biennial, South Korea (2009). Golnaz Fathi received the Young Global Leader 2011 award and her works are housed in the collections of Brighton & Hove Museum, England; Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar; Asian Civilization’s Museum, Singapore; The British Museum, London; Museum of Islamic Art, Malaysia; and Farjam Collection, Dubai. Golnaz Fathi currently lives and works in Tehran, Iran.

THE THIRD LINE
Al Quoz 3, Dubai, UAE
The Third Line gallery's website: www.thethirdline.com

Eithne Jordan at Rubicon Gallery and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

Eithne Jordan, En Route, Works on Paper

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 

Through 8 December 2012

Eithne Jordan, Street
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 
Through 21 December 2012

Just over twenty new gouache on paper paintings by irish artist Eithne Jordan is on view at Rubicon Gallery in Dublin in an exhibition entitled En Route ('On the road' in french). The paintings are uniformly encased in carefully constructed lucite/acrylic boxes, like small TV screens on pause or a glimpsed view through a car window. Individual paintings have subtle gradations of tone and hue, in this they are evocative of Giorgio Morandi’s reduced and deliberate still-life works, yet we have to assume that Jordan had much less control over her curiously quiet city compositions. The flatness of form and distance inferred in her work are suggestive of Alex Katz’ contradictory bold planes of colour and distinctive painted forms. Eithne Jordan’s compositional balance and measured brush strokes produces considered, familiar but unspecific, urban environments.

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Car Park III, 2011

Gouache on Paper, 18 x 24 cm

© Eithne Jordan. Courtesy Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

Eithne Jordan starts outdoors in her direct environs, taking countless photographs often while commuting to or from the studio and always advancing slowly on foot or bicycle. She deliberately takes incidental, unrefined, arbitrary photos - their imperfections are a valuable attribute in her work – a device she uses as a method to create a distance between what is real and how it can be manipulated and edited. The few photographs she selects as source material for paintings offer a roughness and a fragment of reality that Eithne Jordan enhances in her gouaches, as she adapts elements of the configured scenes to suit her own purposes. The detailed gouache paintings are intimate in scale and draw the viewer in, introducing a human perspective, as her works feature no figures, and are largely devoid of human presence with the occasional exception of passing traffic.    

In her major Royal Hibernian Academy -RHA- exhibition, Street [November 15 - December 21, 2012], the artist Eithne Jordan shows large-scale paintings on linen and canvas. These paintings are developed, without exception, from gouache predecessors, creating a further buffer in her re-drawn representations of reality. In replicating scenes she has produced on a small-scale, Jordan takes on new technical and compositional challenges, many details are frequently and deliberately omitted in the transition from small to larger-scale works and areas which are flat planes on a small scale become vast abstract blocks of colour. En Route, at Rubicon Gallery, features those very specific gouache images that Eithne Jordan chose to paint in oil for her Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition and, since these two exhibitions run concurrently for a time, viewers have an opportunity to see part of this artist’s working process.


A catalogue was published by the Royal Hibernian Academy for the exhibition Eithne Jordan: Street with foreword by the curator Patrick T. Murphy and essays by James Merrigan and Colm Tóibín

EITHNE JORDAN

Eithne Jordan, Street 

RHA Exhibition Catalogue, 2012

Courtesy of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

EITHNE JORDAN was born in Dublin and lives and works in Dublin and the South of France. She studied in the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and then at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Solo exhibitions have included, Small Worlds at the Mac, Belfast and the RHA, Dublin, Street Stills, Assab One, Milan, Night in the City, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, The DOCK, Carrick-on-Shannon and Galway Arts Centre, Galway.

Rubicon Gallery, Dublin 2, Ireland

www.rubicongallery.ie

Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
www.rhagallery.ie

Tom Climent at BlueLeaf Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Tom Climent, Final State
BlueLeaf Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
Through 13 december 2012

Irish artist Tom Climent’s most recent work is on view at Dublin's BlueLeaf Gallery. Most recent Tom Climent's paintings tends to focus on the creation of space, investigating the boundaries between abstraction and representation as a means of conveying this, exploring the dematerialised qualities that one does not actually see in reality and using spatial structures as a vehicle to make this quality solid and physical.

The perception of space is a complex phenomenon; we have not simply a mental apprehension of space but an experience of living space. The creation of space through perspective indicates a fixed point of view; a lived space contains a remembrance of past space and a longing for future spaces. The postion of the viewer is always shifting.

Tom Climent’s practice of art to date has been as a painter and one of his interests has been in how art addresses the body in space. For him a painting could become a window connecting an inside with an outside. In his work the devices of perspective and more abstract methods of reduction can create a pictorial surface which allows our bodily world in.

Tom Climent's initial enquiry was focused around spatial constructs and how they might provide a structured space for our existence. Taking a basic structure as an analogy for our place in the world, he started to create very rudimentary spatial structures; a fundamental shape or vessel that could contain a human presence. People organise space so that it meets their needs and supports their social interations. The space buildings create have an important part in how we live our lives. A body is a lived body and as such the spaces it inhabits are lived spaces.

From this original idea Tom Climent's paintings have become more intricate and complex in structure. As traces of memories and feelings accumulate and overlap on the canvas, construction and deconstruction become active tools in the creation of his paintings. His work reminds us of how our spatial ability becomes spatial knowledge as we navigate our world and with this knowledge we create a place for ourselves. Our expression of this place inheres in the kinds of structures we create for inhabitation. A building is a container - for ourselves.  Is this space then, our most basic root in the world; a footprint of our mode of being here? 

Previous solo shows of TOM CLIMENT works include Between Chance and Rhyme at The Hunt Museum, New Paintings at The Fenton Gallery, Pure at The Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dust at Garter Lane Arts Centre, Hansels House at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, A Light Enters The Land at BlueLeaf Gallery, Dancing Parade at Triskel Arts Centre, Ashlar at The Alley Theatre Arts Centre, Harvester House at The South Tipperary Arts Centre and more recently his MA by Research exhibition at The Wandeford Quay Gallery.

TOM CLIMENT is a recipient of the Tony O’Malley award and Victor Treacey award. The artist work is in the collections of  The Central Bank, The National Treasury Management Agency, University College Cork, AIB Bank, The National Self-Portrait Collection, NCB Stockbrokers, The Cork Opera House, Cork City Council , The Office of Public Works, Cork Institute of Technology & Private Collections in Ireland, UK,USA, Spain & Canada.

Ciara Gibbons, Director
Lorna Sweeney, Gallery Manager

BlueLeaf Gallery
Whitaker Court, Whitaker Square
Dublin - Ireland
www.blueleafgallery.com 

Helen Pashgian: Columns and Wall Sculptures at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills CA

Helen Pashgian: Columns & Wall Sculptures 

Ace Gallery Beverly Hills CA

Through January 2012

Helen Pashgian

Columns & Wall Sculptures, 2011 - Installation View 

Photo Courtesy Ace Gallery Beverly Hills 

While meticulously constructed, the artwork of HELEN PASHGIAN shows no trace of the artist’s hand at work; instead, it concentrates on the final impression creating a tension between visual and cognitive perception. The artist’s intimate, small in scale works are enigmatic studies of light and color. Her larger pieces seem to defy their own creation in their intricate and minimal molding as elliptical volumes of light. A slow read is encouraged from the viewer, as one gains partial visual access without finding the origin of the image. While using light and color as exploratory materials, Helen Pashgian has created ethereal works from  industrial materials for her exhibition at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills. As stated by James Turrell:

“Helen Pashgian is a pioneer of the Los Angeles ‘Light and Space’ movement… [She] had the ironic stance of working in such a light drenched arena while maintaining the position of being an underground artist… [Her] efforts are now known.” —James Turell, Foreword. Helen Pashgian: Working in Light, Claremont, CA, Pomona College Museum of Art, 2010. 

Helen Pashgian, amid other artists working in Los Angeles in the late sixties such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, DeWain Valentine, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, and Peter Alexander, has investigated the properties of light in solid form for close to fifty years. Though Pashgian’s work may vary greatly in scale, regardless of size, her sculptures remain pristine and mysterious.

Helen Pashgian has recently created a series of eight-foot tall freestanding columns that take the form of vertical double-ellipses. Every column acts as conjoined twins, which elliptically fall in and out of each other. There is no end nor beginning, rather an envelopment of space and all that inhabit it. By making these sculptures large-scale, Pashgian has created a multitude of angles with which to play with light. The columns at times are just pure, self-supporting, luminescent color, in others Helen Pashgian has placed varying elements into the columns that change as viewers engage them from different approaches. The elements inside, whether they are a flat bar, metallic cylinder, or untraceable color, might appear to be an armature, but as each differs, no solid conclusions can be drawn. Mysterious as the construction is, Helen Pashgian has created tactile color with inner light sources emanating from the sculptures. 

Similar to her columns, some of the wall pieces have varying elements contained within; however, unlike her columns, Pashgian’s wall works appear to float. It isn’t immediately apparent how they are affixed to the wall. The enclosed elements not only appear to be shadows, but also cast shadows from within the pieces. As Kathleen Stuart Howe put it: 

“These interior elements at one moment capture a burst of light, then, as one moves around the sculptures, become solid forms that seem to push against the diaphanous surface… only to subside and dissolve into a ghostly presence.” —Kathleen Stewart Howe, Helen Pashgian: Working in Light, op. cit.

In contrast to her larger works, Pashgian’s small, twelve-inch squares are filled with intriguing contradictions: each conveys a sense of movement despite being fixed, each is small in size yet implies scale, each is predominately black yet colors come forth, and each is flat yet sculptural in nature. She takes what could be from a viewfinder, and frames it with a square, making for an intimate dynamic experience. There is a strong sense of movement within these smaller works –  a blurring effect, trails of light following larger sources – but at the same time there is an uncanny stillness, as if she has trapped light in a frame. Light may be as old as time, yet Helen Pashgian has found a way to reinvent how we look at it, taking a relatively small space and rendering it vast and expansive. In slight relief, she has layered her boxes, condensing luminance and giving the impression of threedimensions. Even though focused lighting may enhance the pieces, she has found a way to make colors glow in a natural light. 

Helen Pashgian does not reveal how her works come to fruition; instead, she leaves the viewer with what is there. Be they matte or so shiny that they glow, there is an obsession with texture and craft so meticulous that it is apparent that the artist has planned every vantage point. 

Born in 1934, Helen Pashgian currently lives and works in Pasadena, CA. She is currently included in the following exhibitions: The Getty Center, Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, and the related Pacific Standard Time exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,  Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.

Ace Gallery Beverly Hills' Release

Art First gallery, London, Projects: Compendium

Art First Projects: Compendium
Art First, London
Through 4 February, 2012

A Survey of small, significant works by artists from the gallery exhibition programme during it's first year in Eastcastle Street new gallery in London

Joni Brenner
Eileen Cooper
Helena Goldwater
Alex Knell
Rasha Kahil
Kevin Laycock
Liane Lang
Simon Lewty
Will Maclean
Jack Milroy
Simon Morley
Karel Nel
Rebecca Partridge
David Price
Joe Watling
Jenny Wiener

Art First will also be exhibiting on stand 4 at the London Art Fair, 18 January - 22 January 2012

ART FIRST
21 Eastcastle Street
LONDON W1W 8DD
www.artfirst.co.uk

L MD galerie : Silent Significance - Expo collective - Group Show

Exposition : Silent Significance 
L MD Galerie, Paris 
Jusqu'au 28 mai 2011 

English version below

Artistes : Noriko Ambe (née en 1967), Claudia Angelmaier (1972), Marisa Baumgartner (1980), Anne-Lise Broyer (1975), Florian Fouché (1983), Morgane Fourey (1984), Hae-Sun Hwang (1969), Manuela Marques (1958), Aiko Miyanaga (1974), Charwei Tsai (1980), Motoi Yamamoto (1966), Xavier Zimmermann (1966) 

HAE-SUN HWANG

Weigth of the Wind, 2006

Video, 37'12

Edition 5/5

Courtesy of the artist and L MD Galerie, Paris

L MD galerie, en collaboration avec Béatrice Andrieux, présente jusqu'au 28 mai l’exposition collective Silent significance qui réunit douze artistes internationaux. Epure des formes, apparente sérénité, sobriété des techniques utilisées, les travaux sélectionnés questionnent les multiples significations et interprétations de l’œuvre d’art dans son rapport au temps : celui de la création, du contexte historique, de la mise en exposition, de la marchandisation et de la réception.

Hae-Sun Hwang travaille sur la persistance des images et leur pouvoir évocateur, à l’image de la vidéo Weigth of the wind (2006). Noriko Ambe et Motoi Yamamoto dessinent inlassablement des cartographies mystérieuses qui invitent à suivre les pleins et les vides d’un parcours sans fin. La sculpture d’Aiko Miyanaga et la vidéo de Charwei Tsai mettent en lumière la notion d’éphémère à travers la transformation de la matière. Claudia Angelmaier, Marisa Baumgartner et Anne-Lise Broyer s’approprient des images et les réinterprètent tout en interrogeant la transmission de l’œuvre à travers le temps. Les sculptures de Florian Fouché et de Morgane Fourey jouent avec la perception du spectateur, le laissant imaginer ce qui ne se voit pas au premier regard. Enfin, les photographies de Manuela Marques et de Xavier Zimmermann proposent une nouvelle vision d’intérieurs ou de paysages nocturnes, qui provoque un sentiment de tension et de sourde inquiétude.

Silent Significance - Group show

L MD galerie, Paris - France

Through 28th May 2011

In collaboration with Béatrice Andrieux, L MD galerie present Silent Significance, a group show with twelve international artists. The featured pieces question the multiple meanings and interpretations of the work of art in time: during the creation, within the historical context, during the exhibition, its sale and interpretation by the audience.

Hae-Sun Hwang work on images' persistence and their evocative dimension as he shows us in the video titled Weigth of the wind (2006). Noriko Ambe and Motoi Yamamoto draw mysterious maps which invite to follow the full and empty spaces of an endless route. The sculpture of Aiko Miyanaga and the video of Charwei Tsai bring to light the ephemerality through the transformation of the material. Claudia Angelmaier, Marisa Baumgartner and Anne-Lise Broyer appropriate and divert images while questioning the transmission of the work of art through time. The sculptures of Florian Fouché and Morgane Fourey play with the reception of the viewer, letting him imagine what is not visible at the first glance. Finally, the photographs of Manuela Marques and Xavier Zimmermann show interiors or night-landscapes which reveal dark and disquieting stories.

L MD Galerie 
56 rue Charlot
75003 Paris - France

www.lmd-art.com

David McDermott and Peter McGough, Of Beauty and Being

OF BEAUTY AND BEING, an exhibition of new work by the collaborative artists DAVID MCDERMOTT & PETER MCGOUH is on view at CHEIM & READ, NYC, through February 12, 2011. Their previous show with Cheim & Read was in 2008.

David McDermott and Peter McGough (born 1952 and 1958), are known for their creative appropriation of different historical eras and styles. Faithful to the subjects and techniques of their chosen period, the duo's multi-disciplinary work questions the nature of perception, identity, gender and narrative. Memory and nostalgia play strong roles, subtly subverted by an aura of artificiality and the artists' sly reconstruction of the past.

McDermott & McGough's recent work has looked to cultural tableaus of 1950s and 60s Americana, culling imagery from advertisements, movies and movie stars, comic books and paperback novels. Their current exhibition continues this theme, referencing imagery from 1940s - early 1950s advertisements, geared mostly towards women and a carefully coiffed, artificial world of beauty and desire. In their focus on the archetypal, mid-century American woman, McDermott & McGough construct narrative portraits, still lifes, evocative nudes and cultural and art historical references (one piece, an obvious take on Roy Lichtenstein's Girl with Ball, 1961, is titled Before the Fall, 1955, 2010). 

The images, all photographs, are printed in a tricolor carbon photographic process, a technique perfected and made famous by the photographer Paul Outerbridge in the 1930s and 40s, and used for color advertisements in magazines. Outerbridge, a successful and innovative commercial photographer, as well as an artist, created a scandal with his color photographs of female nudes. McDermott & McGough reference the saturated hues and precise staging of Outerbridge's compositions, as well as his subjects (as in My Song of Love, 1955, 2010 and Haunts My Reverie, 1955, 2010). They also find inspiration in the commercial work of Man Ray and Edward Steichen. The inherent tension between the photographers' commercial and creative careers interest McDermott & McGough. Their advertisements were a direct result of the approach and aesthetic concerns of their artistic output; art then emulated the advertisements. Conceptually, they orient themselves as "advertisers" of a re-imagined past - an idealistic landscape at home in the American subconscious. 

Representing "the struggle of what beauty presents to the individual and the power that it commands," McDermott & McGough recognize the distance between the remote, ultimately "unreal" look of their objectified subject and the contemporary viewer. In Always Reminding Me That We're Apart,1955, 2010, a purple-gloved woman looks at the viewer through her fractured reflection in a compact mirror, reducing her image to a diamond-shaped wedge and further enforcing her remove from the audience - a condition strongly supported by the work's title. The search for one's own identity and existence is modeled by fantasies and daydreams. Desire for beauty is reliant on a pose.

Cheim & Read
547 W 25 NY
USA

www.cheimread.com

Ghada Amer: 100 Words of Love at Cheim & Read, NYC

Ghada Amer: 100 Words of Love 

Cheim & Read, New York
Through February 12, 2011

A new sculpture by GHADA AMER, entitled 100 Words of Love, 2010 is on view at Cheim & Read gallery's dome room. The piece is comprised of one hundred Arabic words for love. Calligraphic inter-twining of letters creates an open, lace-like lattice form around a hollow interior. This work, like other works by the artist, reference domesticity, society, beauty and abstraction, and, consequently, the stereotypical gender roles found within these themes. Ghada Amer also addresses the Western media's portrayal of Arabic society as aggressive and associated with war. Having lived and worked in New York for over twenty years, Ghada Amer straddles both cultures - the Middle East of her youth and modern day America. The tension of this dichotomy sustains her awareness of how we see others and ourselves, and has been a long-standing influence on her work.

Ghada Amer's work is also on view simultaneously at MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.

Upcoming exhibition at Cheim & Read: Pat Steir: Winter Paintings, 02-17 > 03-26-2011

Cheim & Read
547 W 25 NYC USA
www.cheimread.com

01-07 | 02-12

Irvine Contemporary, Gallery artists exhibition of new works titled Saturnalia is a festival of new art to celebrate the New Year

Exhibition: Saturnalia
New Work by Gallery Artists
Irvine Contemporary, Washington DC
January 8 - February 12, 2011

The exhibition includes works by Teo González, Melissa Ichiuji, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Akemi Maegawa, Alexa Meade, Susana Raab, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick.

ALEXA MEADE

Alexa Meade, Double Take, 2010. 

C-print, artist's installation. 20 x 16 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

ALEXA MEADE's new photographs extend her strategy of defining a new intersecting point for multiple genres and techniques, merging photography, performance, painting, installation, and portraiture. Her images are at once records of a performance, a portrait session in a constructed set or installation, and a reflection on three- and two-dimensional representational spaces. Meade calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium. Her final photographic images read like portraits, but with the codes for fiction, illusion, truth, the index of the real, the imaginary, and pictorial representation confounded, conflated, and exposed. Alexa Meade lives and works in Washington, DC. 

SUSANA RAAB

Susana Raab, Cholita 1, 2010. 

C-print. 24 x 22 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

SUSANA RAAB presents recent work from her evolving photography series, Cholita, which were shot in Peru. Raab was born in Peru, and though she moved to the US at three, Peru has always fascinated her as a land of mixed identities and cultural adaptations. "Cholo" originally referred to people from black and native parents, and is used today in masculine and feminine forms for those of mixed race and/or lower social class. Cholo/chola are also part of US urban slang for Latino/Latina gang styles, usually with deprecation. Raab has re-appropriated the term for her own personal reflection on Peruvian and Latin American identities in a series of highly original and direct portraits that only a photographer with her background, access, and identification with her subjects could produce. Susana Raab lives and works in Washington, DC. 

TEO GONZALES

Teo González, Cloudy Sky, New York, 2010

Acrylic on panel. 12 x 12 in. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

TEO GONZALES's new paintings challenge the boundaries of organic and geometric form through a process of abstraction from the colors of skies over specific city locations. González's new series of works are based on photographs of skies, which he uses to map a color palette in Photoshop. He then selects a restricted set of colors, matches them to pigments, and composes a painting of cells and drops of paint that snake and weave across the surface. These new paintings display González's signature method of elegant challenges to the formal categories and genres of painting, this time drawing in a reference to the world outside painting and fusing computer pixels and organic form. González has looped around the issues in abstraction, and now discovered a way to make paintings like organic stained-glass windows back-lit by a city sky. Teo González lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

MELISSA ICHIUJI

Melissa Ichiuji, Nature's Promise, 2010. 

Fabric, wood, nylon, found objects, mixed media. 

Dimensions variable. Detail. 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

MELISSA ICHIUJI's new work expands on her approach to materials, identities, domestic space, and sexualities. Her sculptures and installations are performative works and staged fantasies about innocence and perversion, power and seduction, sexuality and the domestic space, and often explore the boundaries of childhood innocence and adult self-consciousness and repression. Each sculpture is sewn and assembled from many materials, including nylon, fabric, leather, bones, fur, hair, and found objects. Advancing the Surrealist tradition in the works of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois, Ichiuji's works are at once playful, humorous, and subversive. With humor and playful irony, they provide perfect three-dimensional emblems for today's anxieties about the family, childhood, sex, and the body. Melissa Ichiuji lives and works in Front Royal, VA. 

HEDIEH JAVANSHIR IICHI

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Untitled, 2010. 

Acrylic and mixed media on Mylar, 78 x 60 in. (detail) 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

HEDIEH JAVANSHIR IICHI presents new mixed media paintings on Mylar as provocative visual essays on Persian, Iranian, and American cultural identities. Fusing sources and references from historical Persian miniature painting, contemporary Iranian social and political imagery, and the visual codes of Western abstraction, Ilchi composes imaginary scenes where cultural and sexual identities are given space to reveal questions and contradictions without canceling or denying the significance of multiple histories and cultural positions. Ilchi uses militarist icons of the current Iranian regime as invasions and disruptions of a possible cultural coexistence. Her female figures with long-flowing, loosened hair are posed in jeans and contemporary fashion, a challenge to the current regime's restraints to be sure, but her figures seem equally at home in a Persian landscape, a modern abstract color field, or a contemporary urban scene. Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi lives and works in Washington, DC. 

NICHOLAS KAHN & RICHARD SELESNICK

Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, 

archival pigment print, 10 X 72 in. (detail). 

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

NICHOLAS KAHN & RICHARD SELESNICK present works from their new series, Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, an historical fictional narrative of the colonization of Mars. This body of work also represents the first time that artists have used NASA’s high-resolution imagery from Mars. Continually working like art directors for film sets, Kahn and Selesnick have created complex photo-montage compositions combining NASA shots of the Martial surface with their own sets and location photography. Through the mystery of a discovered colony on Mars, this new project explores questions of ecological and societal collapse, myths about technology and colonization, and the ideologies of utopia and dystopia. Kahn & Selesnick live and work in New York and Massachusetts, and on location in cyberspace. 

AKEMI MAEGAWA

Akemi Maegawa, White Jizō, 2010. 

Unique glazed porcelain sculptures, 18  x 9  x 9 in.  

Courtesy Irvine Contemporary

AKEMI MAEGAWA expands her work in ceramics and Japanese pop culture with new Jizō figures in white glazed porcelain. Jizō Bodhisattva is a traditional Buddhist guardian divinity for travelers going between spiritual states and for the souls of children. Jizō figures have appeared in many forms and in both sexes over the centuries, and are now commonly seen along roadsides and graveyards in Japan. The figure has entered Japanese pop culture in a variety of styles, including cartoon and hyper-cute versions, similar to the use of Daruma images and figures. Maegawa has adopted Jizō for her playful work at the intersections of Japanese and American pop, kitsch, and fashion. Her Jizō figures welcome visitors as travelers into the gallery space. Akemi Maegawa lives and works in Washington, DC. 

IRVINE CONTENPORARY

1412 14th Street, NW

WASHINGTON, DC 20005

www.irvinecontemporary.com

Carl Andre Exhibition in London at Sadie Coles HQ - Sculptures in basalt and in tavertine

Exhibition: Carl Andre 

Travertine / Basalt 

Sadie Coles HQ, London 

19 January - 5 March 2011 

An exhibition of stone sculptures by CARL ANDRE is on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London. TRAVERTINE / BASALT comprising a sequence of works in Icelandic basalt and two major works in travertine.

Throughout his fifty year career, Andre has created sculptures by placing standard units of stone, metal or wood in simple geometric arrangements. In early works such as Equivalents (1966; eight different configurations of 120 bricks) and Cuts (1967; a negative variant in which eight voids were made by removing combinations of blocks from a grid), Andre articulated the concepts of horizontality, repetition and implied extension that have remained central to his methodology.

Andre’s ALTBASE series of floor sculptures, made in Reykjavik in 1996, consists of differently sized groups of basalt squares (12, 15, 21, 24), variously stepped and layered in order to occupy the same three-by-three grid. GRECRUX (Rome, 1985), one of Andre’s earliest works in travertine, uses fifty-three blocks to form a square-shaped Greek cross or crux quadrata. Its intersecting lines accord with the artist’s famous statement in 1970 that “my ideal of sculpture is a road. That is a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point … I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view.” SUM ROMA (Marseille, 1997) arranges the same material in a thirty-unit solid triangle whose stepped form recurs throughout Andre’s oeuvre.

Eschewing metaphorical connotations, the sculptures draw attention to their essential materiality and to the stone’s intrinsic aesthetic qualities. The travertine works recall the material’s use in iconic Modernist buildings and in Roman art and architecture – an association underscored by the title of SUM ROMA. Andre was indeed originally inspired to use travertine by a trip past the quarries on the road to Tivoli. In common with the majority of Andre’s work, these pieces also foreground the dynamic between work, viewer and architectural context. The artist has tellingly described the progression of his own work, and twentieth century sculpture in general, as a shift in emphasis from ”sculpture as form” to “sculpture as structure” and finally “sculpture as place”. 

Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre emerged in the 1960s as one of the key exponents of Minimalism. In the late 1950s he shared a studio with Frank Stella, whose minimal black paintings of that period provided a formative influence, and in the 1960s he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in linear forms and materials excised from pre-existing masses and contexts. A similarly significant episode was his realisation during a canoeing trip that sculpture could be “as flat as water”.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of a number of museum retrospectives, notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘@’, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, Italy, and ‘Carl Andre’ at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2013, Dia Art Foundation, New York, will host the first major retrospective of his work in North America.

Books available at Sadie Coles HQ Bookstore: 

James Meyer ed., Cuts: Texts 1959 - 2004, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2005

Paula Feldman, Alistair Rider and Karsten Schubert, About Carl Andre: Critical Texts since 1965, Ridinghouse, London, 2006

SADIE COLES HQ 

4 New Burlington Place 

LONDON W1 

www.sadiecoles.com

This month Sadie Coles HQ also exhibited work of TJ Wilcox (Through 22 January)

Matteo Basile - ThisHumanity Exhibition at Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy before the SAM, Singapore

Matteo Basilé, ThisHumanity 

Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy 

Through January 29, 2011 

MATTEO BASILE, From THISHUMANITY exhibition
Courtesy Galleria Pack, Milano, Italy

Galleria Pack in Milan is hosting an exhibition by MATTEO BASILE entitled THISHUMANITY, inspired by one of the foremost masterpieces of late Gothic Florentine artwork, The Battle of San Romano by PAOLO UCCELLO (1397-1475).

The exhibition includes 10 large-scale photographs by the Roman artist inspired by the famous triptych Paolo Uccello was commissioned to paint in 1438 by the Barolini Salimbeni family in order to commemorate the Florentine victory over troops from Siena allied with Milan that took place on April 1, 1432.

In the Florentine painter’s artwork everything appears frozen in place, ready for the final act. It was precisely this “image capture,” subdivided into three different moments, that inspired Matteo Basilé to create the subsequent frame, in other words the physical clash between its peoples and imaginary armies. In The Battle of San Romano, Paolo Uccello experimented for the first time ever with techniques in perspective that were revolutionary for his day, creating multiple visions within the same scene. The artwork THISHUMANITY is put together following the same rules of perspective employed by the fifteenth-century painter, this time created using postproduction digital photography techniques.

Faithful to his expressive intent, Basilé is creating the sets within which this great battle will be set directly in South East Asia. The artist has lived and worked there for some time now, and has been able to involve a multitude of identities and female characters ready for the clash.

Women are the protagonists of Basilé’s work – their fight for their own identities and independence – connecting two artworks divided by centuries; a female universe ready to take to the field for a world dominated by men. It is a sort of The Rape of the Sabine Women in reverse, in which rather than being raped, the protagonists fight to reveal and protect their own identities. It is a purifying battle in which women of different races and with different pasts face their enemies down in a fight to the last breath in order to escape a destiny that makes them increasingly resemble the opposite sex.

Following the show in Milan, Thishumanity will be put on display in SAM, the SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM.

MATTEO BASILE, From THISHUMANITY exhibition
Courtesy Galleria Pack, Milano, Italy

MATTEO BASILE BIOGRAPHY

Matteo Basilé (Rome, 1974) debuted in 1997, when he was just 23 years old, with a solo show at the Il Ponte Contemporanea gallery in Rome. His artworks have been exhibited in some of the most important art venues in Italy and abroad. He won the New York prize in 2002. In 2007, Basilé had his first solo show in an Italian art institution: the MART in Rovereto. In 2009, he was among the artists selected for the Italian Pavilion at the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale.

Matteo Basilé is considered one of the foremost protagonists of European digital art. For the past decade he has been blending digital culture with classical iconography, re-inventing the portrait. The artist uses digital photography in order to develop and expand his personal code for contemporary painting, utilizing the computer as linguistic prosthesis in order to expand each vision and lend depth to the splendid surfaces of his artworks. Basilé’s world is an iconographic universe extending between technological mannerism and artistic surrealism. In his case, these two historic art movements mark a novel use of citation that tends towards synthesis and the affirmation of art as a meta-language.

Captured within the digital frame, his subjects become timeless icons. Marks traced upon their skins recount the geography of intimate memories. It is the face understood as voyage, memory as the warehouse for that which Basilé defines as the “archive of the soul.” His collection of faces and bodies tells the tale of a humanity dear to the artist. Women, children, men and the elderly are catapulted into the artist’s timeless imagination with the goal of passing on a three-dimensional verb capable of uniting painting with cinema, writing with material, photography with sound, and scenic space with an audience.

Basilé tests, manipulates and synthesizes his subjects’ DNA, transforming them into martyrs and saints within a world parallel to our own. Startling beauty and marvelous ugliness are blended together within the digital era. Reality and fiction travel side-by-side, ultimately blossoming into a new collective imagination.

CATALOGUE: THISHUMANITY is accompanied by a catalogue published by Damiani Editore (Bologna). The catalogue includes all the artworks from the exhibition, backstage images from the set in Bali, and several texts about the project and Matteo Basilé’s opus.

GALLERIA PACK 

Foro Buonaparte 60

20121 MILAN, ITALY

www.galleriapack.com

11-23-10 / 01-29-11