Peter Stauss @ carlier | gebauer, Berlin

Peter Stauss | The Invisible and the Third Hand
carlier | gebauer, Berlin
7 November - 19 December 2015

For his third solo exhibition with the gallery carlier | gebauer, PETER STAUSS will present a series of large-scale oil paintings alongside related small-scale bronze sculptures.

The Invisible and the Third Hand focuses on a single character, who appears throughout the works on view in different permutations: the Dutch master. Although their significance may not seem immediately apparent, the legacy of Dutch master paintings weighs heavily on our present. Their depictions of the emergence of an inchoate capitalism begs comparison to our contemporary system of alienated labor, speculation, and futures dealing.

In Peter Stauss‘ painterly investigations the Dutch master appears as a sign without a real body, reduced only to his hat. These expressively rendered, outsized accessories seem to dwarf those who wear them. In one painting, the brim of a tall green hat dramatically flips upward to reveal an earnest face that equally recalls a greyhound dog and a once-angular humanoid visage that has deflated like a balloon. A sinewy purple arm raises a large soda to the figure‘s concerned face while long, well-formed fingers proudly display a hamburger. At the bottom of the work, a distended foot seems ready to step out of the painting. This distorted body, which appears more like a superhero on a diet than something that could properly be described as human, seems to be wasting away while „nourishing“ itself with its hands and plotting escape with its feet.

The poppy, vibrant compositions in the exhibition signal a clear departure in style for Stauss. While earlier works depicted wild, animated scenes with multiple characters, the newer paintings fuse—or perhaps more accurately prise open—seemingly disparate body parts and objects into an individual figure with each component forming a constitutive element of the painting itself. A key reference point for the exhibition is Rembrandt‘s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which depicts one of the anatomy lessons that were common teaching opportunities and social events in the 17th century. The public autopsy of criminal cadavers posits the body as a site to be explored, which resonates with Peter Stauss‘ investigation of the body as an open space—a notion influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. As Nancy writes, “the body is that which gives rise to (but literally, gives space or gives room to) existence. The body is that which spaces space: ‘It is the very plasticity of expansion, of extension according to which existences take place.”

PETER STAUSS (b. 1966, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. He has recently exhibited at Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Switzerland; Helsinki Contemporary, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and Drawing Room, London.

carlier | gebauer
Markgrafenstraße 67 | 10969 Berlin | Germany
www.carliergebauer.com

William Pope.L @ Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA

William Pope.L, Forest
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA
October 23 - December 5, 2015

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects announces Forest, a first solo exhibition with William Pope.L opening on October 23, 2015. This exhibition will feature paintings and sculptures in an architectural installation surveying the artists object-based practice from the mid-1990s through the present. A simultaneous solo exhibition, Desert, at Steve Turner Contemporary will present a new film, Obi Sunt, about the ghost of Joe Gans, the first African American World Boxing Champion, and the mythology that surrounds the resurrection of a past through biography. The exhibitions will be accompanied by a GPS tour of the space in between the forest and the desert, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Steve Turner Gallery. An artist-led walking tour exploring these themes will leave from each gallery on November 7, 2015. 

WILLIAM POPE.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. He has been making multidisciplinary works since the 1970s, and has exhibited internationally including New York, London, Los Angeles, Vienna, Montreal, Berlin, Zurich, and Tokyo. He is a featured artist in the book Intersections edited by Marci Nelligan and Nicole Mauro, and Darby Englishs How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. He participated in the New Museums 2010 2011 exhibition The Last Newspaper with a reenactment of his infamous Eating the Wall Street Journal performance. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York invited Pope.L to participate in their FluxKit project. He is the recipient of the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award to create Pull! a large-scale public project presented through Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, OH. In 2013 he created the performance / film project A Long White Cloud at Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand, and presented the solo exhibitions Colored Waiting Room at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC; and Forlesen at The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, which also published the accompanying 2014 monograph Pope.L: Showing Up to Withhold. His work was presented as part of the 2014 exhibitions Ruffneck Constructivists at the University of Pennsylvanias Institute of Contemporary Art and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and in the solo exhibitions Claim at Littman Gallery, Portland, OR, and Gold People Shit in their Valet, at Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, presented his 2015 solo exhibition William Pope.L: Trinket.

Upcomming exhibition at the gallery :
WHITNEY BEDFORD - December 12, 2015 - January 23, 2016
STEVE RODEN - January 29 - March 5, 2016
ELLEN BERKENBLIT - January 29 - March 5, 2016
RUBEN OCHOA - March 12 - April 16, 2016
ARMIN BOEHM - March 12 - April 16, 2016
MARY KELLY - April 23 - May 28, 2016
ANDREA BOWERS - June 4 - July 9, 2016

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 
6006 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
www.vielmetter.com

Guillermo Srodek-Hart, Dina Mitrani Gallery, Miami

Photography: Guillermo Srodek-Hart:  Short Stories
Dina Mitrani Gallery, Miami FL
Through March 30, 2012

Short Stories by photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart at Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami includes images taken during the artist’s travels to remote rural towns outside of Buenos Aires. With his large format, 4x5 film camera, he captures cluttered old shops and bars that have been frozen in time.  His complex compositions deliver rich color images with densely overflowing content, giving the viewer's eye an innumerable amount of detailed information to  observe.Accompanying the photographs in the show are texts that glimpse further into the lives of those people that the artist encounters in these isolated towns.

Guillermo Srodek-Hart
Bar Fradejas, 2007
Archival pigment print, 30 x 38 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Dina Mitrani Gallery, Miami

“My photographs are filled with traces of human presence: objects, furniture, stuff hanging from the walls, accumulations on display. They speak to me of the invisible, that which can't be seen but is there, stories to be imagined, and, ultimately, the acknowledgement of our own transience in this world." – Guillermo Strodek-Hart

GUILLERMO SRODEK-HART (1977) studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Boston, and received his MFA from Mass College of Art. He was awarded the Klemm Prize in 2005 and the Petrobrás Award 2006, both in Argentina. In 2008, he was among the 30 artists chosen to be part of the book Contemporary Argentine Art, Artista X Artista. His work is included in the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. Guillermo Srodek-Hart's website: www.srodekhart.com

Dina Mitrani Gallery
Wynwood Art District
Miami, Florida 33127 USA
www.dinamitranigallery.com

Thomas Scheibitz: A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Thomas Scheibitz: A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Through February 18, 2012

A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events is an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, drawing/collages, and prints by THOMAS SCHEIBITZ on view through February 18 at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery . For his seventh solo show with the gallery, Scheibitz continues to draw from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and the influence of popular culture. Filtering these sources through his own lens, he creates evocative and powerful pieces that blur the line between abstraction and figuration.

In a palette of murky grays, smoky purples, and pale blues, paired with sharp primaries and vivid neons, the new paintings and sculptures in A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events are full of recognizable componentsÑthe numeral "1," a backwards comma, a peering eye - interwoven with the artist's own invented geometric assemblages. Culled from his archive of ephemera, which includes newspaper clippings, snapshots, magazine ads, plates from art books and historical texts, as well as other cultural artifacts, Scheibitz's imagery is pared down to its barest formal properties, then recombined, layered, and expanded upon. For the first time, Thomas Scheibitz shows the viewer how he works with his cache of source material to build compositions: pairing seemingly incongruous found images in collages, he then adds drawings that riff on their formal properties, and hint at how all these components might be synthesized into a painting or sculpture. These "worksheets," and in fact the installation as a whole, serve as an investigation of composition across disparate media, as the artist shows us how each element of his practice relates to the others. Breaking down his formal vocabulary into its constituent parts, Scheibitz lets us into his creative cosmos, showing the viewer the connections within this new constellation of works.

Organizational systems, such as maps, graphs, and charts, have long been of interest to Thomas Scheibitz, and have served as the starting point for many of his most iconic pieces. In this new body of work, instead of using the map as a formal point of departure from which to create an abstract composition, Scheibitz creates a map of his own process -- an overview that demonstrates how each piece fits into a cohesive whole. While existing autonomously, each image can also be connected to the other works in the show. The collaged drawings are displayed on a table made by the artist that resembles both an independent sculpture and a pedestal, and each of these collages reference one of the sixteen small paintings installed on the walls of the main space. In some of the collages the finished painting even appears as an element, complicating the notion that the works on paper are studies for the paintings. Rather, each is its own related but independent final product.

Installed in the back room, and seemingly a composite of the smaller works in the front gallery, the main work in the exhibition, unfurls across the wall. In this piece, from which the show takes its title, Scheibitz explores how imagery can be recombined; compositional elements that might have existed autonomously as small paintings become details within a larger work. The endless reconfiguration of imagery is the basis of the series of prints installed in the gallery's entryway as well. Titled for A.G.C.T., the four nucleic base acids that make up human DNA, these pieces similarly represent the foundations of Scheibitz's practice. In lush color, the prints depict combinations of objects and images from Scheibitz's archive, precisely arranged in unexpected combinations and juxtapositions. These prints also refer to the concept of "Schlagbild" or pictorial slogans images that convey as much meaning as a headline, or a block of text. While each image is important, its arrangement is equally crucial; and in his careful composition of these pieces, Thomas Scheibitz references Aby Warburg, a 20th century professor who created a non-heirarchical approach to image classfication. Like Warburg, Scheibitz employs his own methods of visual organization to create works that are at once readable and enigmatic.

Based in Berlin, THOMAS SCHEIBITZ has upcoming solo exhibitions at MMK, Museum für Modern Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio. Notable recent exhibitions include Thomas Scheibitz: Lineage ONE / Stilleben & Statistics, Jarla Partilager, Berlin, 2011-2012 (solo); Thomas Scheibitz: Il flume e le sue fonti/ The River and its Source, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2011 (solo); Surveyor: An exhibition of human exploration, observation, and construction of the landscape, organized by Curator Heather Pesanti, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2011 (group); If Not in This Period Of Time - Contemporary German Painting 1998-2010, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, 2010-2011 (group); A moving plan B - chapter ONE, Selected by Thomas Scheibitz, The Drawing Room, London, 2010 (group); Der ungefegte Raum, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria, 2010 (solo); among others.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, New York, NY 10011
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

Street Scenes paintings by Daria Deshuk in NYC at New World Stages

NYC Art Exhibition: Flashback: Street Scenes by Daria Deshuk - The Larry Rivers Years 
New World Stages, NYC 
July 11 - September, 2011 

DARIA DESHUK

Flashback: Street Scenes by Daria Deshuk The Larry Rivers Years is an exhibition of 24 original oil paintings by Daria Deshuk. The show is on view at Gallery at New World Stages in New York City through September 5th, 2011, with an Opening Reception on Thursday August 4th, from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

“This series is about creating snapshots of life, my chosen imagery takes that reality and depth of the viewer to a level of universal and subjective intimacy. With paint and brush I strive to capture the essence and atmosphere of the ordinary and mindless vignettes of daily life,” said Daria Deshuk. “The work explores Intensity, Interaction, Passion and Mediation, the individual references the collective and art is created. The artist as voyeur steals selectively from the public environment of streets, parks, images that define a New York City American experience. Far beyond the standardized interpretation of reality provided by photography, painting allows me to capture the essence of human experience condensed into the stolen moment, my choices as an artist extend reality by leading the eye in the re-orchestration of light space and the pure beauty of paint itself,” concluded Deshuk. 

DARIA DESHUK studied art at Parson's School of Design she received her BFA in Painting in 1978. Daria found herself part of the exciting art scene in the early ‘80s living in the East Village, receiving a MFA in Painting from Hunter College. She was a member of PS 122 Artist Space, working and exhibiting for 10 years. Daria met the artist Larry Rivers and at the age of 22, began a companionship of 15 years. Their son Sam Deshuk Rivers was born in 1985.  Daria now resides in Bridgehampton, NY full-time, with her partner David Kushnir.

Gallery at New World Stages 
343 West 49th Street
NYC - USA

www.newworldstages.com

Drawing Machines at Gregor Podnar Gallery Berlin

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione:
or, The Drawing Machines
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin
Through January 8, 2011

Artists: William Anastasi, Anna Barham, Emanuele Becheri, Alighiero Boetti, Ane Mette Hol, Albin Karlsson, Tim Knowles, Nick Laessing, Sol LeWitt, Giovanni Morbin, Marc Nagtzaam, Goran Petercol, Diogo Pimentão, Steve Roden, Jean Tinguely.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (“Trial of Harmony and Invention”) is the title of a 1969 work by ALIGHIERO BOETTI, a series of drawings in which he traced the lines of sheets of graph paper following a different path each time. A work that opposes established order (“armonia”) and the creation of something new (“invenzione”). The idea of both being at odds with each other is interesting, especially if it is applied to machinery and draughtsmanship.

The exhibition focuses on artists who produce drawings with machines or mechanisms following the path opened by JEAN TINGUELY’s drawing (and painting) machines Méta-Matics, but also by self imposed rules echoing the mathematical basis of mechanical procedures, such as Alighiero Boetti himself, SOL LEWITT, WILLIAM ANASTASI...

In fact, from the mid XXth century on, artistic drawing has been partly predicated upon drawing machines or mechanisms. Even in a broader and historical view, which has certainly influenced this phenomenon, drawing has been associated with mechanics in a combination of recreational and scientific uses. From the Jacquet-Droz automaton, which could draw (1772) to a machine inscribing on a sheet of paper the trajectory of a falling body, invented by Arthur Morin (1864), drawing has been both imitated and used. Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography and other breathtaking experimental devices, researched the graphic translation of the body’s movements through the sphygmograph and the cardiograph, for instance, which were able to “draw” the beating of the human heart.

At first, it could seem odd that drawing, a hand-based craft par excellence, was to be included in the domain of machine-made articles. But on closer inspection, automata imitating the skills of the draughtsman upset the standards by which drawing is normally adjudged as such and announce modernity: they demonstrate the mechanic aspect of drawing without destroying its appeal. Rather, they increase it. A triangular relation between the viewer, the artist and the machine, is thus implemented. The act of creation is assumed by others, namely the machine itself, while the artist operates like one. Drawing with, or like, a machine implies an alliance of the hand, the eye, the mind, the device, the artifact, the formula and the rule.

The contemplative and epistemological role of mimesis and utility are at stake here. For from this point on, the extraction of drawn data as well as the graphic transposition of the movement of matter moulds a different and modern beauty, largely based on abstraction and, the moment drawing becomes the result of self-applied rules or exterior factors, chance-based opportunities for the unpredictable emerges. Charles Baudelaire sensed this rather early when he confessed that a fine drawing captivates us beyond what it depicts ( in L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix, 1863).

On the other hand, freed from intention and traditional ideas of quality, and fascinated by machines, the artist chooses to work programmatically. Therefore, this abstract beauty is sometimes generated by a hand carefully automated by seriality and a rigorous set of rules.

But to return to Alighiero Boetti, a debate is then established as to what, exactly, one considers “harmony” and “invention” to be: would the mechanical aspect of drawing (i.e., order) be harmony? But aren’t machines, as actual mechanism or as rules and protocols, inventions? Should one consider chance itself to be the source of “invention”, as opposed to a system? Thus does this show aim to reveal the complexity and ambiguity that lurks behind such seemingly definite categories.

Cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione: or, The Drawing Machines showcases historical and recent works exploring this path of contradictions between the skilled machine and the automated draughtsman, connected by the mesmerizing appeal of their abstract productions, and so much more.

The exhibition is curated by SIMONE MENEGOI and accompanied by a writing of JOANA NEVES, The Drawing Automaton, or the Mechanics of Drawing.

GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR BERLIN
Lindenstr. 35 - 10969 Berlin - Germany

www.gregorpodnar.com 

13.11.2010 - 08.01.2011

Alberto Di Fabio, Over the Rainbow – Exhibition curated by Emanuela Nobile Mino at Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy

Alberto Di Fabio, Over the Rainbow
Curated by Emanuela Nobile Mino
Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy
May 5 - September 11, 2010

For this exhibition, his third personal show at Galleria Pack, ALBERTO DI FABIO has created a project that is bound by a close relationship to the gallery’s recently renovated spaces. Large-scale paintings were created specifically for the show, punctuated by a series of medium-format artworks that highlight a more intimate and fragmented route. Taken as a whole, the artworks are characterized by new chromatic experimentation, including the use of fluorescent pigments and a juxtaposition of shiny tones and dark shades that suggests the idea of a totalitarian vision of landscape, a sort of observatory that provides a view out over the world as a whole: on one hand material and visible (Himalayan landscapes, cosmic geographies), on the other psychological and interior (traces of thought, score sheets for psychic rhythms), leading the viewer’s gaze further, deeper towards the ultra-terrain and as-yet-unexplored regions (luminous interplanetary paths, an enigmatic and celestial predominance of graphic elements).

As the curator EMANUELA NOBILE MINO writes in the critical text for the catalogue: “In referring to the famous song by Harold Arlen and sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939), as well as by many other singers and musicians (including Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarrett, Jimi Hendrix and Rico Rodriguez, the Ramones, Deep Purple, Ray Charles and others), Over the Rainbow intends to suggest the idea of possible ulterior path, one that is parallel, beyond what we can see, transcendent and partially familiar and, precisely for this reason, intriguing. It is an invitation to look beyond contingent reality through imagery that turns abstract, redelivering man to the supernatural dimension (…).

Di Fabio has always led his audience along a backwards voyage from the visible to the invisible, accompanying them into a kaleidoscopic vision that forces the viewer to abandon a macroscopic perspectives and immerse himself in microscopic observation of the world in order to verify formal correspondences, geometric equilibriums and chromatic harmonies between individual natural elements, pointing out how a group of molecules and their organization into sophisticated structures (for example DNA) leads to a qualitative leap, generating that which we commonly refer to as “life.” This kind of process shares an enchanting correspondence with art, understood as the outcome of creation. The verb “create” contains the Indo-European root kere, also present in the Latin form of the verb “to grow” (Italian crescere), and in the name of the Roman goddess Ceres, an immortal being who embodies the principle of growth. Like nature, art is that which is derived from a group of factors and mechanisms, and is in turn capable of producing those of its own. It is a group of abstract units brought together into a single ordered structure (…).

ALBERTO DI FABIO was born in 1966 in Avezzano, Italy, and currently lives and works in Rome and New York. His most recent solo shows include: 2010, Over the Rainbow, Galleria Pack, Milan; Alberto Di Fabio, Gagosian Gallery, New York; (2009), Alberto Di Fabio, Gagosian Gallery, London; Insomnia, Galleria Pack, Milan; Sinestesia, Umberto di Marino, Naples.

Some of the artist’s more important group shows include: 2010, SuperEco, curated by Angelo Capasso, Emanuela Nobile Mino and Edicola Notte, ex-Aranciera del Semenzaio di San Sisto, Rome; 2008, XV Esposizione Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Punti di vista, Unicredit Private Banking, Naples; The Big Bang - Il cosmo visto con gli occhi dell’arte, Carlo Bilotti Museum, Rome; 2007, On the edge of vision, Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta, India; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India; 2006, Capolavoro, curated by Angelo Capasso, Palazzo Primavera, Terni; Napoli presente. Posizioni e prospettive dell’arte contemporanea, curated by Lorand Hegyi, PAN, Naples.

ALBERTO DI FABIO
OVER THE RAINBOW
CURATOR: EMANUELA NOBILE MINO

GALLERIA PACK
Foro Buonaparte 60
20121 MILANO - IYALY