February 19th - March 28th 2009

Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new posters, collages, lambda prints and sculptures by the Berlin-based, Danish artist Jakob Kolding. Entitled memories of the future, the exhibition will run from the 19th of February through the 28th of March 2009. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

Kolding's collages, which have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, take as their subject the cultural collisions inadvertently set up by the contemporary city. Kolding's work celebrates a number of urban cultural, synthetic emanations (hip-hop, graffiti, skateboarding, electronic music), as well as the aesthetics of urban studies. Hybrids of invention and documentation, renderings and diagrams, his work depicts processes and events, historical and futuristic narratives pointing to propositions and effects of urban economics, planning, architecture, ecology, transportation systems, politics, and social relations.

The materials Kolding chooses, often looking like several generations of reproductions and suggesting the possibility of mass-production, give his forms and imagery the clinical quality of propaganda used to advocate public plans. Cut-out texts and photos of individuals foregrounded against post-war, highly-designed institutional buildings, housing and landscapes raise questions - how capable is the built environment of social control and even more importantly, can an ideology be translated into practice? Kolding demonstrates how plans fall flat, pointing out architecture's and its social initiatives' possible malevolence and impotence when it comes to influencing art and society. Revealing the physical spaces of Capitalism as both depletive and ineffectual, Kolding not only elaborates Marx's argument on class struggle but questions the power of Capitalism altogether.

Our obsession with modernity - with speed, technology, with youth and with violence - and our favoritism of the new over the old, has led to the stubborn imposition of maladaptive, albeit idealistic, urban schemes, which thwart social integration and individual expression. Kolding's urbanscapes are aesthetically attractive but empty economic expedients, illustrative of the profound divisions within society. The inhabitants of Kolding's collages are alternatively shown observing - isolated - amused - rebelling - frequently stifled in a never-ending game of cultural one-upsmanship, bounded on all sides by the city's engulfing map.

Jakob Kolding has been exhibiting internationally over the past twelve years. He has had solo shows in London, Geneva, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Stockholm and his native Copenhagen. His work has been included in shows at such prestigious venues as the DeAppel Foundation; the South London Gallery; The Rooseum; The Kölnischer Kunstverein; the Palais de Tokyo; and the Louisiana, among many others. He had a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, mounted an ambitious solo project at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and participated in Utopia Station in the 2003 Venice Biennale. This is Kolding's second solo show at Team.

 

Team Gallery
83 Grand Street
cross streets Wooster and Greene
New York, NY 10013
+1 212 .279. 9219

 

 

 

 

 

Ray Caesar
(digital art)
February 7th - March 4th, 2009

The Magda Danysz Gallery is proud to present Ray Caesar's exceptional personal exhibition. This artist is back in France after having spent the year 2008 visiting international art scenes with new original pieces. All of his works plunge us in a rococo, as well a surrealist universe, yet with a futuristic flavour.

Deformed heads and disproportioned bodies that impress yet don't frighten are the protagonists of his paintings. It's as if these dolls held the key to a deep truth no one can attain, a revelation on human cruelty.

 

 

Kosta Kulundizic
(paintings)

 

 

Ray Caesar
day break,
digital print,
40x30inch., 2008
Courtesy of Galerie magda Danysz, Paris
 

Galerie Magda Danysz
78, rue Amelot
11 Paris
France
+33 1 45 83 38 51

 

 

 

 

February 18- March 9, 2009
Reception for the artists: Thursday, February 26th, 5:30pm-8:30pm

The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art is pleased to present recent work by Los Angeles artists Jean Ferro, Martin Gantman and Michael Salerno.

Jean Ferro
Throughout the '80s, Ferro's fine-art self-portraits (1974-present) received international recognition from magazines such as ZOOM magazine and French Photo, along with US national TV magazine shows for CBS and ABC TV networks. The Women In Photography New Photographers Lecture Series presented "Jean Ferro's Eye To Eye, the Art of Self-Portraiture.

Ferro's "Statue of Liberty" project marked her transition from fifteen years of traditional photography into "Photo Art," mixing various mediums. A City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs award enabled Ferro to create "Through Our Own Eyes, Self Portraits by People Without Homes," a compelling 30-minute photo/video documentary of Los Angeles' homeless community.

"Global Liberty," her photo-based mixed media work using international newspapers from 42 countries, was exhibited at the Bridge Gallery, Los Angeles City Hall. Fine art photographer Edmund Teske was quoted as saying, "...Your show, Jean Ferro!--is the essence of Walt Whitman and Edward Steichen's great show 'Family of Man."

Ferro most enjoys the unknown; from reworking existing work into new dimensions, challenging the original concept to test its endurance, its creative identity to repositioning her thinking to produce something fresh and spontaneous.

Martin Gantman
Martin Gantman is a Los Angeles based artist and writer who has exhibited internationally in such venues as the Alternative Museum, New York; A.R.C. Gallery, Chicago; HAUS, Pasadena; POST and Seyhoun Gallery, Los Angeles; Artetica, Rome and Villaregio, Italy; and La Coruna, Spain. His recent solo show at HAUS Gallery, "Tracking Identity," was reviewed in the January, 2008 issue of Art Ltd. He is currently working on a multi-faceted undertaking entitled "Tracking Empire." His project, "See you when we get home." was featured in Art Journal magazine and his most recent project, "Atmospheric Resources Tracking Incorporated" was shown at the Seyhoun Gallery in West Hollywood last year. Recent published writings include: "The Irresolute Potential in the Unimagined Possibility," "Swingin' in the Slammer," "The Word Was Charm," "DuSable Park: An archeology," "Notes on the Oddness of Things," and "Mapping the Lost Idea." He also co-edited "Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura" for the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, distributed by DAP Publications.

Michael Salerno
Michael Salerno has a special relationship to the line as a formal element of drawing. Lines traditionally delineate space. Rarely can an artist use one element exclusively and arrive at form without shape, and fewer still can manage such a conjecture with the linear element. But there it is, nothing but lines, or perhaps, everything possible of line.

Beyond this essence, the doors are wide open to almost any perception. The rigidity of definition associated with line is hardly extant. Your imagination is required. While some artists have arrived at all-over pictures in color and shape, Salerno has approached the magnificence of the irresolute in his own manner. That which would stand as a border is the device manifesting the borderless.

The current work is a true hybrid of painting as effected by Salerno's own recipe of digital processing.

Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
+1 323.646.9427

 

 

 

 

 

6 February - 14 March, 2009

 

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present for the fourth time the new work of John Bock in his second solo exhibition. John Bock born in Gribbohm, Germany, lives and works in Berlin.

John Bock uses the form of performance as artistic medium, combining theater, video, installation and sculpture. Most of his early actions or performances were termed "lectures" and originated in the idea of an academic lesson on economic concerns. Starting out from that basis he has developed over time increasingly complex, large-scale installations in which he employs simple everyday objects and materials, like wood, fabric, wire, cotton wadding, toothpaste, shaving cream, cleaning products, and food, which he treats and combines in unusual ways in order to create simple structures of life as well as art's evolution into abstract forms and paranoid models.

In his lectures Bock combines speech, dramatic elements with these everyday objects, which are transformed into sculptures. His performances are various and most of the time he uses amateur actors. After each lecture, the objects that he has used are left on stage creating a theatre-collage. The language he uses is not very clear, it is a mutation language that flows on the sculptures. The sculptures as objects are more relicts, vehicles, instruments, which try to combine the artist with the audience and the outside world. This auction comes from a personal utopia of the artist who wants to share it with the audience, hoping that this utopia will influence it. Significant role in the work of Bock plays this interactive connection with the public

The current exhibition with the title "No Time No Screws" presents the new installation work of John Bock, which consists of transformed parts of a bus. These refer to a lecture-performance that Bock did in a city bus, invited by XYZ last October, traveling through the streets downtown Athens. The video, documenting the performance, is also central part of the show.

John Bock has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Athens Biennale (2007), Venice Biennale (1999 and 2005), Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), and Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian (2004). He has exhibited worldwide in Museums and Art Institutions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000); the Museum Bojmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2003); and the ICA in London (2005); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (2006); Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007); Graz Kunsthaus, Graz (2008).

 

 

Eleni Koroneou Gallery
Dimofontos 30 & Thorikion
Thission
Athens 11851
Greece
+30 210 9244271

 

 

 

 

 

 

20 Feb 2009 to 4 Apr 2009

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to introduce Simon Evans, a London-born artist, who currently lives and works in Berlin. Former pro-skateboarder and writer, Evans found his voice as a visual artist and has been exhibiting his work since 2003. This is the artist's New York gallery debut show.

Simon Evan's delicate text-based works are collaged and assembled from prosaic materials including found paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings, colored pencil and white out. They describe a world poised between two poles of earnestness and irony. With his anxieties laid bare and his wry brand of melancholy, Evans presents us with a veritable laundry list of drawings that take the form of diagrams, charts, maps, lexicons, diary entries, inventories, cosmologies and epistolary entreaties that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope.

The exhibition Island Time will be installed over two galleries with titles such as Escape and Rescue Plan and Everything I Have that point to inspiration taken from both the mundane and personal. The title of the show Island Time is a reference to Robinson Crusoe and the hand-made objects that were critical to his survival on a desert island-a metaphor that draws connections between the state of being shipwrecked, to the role of the artist as an outsider, to the artist's personal biography living as an ex-patriot in a foreign city. Evident in the work is Evan's preoccupation with counting and charting-an activity also key to survival as a castaway.

In the main gallery, the drawing Green City presents an exact copy of a tourist map of Berlin redrawn in green ball point pen and white out. Evans says that, "Tracing things is a way of making something mine in a world which feels already filled with too much." He goes on to describe the significance of the color green in this exploration as a reference to naiveté and a utopia unspoiled by experience while at the same time making an allusion to the flip-side which is Berlin's darker history. Green also marks the season in which the drawing was made-it took an entire summer in a very green Berlin to trace this map. The companion piece Home Country is a map of the London Tube made of woven paper. This depiction of the artist's hometown, with all of the Tube lines drawn in black, communicates a web of ideas and reflections about the notion of homeland. Other works in the show will include One Hundred Mix CDs for New York which is a collection of mix CD's that are arranged together in one frame. In this sprawling work, Evans attempts to encapsulate his feelings about art and music, in particular regarding the gesture of exchange that typifies the making of mixed CD's.

Simon Evans currently lives and works in Berlin. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions in 2005 at the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO) and White Columns (New York, NY.) He has participated in the 2006 Sao Paolo Biennial (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and 2004 California Biennial (Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, CA.) Evans' work has been included in international group exhibitions most recently at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, Switzerland); the Tate Modern (London, UK); the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan); and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany).

 

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
+1 212-714-9500

 

 

 

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