FABIENNE VERDIER
Painting

October 23, 2009 to January 9, 2010

From October 23, 2009 to January 9, 2010, the Galerie Jaeger Bucher in Paris will hold Painting, an exhibition of some forty new works by French artist Fabienne Verdier: primarily paintings based on landscapes, arborescences and circles as well as inks and pastels on paper.

Known for her ten-year apprenticeship in China with well-known masters of calligraphy, recounted in the bestseller novel Passagère du Silence, and present in some of the major international collections, Fabienne Verdier's painting is eminently personal, internal and spiritual. It is the result of an immense creative freedom and the fruit of a long preparatory asceticism. Her ancestral technique acts as both bedrock and springboard for the emergence of a succession of inspired fluxes, which now guide us towards a reflection on the metastructures of life.

Fabienne Verdier's painting is continuous with the experiments of the American abstract artists - Tobey, Kline, Still, Pollock or de Kooning - and carries on the work of artists who have explored the line, such as Matisse, Michaux or Degottex...

Each of these canvases is imbued with a subtle balance from which emanates a constancy: the quest for the simple. Nothing is surplus to requirement. The background is charged with a resonant reality, composed of layers and sub-layers that evoke the immensity of the void, giving free rein to the radiant brilliance of the pigment, sometimes blazing red, sometimes vibrant green, sometimes Cistercian white. The form is spontaneous, emergent, expansive, unfinished... and in its ink reveals the enigma of its mineralisation. Through a clever play of contrast, the black of the ink mirrors the coloured background of the canvas; and vice versa.

Fabienne Verdier's great frescoes take us deep into the alchemy of painting and her multiple forms in permanent movement make us live a metaphysical experience. Standing at the heart of the canvas, the act of painting imbues the ink with an interiority of vision suggesting the Essence of the real. The connection between the line drawn on the paper and the line of the ink sliding across the canvas is, in this respect, masterful. Through the living spontaneity of these works, Fabienne Verdier unifies tradition and modernity and allows us to experience a moment of eternity in the midst of Breath.

The artist's work belonging to the National Museum of Modern Art collections will be included in the Centre Pompidou's Elles exhibition next October. Fabienne Verdier is also working towards the realisation of 2 large frescoes for a Palazzo in Rome (for beginning 2011). She is also currently preparing some large abstract paintings for her tributes to the Flemish primitive painters at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges planned for spring 2012.

 

 

GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
5 & 7 rue de Saintonge
75003 Paris
France
+33 (0) 1 42 72 60 42

 

 

 

October 10 - November 7, 2009

Beginning October 10th, Dorsch Gallery is pleased to present "Recorded Eyesight", by South Florida artist John Sanchez. In his opulently framed small oil paintings, Sanchez pursues his ideal of using an academic, traditionally learned style as the mode for depicting the unremarkable moments in our lives that urge to be contemplated in all their reality. This is his third solo show at Dorsch Gallery.

Sanchez integrates his working-class background into the tenets of his practice. A fan of Ayn Rand, he treats painting as a discipline, approaching it like clocking into an hourly job or training for a competitive sport. His subject matter shows what a man of his background sees: a rest-stop lobby, a concert, a football stadium parking lot. His somewhat realist mode follows that of other painters who use photography to inform their work. One cannot completely categorize his work one way or another, however, because his paintings transcend their beginnings as photographs or their subject's assumed bleakness. He strives to do with his paintings what photography cannot: to commit to a surface what a human and his eye sees. That thin line of what can be rendered visible always comes back to the way he paints shadows and light.

Writer Franklin Einspruch states, "Sanchez has identified a way of working at once painterly and photographic, employing the richness of glazed oils and the quirks of the camera. Lights blast into undifferentiated white masses, and shadows turn into black walls. Normally we would scold an artist for painting things in the way they turn out in a photo.. But Sanchez has built a new sort of creature, combining the studied authority of photorealism and the drama of the Barbizon school. The paintings make one think alternately of Daubigny and Robert Bechtle."

"If painting is good, then the light that glints on the rain-washed asphalt of Biscayne Boulevard is as worthy of depiction as any light that fell on Inness's bucolic New Jersey. The thunderheads that menace Miami's landscape of overpasses and palms are not inferior to the ones that troubled the ships in Turner's seascapes. Not only is the red pickup truck lovely in the stadium lighting, but the artificial way that the camera records it in the surrounding darkness of the parking lot is beautiful as well. Indeed, these possibilities bear out. In Sanchez's work, sunshine of divine intensity obliterates the glass facade of a rest stop on the Florida Turnpike, as Americans, identifiable in their sneakered corpulence, pleasantly and heedlessly mill about in it. There is no irony here. The subject's banality and its beauty transform into a single phenomenon when seen in the right way."

John Sanchez was born in Passaic, NJ and grew up in the blue-collar town of North Bergen situated directly across from New York City. He is a graduate of the Art Institute of Miami and holds an MFA from the Florida International University. His work is in numerous private collections including the collections of Debra and Dennis Scholl, and Bill Bilowit and Grela Orihuela. He had a solo show at the Frost Museum at FIU in January 2009 and his work is included in the museum's collection. He lives and works in Miami.

The exhibition will be on view at Dorsch Gallery through November 7, 2009. Dorsch Gallery is located at 151 NW 24 St, Miami, FL 33127. Gallery hours are Tues-Sat 12-5pm.

Dorsch Gallery
151 NW 24 St
Miami, FL 33127
+1 3055761278

 

 

 

 

October 16 - November 13, 2009

 

Melissa Oresky will debut "Rock Gardens", a dynamic group of paintings that make an analogy between painting and gardening, combining a range of visual languages and elements within a series of small, paired canvases. The show's title intentionally misquotes author Roderick Nash, as he describes the role of the labyrinth in a garden as a "wilderness of edges". In her work, Oresky places herself into the role of the painter as gardener of shapes, marks, images and thoughts in a relation to a predetermined field. She contends with disorientation and weediness in her divided compositions -- compositions that seem to fold back in on themselves - as well desires for order and control.

It is this order/control vs. disorientation that gives her paintings such compelling and strange spaces, spaces that effect simultaneous experiences of overlapping volumes. Her process employs improvisation within rigid parameters, rules proving to be generative rather than reductive, that allow her paintings to have conversations between oppositions - garden/wilderness; control/chaos; opaque/translucent; natural/artificial; architectural/atmospheric.

Oresky's paintings and drawings in the past few years have engaged a revolving set of concerns, including landscape, color, science (and science fiction), the body and cognition/perception. This new body of work, 18 paintings in identically scaled pairs, takes on a greater degree of abstraction. Each pair is driven by color (orange, red, blue, black, etc.) with one canvas more explicitly abstract (folded and divided spaces) and the other maintaining some vestiges of pictorial landscape (garden walls and organic forms).

In a recent essay for the exhibition "On Paper" at the Galhberg Gallery, writer Lori Waxman describes Oresky's work thusly:

Conversely, in the formal spaces that inspire Oresky's most recent work - rock beds and German show gardens - lines not only order and fragment space, they do so to the point of total disorientation. It's almost as if the stuff of nature from which these spaces were built - pebbles and small boulders, clipped hedges and rows of annuals - finally resisted the strictures of design into which they were landscaped, rejecting the human order imposed upon them. Oresky renders this tension between the ordered and the chaotic, the human and the organic, abstractly, suggesting that it might be repressed in the gardens themselves. And she manages to implicate the viewer's body, also in a way so distinct from how it feels to be in a formal garden, where vistas are staged and pathways clear cut.

This is Melissa Oresky's third solo show at Western Exhibitions. Her solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Van Harrison Gallery, New York, NY; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA. Concurrent with this show at Western Exhibitions, her work can be seen in a two-person show, Streaking, at Proof Gallery, Boston, MA, with Carrie Gundersdorf, and a group exhibition On Paper at the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Il. Group shows include Thinking in Color, curated by Judy Ledgerwood, Lemberg Gallery, Detroit, MI, Into the Midst, Mixture Contemporary, Houston, TX, and many others. Oresky has attended residencies in Germany (Schloss Pluschow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), New Mexico (Santa Fe Art Institute) and Maine (Skowhegan). In 2005 Oresky received a 2005 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Recent projects include Mineral Fabric, a silkscreened artists book editioned by Kayrock Screenprinting, Brooklyn, NY and available at WesternXeditions. Oresky lives and works in Chicago and Bloomington, IL.

 

 

In Gallery 2: Eric Lebofsky presents selections from a new drawing series, "Superfreaks."

WESTERN EXHIBITIONS
119 N Peoria, Suite 2A
Chicago, IL 60607
+1 312.480.8390

 

 

 

15 October to 14 November 2009

There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. To photograph is to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
-Susan Sontag

The Gallery is proud to present Garden of Turbulence Kristina Jansson's second solo show opening Thursday, October 15th. Jansson continues with her exploration of the predatory nature of photography and popular media, which has been a major theme in her work since 2003 when she first painted her own portrait as an enlarged 35mm film negative. In this show she delves into a conversation of utopian values as derived from The American Arts and Architecture Case Study House Program that existed from 1945 - 1966. The program's mission was to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the return of millions of soldiers after the end of World War II. In four large canvases Jansson paints the models or building sites from this program but it is unclear where the information is acquired by the artist. In the work, Playboy Mansion 180 x 200cm we see inside the pages of a magazine with the centerfold clearly painted on the right side of the canvas. The light and colors therefore are from another source perhaps from the inside of a photographer's studio or a printer's press.. The artist contends that the actual Case Study House buildings built became symbolic Modernist icons in architecture that combined with the glamour of a Hollywood lifestyle ultimately failed to achieve the initial idealistic goals of the program.

Another series of works develops out of a office scene that contains the implication of a sexual encounter between several couples. A large pair of works White Office (oil on canvas, 217 x 160) and Contact (photograph, 160 x 217cm) are combined with several smaller detailed canvases in a group. Contact is a full-scale negative printed as a large photograph of the original White Office piece before the original seems to be damaged by a photographer or a photographic process. The Case Study House Program paintings are dryly presenting the Modernist structures, but in White Office Jansson explicitly subverts the viewer's understanding of the scene by covering the female body with white paint. Her expression and body is gone. The narrative, painted with Jansson's signature style, has been altered in the positive canvas but stands clearly in the negative print. Therefore information of the tryst must be derived from the negative photograph, which the viewer deciphers, elaborates on the way to possession.

Kristina Jansson, based in Stockholm, is the 2010 Carnegie Art Award second prizewinner and her works will be showing at Kunsthal Charlottenborg until November 15th 2009. The Carnegie exhibition tours the Nordic capitals, London, Beijing and Nice for a period of 18 months and notably Stockholm in March 2010. Kristina Jansson's paintings have been shown throughout Sweden, Europe and the United States.

MILLIKEN
Luntmakargatan 78
113 51 Stockholm
Sweden
+46 (0) 8 673 7010

 

 

 

 

16 Oct 2009 to 14 Nov 2009

 

Mie Mørkeberg's solo exhibition Afterwards at Galleri Tom Christoffersen deals with the strongly asserted and the unsaid. The artist has used actual dollhouses and other miniature models of the homely as point of departure for her works on paper. The new series carries violent and humoristic narratives.



 

Galleri Tom Christoffersen
Skindergade 5
1159 Copenhagen
Denmark
+45 33917610

 

 

 

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