|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Simon Lee Gallery,
London |
JOHN M ARMLEDER
SCRAMBLED AND
POACHED
25 June - 29 August
2008
John M Armleder has played a
vital role in shaping postmodern European and international
art practice over the last 40 years. As a co-founder of the
influential Groupe Ecart in the early 1960s he helped open up
new ways of producing, exhibiting and, most importantly,
experiencing contemporary art to a broad public. Armleder's
work defies easy categorisation. Despite the influence of
Fluxus attitudes and the artist's passion for the musical
compositions of John Cage, Armleder's work has always resisted
the manifesto, any form of theoretical attitudes or indeed, a
social or political agenda.
The objects, installations, paintings, sculptures and
performances created by Armleder in recent years have always
been eclectic in their nature and appearance. Through playful
compositions the presented objects are often completely
divorced from any formal artistic concerns. The artist
actively blurs the traditional notions of the support and the
surface, of the subject and object and of high and low art. As
such, he challenges customary ways in which the viewer has
come to perceive and experience modern and contemporary art
and the nature of the places that have come to be used for its
display. Armleder's works are essentially pictorial in their
compositions as they transcend the differences between
decorative design and artwork. As a result, his work has
always offered stirring modes of presentation whilst, at the
same time, opening up the picture pane to include all its
surrounding space.
"Scrambled and Poached" is symbolic of the multitude of
possibilities open to the artist. In John Armleder's long
awaited solo show at Simon Lee Gallery, sparkling Drip and
Pour paintings are placed alongside regularly patterned
canvases and the artist's signature furniture sculptures. The
works are superimposed over wall paintings that stretch from
the floor to the ceiling of the gallery and the exhibition
space is again transformed in its entirety. Armleder creates
an ensemble of different works from his repertoire and
arranges them in the space to form a complete installation,
thus demonstrating the activities that lie at the heart of his
artistic practices and forming juxtapositions of familiar
shapes and colours, in which the artist's canvas and medium
successfully shrug off their accepted implications.
Born in Switzerland in 1948, Armleder now lives and works
between New York and Geneva, where he continues to develop
ideas and strategies for his work. He has had numerous
one-person exhibitions in the USA and Europe, most recently at
MAMCO in Geneva, The South London Gallery in London, the ICA
in Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.
He has also been part of hundreds of group shows around the
world and features in significant international collections,
such as that of the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Kunstmuseum, Basel; Kunstmuseum, Zurich; Moderna Museet,
Stockholm; Sammlung Ludwig, Vienna and Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart.
Image:
John M Armleder
Yankee Trader,
2006
Acrylic on canvas with plastic chains
200 x 200 cm,
78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in.
Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery, London
Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley
Street
London
W1J 8DT
|
|
Sandroni Rey, Los
Angeles |
|
Matty Byloos
New
paintings
June 21, 2008 - July 19,
2008
Sandroni Rey is pleased to
present an exhibition of new work by Matty
Byloos. This will be Byloos' first solo exhibition
with Sandroni Rey.
Byloos' latest series, New Paintings, is inspired by
the homes that were removed during the Los Angeles
International Airport expansion that occurred during the
mid-1970s. Byloos focuses on architecture; specifically of his
native southern California and using a variety of source
materials his paintings aim to capture the homes in a
transitional moment.
Boarded up, vacant and completely drained of
functionality, these homes allow Byloos to investigate ideas
of photography's ability to reconstruct memory and how
painting might be a more appropriate vehicle for representing
the mercurial qualities of distant experience. Like a recycled
vellum manuscript, Byloos' paintings embody the idea of a
palimpsest. The homes no longer occupy any tangible
architectural space, rather they exist as portraits of houses
already lost to the past and have already been "scraped clean"
for new use. Obscured by shadows and built up through
suggestive layers, the paintings convey a ghostly and
mysterious air: seen but nonetheless intangible. Furthermore,
Byloos' paintings push this metaphor of architectural
palimpsest into a more general sense of understanding the
complex writing of Los Angeles' own architectural history and
its constant revision rivaled against its own historical
context.
Matty Byloos currently lives and
works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from ArtCenter
College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
Image:
Matty
Byloos
Pineywoods Revisited, 2008
Acrylic and
prismacolor on mahogany panel
60 x 48 (152.4 x 121.9
cm)
Courtesy of Sandroni Rey, Los
Angeles
Sandroni Rey
2762 S. La
Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
|
|
StART SPACE,
London |
|
Departure
New Paintings and Assemblages by
Nick Bowering
1st June - 13th July 2008
Nostalgia for impossible journeys, a treasure chest
of vintage toys and the 'ghost' and 'dazzle' ships of two
World Wars, Departure, Nick Bowering's new
body of work is redolent with a sense of being 'born out of
time'.
One starting point of Departure is the exploration of
his parent's journey in 1963 as £10 Poms, when they followed
thousands of other British couples who were given assisted
passage to emigrate to Australia. Nick was born in Perth,
Western Australia, two and a half years later. As a child was
fascinated by the photographic slides of his family voyage
back home on the Fairsky in 1966 when they returned to
England. His new paintings are in part an evocation of that
journey which Nick was too young to recall.
One vivid childhood memory is when his father came
home with a battered leather case filled with toys and a train
set. It was typical of his father to keep small treasures in
boxes and old tobacco tins for safe-keeping. The 'boxing and
encasing' elements of the new work investigate this wish to
'preserve the precious'.
Nick has also begun to explore the extraordinary
roles ocean liners performed in two World Wars in his
assemblages based on the 'ghost' and 'dazzle' ships. The liner
Queen Elizabeth became the 'Great Grey Ghost' when she was
used as a troop carrier during World War II and she is one of
the many models Nick has worked from for this series. Using
dramatic cropping and elevated viewpoints, Departure also
explores the romance of travel, the inherent deception of
model-making and the ambiguity of memory.
Nick Bowering attended Camberwell
School of Art (1982-86) where he received a BA Hons in
Illustration and has also studied lithography and photography.
He has exhibited widely (London, New York, Dublin, Glasgow and
Miami) and has work in private collections, from BP Oil to the
Science Museum. Cunard recently purchased a series of ocean
liner paintings for their latest ship, Queen Victoria.
Image:
Nick Bowering
Fairsky,
2008
Courtesy of StART SPACE, London
StART SPACE
150 Columbia
road
London
E2 7RG
|
|
See Line, Los Angeles |
|
Ami Tallman
When the Sun Shines, It Does Not
Need Proof
21 June 2008 to 26 July 2008
See Line Gallery is pleased to
present Ami Tallman's first solo exhibition,
When the Sun Shines, It Does Not Need Proof.
This body
of work by Ami Tallman muses on the shared qualities of gurus
and dictators, in particular the aesthetic devices used by
both to inspire awe and ecstatic devotion amongst their
followers. Tallman's practice draws on images and phrases
culled from idiosyncratic research. As she sought materials
for this show, Tallman observed a recurrence of charismatic
leaders in the 20th century who employed extravagant and
sophisticated spectacles to create new, insular societies
comprised of fiercely committed followers. The movements these
men created usually slipped into violence and paranoia, ending
in purges of their inner circles, scandal, and
dissolution.
With a lush use of color, Tallman's use and choice of
materials is promiscuous. She combines colored pencil, oil,
and ink with other materials, on a wide range of surfaces,
yielding a tactile variation which echoes her subjects' shifts
from beatific to vengeful, doting to aloof, delphic to
precise. Her work is tinged with foreboding, and both broods
and frets on themes of power, hope, bliss, and betrayal. Her
whimsical line slips into doubt, its cheer faltering as it
encounters gaps on the page. The resultant series of images
includes depictions of pageants, expectant throngs, blissed
out hippies, banks of microphones, banner-lined streets,
shrines, thrones, and of course, gurus and dictators.
Ami Tallman lives and works in Los
Angeles. She completed her MFA at Art Center College of Design
in 2006. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and San
Francisco and was featured in "15 Artists Under 35" in the May
2008 issue of Art ltd magazine. Tallman was most recently
included in Against the Grain, a group show at Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions that runs concurrently with this
exhibition.
Image:
Ami Tallman
Jean-Bédel, Bokass
Central African Empire, 1977 (2008)
colored pencil on
polypropylene, 9 x 12 in
Courtesy of See Line, Los
Angeles
See Line
1812 Berkeley
Street
Santa Monica
Los Angeles, CA90404
|
|
Galleri Nicolai Wallner,
Copenhagen |
|
Glenn Sorensen
Black
Paintings
June 13 - July 26 2008
It is
a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present Black
Paintings, an exhibition with new works by Glenn
Sorensen.
Glenn Sorensen finds his motifs in his direct
personal environment; two people standing on the beach or an
empty can holding a flower.
The figures in the paintings are often placed
slightly off centre, half cut off by the edge of the canvas,
giving the works an immediacy of a snapshot or a quick glance.
Often repeating the same scene more than once, seeing it from
different angles or making minute changes, the artist seem to
have an almost meditative approach to painting. Sorensen works
figuratively but also pushes his images towards a
two-dimensional abstraction. Shapes are slightly blurred as if
moving in front of your eyes and a real sense of perspective
is distorted by the empty space the figures seemingly
inhabit.
The colors employed are dreamy and drowsy, rendered
in lush shades of lavender, pink and light turquoise on a dark
background that drains the vitality of the delicate figures
set against it. The contrast between light and darkness
creates unnatural phosphorescence, a peculiar, sleepy way of
seeing the world. This look is only further enhanced by the
blissful domesticity of the motifs. Like the opaque remnants
of a dream they play with your senses and linger in your mind
long after you have experienced them.
A feeling of weariness marks this series of portraits
and household still-lives. A certain melancholy that is
reflected in the various titles with which Sorensen describes
his work; Sick, Dented and Waiting. Also in the actual size of
the paintings the artist steers away from the grandiose.
Instead the works appear small and intimate as they hang
sparingly in the white gallery space. They resemble small
windows or perhaps even exclamation marks as the rigorousness
of the composition and the consistent use of the same colors
somehow seem to belie any reading of the works that focus on
their smallness and delicacy. It looks like the artist has
managed to find strength in weakness, giving his paintings a
mysterious aura that inevitably attracts the attention of the
viewer.
Also showing at Galleri Nicolai Wallner:
JuJu White Magic, a new video work by Danish artist
Gitte Villesen
Image:
Glenn Sorensen, Low Tide (2008)
Oil
on canvas
37 x 42,5 cm
Courtesy of Galleri Nicolai
Wallner
Galleri Nicolai
Wallner
Njalsgade 21, Building 15
DK-2300
Copenhagen
Denmark
|
|
|
|
re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
July 2-3 Sculpture &
Installation
July 10-11 - Photography & Multi-Media
July 17-18 - Painting / Drawing
July 24-25 - Summer Shows
These newsletter features are an exclusive service for
re-title.com members.
Please contact us for
membership information and to discuss your publicity
requirements in more detail
| |
|
|
| |
