re-title.com Features

TEAM GALLERY, New York

 

 

 

Chris Vasell

The Estate of Chris Vasell

 

28 October - 18 December 2010

 

Team is pleased to announce our first solo presentation of work by the Los Angeles based painter Chris Vasell. The exhibition, entitled The Estate of Chris Vasell, will run from the 28th of October through the 18th of December 2010. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

 

Chris Vasell's abstractions are informed by elements of color field painting, op art, figuration, and the abject. His paintings and collages are structured with a keen cerebral control that exists alongside a constant flirtation with chaos, repeatedly blending slapstick humor with a serious encyclopedic knowledge of his medium's historical lineage. His consistent refusal to settle into a signature style is reflected in a malleable practice in which divergent bodies of work display an optimistic restlessness, revealing a playful and open-ended engagement with materiality.

 

Vasell's process can be characterized as an aestheticization of temperament. In his shifting methodology, an attitude of non-conformity elicits a jovial poetics of dissonance. One could argue that Vasell's meandering stance is consciously subversive and an examination of his output to date elucidates this thesis. In earlier works, a concern with the perceptual space of painting juxtaposed abstracted human faces with overlapping skeins of color. These representational avatars reflected the act of looking back onto the viewer. Strong references to spirituality and psychedelia led to works that borrow freely from the history of optical painting, with treatments of softly vibrating concentric rings. He has riffed on the sublime trajectories of color field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis in paintings that hybridize a hippy tie-dye Camp with a philosophical contemplation of the void. Recent works have shown an engagement with the relationship between fine art and craft, yielding paintings made from collaged remnants of painted canvas.

 

For this exhibition, Vasell furthers his idiosyncratic project with a new body of work that utilizes detritus scavenged from life, which is then frequently appliquéd to corrugated cardboard sheets. By turning to cardboard as both a support and a surface material, Vasell recalls artists such as Daniel Spoerri, Robert Rauschenberg and Al Hansen in his process. The resultant bricolage includes bits of underwear, bottle caps, cigarettes, fuzz, and lace, and suggests a coyly off-hand, punk sensibility. By using discarded common materials alongside the standards of paint, canvas, and stretcher, Vasell's new work performs another shape-shifting coup. These painterly aggregates toy with the forms and functions of a recycled vernacular, inviting a celebratory critique of traditional notions of style. His is not the mechanical mode of recycling that dominates contemporaneous dialogues surrounding appropriation, reproduction, or distribution. Instead, a strong engagement with the physical properties of materials is a starting point for his survey of repurposed painterly tropes.

 

Vasell has had numerous solos in galleries both in the U.S. and abroad, and has participated in exhibitions at several museums, including The Aspen Art Museum and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. His work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

 

 

Image:

Chris Vasell

The Misty and Christy Show, 2010

acrylic, bottle caps, plastic jewels, rope, and canvas on canvas

84 x 70 inches

Courtesy of Team Gallery, New York

 

 

Team (Gallery Inc)

83 Grand Street

cross streets Wooster and Greene

New York, NY 10013

T +1 212 .279. 9219

 

Team Gallery

 

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GALERIE ADLER, Frankfurt am Main

 

 

 

Sigga Björg Sigurdardottir & Latefa Wiersch: BEAST

30 Oct 2010 to 8 Jan 2011
 
When mountains move in Iceland, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. After all, elves might be living inside! Before undertaking major construction projects, businesses and government agencies usually check their plans first with an elf expert. In fact, the majority of the population believes that elementary spirits such as trolls exist, or at least doesn’t rule out the possibility. They are part of life on the harsh island just like volcanoes, glaciers and geysers. Where people are forced to do battle with the forces of nature, there are always some inexplicable phenomena, and where reason fails, fantasy and lore step in, to which Iceland owes a whole panoply of supernatural creatures.
 
Icelandic artist Sigga Björg Sigurðardottir (*1977) dips into this inexhaustible pool of mystical beings to pick out human behaviors and problematic emotions as central themes in her drawings, murals and animated videos. Like little hairy beasts, her impish creatures make all kinds of mischief, spilling bodily fluids in the process, gagging and spitting, dripping and drooling. Some of the scenes are quite revolting, and yet they express deep-seated emotions. The figures scream and cry, badger and torture one another.
“The contrast between horror and beauty and the state of mind you get in when you don’t know when something is disgusting, beautiful, sad or funny… Have you ever started laughing when something sad happens?”, so the artist.
 
A similarly queasy feeling and hard-to-describe mix of emotions arises when examining the assemblages created by the young German artist Latefa Wiersch (*1982). Like Sigurðardottir’s creatures, Wiersch’s objects also seem to emanate from a different, very mysterious world.
A protective lampshade shields the light shed on a pair of red shoes placed underneath it, from which an indefinable, fleshy mass oozes. In this work, titled “Heim” (Home), the impression is like peering into a hidden cellar corner or secret sleeping nook where someone has made their home and left behind some enigmatic clues. Associations with both cosy security and horror arise. Home, sweet home?
A little old wooden house prompts ambivalent feelings in those who enter, seeming by turns intriguing and somehow morbid. The viewer becomes part of the sculpture, intruding on the private realm of an absent inhabitant who has used red light for drama while creating a homey atmosphere with the belongings he has left behind.
In Wiersch’s hands, found objects become hybrid sounding boxes, overgrown with soft garments. They inspire feelings that fluctuate between intimacy and distance, provoked in part by the growling and wailing noises emerging at irregular intervals from inside.
 
With new drawings, murals and videos by Sigga Björg Sigurðardottir and intriguing objects by Latefa Wiersch, the dual exhibition “BEAST” launches an interesting dialogue between Iceland and Germany. Both artists experiment with melding contradictory notions such as good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly, scary versus pitiful, cute versus monstrous. While Sigurðardottir interrogates her Icelandic roots, instinctively putting her impressions on paper, Wiersch collects everyday objects which she turns into assemblages that function as emotional projection surfaces. Neither position leaves the viewer cold, both offering a chance to venture into the realm of conflicting emotions, between laughing and crying, fondness and aversion, pity and malicious glee.
 
 
Image:
Sigga Björg Sigurðardottir
Untitled
2010
Mixed media on paper
41,6 x 51,9 cm
16.4 x 20.4 in
Courtesy of Galerie Adler, Frankfurt am Main
 
 
Galerie Adler
Hanauer Landstraße 134
60314 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
T +49 69 43053962
 
Galerie Adler

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FOXY PRODUCTION, New York

 

 

 

ESTER PARTEGÀS

MORE WORLD

 

October 21 through November 27, 2010

 

More World, ESTER PARTEGÀS' latest solo exhibition at Foxy Production, plays with perceptions of excess, anxiety, pleasure, and deprivation. More World combines wallpaper, drawings, prints, sculpture, and video in a charged environment of color and contrast. Nature within the city, packaging, and fast-food provide inspiration for the artist’s ironic takes on the psychic underpinnings of landscapes, surfaces, and objects.

 

Partegàs unpacks Pop, contaminating it with trash, removing its logos and references, and infusing it with a corrupted photo-realism. Private and public spheres sit uneasily together, as the artist traces the process of consumption: from the birth of desires in marketing to the final transformation of products into trash, the symbol of depletion and, perhaps, death.

 

The walls of the gallery are covered by the monochromatic Wallpaper (Fences) (2010) with its repeating photographic images of fencing and trees. The landscape is immediately recognizable as an abandoned urban area, common to large swathes of the post-industrial American city. For Partegàs the fence represents the division between the civilized and the wild, between order and disorder, and between the clean and the tainted; unnervingly, we cannot be sure which side of it we are on.

 

Studies on Mysticism (2010), a series of iridescent candy package drawings, hang before the black-and-white wallpaper, creating senses of both animation and disorientation. Using airbrush and stencils - the tools of choice of pre-digital graphic designers – Partegàs draws only the background designs, highlighting their cosmic, almost transcendental allusions, as if they were promising, with the purchase of a product, a kind of celestial reward. The works’ intense coloring amplifies merchandising’s optimistic appeal, one so often undercut later by dissatisfaction and disillusion.

 

Organized Fries (2007-2010), also hung directly onto the wallpaper, are digital prints of arrangements of French fries on brightly colored backgrounds. Partegàs makes the humble fry – unremarkable, almost invisible in its ubiquity – the focus of attention, the essential element within the visual systems she develops. She wittily places and classifies each fry with a formal precision reminiscent of a natural history museum exhibit.

 

Overcast (2010) are sculptural renderings of outdoor potted plants that have been covered in plastic bags to protect them from the winter weather. Their plastic covering is their protector from the elements as well as their oppressor – it seems to both constrict and suffocate. Cast in polyurethane, their leaves have a bright pigmentation that gives them an uncanny, almost surreal quality.

 

You Are Here (Lightbox) (2006-2010) is an illuminated idyllic forest scene that on closer scrutiny may not be quite what it seems: weeds sprouting in the foreground and strange marks and printing inconsistencies reveal the scene to be a photographic screen. The image is in fact of a hoarding around a Chinese building site, masking its dirt and disruption with a vision of bucolic splendor. Perception is distorted, and flatness and depth collapse into one another as differing levels of reality refract and disorient.

 

The silent video Ghost (2009) reflects the world through a trash-strewn puddle on a lonely industrial street. A truck rolls by, pigeons fly overhead, and an electronic advertising sign changes. Ghost distils many of the themes of More World: the odd glamour of the marginal and the discarded, the possibilities of multiple perspectives on the one subject, the trickiness of absolutes, and the experience of looking with fresh eyes upon the ordinary and everyday. As the video progresses it is clear that even the most mundane and forgotten backstreet, the so-called “non–place”, is rife with transformative activity.

 

ESTER PARTEGÀS (La Garriga, Barcelona, 1972) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Universitat de Barcelona and has completed postgraduate studies in Multimedia at Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin. Exhibitions include: Whitechapel Gallery, London (upcoming)(2011); Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (solo); Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; Denison Museum, Granville, OH (all 2010); Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Macro Future, Depart Foundation, Rome; Foundation CaixaForum, Barcelona (all 2009); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (solo); 2nd Moscow Bienniale (both 2007).

 

 

Image:

Ester Partegàs

Organized Fries

2007/10

Inkjet Ultrachrome archival print

41-3/4 x 29-1/2 in. (105.4 x 74.9 cm.) paper size
Edition 1 of 1

Courtesy of Foxy Production, New York

 

 

FOXY PRODUCTION

623 West 27 St

New York, NY 10001

T +1 212 239 2758

 

Foxy Production

 

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ANNET GELINK GALLERY, Amsterdam

 

 

 

David Maljkovic

Missing Colours

 

23 October – 20 November 2010

 

Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents ´Missing Colours´, the third solo exhibition of David Maljkovic. With ´Missing Colours´, David Maljkovic (Croatia, 1973) has taken a new road within his investigation of the history and the future of modernistic concepts. His place of residence Novi Zagreb – a part of the town that was built in the Socialist period – was point of departure for this new exhibition.

 

Colour plays the leading role in ´Missing Colours´. Inspired by a key scene from the Yugoslav comedy ´Balkan Spy´ (1984) in which an artist throws coloured paint against the grey apartment buildings and is picked up by the police, various colours are alternately projected from a slide projector at a monumental pedestal. The room is filled with the reflection of the coloured slide series. In this light the walls show new collages on canvas. A second slide series in the back of the room shows a sculpture photographed at various locations outside Zagreb.

 

With ‘Missing Colours’ David Maljkovic puts an accent at the current situation rather than referring to events in the past. Despite the intensity of the colours the exhibition emphasises the literal and figurative emptiness of a failed utopia that at this moment can be seen not just in Novi Zagreb, but at many places in the world.

 

David Maljkovic received recently the International Contemporary Art Prize Diputacio de Castello, which was presented by the province of Castello (Spain). The jury praised him “for the new sense that he gives to the photographic scale and to the architectural iconography of the modern movement. From the collage and the pages of magazine, the Croatian artist has been able to articulate the memory of a society that has not abandoned the utopia, with all its contradictions". Recent solo exhibitions were amongst others at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunstverein Hamburg (2007); CAPC, Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (2007). With his work David Maljkvovic is represented at a number of group exhibitions, amongst which the Bienal de Sao Paulo 2010, de 51e October Salon in Belgrade, ´5x5 Castello 2010´ in het EACC in Castello, ´Rehabilitation´ at Wiels in Brussels, de Istanbul Biennale, ´Les Promesses du Passe´ in Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2008.

 

 

The Bakery

Sarah van Sonsbeeck: Breaking the Silence

 

The Bakery presents the exhibition ´Breaking the Silence´ by Sarah van Sonsbeeck. In her work Sarah van Sonsbeeck (Amsterdam, 1973) concentrates on defining and appropriating space. In 2008 she wrote a letter to her neighbours asking them to pay 80 % of her rent since their noise pollution took up 80 % of her living space. Since then she has occupied herself with the meaning of sound, or the absence thereof. In 2009 Van Sonsbeeck investigated silence in one of the last unplanned areas of Almere, a relatively quiet area. Walking through the area Van Sonsbeeck recorded between the 10 and
23 July (2009) the silence with a decibel meter. Graphic designers Catalogtree, made sound profiles of the decibel measurements and used the information to form a silence map: silence mapped. The most silent point of the area is captured by Van Sonsbeeck in a large glass cube of one cubic meter “One cubic meter of silence”. After the glass cube was damaged by vandals and the work was then again removed to her studio, it became “One cubic meter of broken silence”. Van Sonsbeeck makes silence tangible.

 

Sarah van Sonsbeeck studied architecture at TU Delft and at Rietveld Academie and had a residency at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam until 2009. Her work was amongst others on show at the Paviljoens in Almere.

 

 

Image:

David Maljkovic

Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

 

 

ANNET GELINK GALLERY

Laurierstraat 187-189

NL-1016 PL Amsterdam

Netherlands

T +31 20 3302066

 

Annet Gelink Gallery

 

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MIMI FERZT GALLERY, New York

 

 

 

Mikhail Magaril

UTOPIA AMISS

 

October, 28th – November, 14th 2010

Opening: October 28th, from 7 to 9

 

Mimi Ferzt Gallery is pleased to present Utopia Amiss, an exhibition of works by Mikhail Magaril produced in the past decade. The exhibition features oil paintings, archival prints and sculptures as well as hand – made books …..by the artist. Magaril’s artistic output is the product of various influences ranging from early Soviet avant-garde illustration to American Pop-art of the 1970’s. Highly diverse in media, format and subject-matter, the works represent the artist’s unorthodox view s on tradition, history, language and a fate of an individual seen through the prism of the Soviet cultural and political symbolism. Combining a derisive version of the Communist imagery with the graphic principles of socialist propaganda, Magaril explores the nuances of the complicated operation of the socio-political system and its relationship with its human constituents. The artist draws on indigenous Russian concepts to portray such salient aspects of private and public spheres as man and nature, ideology and children, conformity and individualism.

Utopia Amiss embraces the entire scope of Magaril’s incisive humor, ranging from such purely comical productions as Hooray from Stalin (2010, wood, acrylic), a wooden pink-hued figure of a once-dreaded oppressor, to the sarcastic visual commentary on the pervasive myth of high morality of the Communist leaders as in Lenin in Paris (2010, archival digital print). In Aurora (1991, oil on canvas), the great illusion, impersonalized by the famed battleship, goes up in smokes flanked by the profiles of its most renowned leaders. Lenin’s idealistic idea of converting the backward Russia into a highly industrialized state by means of overall electrification is monumentalized in Lampochka Ilyicha (2010, glass, epoxy), an imaginary headstone that combines the leader’s mask with the elements of a light bulb. In A Friend of the Guard (1987, oil on canvas), a pack of cigarettes becomes a symbol of the Soviet multilayered hypocrisy. Palace of Culture (2010, archival digital print), featuring a gilded statue of Lenin propped in the foreground of one of the fallacious symbols of foregone epoch, demonstrates the artist understated lament over the demise of the great illusion.

Born in Leningrad in 1950, Mikhail Magaril received his degree from the Moscow Printing Institute. Like many other unofficial Soviet artists, Magaril made his living as a book illustrator collaborating with leading Leningrad publishing houses. In 1990, Mikhail Magaril immigrated to the United States. In 1991, he began working at the Center for Book Arts, New York. In 1998, Magaril founded Summer Garden Editions, a private press devoted to limited editions of his livres d`artiste. The most recent exhibition of his paintings was held at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. Mikhail Magaril’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the State Hermitage Museum as well as book collections of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard and Cornell Universities, the British National Library, the Russian National Library and numerous private collections.

 

 

Image:

Mikhail Magaril

Ball, 1999

oil on canvas

48 x 72 in. (122 x 183 cm).

 

 

Mimi Ferzt

81 Greene Street

New York, NY 10012

T +1 212 343-9377

 

Mimi Ferzt Gallery

 

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ASCHENBACH & HOFLAND GALLERIES, Amsterdam

 

 

 

PETER VOS

New Paintings

 

October 23rd to November 27th, 2010

 

Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries proudly presents a new series of paintings by Peter Vos (1975 Utrecht). The 15 paintings cover a number of themes, from animal portraits and details of still lifes and landscapes. This exhibition is a prelude to a comprehensive overview exhibition of his work at Rijksmuseum Twente in Enschede at the end of 2011, early 2012.

 

After graduating from the Rijksacademie in 2002, Peter Vos paints a series of imposing mountain landscapes typified by a sense of distance and chilliness. He strips the landscapes bare, removing every trace of flora and fauna. This is followed by a series of nocturnal animals; their specific shapes, and the details and textures of their plumage and pelts pose a technical challenge. But also gives Vos an opportunity to zoom in, closing in on the tiniest of details. In his mountain landscapes, Vos references the Romanticism of artists such as Casper David Friedrich. The romance of the sublime and overpowering presence of nature. In Vos’ portraits of animals, the romanticism has a far darker resonance, without being overplayed or dramatized. Vos’ meticulously painted portraits of young and adult animals, automatically conjure up an intimate yet oppressive mood.

 

Peter Vos’ technique of painting directly from life reflects his passion for the natural world. While travelling, he loves to hike, or visit an animal park. Peter Vos paints what he sees and how he perceives it.

 

Peter Vos graduated in 2002 from the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and in 2004 was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor Schilderkunst. An extensive catalogue on his work will be published to accompany his retrospective exhibition in Rijksmuseum Twente.

 

 

Image:

Peter Vos

Untitled, 2010

58 x 46 cm

oil on canvas

Courtesy of Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries, Amsterdam

 

 

Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries

Bilderdijkstraat 165-c

NL-1053 KP

Amsterdam

T +31 204121772

E mail @ gerhardhofland.com

 

Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries

 

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MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS, New York

 

 

 

Omar Chacon

Bacanales

 

October 21- December 23, 2010

Reception: Thursday, October 21, 6-8 pm

 

Thatcher Projects is pleased to present Bacanales, an exhibition of new works by New York artist Omar Chacon. This is the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

 

Exuberantly vivid, colorful and wild, Omar Chacon's abstract paintings - layers upon layers of bright peacock-feather ovals, dots and drips streaming across the canvas - draw inspiration from the vibrant life of his native Colombia, a place where cultures, classes and ideals from around the world blend to create a rich diversity. Embracing this 'Mestizo mix,' Chacon views his paintings as a 'coming together of the masses, for a festival or a protest,' where individual elements combine to develop a strong visual synergy. Each oval or drip is in fact an individual, created separately through building up acrylic on a plastic surface; the shapes are then peeled off and collaged to the canvas. This process brings yet another facet of Mestizo to the work - the elements are literal migrants, created elsewhere and transplanted into a new paradigm.

 

The title Bacanales references both Colombian street vernacular - bacano is an adjective implying something is optimal, beautiful, or encourages a sense of joy - and the Classical Roman concept of orgiastic festivals, or Bacchanalia, to honor the rowdy god of wine, Bacchus. This interweaving of historical and contemporary extends beyond the title as Chacon creates his palette for each painting by combining the colors of ancient indigenous textiles with the red, yellow and black of the Spanish flag, or metallic greys that recall the armor of the Spanish conquistadors. With color bursting from each canvas, and, in some cases, streaming down the sides and onto the walls, Chacon's collection in Bacanales is imbued with a sense of orgiastic beauty and celebration.

 

Work by Chacon has been recently featured in the Queens International Four, the 2009 Biennial at the Queens Museum of Art, New York. Chacon is the recipient of the 2007 William and Dorothy Yeck Award through the Miami University National Young Painters Competition and was also awarded a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Chacon shows his work in New York, Milan and Mexico City. His paintings have been reviewed in Art & Antiques, Artnet, and Artweek Magazine, among others. Chacon received his BFA at Ringling School of Art and Design and his MFA at San Francisco Art Institute.

 

 

Image:

Omar Chacon

Bacanal Bacan, 2010

23 x 31in

Acrylic on Canvas

Courtesy of Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York

 

 

Margaret Thatcher Projects

539 W. 23rd street

New York, NY 10011

T +1 212 675 0222

E info @ thatcherprojects.com

 

Margaret Thatcher Projects

 

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THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS, New York

 

 

 

ALISON BLICKLE

Zabriskie Point

 

October 15 - November 14, 2010

 

Thierry Goldberg Projects is proud to present Zabriskie Point, new work by ALISON BLICKLE. Inspired by the aesthetic of the desert scenes in Michaelangelo Antonioni's film, in which a couple drive into Death Valley and have a mystical experience, the paintings depict solitary females, nude or partially clothed, in semi-lush, semi-desiccated landscapes. Blickle's own trip into the California Desert to see Zabriskie Point last year furthered her fascination for wild unadulterated environments, leading her to make this sequence of images, which explores the human longing for union with nature, and questions the possibility of the desire for transcendence.

 

In Augurs, a figure sits upright with her back to viewers, calling to mind Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. Yet while there exists in Blickle's work a romantic belief in that "all-embracing and deeply fulfilling world" of natural beauty, as she herself says, the paintings also challenge that very belief. The brushwork creates a texture in the paint that both dazzles, and at the same time insists on its own flatness. The landscapes are seductive in their vividness, but also suspiciously opulent and psychedelic, if not unnatural. Viewers, like the figures in the paintings, are continually confronting the limits of their experience with these images of nature, hitting up against the possibility of escaping into an unspoiled wilderness. The artist's portrayal of the individual's encounter with nature is thus no longer straightforward and harmonious, but rather, tinged with self-consciousness and irony.

 

In many of the paintings, the land is transfused with an extreme brightness, pivoting between the harshly stark and the magically radiant. When it is not an overabundance of light that renders the scene ambiguous, it is sunset colors, like, for instance, in Ascribed to Signs, where the pigments call to mind the alluring Californian landscape, while teetering on the edge of the fantastical. A sun, absent from the sky, appears as a reflection on the sea, abnormally bright, while pinkish scratches and abstract forms resembling stairs appear on the canvas, giving the scene a surreal quality. Once more, these details gesture toward an environment that, like the figures that dwell in them, is difficult to determine, at once alienating and alluring, real and unreal.

 

In Wish you were Here, a lithe woman with long limbs in a white bathing suit stands upright, fore-grounded by a bed of flowers. The softness of the figure's contours and the smoothness of the brushwork bring painters like John Currin to mind. While the opulence of the colors and the simplicity of the rendering border on parody, the sky, as in Blickle's other paintings, is complicated with diamond-like formations. A feeling of tension is created between the realistic, the representational, and the abstract. As a result, the paintings exist somewhere between the fanciful, the facetious, and the meaningful.

 

And so, while the paintings portray the desert as a place where one can "be free, to explore and experiment, and to be completely removed from the confines and rules of society," as the artist remarks, this very locus and symbol of freedom becomes something that risks being secluded to the realm of the imaginary. One is left to wonder whether the desire for a genuine and sustainable connection with the natural world is just another pipe dream?

 

Alison Blickle was born in San Diego, California, in 1976 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at Deitch Projects, New York; Richard Heller, Los Angeles; Kinz Tillou & Feigen, New York; Adobe Books, San Francisco; and Parlour, New York. Zabriskie Point will be her first solo exhibition in New York.

 

 

Image:

ALISON BLICKLE

The Lesson, 2010

oil on canvas

40×30in.

Courtesy of Thierry Goldberg Project, New York

 

 

THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS

5 Rvington Street

New York, NY 10002

T +1 212.967.2260

 

THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS

 

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THOMAS ERBEN GALLERY, New York

 

 

 

What with What

Rose Wylie

 

October 14 - November 13, 2010

 

Thomas Erben is pleased to present the first US solo exhibition by British painter Rose Wylie. Born in 1934, Wylie attended the Folkestone & Dover School of Art until 1956 and received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1981. This exhibition includes works from the past two decades, providing the audience with access to the evolution of an idiosyncratic, astutely created body of work on canvas and paper.

 

The images in Wylie’s large-scale paintings, such as a cat, a skull, or seemingly inconsequential details of everyday life, are drawn from a variety of sources. Memory and emotional resonance guide her selections as in the movie scenes, which she paints, unchecked against the original references, in her Film Notes. Often a doll-like, female figure appears with objects or stands alone, assuming various rolls.

 

To give form to the everyday, personal and emotional, Wylie draws from a comprehensive knowledge of art historical references; including Dürer woodcuts, folk painting, Egyptian figures, medieval art, El Greco and early, hand-painted Pop. She first works out her ideas in drawings on paper, which she alters, crops, collages, layers and combines. Similar processes are then employed when she reworks these drawings in oil onto raw, unstretched canvas.

 

One senses Wylie’s visceral delight in the physical process of putting down paint, reworking it over and over, sometimes hiding unsatisfactory results with a patch of fresh canvas, white paint or simply scratching it out. Everything is in a serendipitous flux until completion, when the lines feel as if generated by themselves and every blob is in its place. Text, as Wylie indicates, is included as much for pattern as for content. This amalgamation of image and text creates a maze of narrative possibilities where the process of combining produces a distinct interplay between meaning and representation. What to express with What, What to paint with What, What to combine with What lies at the core of Wylie’s process.

 

Rose Wylie’s work is currently garnering quite some attention: Who is Britain’s hottest new artist? A 76-year old called Rose Wylie, Germaine Greer commented in The Guardian in a full-page article, July 2010. And the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, selected her to represent Great Britain in its 2010 exhibition Women to Watch. Over the years, she has had several solo shows in London with UNION (2010 and 2006), Transition Gallery (2008) and Stephen Lacey (1995 and 1999), and has appeared several times in the Norwich Gallery’s East International under such selectors as Matthew Higgs, Camille Chaimowicz, Neo Rauch, Rudi Fuchs and Jan Dibbets. Wylie was selected twice for the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2000 & 2002) and short-listed for the Jerwood Painting Prize (1997). Her work is in several public as well as high profile private collections.

 

 

Image:

Rose Wylie

Christmas Fairy (2008)

oil on canvas, 180 x 165 cm

Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

 

 

Thomas Erben Gallery

526 West 26th Street

floor 4

New York, NY 10001

T +1 212. 645.8701

 

Thomas Erben Gallery

 

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YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

 

 

 

Laura Letinsky

After All

 

September 16 – October 30, 2010

 

The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present After All, an exhibition of photographs by Laura Letinsky that continues the artist’s exploration of the still-life tradition, featuring selections from two recent bodies of work – “The Dog and the Wolf” and “Fall.” Formal elements characteristic of Letinsky’s oeuvre – oblique lines of perspective and depth, juxtaposition of incongruent objects, exquisitely controlled gradations of light – are presented here as a backdrop upon which our ideas surrounding food, desire, and death are illuminated.

 

“The Dog and the Wolf” is a reference to the Aesop Fable of the same name, alluding to the tension between domesticity and a romanticization of the wild. This series, made at twilight as the brood of night approaches, touches upon a formal literalism as this time of day is known also by the phrase, “le chien et le loup.” Distinctions between comfort and danger are investigated in their relation to “home,” in all its abundance and denial. The few objects included in each image - dead animals, wilting flowers, the dried, peeled skin of an orange - emphasize these conflicts, identifying the photographs under a shroud of temporality. Reminiscent of 17th century Dutch vanitas, Letinsky’s elegiac arrangements are a subdued meditation on the symbolic passage of day into night.

 

Taken one step further, Letinsky’s most recent series – “Fall” – examines a singular, enigmatic strand of the relationship between food and mortality. Driven by the artist’s thinking about last meals, the works are suggestive and abstracted considerations of what those meals would look or taste or even smell like. Drawn from real and fictional accounts of last meals, Letinsky’s sparsely occupied picture planes are bathed in an eviscerating light that does more to obscure than reveal the picture space.

 

Born in Canada in 1962, Laura Letinsky received her MFA from Yale University in 1991 and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. Letinsky’s work is held in the collections of the Stuttgart Museum, Germany, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Amon Carter Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. She has exhibited internationally, most recently in Rome, London and Germany. The exhibition coincides with the release of her third monograph, After All, by Grafiche Damiani. She is currently a professor at the University of Chicago.

 

 

Image:

Laura Letinsky

Untitled #28, from the series The Dog and The Wolf, 2009

40 x 53 inches, Chromogenic print

Ed. of 9

Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

 

 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY

535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor

New York, NY 10011

T +1 646-230-9610

Tuesday - Saturday, 10 AM - 6 PM

 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY

 

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