re-title.com Features

The Naughton Gallery, Belfast

Simon McWilliams
"Red Model", 2014
oil on Linen
153 x 123cm
Courtesy of the artist
 
 
SIMON McWILLIAMS
Abstract Armature
 
11th April - 18th May 2014
Reception Thursday 10th April, 6-8pm
 
The Naughton Gallery at Queens University presents a solo show of paintings by Belfast Artist Simon McWilliams.
 
For more than 20 years Simon McWilliams has proven himself to have a unique painterly voice gathering accolades and awards in the USA, London and Ireland.
Following the success of his solo show in Los Angeles, these paintings continue his use of architectural armatures and organic elements to reveal his fascinating and individualistic handling of paint.
These are vibrant, densely built, spatially complex paintings. Underlying their quasi-abstraction is an armature of realism which effectively organises the sumptuous paint.
 
Shana Nys Dambrot, writing in the Huffington Post, says
"McWilliams is looking at ordinary cement, rebar, polyurethane, and debris, but he's using paint and saturated color to understand it; melding natural, industrial, and emotional phenomena into a singular expressive construct prompting our attention to not only what we see, but how we see it."
Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles 2013
 
About Simon McWilliams:
Simon McWilliams (1970) Studied painting at the Royal Academy Schools in London, he has received almost 30 awards for his paintings in the last 20 years including  the Guinness Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, a Major Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Perpetual Gold Medal and Silver Medals from the Royal Ulster Academy. This is his 8th Solo show and will be accompanied by a colour publication.
 
About Naughton Gallery:
The Naughton Gallery is named after its generous benefactors Martin and Carmel Naughton. Since 2001, The Gallery has become one of Belfast's most sought after and exciting visual arts platforms, featuring a rolling programme of works from the University's own collection, touring exhibitions and shows by local and international artists. The Naughton Gallery is a registered museum.
 
 
The Naughton Gallery
Queen's University
Belfast BT7 1NN
T: + 44 (0) (028) 9097 3580
 
The Naughton Gallery
 
Read On... The Naughton Gallery, Belfast

 

 

Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin

Lea Asja Pagenkemper
"Blacks and Whites" 2014
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin
 
 
LEA ASJA PAGENKEMPER
Remote Fate
 
13 March - 19 April, 2014
 
The Jette Rudolph Gallery is pleased to present REMOTE FATE, an exhibition of current works by artist Lea Asja Pagenkemper. In her new series of paintings, the artist has elevated the role of word and text by transforming them into essential motifs in her visual representations. What is striking in this transformation is the way she organizes the text into creations that are comprised of visually legible structures. While the words are intentionally arranged in specific sequences that look like rhythmic poems or simple, formal line compositions, the contents of her texts or word sequences undermine the apparent harmony that seems to be imposed by an external order; instead, they confront the viewer aka reader with concepts originating in the domains of the sexual, the personal and the intimate as well as with doubts pertaining to the social and professional worlds.
 
"Plainly the visual system is persistent, inventive, and sometimes rather perverse in building a world according to its own lights; the supplementation is deft, flexible, and often elaborate." (Nelson Goodman: Ways of Worldmaking, 1978)
 
Pagenkemper's most recent works allow us to recognize the essential character of her visual creativity and to read it as a conscious and systematic processing and further elaboration of already existing groups of works. Her pictorial creations are almost exclusively dominated by her will to textual structure, which in turn reflects language in terms of artistic visual representation. The artist arranges text fragments that revolve around select key terms and transfers them to the medium of painting. She thereby combines and collapses them until they create a unifying surface - to the point that pictorial form and linguistic content can no longer be identified separately. In her new canvases, large-format panels and works on paper, the artist radically condenses the indefinite sense of place and time that are typically the hallmark of her works, instead privileging the austerity of written structures and the sensual-poetic expressivity of orderly word arrangements. These structures and arrangements are penciled onto pure, unprimed canvas, or they're drawn in white chalk on wooden panels painted with pitch black blackboard lacquer, or yet again they appear as charcoal transfers on rag paper. As in her previous paintings, the appearance and significance of her motifs are determined by her work strategies of applying layers upon layers, of blurring and smudging, of erasing and superimposing new writing, and by her handling of repetitive sets of phrases; it is these strategies that give to her motifs the pervasive appearance of a temporality that is visibly in-process.
 
Accepting the artificial order imposed by the character of the tableau, Pagenkemper amplifies the range of possibilities available to mimetic panel painting within these confines by adding the potential for the panels' pure readability and visibility: Unlike Leon Battista Alberti's model of painting as opening 'a window to the world,' these text-works create descriptive, visual apparatuses that are like open rooms, spatial enclosures without a center but furnished with a variety of entrances and exits. Beyond the limits of specifiable location and chronology, these text fragments keep constantly producing new organizational structures, thereby creating for themselves an imaginary deep space that is the effect of their visual scaling and stylistic variation.
 
For the 'Typo Drawings,' handmade text-prints on paper, Pagenkemper literally uses the written word as material. In other words, she uses the process of transferring the text to the picture's surface to create tangible, meaningful points of emphasis. When you first look at the various visual ornaments, the letters look like they have been subsumed by the design principle, but the text-pictures - with their strings of letters and word fragments - very intentionally express specific statements and assertions. "For a subject, it is about touching upon a truth amidst all uncertainty and in giving that which is touched upon form, language." (Marcus Steinweg: Behauptungsphilosophie, 2006)
 
Pagenkemper doesn't shy away from provocation. It is as if the artist's means of expression is not the pictorial motif but the word. Because, as Michel Houellebecq reminds us: "Believe in structure. Believe in the ancient metrics, equally. Rhyme and rhythm are powerful tools for the liberation of the inner life" (Michel Houellebecq: To Stay Alive, 1999). Moreover, they can be sexist or pornographic and they can even be a direct accusation against the person looking at them. Absurd wordplays also pop up: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Pagenkemper uses provocation as a way to release and liberate feelings, which in turn "(...) override the causal chain; one's feelings are the only thing that allow one to perceive what's going on inside; communicating this perception is the object of writing." Lastly, according to French writer Houellebecq, it is love and passion alone that allow purified objects to appear in all their clarity; that make their crystalline truth visible
(Michel Houellebecq: To Stay Alive, 1999).
 
 
Galerie Jette Rudolph
Strausberger Platz 4
10243 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 (0)-30- 613 03 887
 
Galerie Jette Rudolph
 
Read On... Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin

 

Kingston Gallery, Boston

Mary Bucci McCoy
In Green, 2013
Acrylic on panel, 10.5 x 8.5 x 1 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Kingston Gallery
 
 
MARY BUCCI McCOY
New Paintings
 
April 2-27, 2014
Reception: Friday, April 4, 2014, 5:30-8:00 p.m.
 
Kingston Gallery is pleased to present Mary Bucci McCoy's third solo exhibit with the gallery in its Main and Center galleries, April 2-27, 2014.
 
Bucci McCoy's intimate abstract acrylic paintings on rectilinear and vertical oval panels negotiate the reconciliation of intention with acceptance, action with stillness, object with image, and conceptual rigor with intuitive process through a poetic material language that investigates and exploits the opportunities and exigencies of her chosen medium. The work synthesizes oblique references to the body and the landscape on both macro and micro levels through form, color, and material.
 
This exhibit reveals that Bucci McCoy's paintings are increasingly informed by her early experience with the materials, processes, and techniques of ceramic sculpture: from a process of building paintings over a period of time by deliberately situating painted marks on a monochromatic ground, she has gradually expanded her practice to include working in a very immediate, improvisational way, with the possibility of an entire painting occurring simultaneously in the still-liquid matrix of the ground.
 
The paintings value the interior rather than exterior scale of the viewer's experience, and many of them resist reduction to a single image, requiring physical presence and time to be fully seen. Bucci McCoy cites a diverse range of influences for the work in this exhibit, including composer/artist John Cage, choreographer Deborah Hay, and sound artist Bill Fontana, as well as traditional Japanese ceramics, Samnite artifacts encountered during travels in the Italian provinces of Abruzzo and Molise, and the experience of hiking through the volcanic landscapes of the west coast of the United States.
 
Mary Bucci McCoy lives and works on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Honors include a 2012 Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellowship, nomination for the 2013 Brother Thomas Foundation Fellowship (Boston, MA), and selection for the White Columns Curated Artist Registry (New York, NY). In addition to Kingston Gallery she has also exhibited at venues including Rhode Island College (Providence, RI); the Artists Foundation (Boston, MA); Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA); Salem State University (MA); Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia, PA); AG Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); Southern New Hampshire University (Manchester, NH); Art Complex Museum (Duxbury, MA); Merrimack College (Andover, MA); and Emmanuel College (Boston, MA). She holds degrees from Tufts University (Medford, MA) and School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University (Boston, MA). She has also studied ceramic sculpture at l'École des Arts Decoratifs (now Haute École d'Art et de Design Genève) (Geneva, Switzerland).
 
Gallery hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 12-5 pm and by appointment
 
 
Kingston Gallery
450 Harrison Ave., #43
Boston, MA 02118
T: +1 617-423-4113
 
Kingston Gallery
 
Read On... Kingston Gallery, Boston

 

dalla Rosa Gallery, London

Benjamin Bridges
Pythagoras (2013)
oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cm
Courtesy of the artist and dalla Rosa Gallery, London
 
 
BENJAMIN BRIDGES
PYTHAGORAS ADRIFT
 
14 March - 12 April 2014
 
dalla Rosa is delighted to present Pythagoras Adrift, Benjamin Bridges first solo exhibition at the gallery. Working on canvas, board, and paper the artist has created a new body of work that focuses on compositional balance, pairings of colours, line and application of paint. Bridges' recent paintings - especially the ones on canvas - explore ways of creating texture, using paint in a much looser manner to reveal his layering technique in a less controlled way. Structures defined by neat lines are counterbalanced by washed-down backgrounds that emphasize the perception of liquid drift.
 
I loved the Perspex surfaces I was working on for a long time. It was so smooth and flat and the edges were stunning, but the moment I wanted to push more movement and energy into the painting, it just couldn't handle it. I had discovered its qualities but also its limitations and had grown weary of it. I found it restrictive. I started looking back at the surfaces I had used before, namely canvas and MDF and at what artists had been using for thousands of years. I took the plunge and bought a big box of canvass frames and varying mdf panels.
 
Working on them has really opened up the possibilities, allowing me to be far more aggressive with the paint and more versatile in the application. These surfaces give me a chance to push myself, and even alter my practice and aims mid way through a painting If I so choose. In essence that's what's represented in this show. It is about reaching, maybe even groping in the dark for some ideas. Where the surface is the place on which the idea is worked out rather that where it is illustrated.
(Benjamin Bridges, 2014)
 
Along with the canvas works, Bridges has explored the use of dark tones on board, a series that he defined as 'blanks'. These smaller paintings are studies on composition, framing the outer edges (round or squared) with vibrant colours and adding a few touches of paint that suggest depth and movement. Considering these works Bridges wrote: I think the framing gives them a context, and the darkness is a void, and any mark made in the space is a kind of pure gesture, floating in the darkness, alone and isolated. It has room to breath, and sit and rest in the minds eye.
 
Two series of large graphite drawings also highlight similar themes, building line and composition within framed areas. Using the same size paper he took different approaches to geometry, expressing the push and pull between extreme order and chaos. In one case a controlled study on well-defined lines (how to construct a box), and in the other a progressive implosion of angular shapes (particles bouncing within a space).
 
Benjamin Bridges is an artist, curator, and documentary producer based in London. He started showing while studying Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon (2007-10), and had two solo exhibitions at ARTTRA (Amsterdam) in 2010 and 2013. He took part in group shows at dalla Rosa (2012 and 2013), Transition Gallery (2013), and Matthews Yard (Croydon, 2013) among others. Bridges was short listed for the 2009 Prunella Clough Painting Prize, and took part in the Royal Academy Summer Show (2008 and 2012) and the 2013 Threadneedle Prize. In 2012 he set up Hollow Earth London, a fine arts platform showcasing emerging talent in London through artists interviews and documentaries.
 
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday 12 - 6, Saturday 12 - 5, and by appointment.
 
 
dalla Rosa Gallery
121 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1R 5BY
 
dalla Rosa Gallery
 
Read On... dalla Rosa Gallery, London

 

Von Lintel Gallery opens in Los Angeles with Lay of the Land

LAY OF THE LAND   CURATED BY FARRAH KARAPETIAN   MARCH 22 - MAY 10, 2014 OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 5-8PM   FEATURING: FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN BRICE BISCHOFF ZOE CROSHER ANTHONY HERNANDEZ PETER HOLZHAUER SOO KIM SHARON LOCKHART KLEA MCKENNA CATHERINE OPIE ED RUSCHA MATEO TANNATT MELANIE WILLHIDE AMIR ZAKI

Mateo Tannatt, Untitled, 2014
Archival pigment print, 53 x 36 inches,
courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx gallery

Von Lintel Gallery is proud to present its inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles: Lay of the Land. The exhibition culls from artists, primarily based in LA, with a variety of perspectives on both photography and the city itself that reinforce the reputation of LA as a place for experimentation and of its landscapes as a well of inspiration. Los Angeles yields a rich field of practice precisely because its artistic history and sense of place have never been codified.
 
Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles Apartments of the 1960s are a crucial part of that argument: this work is photography but not beholden to the medium's strictures conceptually or technically; similarly the work is of Los Angeles but not beholden to the city's perpetuated myth. Looking at these pictures alongside Catherine Opie's mini-malls, Florian Maier-Aichen's altered image of a snowy La Brea Boulevard, and Peter Holzhauer's close-ups of mark-makings on city surfaces suggest the broad parameters within which the landscape of this city and the photographic medium can be understood.
 
Many of the works in this show are generated by a conceptual framework but result in imagery that transcends its own rules. Anthony Hernandez's images taken inside homeless camps become projects in abstraction and Sharon Lockhart's photographs pulled from carefully constructed projects suggest two potentials for interior life: labor and pause. Zoe Crosher's LAX series grounds dreamy lyricism in the banality of the airport motel; describing the investigation of LAX and its surrounding infrastructure as a "non-center, a metaphor for Los Angeles, captured from surrounding satellite positions." Klea McKenna's photograms of rain exist on the backdrop of California's longstanding conditions of drought. Mateo Tannatt's untitled image of jeans strewn in the branches of a lemon tree becomes a pictograph: a surreal moment of found visual poetry. These images go beyond the circumstances under which they were produced.
 
Photography can also be a tool that speaks to other kinds of image production. Brice Bischoff's movements in the Bronson Caves, recorded photographically and producing a colorful haze, suggest opportunities to consider time and its mysteries as much as their environmental backdrop. Amir Zaki's prints from Time Moves Still demonstrate the potent and quiet combination of multiple moments: fog obscures the architecture on top of seaside cliffs, while the viewer's back remains to the ocean. Melanie Willhide's images recovered off a stolen and improperly wiped laptop are deliciously corrupt and, like Zaki's photographs, deny total access to the presumed content of the work. Soo Kim renders trees from cut paper that are not literally photographic but echo the forms and practices she developed through her photographic work.
 
Each of the artists in the show creates work with consequences reaching well beyond the borders of Southern California and the photographic medium at large. The legacy of such imagery is that as photography becomes increasingly conversant with other practices, Los Angeles becomes ever more a part of the world.
 
About the gallery:
Initially founded in Munich, Germany in 1993, Von Lintel Gallery opened in the Chelsea gallery district in 1999. After two decades in business and fourteen wonderful and successful years in New York, we are excited to become part of the burgeoning, vibrant Los Angeles art world. We are drawn by the growing community of artists living in LA and the opportunity to be part of a developing art center; the move to California will allow us to expand our vision and scope. The contemporary art scene in LA presents greater opportunities and flexibility for us and we are excited both to exhibit new artists and to introduce the gallery program to new audiences. And importantly, Thomas von Lintel can't wait to have a lemon tree in his backyard.
 
About the curator:
Farrah Karapetian is primarily an artist and an occasional curator. Her art involves works with cameraless photography in a sculptural and increasingly relational field. Recent exhibitions include Trouble With the Index, California Museum of Photography at Riverside; Good Sign, Flint Public Art Project, Michigan; the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; and Rogue Wave '13, L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA. Upcoming group exhibitions: Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, and the Torrance Art Museum. Curatorial projects include: Unsparing Quality (2014) and The Black Mirror (2013) at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA. Karapetian received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Ms. Karapetian lives and works in Los Angeles.
 


Klea McKenna
Rainstorm 6 (California, February), 2014
photogram of rain on gelatin silver fiber paper, unique
34 x 41 inches (86.3 x 104.1 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery
 


Sharon Lockhart
Untitled, 2011
Chromogenic print
41 x 52 inches (104.1 x 132.1 cm)
Edition of 6
Courtesy of the artist, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, neugerriemschneider, Berlin
 


Melanie Willhide
Untitled (the Jack Benny House #2),, 2011
Archival pigment print
30 x 28 inches (76.2 x 71.1 cm)
Edition of 5
Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery
 


Anthony Hernandez
Forever 36, 2007-2012
Chromogenic print
40 x 40 inches (101.6  x 101.6 cm)
Edition of 7
Courtesy of the artist
 


Brice Bischoff
Bronson Caves #3, 2010
C-Print
38 x 48 inches (96.5 x 121.9 cm)
Edition of 5
Courtesy of the artist and Cirrus Gallery
 


Zoe Crosher
LAX Mircotel, 2005
Lightjet print
27 x 27 inches (68.6 x 68.6 cm)
Edition of 5
Courtesy of the artist
 


Florian Maier-Aichen
La Brea Avenue in the Snow, 2011
C-Print
65 5/8 x 81 3/4 inches, framed (166.7 x 207.6 cm, framed)
Edition of 6
Courtesy of the artist, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, London and 303 Gallery, New York
 
 
VON LINTEL GALLERY
 
new location:
2685 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
310.559.5700
 
www.vonlintel.com

http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/vonlintelgallery.asp

 

SHAPE OPEN EXHIBITION AND CLOSING PARTY at Lewisham Arthouse

Wednesday March 12th - 29th 2014
 


James Lake
Entitlement - series number 1
2013
Cardboard
910mm x 520mm x 180mm
© James Lake
 
Lewisham Art House
 
Dates: Wednesday March 12 - 29 2014
Opening hours: Wed- Sun 12-6pm
Late Opening and Closing Party: Friday 28 March 2014 from 6 - 8:30PM
Address: 140 Lewisham Way, SE14 6PD London, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk
 
The Shape Open is an annual call-out which invites disabled and non-disabled artists to submit work in response to a disability focused theme.
 
This year's theme, 'Disability Re-assessed', generated submissions from an exciting multidisciplinary range of artists and includes painting, textile, photography and video works. After a successful six month tour the exhibition has reached its final destination, opening at the Lewisham Arthouse from Wednesday 12 - 29 March 2014.
 
Join us at the exhibition tour closing party on Friday 28 March 2014 from 6 - 8:30PM for the final opportunity to see this unique and thought provoking collection of works by 29 emerging contemporary artists.
 


Maria Constantinou
Bandaged
2013
C-Type Print
107cm x 72cm
© Maria Constantinou
 
Special mention goes to the Shape Open Prize winners Eric Fong and Katherine Araniello, who were selected by our Open Patron Yinka Shonibare MBE, Marcel Baettig, CEO of Bow Arts and Tony Heaton, CEO of Shape.
 


Eric Fong
Reflection 01
2013
HD Digital File
3 mins 56 Sec
© Eric Fong
 
Yinka Shonibare MBE, launched the exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery (Bow Arts) and commented on the winning submission:
 
'Eric Fong's winning film is piece which plays with perception, and moves between abstraction and reality. What is so impactful here is that it plays with one's own judgment and feelings of how other people might look different to one's own self.'
 
Shape, the UK's leading arts charity working to improve access into arts and culture for disabled people.
 


Aminder Virdee
...And The Odds & Sods
2013
Solid Maple Wood.
25mm x 25mm x 25mm
© Aminder Virdee
 
Featuring artists:
Eric Fong (Winner of the Shape Open best in show prize), Katherine Araniello (runner up for Best in Show prize), Katharine Armstrong, Lizz Brady, Sophie Brown, Charles Burns, Vivi-Mari Carpelan, Ellie Collins, Maria Constantinou, Alice Dass, Beth Davis-Hofbauer, Jon Adams, Tony Allan, Gabriel Andreu, Rachel Gadsden, Ruth Hamblett, Stephen Lee Hodgkins, Matthew Humphreys, Margherita Isola, Fabienne Jacquet, Kasia Kaldowski, Babis Karalis, Ann Kelson, Pragya Kumar, James Lake, Beth Lau, Dene Leigh, Ilsun Maeng, Aga Maria Masternak, Marion Michell, Graham Miller, Cecilia Montague, Annie Morgan, Andrew Omading, Thomas Owen, Jo Paul, Evaldas Pauza, Bekki Perriman, Simon Raven, Yvette Rawson, Sally Redway, Ivan Riches, Christopher Sacre, Tracy Simpson, Monica Takvam, Will Thompson, Aminder Virdee, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, Andy Wild, Naomi Woddis and The Vacuum Cleaner.
 


Marion Michell
Soldier's child
2012-2013
Crocheted from wool/polyester yarn
450mm x 260mm
© Marion Michell
 
Shape Website: www.shapearts.org.uk 
Exhibition Page: http://www.shapearts.org.uk/artandexhibitions/shape-open-2013.aspx
Shape Twitter: @ShapeArts
Shape Facebook: ShapeArts
Enquires Contact:
020 7424 7330
[email protected]
 
 
Lewisham Art House
Wednesday March 12th - 29th 2014
Opening hours are: Wed- Sun 12-6pm
140 Lewisham Way
SE14 6PD London, United Kingdom
Web: http://www.lewishamarthouse.org.uk
 

The Front Room, Brooklyn NY

Patricia Smith
"Compulsion Drift"
Ink, watercolor, pencil, charcoal pencil on paper
25" x 19"
Courtesy of the artist and The Front Room, Brooklyn, NY
 
 
PATRICIA SMITH
Mapper
 
February 28-March 30, 2014
Reception: Friday, February 28th, 7-9
 
Front Room Gallery presents Mapper, an exhibition of new works on paper by Patricia Smith. Known for her idiosyncratic cartographic explorations of the psyche and mental states, Smith incorporates new outer and inner geographical regions in her latest works.
 
The writings of the Situationists on psychogeographical mapping served as a jumping off point for her recent year-long odyssey to Paris and other European cities to create works incorporating some of the locations that inspired these concepts. In her wanderings (dérives) through unfamiliar places, the artist gathered impressions of physical space, the residue of history, related emotional states, synchronicities and other details to map a specific place, time and point of view. The finished works are delicate, highly detailed paintings on paper incorporating images and texts rendered in ink, pencil, watercolor, rubber stamping and collage. Smith's faintly biomorphic forms are somewhat reminiscent of medical illustration, antique cartography and mystical diagrams, yet are something else entirely.
 
Smith's mappings are not exclusively anchored in external geography. In other works, such as Schizoanalysis, she organizes and analyzes texts, and maps their intersections with her own thoughts. The results are a highly individual infiltration of mapping into the fluid and mysterious regions of the mind.
 
As critic Benjamin Sutton has stated, "Smith's mind maps underline how we make sense of our accelerated and dematerialized interactions in elaborate, self-reflexive spatial terms. Maps grow more important as our trajectories become increasingly unclear."
 
Patricia Smith has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including recent exhibitions at Broadcast Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, Housatonic Museum in Bridgeport, CT, Voorkamer in Lier, Belgium, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Meyers, FL and other venues in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Montreal. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, the LA Times and L Magazine. In 2013 she was awarded a six-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. This May she will be an artist in residence at Stichting Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. Smith lives and works in New York.
 
 
The Front Room
147 Roebling St
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
New York, NY
Fri-Sun 1-6 & by appointment
T: +1 (718) 782-2556
 
The Front Room
 
Read On... The Front Room, Brooklyn NY

 

DOMOBAAL, London

Christopher Hanlon
Rubber Plant, 2014
oil on linen stretched over board
60x50.3cm, photograph by Andy Keate
Courtesy of the artist and Domobaal, London
 
 
CHRISTOPHER HANLON
CHAMBER
 
21 February - 29 March, 2014
 
#1
 
Chamber, a word that suggests enclosure, has an expansive field of meanings: cloud chambers, brooding chambers, chamber pots, chamber music, bullet chambers, dark chambers, chambres claires. Christopher Hanlon's chamber presents us with rubber plants, heads of hair, poly-satin and velvet pile. His motifs are interior, accumulated, and mute except for their quiet introverted chatter once our backs are turned. These paintings confront us with their posterior challenging us to find the right words to describe them. An empty podium dressed in fabric. A velveteen oxblood rondel that offers no point of entry. It hovers slightly above the floor, incorporating in its wefts (or woofs) and warps decades of dust and follicles. A rubber plant. Rubber plants yield a milky white latex, irritant to the eyes and fatal if taken internally. A rubber plant is tough love. The back of a shiny marble head with a strand of hair twirled into place by whom exactly?
 
The anatomical word for the back of the head is occiput. The hair that curls into a shell-like cone at the occiput of Hanlon's painting's sculpted head has no follicles, no cuticles, no medulla. It has never grown. It has the smooth sheen of stone sculpted into seamlessness, but it exists in the semantic gap between being (or meaning) stone, hair, or pigment.
 
Domo Baal presents Christopher Hanlon's third solo show in the gallery. There will be 8 new paintings (approximately). Domo Baal and Christopher Hanlon would like to thank Eva Wilson for this text, which she might well expand on as time goes by and the rubber plant makes new spring shoots - and the paintings make their way to the gallery.
 
#2
 
'Oh, shoot!' thought the rubber plant as it sensed itself growing a new extension. It was a shot in the dark, this new leaf, still wrapped in its bright red protective sheath that would soon fall off like a shoe dropped nonchalantly to the floor after dangling on the tip of its owner's toes. The discarded skin would be released to drift down into the smooth terrene of laminate and screed once the leaf itself was mature. Inside the new leaf, another immature one was waiting to push into its own coating, at the meristemic cell of the Ficus. The immature leaf eminently appreciated the salacious roots of the rubber plant's Latin name as well as its modern variations - fare la fica, as in flipping the bird.
 
#3
 
This morning the postman handed me a jiffy bag containing the 1952 edition of André Malraux's Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The 703 images of stone figures in Malraux's compendium are arranged to illustrate a 'confrontation of metamorphoses' letting another medium, the enigmatic, fragmenting, composed, dramatic act of photography, do the talking.
 
Image number 635 shows a black and white photograph of the helmet fastened to the back of the head of Benvenuto Cellini's bronze sculpture of Perseus (1533) from the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The helmet (functioning as a Janus head facing backwards) has eyes, wings, a dramatic nose leading to a radial moustache that blends into Perseus' curly hair at the nape of his neck. Perseus, as seen from the front, holds high the severed head of Medusa, the Gorgon, and shares with her a melancholy (and finally harmless) downcast gaze. Only the eyes on the back of his head stare straight out under flinty eyebrows. The eyes: slightly anxious, tired, like an old man's whose one-time ferocity is slowly fading into the growing disquiet of age.
 
Malraux's hazy photograph tampers with the sculpture's bronze sheen and renders it instead rough and textured like a concrete cast that has stood in the rain. Christopher Hanlon's imposing painting of the back of another sculpted head (which however denies what even the flipside of Malraux's portrait possesses: eyes) uses the oil paint's glistening reflections to the opposite effect. The surface of the head is reminiscent of the sensation of fever dreams, when flashing neurons make you run your fingers endlessly over hallucinated, impossibly smooth, infinite surfaces. The same fever dream also seems to have come up with the disconcertingly small horns that appear to be growing out of the sculpture's forehead and that make not knowing this head's gaze even more unsettling.
 
Hanlon seems to have a similar approach to the idea of an imaginary museum of images as Malraux, plucking them from a subliminal maelstrom of revenant motifs and juxtaposing them as fleeting aperçus, déjà-vu. But Hanlon disrupts what in Malraux's endeavour functions as a unifying codex of images by essentially severing them from their origins (much like Perseus' Gorgon head), from their compatibility with a history of similar tropes, from their conjugation within a pictorial grammar. In all their painterly virtuosity they remind me of someone who is relearning a language after a stroke or a trauma and fumbles to recognize and pronounce each word - words that are sometimes hairy, sometimes bulky like pebble stones. Rubber plant. Penumbra.
 
 
DOMOBAAL
3 John Street
London WC1N 2ES
T: +44 2072429604
 
DOMOBAAL
 
Read On... DOMOBAAL, London

 

Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

Brad Kahlhamer
Please Pay Me So I Can Pay Them, 2013
Spray Paint, ink pencil on bedsheet
100 x 84 in. (254 x 214 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
 
 
BRAD KAHLHAMER
The Four Hairs
 
February 20 - March 29, 2014
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko proudly announces Brad Kahlhamer's third solo show at the gallery.
 
The exhibition centres around a large wall installation entitled The Four Hairs, with elements spanning from paintings and water colours, collages, vintage photos and Xeroxes to objects and sculptures. It offers a profound insight to the many facets of Brad Kahlhamer's work and his own personal mythology. In his realm he mixes contemporary Native American culture, urban street culture, subjective experiences and mythical symbols and deals with topics such as identity politics and urban, global culture.
 
Another major work in the show is Please Pay Me So I Can Pay Them. It is comprehensive and detailed, mixed media painting on a full-size bed sheet. Here, historical allusions to Native American crafts and symbols are mixed with contemporary materials such as spray paint and ballpoint pens. A large collage and a group of watercolours complement the central pieces with texts and images, referring to Kahlhamer's background both as an art director at Topps Company and as a musician.
 
Brad Kahlhamer was born in Tucson, Arizona and lives in New York City. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally and he will be included in Musée du Quai Branly's exhibition The Art and Life of the Plains Indians opening in 2014 and traveling to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work has recently been shown at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri, 2013 and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut in 2012. Recent group exhibitions include One Must Know The Animals, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, 2012. He was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Award, 2006 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in painting, 2001.
 
Kahlhamer is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin and the Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire.
 
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
Stockholm
Sweden
T: +46 (0)8 612 00 75
 
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
 
Read On... Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

 

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ryan Mosley
Audubon's Last Aviary, 2014
Oil on Canvas
210 x 275 cm / 82 5/8 x 108 1/4 ins
Courtesy of the artist and Alison Jacques Gallery, London
 
 
RYAN MOSLEY
 
21 February - 15 March, 2014
 
'Ryan Mosley is one of the most inventive of the younger English painters at work today, and you can feel the ghostly presence of Picasso here ceaselessly at work... Mosley is a fantasist, a maker of wild, irrational, dancing imagery, who seems to have learnt lessons from every modern movement.'
- Michael Glover, The Independent, 2013
 
In Ryan Mosley's third solo exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery his narratives within narratives and worlds within worlds feel even more transgressive and irreverent than those we've previously been invited to explore. Rich with art-historical devices and painted asides, his vocabulary is now unmistakably Mosleyan, and his characters not only veer well beyond the boundaries of societal norms, but are willing us to get lost with them.
 
In the large painting, Audubon's Last Aviary, a skull whose entire torso is constructed from its falling beard conspires with a humanoid spearhead and a vine-stem-face in a yellowing cave. They are surrounded by a flock of abandoned and undiscovered subspecies of bird - hunchbacked and monochrome as if their subterranean existence has made colour, flight and even birdsong distant redundancies. Elsewhere, two courtiers - also with only skulls for faces but resplendent in afros and harlequin-chequered garments - are held in some pre-Quattrocento heraldic pose, carrying boules as orbs and standing within a living coat of arms which is itself part giant skull, part disturbing Botticelli-twin-fantasy.
 
Among the other larger works, a figure within a twilit rural paintscape communes with the faces emerging from the smoke of his pipe, then in turn from one another's. He seems quite content to be guided, lead and mislead by these smoky profiles, despite their having emanated from him. In The Educationalist a cacophony of colourful bananas have congregated to form the shape of a figure, whose only other features resemble the head of an owlet, suspended in what has become both their classroom and stage. In the side space, a gathering of ghostly latter-day troubadours seem to eschew conversation, lost in their own whimsies and faraway thoughts before another performance on their travels.
 
The charlatans and reprobates in the exhibition's smaller paintings are just as fractured and compelling. Busy Head stares manically like the startled androgynous offspring of a Berserker and Roman Centurion, and the multi-faced moustachioed Duchess of Oils is both camp and macho - as much painterly muse as a formidable, buxom monster. Her transgendered grandeur is matched only by the twin courtiers' white wigs that diagonally bisect the canvas of Headswill, while Dead Leg provides a humourously chilling reminder of where all this revelry ultimately ends.
 
Ryan Mosley (b. 1980) graduated from an MA the Royal College of Art and lives & works in London and Sheffield. Notable solo presentations include Susanne Vielmetter Projects, Los Angeles (Forthcoming, September 2014), Thoughts of Man, Tierney Gardarin, New York (2013), Reversed Limbo, Eigen + Art, Berlin (2012), Alison Jacques Gallery, London, (2011 & 2010), and Painting Seánce, Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri (2010); while selected group shows include Zero Hours, S1 Artspace, Sheffield (2013); Nightfall, Modem Museum, Hungary (2012); London Twelve: Contemporary British Art, City Gallery, Prague (2012); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2012); Merging Bridges, Museum of Modern Art, Baku (2012); and Newspeak: British Art Now, at The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2009), The Saatchi Gallery, London, (2010), and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011). Mosley's paintings are included in the Arts Council Collection, UK, the Saatchi Collection, London and Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg.
 
 
Alison Jacques Gallery
16 - 18 Berners Street
London W1T 3LN
T: +44 (0) 20 7631 4720
 
Alison Jacques Gallery
 
Read On... Alison Jacques Gallery, London