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DEBORAH KASS: NO KIDDING
515 W. 27TH STREET
DECEMBER 9, 2015 – JANUARY 23, 2016

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce DEBORAH KASS: No Kidding, an exhibition of new mixed media paintings on view at 515 West 27th Street from December 9, 2015 – January 23, 2016. Mounted on fields of primarily black and blue, Kass incorporates neon lights in her paintings for the first time, limiting her signature palette, to spell out puns and phrases bearing pop cultural references that provide a somber meditation on the troubling present, and uncertain future.

No Kidding represents the artist’s fourth body of work that deals at the intersection of popular culture, contemporary art, art history, and politics. Like all of Kass’s most important series of the past 25 years, these works might be said to deploy what has been recently labeled citational modernism. But in stark contrast to its current practitioners, her work has consistently and articulately deconstructed the unspoken politics of modernism and reinvented it with urgent and contemporary political meaning. An extension of her feel good paintings for feel bad times, Kass’ most recent body of work sets a darker, tougher tone as she reflects on contemporary issues such as global warming, institutional racism, police brutality, gun violence, and attacks on women’s health, through the lens of minimalism and grief.

Kass’ paintings often borrow their titles and puns from songs, such as, Just A Shot Away, 2014, which takes its name from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 song - “Gimme Shelter,” that was written in response to the violence of that time. Consistently laden with ambiguity, this work, along with others in the series, references a range of current social, political, and environmental tipping points.

Happy Days, 2014, a multi panel, black-colored painting, references the campaign song for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successful 1932 Presidential campaign. The song was re-recorded thirty years later by Barbra Streisand–historically one of Kass’ muses– giving it a new context for a different generation. Kass provides yet another reading, commenting on the fate of the New Deal and America’s relationship to happiness and hope. As the viewer sees their reflection in the mirror-like surface, they are reminded of their responsibility for the present state of affairs.

In a separate room, Kass’ paintings The Band Played On and Prepare for Saints provide the coda for the show. In the spirit of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, they are made with non-traditional materials, and collectively with all the paintings in the exhibit, look at the present and the future with striking ambivalence.

Concurrently, Kass’ first monumental sculpture OY/YO will be on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park through August 16, 2016.  Presented in collaboration with Two Trees Management Company, the yellow painted aluminum sculpture will be set alongside the iconic bridges of Brooklyn’s waterfront and visible to viewers from Manhattan. OY/YO has been a significant and reoccurring motif in Kass’ work since its first appearance in 2011, taking form in paintings, prints, accessories and tabletop sculptures.

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ERIK PARKER: UNDERTOW
297 TENTH AVE
DECEMBER 9, 2015 – JANUARY 23, 2016

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present Erik Parker: Undertow, an exhibition of new paintings on view at 297 Tenth Avenue from December 9, 2015 – January 23, 2016. The works on view represent a confluence of ideas and styles explored in previous bodies of work including the Maps, Heads, Landscapes and Hydroglyphics His iconic, highly-saturated palette and intricate compositions are amplified by collage and airbrush techniques that create a balance of density and open space.

Undertow marks the artist’s third solo-exhibition with the gallery and offers insight into the evolution of Parker’s work over the last two decades. Here, Parker continues to critically chart the world’s current political, social, and economic landscapes with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. Synthesizing multiple elements from his myriad styles into new dynamic compositions, the artist works at breaking down the metanarratives of late modernist painting while simultaneously digesting the pictorial chatter of scrolling feeds of social media.

Highlighted in the exhibition are Parker’s new shaped canvases with which he develops the narrative possibilities of form. In Offshore, 2015 the support structure of the canvas takes the shape of binocular lenses, framing the action as if seen from afar. Parker’s large-scale, two-part shaped canvas titled Disconnected, 2015, features a pyramid representing the global elite. It is physically separated from the second canvas – literally leaving the rest of the picture, or perhaps, society behind.

Erik Parker (b. 1968, Stuttgart, Germany) studied at the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Purchase, New York. Parker has had solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Modern Museum of Art Fort Worth, Honor Fraser, Galleri Faurschou, and Galeria Javier Lopez. Parker lives and works in New York. As such, his work was included in the inaugural “Greater New York” show at MoMA P.S. 1 in 2000. In Spring 2016, the artist will present a solo-exhibition of recent works at the Newcomb Art Museum in New Orleans, LA.

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MARK RYDEN: DODECAHEDRON
293 TENTH AVE
DECEMBER 10, 2015 – JANUARY 23, 2016


Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce Dodecahedron, Mark Ryden’s second exhibition at the gallery, on view at 293 10th Avenue from December 10, 2015 - January 23, 2016. Dodecahedron features the Los Angeles-based artist’s first-ever bronze sculpture, along with eight new paintings, drawings, color studies and a new porcelain edition.


The vocabulary of images in Ryden’s new body of work remains consistent with his pervasive distortion of scale and his iconic fairytale-like creatures set against seductive landscapes of untouched beauty. However, the subject of his latest series is informed by the geometric structure “dodecahedron,” a solid figure bearing twelve sides whose perfect symmetry has been the source of extensive query by mathematicians and scientists since antiquity. Drawing upon the form’s mystery and divine connotations as a source of inspiration, Ryden explores the bridge between the physical world and the intangible realm.


For the exhibition, Ryden created his first sculpture cast from bronze. Measuring one meter in height, the work consists of twelve pentagonal panels that join together to form a dodecahedron. Each panel is individually cast and features images and motifs that have been prevalent throughout the artist’s oeuvre such as; the tree, the eye, the fetus, the bee, the ammonite, and Abraham Lincoln.


Ryden’s labor-intensive canvases skillfully rework centuries of art history, combining the grandeur of Spanish and Italian religious painting with the decorative richness of Old Master compositions and the lush textures of French Neo-Classicism. Expanding on these concepts, the artist’s paintings focus on “the soul confronting its physical form” as represented by his reoccurring feminine child figure, he calls “anima” or “soul” figure. These anima figures appear under different guises, such as in Anatomia, 2015 and Aurora, 2015. For the artist, they represent the part of us that wonders at the elegant mathematics that exists underneath everything and the sacred geometry that constructs our physical world.


Mark Ryden was born in Medford, Oregon and received his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasedena in 1987. Exhibitions include a mid-career retrospective “Wondertoonel” at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004-2005); "The Artist’s Museum" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; “The Gay 90’s: Old Tyme Art Show” at Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2010, and "The Gay 90's West" at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles in 2014. His work is currently included in “Hey! Modern Art and Pop Culture / Act III,” a group exhibition on view through March 3, 2016 at La Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, France. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.