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RUBEN OCHOA 
"Tripping the Light Fantastick"

March 12 - April 16, 2016
Reception: Saturday, March 12, 6 - 8 pm

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our fourth solo exhibition with Los Angeles artist, Ruben Ochoa. Over the last decade Ochoa has built a career exploring the possibilities of everyday materials, using concrete, steel, and the actual floors and foundations of gallery spaces to produce works that upset the viewer’s experience of the built environment. While sculpture continues to be at the center of Ochoa’s practice, over the last two years he has been increasingly interested in how this material play can translate into two-dimensional works. For this exhibition Ochoa will present a series of new paintings made from rust and acrylic on linen alongside works on paper and steel floor sculptures.
 
Ochoa has titled this exhibition “Tripping the Light Fantastick,” a quote from a poem by John Milton. This playful title and liminal space it alludes to is indicative of Ochoa’s melding of serious sculpture and paintings with a silver lining (or in this case, a rust lining). The viewer can almost imagine the painterly rust, which sometimes appears to scatter along the linen-scape like stars hovering in the Milky Way, growing before their eyes.
 
Approaching rust as a pigment first and foremost, Ochoa produces lively compositions that take full advantage of the unpredictable nature of this medium. Iron oxide, that striking russet color, is the bane of iron and steel. Its effect on the canvas call to mind the visible deterioration of the built environment; a byproduct of an innocuous substance that indicates class boundaries within a city. In this way, Ochoa’s use of rust abstracts the social while emphasizing its materiality and thus a possibility of its finite cultural significance. 
 
Ochoa has also created several sculptural works in juxtaposition to his new paintings. The first is a series of welded and manipulated sheets of raw steel that integrate geometric planes and organic lines. These sculptures continue Ochoa’s dialog with form and formlessness. They mimic pulled slabs and folded architecture, extending the artist’s exploration of how gestures operate volumetrically in space. Installed alongside a suite of smaller rust works on linen and paper, a second floor sculpture assumes the footprint of a gallery bench. Lounging like a reclining Olympia, the polymorphic sidewalk-esque steel form appears to have been marred by an accordion bend. Ochoa explores the spatial relationship between the viewer and the site by interjecting a humorous ode to the famously voluptuous nude rendered in less accommodating angles in his Olympic Blvd.
 
In 2014 Ochoa presented his first solo painting exhibition, “Cloudless Day”, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum as part of their Matrix program. In 2013 his sculpture, “Flock in Space,” was featured in the “Nasher XCHANGE“ curated by Jeremy Strick at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX. Ochoa’s work has also been featured in solo exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, FL; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; and at SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM.  Group exhibitions include “The Artist’s Museum: Los Angeles Artists 1980-2010”, at the Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; “54th Venice Biennale Collateral Event, Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice” Palazzo Papadopoli, Venice, Italy; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2008 and is a two-time recipient of the California Community Foundation grant in 2004 and 2013. His work was recently acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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ARMIN BOEHM
"1, 2, 3, Soleil"

March 12 - April 16, 2016
Reception: Saturday, March 12, 6 - 8 pm

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Berlin-based painter, Armin Boehm. Using a haptic formal language that combines abstraction with figuration and collage with painting, Boehm creates richly layered portrait and still life paintings.
 
Boehm’s group portraits are grounded by the conscious placement of specific landmarks like the Fernsehturm and the Park Inn at Alexanderplatz, the center of social activity for contemporary Berlin’s bohemian culture. Other paintings present domestic scenes or still lifes of vibrant flowers paired with books on art, design, or spirituality. In a painting of a penthouse lounge, where both the TV tower and the Park Inn can be seen through the window, the primary interactions are between pairs of people: Two women in conversation; Two men perusing the menu, but really scoping out the scene, their grotesque, multi-colored, multi-planed faces shown in multiple angles at once; A man deeply engaged with his cell phone; A female psychic at a crystal ball receiving a vision of herself in a male body resplendent in pattern, carrying flowers; Two men locked in conversation.
 
In his recent exhibitions, Boehm has left the soft atmospheric effects and muted black and white palette of his earlier works behind. The paintings in “1, 2, 3 Soleil” reflect a certain fetish for surface texture and color. Boehm mixes his colors as he works, collaging silks and other fabrics in to his already active compositions. The result is a psychedelic, mesmerizing use of color and composition that the artist uses to make visible emotional or psychological relationships between his protagonists. Boehm’s observations of urban contemporary bohemian life reveal the transcendent energy fields between people and objects, the moments of aloneness within a crowd and the mystery of how we interact and relate to each other. 
 
Armin Boehm was born in Aachen, Germany in 1972. From 1995 – 1996 he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Münster and from 1995 – 2001 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 2009 Boehm had a solo exhibition titled “The Evil Eye” at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. He has also been featured in exhibitions at the S|2 Gallery in London, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Stadtgalerie Kiel, Kai 10 in Düsseldorf, the Städelmuseum Frankfurt, and the Goethe-Institute in Johannesburg. Armin Boehm is represented in Europe by Meyer Riegger and Peter Kilchmann.

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