THE NEW VERISIMILITUDE July 14 -September 2, 2011 Arists' Opening Reception Thursday, July 14, 2011, 6-8 PM
"Art is the lie that tells the truth" - Pablo Picasso
M+B and François Ghebaly Gallery are pleased to announce The New Verisimilitude, a two-part group exhibition across both gallery spaces, curated by François Ghebaly. This exhibition explores new approaches to realism in the contemporary practices of ten artists working in different mediums (painting, sculpture, video, and performance), with each work manifesting a different approach to verisimilitude.
Italian historian Bartolommeo Fazio first formally described verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, in a discussion of a Jan Van Eyck painting in the fifteenth century. In a description of a triptych by Van Eyck, the Genoese humanist noted an Angel Gabriel with “hair surpassing reality” and a donor lacking “only a voice.” Since this first contextualization, verisimilitude has been closely associated with aesthetic representation, and the very idea of verisimilitude in art has evolved alongside technology: first defined through painting and live performance, then through photography and cinema, and now through recent developments in CGI and virtual reality.
For over thirty years, Daniel Douke has created meticulously crafted paintings that push the boundary between image and object. In his re-creation of boxes and packaging materials, Douke is pushing his masterful painting technique towards an illusion that takes the form of a three-dimensional object, which once the artifice revealed, cleverly comments on pop art and minimalism.
Dan Finsel’s videos, objects and installations exist as documents of a centrally performative practice. His work chronicles the narrative and psychological motives of a fictional but often unstable character—Dan Finsel—whose subjectivity is constructed from a displaced perversion of Finsel’s “authentic” self. Taking from Lee Strasberg’s method acting techniques, Finsel immerses himself in the psychological trauma of this performed identity and attempts to destabilize/disrupt the relationship between the construction of the subject and the subject as production/performance.
Inspired by the neon signs and billboards of Las Vegas where he was born and raised, Cayetano Ferrer investigates the continual change and growth of the city in his own art practice. In Roadside Monument (2011), Ferrer recreates various computer-generated commercial signage, those familiar blinking signs that the average American sees hundreds of times a day. These signs invite the viewer to enter his site-specific sculptural video installation, which in return questions the unknown and the improbable, challenging the verisimilitude that allowed entry to his work in the first place.
Argentinean artist Victoria Gitman’s small and highly detailed oils on wood depict vintage fashion artifacts that the artist collects from thrift stores. Using a technique reminiscent of the works of the Dutch masters and working directly with the actual object rather than a photograph, her subjects levitate from a minimal background, giving them a radiating presence.
Karl Haendel’s photorealistic graphite drawings reproduce images culled from the world of mass media and everyday objects, playing with notions of authenticity and truth. Haendel’s installations of overlapping and seemingly unrelated subjects create a new narrative and invite the viewer into a radical social commentary on American culture.
Using actors as a material, David Levine is interested in the idea of acting techniques as a means of knowledge and experience-acquisition, often putting actors in unorthodox situation. Combining elements of endurance art, performance art and theater, Levine’s performances and installations question our fascination with actors and the hopelessness of their efforts to fully become someone else.
Isaac Resnikoff’s hand-carved wood sculptures are the result of countless hours of a methodic and precise process. Using this ancient technique, the artist creates large and ambitious reproductions of real life objects that forces the viewer to modify his behavior and to rediscover the surrounding architecture and meanings presented under a new perspective.
In Peter Rostovsky’s practice, images are mined from a wide array of media—including film, video or photographs—from which still images can be captured. Rostovsky sees these single frames as the most concise and expressive increment of our mediated lives. His photo-realistic paintings and sculptures show an interest in the ephemeral quality of painting and make visible the constantly shifting balance between the power of transmitting and receiving information.
Robert Russell explores the existentialism of the painter through a rigorous daily painting practice. His work questions, like Richter or Tuymans, the relationship between painting as a primary hands-on means of producing images and all the medium’s technically assisted derivatives. The metaphysical concern of this major issue is subtly raised through his gentle painting touch, and his work functions as homage and criticism to the medium.
Yoshihiro Suda is a Japanese contemporary artist known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of plants and flowers created in the tradition of Japanese woodcarving. In his installations, he strategically places his small sculptures—which might be in the form of perfectly rendered clumps of weeds or a single rose—in unexpected places, such as a crack on a wall or a window frame.
LEROY GRANNIS THE COMMEMORATIVE SHOW July 14 - 30, 2011 Opening Reception Saturday, July 14, 2011, 6-8 PM
In celebration of LeRoy Grannis’ legacy and his great contributions to both the surfing and art communities, M+B is pleased to present a commemorative exhibition of LeRoy Grannis’ photographs to honor his legendary career. Documenting the Golden Age of Surfing—the Sixties and Seventies—Grannis was the first to capture the purity, soul and lifestyle of a seminal moment in American cultural history.
Dubbed the “godfather of surf photography” by The New York Times, Grannis supplanted himself as THE photographer that documented the birth of a generation spurred on by both the surf-film Gidget and the Beach Boys who created an entirely new youth subculture centered around the surfing lifestyle. Whether shooting surf-god (and surfing buddy) Greg Noll catching the big waves in Waimea Bay or a San Onofre parking lot filled with long boards, VW buses and surfer girls, Grannis’ work nostalgically embraces both the lost elegance of the sport as well as the idealization of this uniquely California lifestyle. Grannis’ poignant images record the decades’ surfing spirit and evoke a sense of timeless grace that greatly contrasts with the modern-day extreme sport and endorsement-filled notion of surfing.
M+B was the first to exhibit Grannis’ large format color photographs in February 2005. Shortly thereafter, TASCHEN published a limited edition book LeRoy Grannis: Surf Photography of the 1960s and 1970s that sold out instantly. In the introduction to the book, Steve Barilotti writes that Grannis’ photographs “caught surfing at a critical juncture between cult and culture. [He] was documenting surfing’s rapid evolution into an iconic lifestyle. His photos captured the real thing, providing a bridge between the world of Beach Boy lyrics and the reality of the Southern California beach scene.” The Los Angeles Times 2006 review said that Grannis’ “legacy is affirmed . . . [He] “helped to innovate a style of art . . . [that] has the effect of a time capsule, bringing back an era that continues to resonate for us in shades of Technicolor and black and white.”
A surfer himself, LeRoy Grannis was born in Hermosa Beach, California in 1917 and began shooting surf-culture images on 22nd Street in Hermosa in 1960 as a hobby at the suggestion of a family doctor. He began selling his photographs for $1 a piece to the surfers on the beach and soon after, Reef magazine paid him $5 per photograph for publication. He quickly became one of the sport’s most important documentarians: within only two years, he was the head photographer of Surfing Illustrated and in 1964, he co-founded International Surfing, now known as Surfing magazine. Grannis was hailed as one of the only photographers to capture the true essence of the surf culture that spread up and down the California coast, and the most iconic and recognizable images from this period were shot by Grannis. Throughout the 1960s, every important surf culture magazine of the time printed photographs that would bear the inscription “Photo: Grannis.”
Grannis’ awards for his accomplishments are far-reaching. In 1966, he was voted into the International Surfing Hall of Fame as the number one lensman and later in that decade Life Magazine presented him with “First Prize for Action Sports Photograph.” In 1993, Grannis was honored with the Eddie Aikau/Quiksilver Lifetime Achievement Award; in 1999, he was inducted into the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame; in 2002, he was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” for his legendary surf photography by the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association; and in 1998, The Surfers’ Journal would honor Grannis with his first monograph Photo: Grannis, which was also first book The Journal would publish. His work reached a broader audience in 2004, when Stacy Peralta featured his photographs in the critically acclaimed surf documentary Riding Giants and in 2005, when they appeared on the cover and within TASCHEN’s Surfing: Vintage Surfing Graphics. Later that year, M+B gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his photographs as fine art for the first time. Other major gallery and museum shows around the world continued. In 2006, TASCHEN published his second major monograph as a limited edition, which—due to the demand—is now in it’s second trade edition publishing. And in April 2011, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) acquired a LeRoy Grannis’ photograph for their permanent collection.
LeRoy Grannis surfed religiously well into his 80s until a hip injury forced him off his board. On February 3, 2011, Grannis died of natural causes at his home in Torrance. He was 93. A paddle out memorial was held in Palos Verdes Cove in June, and later this month, Hermosa Beach is slated to unveil an impressive 10-foot bronze sculpture honoring Grannis’ work that will be located at the Community Center Pier and Pacific Coast Highway. This will be Grannis’ fourth exhibition at M+B.
For further information, please contact Shannon Richardson at 310 550 0050, [email protected], or visit our website www.mbart.com.
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