|
Sean Kelly Gallery: Nathan Mabry - Shapeshifter || Meshes of the Afternoon - 29 Mar 2013 to 4 May 2013 Current Exhibition |
||||
|
Nathan Mabry
Heavy Handed (Separation Anxiety), 2012 Photo: Robert Wedemeyer |
|||
|
||||
|
Nathan Mabry Shapeshifter March 29 through May 4, 2013 Sean Kelly announces Shapeshifter, an exhibition of new work by Nathan Mabry. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and will include sculptures from two different series of work. Mabry’s Heavy Handed (Separation Anxiety) and Heavy Handed (Tocca Ferro/Horns Up) will be presented in gallery two. The Heavy Handed works are large-scale sculptures made of steel that resemble block-like human hands, making gestures ranging from the benign to the profane. They reference sign language, colloquial symbols and other forms of gestural communication that can be simultaneously illustrative and provocative. In gallery three, Mabry will exhibit his newest series of work, which comprises oversized terra-cotta heads resting atop aluminum bases that reference minimalist sculpture, specifically Donald Judd’s milled aluminum works. The heads, hand-sculpted by Mabry, are derived from architectural elements–tenon heads found at Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Columbian religious and political site built by the Chavín people in Peru. The Chavín religion involved human to animal transformation, or shapeshifting, achieved through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Mabry’s heads incorporate animals commonly associated with Chavín iconography, specifically jaguars, eagles and snakes. The stark contrast of these ancient figurative forms to the cool reserve of their abstract minimalist bases creates, in Mabry’s words, a “crashing together” of cultural aesthetics; this juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary is a common theme in Mabry’s oeuvre. Shown together, these two bodies of work offer an opportunity to see the broad range of Mabry’s sculptural vocabulary, his complex visual language and his underlying use of humor to connect with the viewer. While the exhibition title, Shapeshifter, is a specific reference to Chavín iconography, it is also a reference to Mabry’s ability to move between artistic styles and find inspiration from varied sources. Nathan Mabry received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla. His work has recently appeared in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; the Las Vegas Art Museum; the 176 Zabludowicz Collection, London, and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels. Mabry will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Sightings, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, which opens April 13th and runs through July 17th. Meshes of the Afternoon March 29 through May 4, 2013 A group painting exhibition of works by: Cecily Brown, Kaye Donachie, Lars Elling, Sam Falls, Valérie Favre, Pawel Ksiazek, David Salle, Lu Song and Thomas Zipp Meshes of the Afternoon, a group exhibition of paintings, draws its thematic inspiration from the iconic 1943 Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid film of the same name. The film Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most important works of early American avant-garde cinema—a non-narrative, short black and white work that is an influential Surrealist-inspired exploration of the subconscious and symbolic imagery. The exhibition will be held in gallery one and includes the film itself along with almost thirty paintings from a diverse group of nine artists. The film, which delves into the unconscious mind of the main character, conflates the subconscious with reality, creating an ominous tone fraught with feelings of unrest and violence imbedded in domestic complacency. This unquiet and unsettling mood, which, in Deren’s words, aims to articulate "the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately”, is reflected in the paintings included in this exhibition. In these works, architecture, object and subject are depicted in shifting relation to one another, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Meshes of the Afternoon explores both the figurative impulse in contemporary painting and the representation of deconstructed narratives, non-linear time and the mediated image. The exhibition brings together works from a geographically widespread array of artists to explore these themes. Included in Meshes of the Afternoon are large-scale paintings from New York-based artists Cecily Brown and David Salle that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, alongside the works of Lars Elling (Norway), Lu Song (China) and Thomas Zipp (Germany), which suggest dream-like sequences with a quasi-narrative feel. The large-scale works are juxtaposed with the carefully considered intimacy of smaller paintings from Kaye Donachie (United Kingdom), Valerie Favre (Switzerland) and Pawel Ksiazek (Poland). Physically engaging the space with a painting that transforms into sculpture, Sam Falls (United States) contributes a monumental work to the exhibition that employs the elements and the passage of time in its creation. As a whole, the works included in Meshes of the Afternoon draw on the techniques of avant-garde cinema, such as those employed in the Deren/Hammid film, to evoke psychologically-charged settings accompanied by ambiguous and often unsettling connotations. Sean Kelly Gallery 475 Tenth Ave New York NY 10018 T. 212.239.1181 F. 212.239.2467 www.skny.com |
||||
|
||||
re-title.com
International contemporary art
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP for ARTIST MEMBERSHIP
SIGN UP for GALLERY MEMBERSHIP
Click on the map to search the directory