american contemporary art (january 2011)

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357 North La Brea Avenue Los Angeles, California 90036 Telephone (323) 938-5222 www.jackrutbergfinearts.com JACK RUTBERG FINE ARTS

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Jordi AlcarazHannelore BaronRomare BeardenHans BurkhardtJoseph Cornell

Jim DineClaire Claire Falkenstein

Llyn FoulkesMathias GoeritzPatrick GrahamGeorge Herms

Freindensreich HundertwasserEdward Kienholz

Conrad Marca-Conrad Marca-RelliRobert MotherwellLouise Nevelson

Man RayRobert Rauschenberg

Mark TobeyFrank Stella

Gordon Gordon WagnerJerome Witkin

& Others

Assemblage & Collage

“Some Assembly Required”

FEBRUARY 19 - APRIL 30

Booth D-120L.A. Convention Center

Los Angeles Art ShowJanuary 19 - 23

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Drawings

Prints

Sculpture

Modern & Contemporary

Group Exhibition

JANUARY

45 North Venice Boulevard

Venice, California 90291

Tel 310 822 4955

www.lalouver.com

Sol leWitt StructureS. WorkS on PaPer. Wall DraWingS. 1971– 2005.

PHotograPHY RichaRddeacon FRedeRickhammeRsley sollewitt seanscully Juanuslé 20 January — 26 February.

alSo SHoWing:

Michael Salvatore Tierney

AEROSPACE

January 8 - February 26, 2011

5797 Washington Boulevard | Culver City, California 90232323.272.3642 | www.blytheprojects.net

Michael Salvatore Tierney, ‘Durand Durand,’ 2010, archival pigment print

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45 North Venice Boulevard

Venice, California 90291

Tel 310 822 4955

www.lalouver.com

Sol leWitt StructureS. WorkS on PaPer. Wall DraWingS. 1971– 2005.

PHotograPHY RichaRddeacon FRedeRickhammeRsley sollewitt seanscully Juanuslé 20 January — 26 February.

alSo SHoWing:


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JANUARY 2011

CONTENTS

Advertising [email protected]

561.542.6028 / Richard Kalisher

acamagazine.com© 2010 R.K. Graphics. All Rights Reserved.

Content courtesy of represented institutions.

Richard Kalisher PUBLISHER

Donovan Stanley EDITOR

Eric Kalisher DESIGN

EXHIBITIONS30 Los Angeles 35 San Francisco36 New York39 Philadelphia39 Boston40 Washington41 Santa Fe41 Tucson41 Scottsdale

FEATURESKorean Art in Los Angeles 22

Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus & Beyond 24

COVER Abland - Ulf Puder 36

2010 - oil on canvas - 83” x 59”

Cui Xiuwen - Existential Emptiness No.20 - 2009 - c-print - 37.4” x 181.1”

Alexander KrollUnfoldingsJanuary 13 - February 20, 2011

207 W. 5th StreetLos Angeles, CA 90013

[email protected]

Gallery Hours:Wednesday - Sunday, noon - 6 p.m.Thursday & Friday open until 7:30 p.m.

EDWARD CELLAART+ ARCHITECTURE

February 5, 2011 - March 12, 2011

Reception: Sat., February 5, 5-7 p.m

East Gallery:

No. 10, 2010, oil & alkyd on canvas, 23 x 23 "

2525 Michigan Ave. T3 Santa Monica CA 90404 t (310) 828 -1133 [email protected]

m o n o c h r o m e s

L o r a S c h l e s i n g e r G a l l e r y

B R U C E H O U S T O NN E F E R T E T E S , T R U C K S &

A S S E M B L A G E S

w w w . l o r a s c h l e s i n g e r . c o m

EskE kaththErE arE housEs EvErywhErE

January 8 – FEbruary 12, 2011opEning rEcEption January 8, 2011 7-10pm

975 chung king road Los angELEs, ca 90012www.cjamesgallery.com o (213) 687-0844 [email protected] F (213) 687-8815

January 22 – February 19, 2011Opening receptiOn January 22, 2011 | 7pm – 10pm

Curated by Jae yang |art-merge.cOm | bringing promising emerging artists to america

6023 Washington Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232 310.558.0200 www.lebasseprojects.com

Ahn-Nyung | Hello IntroduCtIon to Korean Contemporary art

www.riveragallery.com

RAY TURNER15 FEBRUARY - 15 MARCH

Walker, 2010, Oil on linen, 70” x 60”

DAVID KAPPNew Paintings

Bergamot Station Arts Center Unit G2 Santa Monica, CA 310 829 3300 www.ruthbachofnergallery.com

RUTH BACHOFNER GALLERY

January 15 – March 12, 2011

2903 Santa Monica Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90404 310-828-1912 www.gallerykmLA.com

Gallery Hours: Tue –Sat, 11am –5pm or by appointment

Whitney Hubbs, “Untitled”, 8 x 10", Silver Gelatin Print, 1993 Laura Kim, detail from “Artifact Drawing #1”, 6.8 x 10.2", C-print, 2010

EmbarrassmEnt 2: thEorythrough February 10, 2011

michael Dopp

Liz Glynn

Peter holzhauer

Whitney hubbs

Laura Kim

Juliana romano

Frank ryan

Lily simonson

Caleb Waldorf

Jessica Williams

GalleryKM_ACA_FP_Final.indd 1 1/25/11 9:02 PM

22 A|C|A January 2011

is an exhibition of 15 multimedia works by four Korean artists exploring the conceptual and visual currents igniting the Korean contemporary art scene today. Curator Jae Yang is the founder of Art-merge, a Los Angeles-based consultancy that supports emerging artists. Drawing on seven years of introducing cutting-edge con-temporary work to the American art market, Yang mines the vanguard of South Korea’s dynamic gallery scene to de-liver the American audience an unprecedented survey of works that are as effusive in their naiveté as they are ex-pansive in their aesthetic achievement. As a whole, Ahn-Nyung | Hello uncovers a culture in transition: memories are mutable, synthesis abuts tradition, and experience is subject to a regimen of creative re-envisioning. Featured artists include Hyung Kwan Kim, Seok Kim, Yeonju Sung, and Jin Young Yu. A companion exhibition, Paperwork, will take place in the gallery’s project room, featuring works on paper by artists Kim Eull, Tae Heon Kim, Kakyoung Lee, and Yong Sin. In Ahn-Nyung | Hello, the artists utilize a range of media to explore a rapidly changing society, work-ing with either synthetic materials (Hyung Kwan Kim’s plastic tape reliefs and Jin Young Yu’s PVC sculptures), or

organic matter reinterpreted anachronistically (Seok Kim’s wooden robot sculptures) and unexpectedly (Yeonju Sung’s photographs of haute couture designs constructed from a variety of common foodstuffs). In contrast is Paperwork, the companion exhibition in the gallery’s project room. Where Ahn-Nyung | Hello embraces postmodernity’s frag-mented, disparate luster, Paperwork evokes tradition and continuity in its presentation of contemporary work made from Asian art’s most fundamental media—ink and paper. Taken together, Ahn-Nyung | Hello and Paperwork operate in dialogue with one another to offer an engaging and chal-lenging overview of Korean contemporary art. Jin Young Yu’s work depicts the outsider longing to be in-visible—the fly on the wall or the observer seeking to go unseen. Artist handiwork meets the commercial perfec-tion one would usually expect from the likes of Koons or Murakami, as Yu constructs her figures from a ultra-trans-parent PVC and hand cast and painted plaster. The result-ing sculptures explore the dynamics of social anxiety and expectation through a semi-apparent cast of subjects who are somber, withdrawn and exquisitely unapproachable.

Korean Art Showcase in Los Angeles

Featured Exhibition

Ahn-Nyung | Hello

Feature 23

The robot — a childhood plaything, object of desire and memory, and once a cornerstone of Asian pop-cultural ver-nacular — assumes a transcendent role in Seok Kim’s sculp-tural work. In his monochromatic plastic pieces, the artist’s subjects appear nearly untouchable, deep in epic poses of thought and prayer. Meanwhile his colorful wooden robots take on distinctly human frailties, as they sit alone at a desk or pose alongside their bicycle during a commute home. In her photographs of clothing constructed from material

that could never be worn, YeonJu Sung captures a series of phantoms — temporal checkpoints depicting objects des-tined to decay, objects that fail in function what they seem to fulfill in appearance. By ultimately rendering what be-gins as sculptural work in the photographic medium, Sung exposes an authority of image over reality, revealing the tenuous line that separates lived from imagined experience. In Hyung Kwan Kim’s work, wistful scenes of discovery are born out against dense, hyper fields of urban activity. Hu-man figures appear obscured, dismembered or caricatured in each colorful relief, as Kim explores the concept of cities and societies as grand artificial exhibition halls. This is a process-rich endeavor in which the artist derives a nuanced palette from the subtle color deviations and inconsistencies in plastic electrical and packing tape.

“Ahn-Nyung | Hello”LeBasse Projects Culver City

[through February 19]

(left page) Hyung Kwan Kim, More Than This #3, plastic electrical tape, 70”x46”. (above) work by Seok Kim (below) Yeonju Sung, Banana, pigment print, 35"x54".

Jin Young Yu, Family in Disguise, mixed media, 14"x51"x18".


Bauhaus and our very sense of what is modern in twentieth century art and design are practically synonymous. We are surrounded in our everyday lives by the designs and theories put into practice by the Bauhaus. While the school of the Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, its principals and influence resonate today because of the achieve-ments of the artists and architects associated with it: Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Joseph Alpers, Lyonel Feininger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Warner Drewes and Herbert Bayer. By definition Bauhaus means construction or architecture (bau) and house (haus) in German. It was the creation of Walter Gropius, who in 1919 assumed control of the Weimar School of the Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. He combined the two into the Weimar Bauhaus School. It was Gropius’ intention to create a new generation of craftsmen without the class distinc-tions between craftsmen and artists. No doubt it

“No institution has affected the course of twentieth century art and design so pro-foundly as the Bauhaus. Its impact is stag-gering. Bauhaus precedents provide sources for everything from the appearance of our urban skylines to the modern dinnerware on our hard-edged, contemporary tables. They are found in virtually every functionally de-signed object and graphic today.”

Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus and Beyondby Hugo Anderson

- Gwen ChanzitCurator, Herbert Bayer Archive at the Denver Art Museum

Feature 25

was an attempt to build something new and positive out of the ashes of World War I when Gropius stated “Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together.” The central concept was that no one art form was in-herently better than any other and that the fine arts and applied arts must be studied and used together. Through good design the new artist/craftsman would create a better world. The very fact that easel painting was replaced in the curriculum by mural painting showed Gropius’ commit-ment to integrate all the arts within architecture. Of all of the artists associated with the Bauhaus during its brief 15 years, it is Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) who actu-ally devoted a lifetime to a career which incorporated the ideal of total integration of the arts, in design, advertising, architecture, public sculpture and painting. Herbert Bayer was born April 5, 1900 in Haag am Hausruch, Austria. Because of a book he read by Vassily Kandinsky (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) he enrolled at Weimar Bauhaus at the age of 21. He actually arrived at the Bauhaus six months before Kandinsky began teach-ing. Bayer studied at the Bauhaus for two years, taking a leave in 1923 to travel through Italy. He had arrived at the Bauhaus with almost no prior background in art, and thus offered the perfect “blank slate” upon which to create the essential Bauhaus artist. Since the Bauhaus offered no art history in its curriculum it made sense to expand his first-hand knowledge of art architecture and design by spending a year traveling in Italy, sketching and painting. To support himself he painted houses and stage sets during his travels, thus applying the integration of craftsman and artist at the first opportunity. In 1925 he was offered a position on the faculty at the Bauhaus, as Master of Typography. It was then, in conjunc-tion with the ideas of Moholy-Nagy, that Bayer developed a “universal alphabet” using only lower case letters. This was designed to be a practical typeface, which was large enough to read and free of distortions and curlicues, sans-serif type. Bayer applied this type design to ad copy, posters and books throughout his career. In 1928 Bayer left the Bauhaus to pursue a design ca-reer in Berlin. It was his desire to put the theories of the Bauhaus into practice in design and advertising. In 1933 he produced a “bayer type”. During his Berlin years, in ad-dition to his design work, Bayer ventured into photography, which he used in both commercial (ads and posters) and fine art production. With Maholy-Nagy, Hebert Bayer was an early creator of photoplastic or photomontage. The al-tering of photographic imagery through the use of multiple

negatives and collage meshed well with Surrealist imagery, as in self-portrait (1932), lonely metropolitan (1932), and metamorphosis (1936). The later 1930’s were difficult times for free expression. Artists were among the many groups who felt the need to find exile outside Nazi Germany. The Bauhaus had closed in 1933 and many of its artists/faculty had already emigrat-ed to the United States, finding work teaching at Harvard and at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Bayer had traveled to the U.S. in 1937 and became involved in the design of an exhibition on the Bauhaus at the newly created Museum of Modern Art. In 1938 he moved to New York City. Deposi-tion (1939) while depicting the tools of Christ’s crucifixion, also portends the dark future of a Nazi victory in Europe, a victory that seemed quite possible in 1939. The exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 opened at the Mu-seum of Modern Art and later traveled around the United States. It provided an introduction to modernist design to a country slow to accept abstraction in painting, much less in advertising, which required client acceptance. During his tenure in New York, Bayer’s graphic work prospered, but when the opportunity arose to move back to a moun-tain environment he took it, moving to Aspen, Colorado in 1946. He accepted a position as design consultant for Wal-ter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, whose headquarters were in Chicago. The Aspen of 1946 was a small mountain town of less than 800 residents and only the beginnings of a ski town,

Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus and Beyond


with two pre-war ski runs. Paepcke and Bayer were instru-mental in initiating the changes that would make Aspen a cultural oasis in the 1950’s and beyond. The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was founded by Paepcke in 1949, with Herbert Bayer working as architect and design consul-tant. He designed a complex of buildings for the institute, integrated within the natural landscape of the mountain valley. In 1955 he created a work called grass mound, a for-ty foot grassy place for relaxation, years before the concept of “earthworks” became popular. He also created marble garden using discards from an old marble quarry. In 1963-64 he designed a new tent for the Aspen Music Festival. With his return to mountain living, mountains and contour map elements began to emerge in his artwork from the late 1940’s on, as in his lithograph mountains and lakes (1948). He designed a series of ski posters, including ski broadmoor (1959). In 1953 the Container Corporation published world atlas with graphics designed by Herbert Bayer. His goal was to put together an atlas with clean graphics that was easy to read. The interaction between fine art and commercial art again shows in Bayer’s paintings and prints with continuing use of weather related symbols, such as arrows, flow charts and contour maps. The Container Corporation employed the talents of Man Ray and Fernand Leger as well as Bayer in the late 1930’s. It was their concept that through good design, cor-porations could influence good taste and profits. Bayer, with his Bauhaus ideals, was a natural to work in this col-laboration of art and industry. In their ads, text was limited to fifteen words of copy in order to put the emphasis on visual images. Lengthy texts were out; clean copy was in. Advertising was seen as good public relations with consum-ers and buyers at other corporations. Bayer used collage and photomontage, elements from his fine art, in his early advertisements. He became chairman of Container Corpo-ration’s Department of Design in 1956. He was more than

just an art director, contributing in management decisions, including the design of buildings and interiors. The Great Ideas of Western Man was a Herbert Bayer advertising campaign of the 1950’s and 60’s. These ads had no sales message, again working on the concept that a good corporate image was also good for business. The ad con-cept was an out- growth of discussions at the Aspen Insti-tute for Humanistic Studies. The Institute worked to bring business executives and managers together to discuss ideas in a relaxed setting and a cultural environment. The Aspen Institute was as respon-sible for putting Aspen on the world map as was skiing. It was also a great concept for expanding the year past ski sea-son, with many of its programs in the summer months. It was through connections at the Aspen Institute that Bayer met Robert O Anderson, founder of Atlantic Rich-field Oil Company. In the early 1950’s they became friends; Anderson bought Bayer’s house in town when Herbert moved his studio onto Red Mountain, overlooking Aspen. Along with the house, Anderson also began to buy artwork by Bayer, providing the beginning of a relationship of pa-tron and friend that would last until the end of Bayer’s life. After Walter Paepcke’s death in 1960, Bayer began working for ARCO as an art and design consultant, starting in 1966. Bayer oversaw the design of corporate offices in New York and Philadelphia, as well as Los Angeles when the cor-porate headquarters moved there. He designed the artwork for ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles: double ascension, two linked staircases in a pool of water. He also advised ARCO on the development of its large corporate art collection and the performing arts programs it sponsored. He designed carpets and tapestries for the corporate offices. He designed a sculpture for the 1968 Olympics in Mex-ico City. A similar sculpture resides at the Design Center in Denver, Colorado. He also developed a seriesof sculptures for ARCO that were designed to hide/beautify the Philadel-

Feature 27

phia refinery area. These were among a number of sculp-tural projects that were never created and exist only in the form of maquettes. Currently the Bayer family is working to try to realize some of his models as larger works in Den-ver and other cities. Bayer moved from Aspen to the Santa Barbara area in 1976. He lived there for the last ten years of his life. A fine collection of his work can be found in the Santa Barbara Museum, while The Herbert Bayer Archive is at the Denver Art Museum, with over 9000 artifacts in the collection. During the last four decades of his life, Herbert Bayer was well employed in design positions with the Container Corporation and ARCO. In addition to his corporate re-sponsibilities he developed a significant fine art portfolio during these years. Artistically Bayer is probably better known for his earlier photomontages from the Berlin years (1928-1938). Having two significant patrons in Walter Paepcke and Robert O. Anderson, there was little need for Herbert Bayer the fine artist to go through the normal rou-tine of gallery exhibitions and reviews necessary for artwork to find its way into important private and public collections. The town of Aspen is full of Herbert Bayer paintings that moved directly from studio to private hands. To a certain degree his reputation as a painter, printmaker and sculptor never received the critical acclaim that ex-hibitions and reviews would have allowed. He suf-fered a bit from being too successful. In his later years Bayer used his graphic skills to create fine art prints, using lithography and silk-screen, the same mediums used in his commercial work. A skill learned in one area is used in another. In these graphic images, as in his later paintings, he returns to geometric design and abstraction in a se-

ries of works he called “anthologies”. In these works the Bauhaus artist has returned to basics: color, geometry and design. The sculpture he produced during these same years still maintains a freshness today, thanks to his combination of clean design and primary colors. His surrealist photo-montages from the 1920’s hold as much shock value today as they did then. The success and legacy of Herbert Bayer are the combi-nation of Bauhaus ideas and American optimism from the post WWII period applied to a work ethic and career which lasted until his death in 1985. It is the combination of clean design and a fresh palette of primary colors that explain the continuing appeal of his artwork. His work is optimistic and easy to live with, the result of his lifelong adherence to good design. More than any of his contemporaries, Her-bert Bayer stayed true to his Bauhaus ideals through his sixty-year career.

Hugo Anderson is the Director of Emil Nelson Gallery, which represents the works of Herbert Bayer

from the Bayer Family Collection.

BLEICHER GALLERIES

(Ann McCoy Feb /2011)

BGartDealings.com [email protected]

BG Gallery [Bleicher/Golightly] 1431 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90401 (310) 878-2784

CB Gallery [Caporale/Bleicher] 355 N. La Brea Avenue, LA, CA 90036 (323) 545-6018


EXHIBITIONS

LOS ANGELESNigel CookeBlum & Poe Los Angeles[through Feb 12]

Nigel Cooke's paintings — "hybrid theatri-cal spaces" as he has called them — often depict fantastic graffiti-strewn architecture and supernatural landscapes. Rendered in a naturalistic style that bounces back and forth between affirmation and complica-tion of the canvas surface, Cooke's paint-ings hover in the vicinity of landscape, still life, portraiture, and narrative tableau with-out ever touching down. His current paint-ings similarly flirt with and confound an-other painting tradition, the "figure in the landscape as allegory." Departure, Cooke's three-panel centerpiece is a self-aware take on the German artist Max Beckmann's 1933-1935 triptych of the same title. In Beckmann's painting, images of torture and brutality bookend a central panel in which a dignified family sails to salvation. In contrast, Cooke's figures hang in the end panels pathetic, comedic, and tragic all at once, while in the central panel they writhe and wretch in a boat, tossed about on a dark ethereal sea. Whether abused by nature's

whim or their own bacchanalian excesses, for them there is no escape. Cooke de-scribes his reworking as a vision of "provin-cial philosophy lecturers sailing to Ibiza for a rave," yet falling prey to a disastrous reck-oning en route in which only one "thinker" makes it to land. Cooke imagines this avatar of hubris washed up in more ways than one, dragging himself and his wreckage onto strange shores to begin the process of re-building and reflecting. The other paintings in the exhibition continue to present scenes of thickly bearded "Master chefs", sailors, artists, and philosophers as they navigate the dystopian environment in which they find themselves. This psychic landscape is peopled by dredged-up corpses, ancient philosophers and burnt-out fry cooks, all overshadowed by the decaying specter of factory buildings that echo modernist geo-metric painting. These haunting portraits model failure, but also artistic production in the face of peril and creativity on the verge of existential self-immolation.

Nigel Cooke, Washed Up Thinker, 2010, Oil on linen backed with sailcloth, 87” x 77”.

Sol LeWittLA Louver Venice[through Feb 26]

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), a pioneer of mini-mal and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, achieved a major breakthrough in his work in 1968, when he began employ-ing predetermined line-making proce-dures and materials usually associated with drawing or commercial art techniques. He used this method to execute large-scale drawings directly on the wall. In 1980, a variety of geometric shapes emerged as autonomous subjects, which in turn led LeWitt to isometric projections in 1982. By dividing the sides of the basic cube into halves, thirds and quarters, and con-necting the resulting dividing points with lines, LeWitt transformed planar figures into three-dimensional forms. This exhibi-tion, Sol LeWitt: Structures, Works on Pa-per, Wall Drawings 1971-2005, will address the artist’s investigation of the cube – the basic modular unit of inquiry throughout his art practice – with a focus on triangula-tion. Four of the artist’s wall drawings will be presented in a dedicated gallery on the

first floor. Dated October 1989, the draw-ings are from the artist’s 620 series, with forms derived from cubic rectangles and superimposed color ink washes. These were installed in the Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain in October 1989, and have not been exhibited since that time. The wall drawings were over three weeks, employing four L.A.-based artists, working with, and directed by, Gabriel Hurier from the Sol LeWitt Estate. LeWitt’s renowned modular structures originate from his exploration of the cube, which was the form that inspired him throughout his career. Works in the ex-hibition range from seminal squares from the ‘70s and ‘80s to the artist’s division of the cube through triangulation. It will be rounded out by large-scale works on pa-per, executed in gouache. Comparing the gouaches to his wall drawings, LeWitt stat-ed that only he could make the gouaches, which “followed their own logic,” whereas the wall drawings “have ideas that can be transmitted to others to realize.”

Sol LeWitt: (top) Structure with Three Tow-ers, 1986, wood painted white, 48.75”x121.5”x 48.5”; (bot) Pyramid #10, 1985, wood painted white, 79.87”x 47”x 37.5”. Courtesy of LA Louver.

Exhibitions 31

EXHIBITIONS

Alexander KrollCB1 Los Angeles[through Feb 20]

In Alexander Kroll’s first solo show in Los Angeles, Unfoldings, modestly scaled abstract paintings are simultaneously structural and intuitive; informal and hy-per-considered; gestural and geometric. Alongside an interest in exploring binary positions, Kroll’s work deals with scale, painting history, intuition, systems, emo-tions, and painting as a conversational nex-us and means of producing an object that can embody and contradict these issues. His work exists at a place of complexity and intensity. Through its conversational nature the work asserts an expanding set of ideas. As the work unfolds there occurs a process that necessitates further viewing and con-

tinuation of a dialog — both sensual and intellectual.

Kroll, 2010: (left) Untitled, oil, egg tempera, and ink on panel, 10”x8”. (right) detail of Untitled, oil and egg tempera on linen over panel, 12”x5”.

More than or Equal to Half of the Whole, a two person exhibition of photography by Kate Johnson and Siri Kaur, is a vivid explo-ration of both the power and the illusion of the photographic medium. The exhibition examines the awe, dislocation and limita-tion inherent in photographic practice. Il-lusion and limitation play a central role in Kate Johnson's work in a series she calls More Than Or Equal To. For each of these infinity portraits - self-aware photographs that attempt to capture the concept of in-finity - Johnson constructs a small glass and mirror diorama which she then photo-graphs. There is a sheer, crystalline beauty in each of these prismatic pieces, even as they wryly admit to the illusion that infinity and depth are being rendered falsely with-in a finite, two-dimensional work space. Johnson's hall of mirrors visual trick (in which images repeat endlessly against one another) purposefully calls attention to it-self through the repeated appearance of her camera lens (as well as the green-blue edges of the glass) throughout the photographs. Paired loosely in dark and light opposites, these photographs intrigue aesthetically and entertain conceptually. In pursuit of a profound sense of the sublime, and play-ing, like Johnson's work, with the dynam-ics of perception, illusion, and immeasur-able scale is the Half of the Whole series by Siri Kaur. This series features a number of extra-galactic photographs (taken between 2007-2010 using a digital sensor attached to a Meade solar telescope on Kitt Peak in Ari-

zona), alongside "faked" astrophotographs (evidenced by such titles as Lightbulb with Sunspots Made by Hand), and a single diptych. After shooting the initial frames, Kaur exacts a battery of darkroom "experi-ments" on her work by applying color filters and chemical drawings to both the photo negatives and positives. By manipulating the printing process, Kaur effectively dislo-cates the signified from the signifier - dis-tinguishes what is represented from what might represent it - as her images transform from distant celestial objects into light and ultimately back into physical form, albeit much smaller, within the gallery. Rounding out the series, and further illustrating her penchant for aesthetic awe and print ma-nipulation is Kaur's stunning diptych of the Aurora Borealis, fittingly titled (in the de-scriptive vernacular commonly associated with late 20th century photography), On the Left, Aurora Borealis, White Horse, Yu-kon, March 31 2008, 235 AM. On the Right, the Way I Wanted It to Look (see below).

Kate Johnson & Siri KaurGarboushian Beverly Hills

[through Feb 12]

(above) Kate Johnson, Untitled #14, 2010, from series More Than Or Equal To, 1 of 3, Lambda print mounted on aluminum, 34”x40”. (below) Siri Kaur, On the Left, Aurora Borealis, White Horse, Yukon, March 31 2008, 235 AM. On the Right, the Way I Wanted it to Look, 2008, Diptych 1 of 3, Chromogenic print. Each 30” x 38”.


EXHIBITIONS

Margie Livingston has long been admired for her abstract paintings that articulate the interaction between the architectural grid and the natural, organic world. Based on three-dimensional models that she builds in the studio (perspective grids crafted out of string and wood around branches and twigs) her paintings directly translate the phenomena of space, light, color and grav-ity upon these hybrid structures into lines and bands of color that hang seemingly suspended in space. Now, letting accident and discovery meet invention and experi-mentation, Livingston reverses her usual process, using paint to construct objects. Her new paint objects—built entirely from dots, strips, and skins of dried acrylic pig-ment—investigate the properties of paint pushed into three dimensions and offer a compelling view into how the medium of paint can be used sculpturally. With this major transformation of her practice Liv-

ingston has moved away from working with the illusion of space and toward work-ing with literal space, constructing objects that straddle two media — painting and sculpture. Like her earlier canvas paintings, which were an accumulation of multiple gestures and parts, Margie Livingston’s new paint objects can be seen as a calculated decision on her part to show her process and to “reveal how I got from one point to the next…building a concrete relationship between each part and the whole.” Her goal to create an equivalent sense of light and space with minimal means (“especially when a daub of paint is referencing a bit of air in the middle of the room”), asserts its emphatic physical presence in the form of paint objects suspended from the ceiling, attached directly to the wall, or as solid cube, slab, or egg-like forms installed on work tables and pedestals.

Margie LivingstonLuis de Jesus Santa Monica[through Feb 26]

Margie Livingston, Study for Spiral Block 3, 2010, acrylic, 5.75” x 6” x 6”.

After The Rain, a group exhibition featur-ing Boogie, Guy Denning, Aakash Nihalani and Pascual Sisto, merges and contrasts the palettes of four artists who work in a range of media. The precise neon color sculptures and abstract mixed media can-vases of Aakash Nihalani highlight the raw, candid nature of Boogie’s black and white photographs, while Guy Denning’s dark portraits, built with indulgent layers of oil paint, situate Pascual Sisto’s video and sculptural works in a new contextual light. As a photographer, Boogie is singular in his ability to remove his presence as the mediator between the subjects of his work and those viewing them from without. His illumination of the complexity of the hu-man condition without the imposition of his own ego or ideologies presents a more compelling foundation for the contempla-tion of his weighty subject matter and the socio-economic, philosophical and emo-tional currents that press from beneath. He will present a series of black and white photographs. He lives and works in Bel-grade. Guy Denning’s enigmatic portraits of androgynous figures possess a strange and often ethereal beauty, blending the smooth-ness of classical form with a blunt contem-

porary perspective. Sexual and temporal politics, objectification, and isolation are illuminated through carefully honed con-trasts of shape and shade. His will present a series of oils on canvas. . He lives and works in Finistère. Aakash Nihalani has fashioned a visual language all his own. The neon in his work highlights details that might oth-erwise go unnoticed, while his minimalist patterns form self-contained pockets which encourage examination both within the isolated space and of the world at large. His work often engages the public by creating three-dimensional environments that can be physically entered, transforming pass-ersby or gallery visitors into participants and offering them a momentary escape from daily life. He will present new sculp-tural works from his Optiprism series, as well as new works on canvas. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Los Angeles-based Pascual Sisto’s works, which include neon, video, photography and text-based series, reassess and recontextualize a range of historical dialogues that have been instru-mental in shaping both contemporary so-ciety and his own artistic practice. He will present a video installation, amongst other works, in one of the gallery’s project rooms.

“After the Rain”Carmichael Culver City[through Feb 5]

(top) Boogie, Train To Bushwick, 2005, silver gelatin print, 20”x24”. (middle) Guy Denning, Jocelin’s Nail, oil on canvas, 36”x36”. (bottom) Pascual Sisto, Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work), 2010, neon light installation based on situ-

ationalist graffiti in Paris, May 1968, 33” x 82”.

Exhibitions 33

EXHIBITIONS

Anthony PearsonDavid Kordansky Los Angeles

[through Feb 5]

Anthony Pearson's sculptures and photo-graphs are, on the one hand, records of a studio practice dedicated to non-represen-tational mark-making and the pursuit of free aesthetic movement; on the other, they are the elements of a vocabulary designed to systematize the irrational and inexpli-cable facets of artistic endeavor. For the first time, Pearson has created large-scale steel sculptures whose forms are derived from two of these photographs. Composi-tions originally made with ink and brush have undergone a complete alchemical transformation, passing through the pho-tographic process to become templates for three-dimensional objects in space. Until now, photography has served as a way to create conceptual distance between the act of making non-representational compo-sitions and the act of displaying them in the context of other artworks. Here, how-ever, photographs have been cycled back through the studio practice, and have led to an expansion of physical scale, the ad-aptation of new technical procedures, and

increased conceptual reach. Corresponding developments can be seen in new examples of Pearson's trademark 'arrangements', which combine photographic elements with bronze sculptures made from castings. The 'arrangements' are powerful examples of instances in which Pearson applies cu-ratorial logic to the results of idiosyncratic, even hermetic, processes. The relationship between the pictorial and the physical is also explored in a series of small bronze wall-based sculptures. Created using molds made from shaped clay forms, these works mark the first time that Pearson has hung objects directly on the wall, as well as the first time that he has exhibited bronzes without photographs.The work is not only a study of the alchemical relationships be-tween materials, but an ongoing record of competing forces at play in the studio. As such, Pearson's practice represents the fur-thering of a tradition exemplified by fig-ures as diverse as John Cage, Jackson Pol-lock and Bruce Nauman, one based in both pragmatic and rigorous experimentation.

Luis Cornejo paints with cheek. He dons pretty young things with Mickey Mouse ears, tails, clownish caps and surrealisti-cally long hands, marring their exquisite beauty. By using slapstick and coarse dis-tortion, Cornejo challenges our idea of per-fect beauty and our tedious worship of it. Cornejo has had sold out many shows and has exhibited individually and collectively in Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, Canada and Germany. His work continues to take off, with a one year paid scholarship

in Berlin and top awards from the Museum of Art of El Salvador. Wedding pop and hyperrealism, Andriy Halashyn’s dys-topic dreamscapes juxtapose moneyed beauty with ruin, waste and contamina-tion. His canvases tell a tale of two cities in the optic language of a deadpan and painterly pop. Ukranian born but living and working in Costa Rica for over ten years, Halashyn brings a cosmopolitan sensibility to his lush paintings.

Luis Cornejo and Andriy Halashyn

SALT Laguna Beach[through Feb 28]

Andriy Halashyn. Baby Garbage, 2010, oil on canvas, 39.5”x32”.

For more than 40 years, Olivier Mosset has challenged the historical notion of paint-ing as an art object. Beginning with his in-volvement in B.M.P.T. (a Paris-based group of painters active during the mid-1960s consisting of Daniel Buren, Mosset, Mi-chel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni), Mosset sought to question authorship and democ-ratize art through "radical procedures of deskilling". As each artist became identified with a specific composition, the members of the group would then sign each other's work thus calling into question the origi-

nality of the painting. Following his affili-ation with B.M.P.T., Mosset has become a pivotal figure in artistic practices span-ning monochrome, abstract and 'Neo-Geo' painting. By employing variations on col-or, size, paint application, format and the stretch of the canvas, Mosset has continued questioning the preconceived notions of what constitutes a painting. Collaboration remains an integral aspect to his practice. For this exhibition Mosset will collaborate with Vincent Szarek and Jeffrey Schad by exhibiting their custom motorcycles.

Olivier Mosset Christopher Grimes

Santa Monica[through Mar 5]

Jeffrey Schad, Rootbeer Bike, 2004, custom. 96 in3.

Anthony Pearson, Untitled (Transmission), 2010, steel, patina, sandblasted white Portland

cement, 81” x 70” x 30” unique.


EXHIBITIONS

For his exhibition Furious Seasons, Los Angeles-based artist Josh Peters mined still images from obscure films and drew inspi-ration from a short story by the author Ray-mond Carver, the title of which Peters uses for his show. These most recent paintings can be described as both portrait-mask-icons and figures-in-landscape paintings. Figuratively, the subjects are mainly taken from films, albeit mostly obscure with little inherent 'iconic' value associated. Peters makes references to figures "away from civilized society," or, more ambiguously, "a sense of impending violence or spiritual awakening lurking just under the surface." In Peters' recent work, these polarities reg-ister side by side, beneath surfaces both saturated and scraped to the canvas (or

frequently, especially in larger scaled work, linen), and in either case, luminous with a glow that seems to emanate from within, irradiating both its subjects and whatever space it happens to inhabit, including the viewer's own interior space. Most of this material falls loosely into a category we might label mood or atmospheric, with a few qualifiers. Peters is clearly looking for certain conditions, the “incident” or its po-tentiality, the possibility of creating a cer-tain, transformative moment, of commu-nion between subject and artist and viewer. This is not a narrative style, the spaces of these paintings are transparently abstract, existential, but almost quintessentially lyri-cal. [Accompanying this exhibition is a catalogue featuring an essay and interview.]

Josh PetersKaycee Olsen Los Angeles[through Feb 12]

Josh Peters: (top) Furious Seasons, 2010, acryl-ic on unprimed linen, 65” x 86”; (bot) Autumn,

2010, acrylic on canvas, 11” x 14”.

David Kapp & Soojung ParkRuth Bachofner Santa Monica[through Mar 12]

David Kapp was born and raised in New York and has painted the city since the 1970's. While his subject of traffic, build-ings and skewed aerial perspectives remain intact, his current work brings in images of crowds and figures. For Kapp, the physical painting is just as important as the scene being depicted; experiencing one of his paintings is sometimes seeing the paint and composition before the image itself. Kapp’s paintings extract the dramatic contrasts, harmonies and forms of urban movement through a graceful shift between abstraction and representation. The artist responds to his amplified surroundings through equal-ly charged brushwork, yet keeps a taught, Mondrian-like structure intact through-out his work. Kapp’s physical movements of paint usher not only a two dimensional feel for the city, but also a physical sense for it; acute angles and dramatic perspectives viewed on a grand scale induces a vertigo-like sensation in some works, while in oth-ers, Kapp sets you right into the thick of ur-ban vitality. David Kapp’s work has been the subject of over twenty-five solo exhibitions throughout the country. He has received two Academy Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters along with a Rosenthal Foundation award. His work is in many public and private collections in-cluding The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Academy of Design, and The

Mint Museum of Art. In her current body of work, Soojung Park continues to create luminous linear abstractions that play on contrasts of flatness and space, buoyancy and heft. The severity that seems initially intrinsic to Park’s medium and precisely stacked slabs in the fashion of Donald Judd, is countered by the artist’s treatment of the plexiglass. Subdued hues of inks and pig-ments are rubbed into the front and back of the tablets, which are sandwiched together and arranged into grids. The overall weight of Park’s work is counter-balanced by di-aphanous color applications and the array of striations which range from pencil thin to several inches thick. Where in previous work, color penetrated every surface, her current series offers more variation in both color and texture. Areas of clear plastic to play off saturated areas and rough, sand-blasted bands intermix with smooth, re-flective ones. Park’s stacked tablets seem to generate light from within as ambient light penetrates and bounces between layers of plexiglass, allowing infinite perceptions to emerge. While the layered striations allude to landscape, a more intimate dialog devel-ops within/between panels, bringing the work into a sculptural and painterly realm. Viewers become immersed in the smokey spaces of the thick plexiglass and milky inks while always being drawn back to the syncopated rhythms of the etched lines.

David Kapp, Big Crowd, 2010, oil on linen, 98”x76”; Soojung Park, June Paige, 2011, ink

on plexiglass, 38”x56”.

Exhibitions 35

EXHIBITIONS

SAN FRANCISCO

Dennis LeonPatricia Sweetow San Francisco

[through Feb 12]

Remembering, works from the estate of Den-nis Leon, include many of the artist’s semi-nal sculptures and drawings. Two bodies of drawings, Dedicated to my Father (1984), and Thicket’s (1994), are brought together along with wood and bronze sculpture fromt he same time frame. Although some years separate the making of these draw-ings, they coalesce into a powerful, reflec-tive exhibition. Dennis Leon’s work reflects his youth on the Yorkshire Moor’s, with it’s mix of Celtic stone monuments throughout the countryside. The work is also resonant of his adopted home, with it’s rich com-plexity of nature and artifice. With so much

written about Dennis Leon, his life and work, it seems best to offer a few insights from those voices. he London-born artist seeks a simple statement of unity in his works, which is rooted in landscape and memory. The anonymity in his works is intentional: “it’s not like the uniqueness of individuality. I tend to make things that look like no-one made them.”

Dennis Leon: (left) Dedicated to my Father #7, 1984, pastel on paper, 30.25”x44.50”; (right) Heelstone, 1990, wood, saw dust, paint, 38”x40”x29” Courtesy Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Marco CasentiniBrian Gross San Francisco

[through Feb 26]

Marco Casentini, The Bridge on the Sea, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 51”×51”.

This exhibition of works by Italian painter Marco Casentini will feature the artist's signature geometric abstractions, com-posed of overlapping rectangular shapes in intense, saturated colors. Working in acrylic on canvas, Casentini continues his investigation of color and shape in limited palettes of red, blue, white and silver. In each work, the artist incorporates painted plexiglass panels attached to canvas, adding a physical dimension to the paintings. The clean, hard edges of the plexi blend seam-lessly into Casentini's geometric composi-

tions and create unexpected variations in surface and texture. Casentini's seemingly non-objective works are actually the artist's translations of his emotions and environ-ment. Each painting is inspired by a feeling, place, or memory, expressed through color and composition. In large monochromatic canvases, subtle variations in tone give the paintings a contemplative, emotive quality. In contrast, the largest work in the show features blocks of multiple hues arranged in an energetic composition that echoes both urban architecture and natural landscapes.

Max ColeHaines San Francisco

[through Feb 12]

Having refined her practice over a period of four decades, New York artist Max Cole has earned a reputation as a premier prac-titioner of reductive painting with a con-sistently and highly recognizable aesthetic. Employing a subtle palette of black, white, and shades of grey, this new body of work includes a selection of gem-like small-scale pieces as yet unseen here in San Francisco. From a distance, Cole’s works appear to be composed of simple bands of color. But upon closer inspection, these horizontal bands reveal intricate patterns of short, ver-tical hatch marks consisting of alternating colors. What at first appears devoid of the human hand reveals itself as an accumu-lation of subtle imperfections. The stripes seem to vibrate, at one moment alluding

to foggy horizons or waving fields of grain, and in the next falling flat on the canvas’s surface. This allusion to landscape is be-fitting of an artist who was raised on the plains. Horizontal, unpopulated landscapes are as much a part of her visual lexicon as is Native American thought (Cole main-tained a close relationship with her pater-nal Grandfather, who was half-Cherokee), and indeed, her works evolve from the ide-al of harmony with nature, which is at the heart of that culture. Cole’s work has been described as obsessive, but she prefers the term passionate, as it is self-determination rather than compulsion that urges her to-wards creation and completion. Cole does not rely on a preconceived plan; the work unfolds through time and rigorous process. Max Cole, detail of Briscone Pine,

2010, acrylic on linen, 33” x 49”.


EXHIBITIONS

NEW YORK CITYUlf PuderAna Cristea Chelsea[through Feb 19]

Ulf Puder’s quiet yet forceful paintings de-pict an uninhabited world composed of vast, luminous skies and off-kilter man-made structures. Employing a distinctive color palette dominated by grays and pas-tels and a visual language that is both figu-rative and highly-abstracted, Puder creates images that are as inexplicably beautiful as they are haunting. In works like Waldbad and Schwestern, house-like structures are composed of flat and weightless planes of color, but some of these planes are askew or simply missing. The two bungalows in Schwestern are so battered that they ap-pear almost entirely open to the elements, and stray walls float in what seems to be an expanse of water covering the ground. Offenes Gelände suggests a slightly new direction for the artist: Puder’s paintings have often suggested the disarrayed and desolate aftermath of an unidentified nat-

ural disaster, but in this painting, which depicts a massive tornado approaching a backdrop of low-slung buildings, we seem to be witnessing the moment just before the destruction begins. Born in Leipzig in 1958, Ulf Puder was a member of the now-famed first generation to graduate from the Leipziger Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Along with Neo Rauch, also a member of this first generation, Puder was uniquely successful in melding East-Ger-man neo-realism with a more imaginative, dreamlike, even surrealistic vocabulary. His work is greatly admired by and has had a tremendous influence on a younger genera-tion of Eastern European artists. Puder has been included in recent group exhibitions in museums in New York, London, Paris, Dresden, the Netherlands and Prague. He has had solo exhibitions in Leipzig, Am-sterdam, and Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Ulf Puder: (top) Waldbad, 2010, oil on canvas, 71 “x 86.5”; (bottom) Abland [cover image],

2010, oil on canvas, 83” x 59”.

Christian VincentMike Weiss Chelsea[through Feb 12]

Tunnel Vision, a show by Los Angeles-based artist Christian Vincent, consists of eight large-scale oil paintings, in which the artist deconstructs notions of the collective. In comparison with Vincent’s previous body of work, Tunnel Vision is notably re-duced in palette, line, and narrative. Even the subject matter, while adhering to the male figure, is more stark and streamlined. Vincent is not concerned with mastering anatomical expertise but rather with con-veying a polemical undertone, and inten-tionally leaves the works in contentious balance, overlapping political propaganda and pop culture. It is upon immediate en-counter with the works that their massive scale divulges their confrontational under-pinning. Being larger than human size, the boys depicted in the canvases are turned into monumental objects that intimidate, demand attention and inspire awe. The paint is thick but flat, as Vincent carefully sands down the remnants of his brushwork, thereby symbolically removing his finger-prints from the works and allowing them to exist autonomously. Much akin to early to mid twentieth-century mass-printed war-time propaganda, the identity of the artist

is usurped by the message of unity, solidar-ity and conformity. In Line Up, viewers are met with a descending row of young boys that cuts a sharp diagonal across the canvas. The convergence point on the horizon is eliminated, hinting at the infinitesimal con-tinuation of the lineup. Despite the boys’ petite forms, they are endowed with notice-ably large heads, becoming cloned eugenic man-child hybrids. Their nearly eyeless fac-es speak of their blind faith in a figure that could evoke as much spiritual benevolence as it could mass destruction. Group devo-tion is not meant to be outright rejected as much as challenged in these works. These scenes could be culled from a rock concert or a cult gathering, a private boy’s school outing or a militia camp – all of which are unified in the worshipping of a messianic figure to which the masses turn to for salva-tion and guidance. The desire for empow-erment through belonging, while seductive, is hinged on the acceptance that a person’s dream would inevitably be sacrificed for a collective. Vincent, who was born in 1966, currently lives and works in Los Angeles and has been widely exhibited throughout the United States.Christian Vincent, detail of Waterfall,

2010, oil on canvas, 92” x 154”.

Exhibitions 37

EXHIBITIONS

INDOOR/OUTDOOR will be comprised of works from the grand arc of George Rickey’s career, including some of his most recognizable imagery, his boldest varia-tions, as well as some of his most delicate kinetic creations. Rickey turned to sculp-ture in earnest when he was in his early forties – late by most standards – but his opus is deep thanks both the artist’s lon-gevity and his tireless work ethic. George Rickey died in 2002 at the age of 96, and had only stopped creating sculpture about a year before his death. Though he is per-

haps most well known for his bladed “line” sculptures, Rickey’s work varied greatly over the span of six decades. At the start, Rickey’s work resembled Calder’s catenary systems, though those early mobiles soon evolved into the finely balanced sculptures, “little machines” as Rickey called them – swaying, rocking, and twisting – that gave Rickey his renown. Along with the quintes-sential blades, Rickey used rotors, squares, triangles, and trapezoids. With this show - the 16th of the artist at this gallery - the im-pressive career of George Rickey endures.

George RickeyMaxwell Davidson Midtown

[through Feb 12]

George Rickey, Etoile I, 1958, stainless steel, copper, and brass, 26” x 64” x 64”.

Through a series of eleven paintings, Robin Williams’ first solo exhibition, Rescue Party, reveals a surreal world inhabited by ado-lescents of ambiguous gender that are on the brink of discovery or revelation. Each painting has a distinct narrative but with no specific conclusion. There is a sense of pause in each work which heightens the sense of the impending chance for change. Williams is able to achieve this surreal time-lessness through her painting techniques. While at once employing traditional paint-ing methods, she is also experimental and intuitive. Her use of color, light, texture and composition are all used to explore painting as a medium and to link this to the conceptual content within each work. Rep-resented through her adolescent subjects, Williams examines the internal phase of development that takes place during young

adulthood. These youths inhabit a lim-inal state of being; they are often stranded, Hopperesque figures, posing in their cos-tumes, hoping their visage will evince an inner truth. Each of her characters is seek-ing a sense of identity, safety, and well-be-ing. Some choose to wait for rescue, while others willfully adopt a persona hoping it will lead them toward salvation. In Rescue Party (see right) many possess this stare but there is also hope in this distant gaze. This painting, which pulls from art histori-cal references such as Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, transforms the raft into a kiddie pool and although it is staged in a banal vacancy of surrounding and ges-ture, there is a sense of hope and possibility. Each of Williams’ subjects is searching for meaning: seeking an answer and they will endeavor in the absurd until it is revealed.

Robin WilliamsP.P.O.W. Chelsea[through Feb 26]

Robin Williams: (top) Swoon at the Waterpump 2010, oil on canvas, 40”x60”; (bot) Rescue Party,

2010, oil on canvas, 80”x90”.

David AlleeMorgan Lehman Chelsea

[through Feb 19]

For his new show Dark Day, David S. Allee derived the name and its theme from the manner in which he captured the images. In much of his earlier work, he photographed locations at night with intense artificial light and extremely long exposures, catching un-real landscapes in a nether time somewhere between night and day. For Dark Day, he did the opposite. The images for this se-ries were shot on bright sunny days, us-ing tiny apertures and the highest shutter speeds possible, with exposures reaching 1/10,000th of a second. This work captures the texture of the sun's brightest reflections by letting as little light as possible into the camera, enabling us to see something we wouldn't normally be able to see-a kind of dog-whistle light that leaves everything

else in the photographs underexposed and dark. In this series, the light re-imagines many different structures and places in the cityscape. In 4:02PM, for example, the sun's intense reflection on an aboveground sub-way car filled with commuters re-imagines this everyday scene with an unusual opac-ity and unexpected starkness. Additionally, a number of the images are of glass office buildings, which capture and provide the bursts of blinding light that move and flash across the skyline throughout a sunny day. The light doesn't penetrate them, nor does it illuminate- for our purposes anyway- the veiled things that go on inside the subjects here; such places as the World Financial Center and the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and other banking giants.

David S. Allee: (top) 4:02PM, Chromogenic print, 40”x60”, ed. 3; (bot) 3:46PM, Chromogenic print, 60”x80”, ed. 3. Both from Dark Days series.


EXHIBITIONS

“Bella Pacifica”David Nolan Chelsea[through Feb 5]

Presented by Nyehaus, “Bella Pacifica” is hosted at four venues, including David No-lan Gallery, whose selection focuses mainly on 6 Gallery from the 1950s. Characterized by tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic instabil-ity, the 6 Gallery exemplifies the ‘50s at its most restless, carefree and experimental. The work shown at the gallery within its short life span (1954 to 1957) ranges from expressionism, to surrealism, illusionism, collage, assemblage and abstraction; pure and impure. A DADA attitude of Hilarity and Disdain had replaced the grave sense of mission that characterized the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. In San Francisco, the Alternative Scene resulted in collective projects such as galleries, publications, jazz bands and film-screening societies. Found-ed in 1952, the City Lights project became the center for the literary movement, and was to poetry what the 6 Gallery was to art.

The gallery, located on 3119 Fillmore Street, was an informal co-op with six members and no records were ever kept. The origi-nal 6 (members) were Jack Spicer, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan and David Simp-son. The 6 fostered a spirit of coexistence not only between faculty and students, but between different art movements, disci-plines and ideals. Some of the other artists who participated included Robert Duncan, Clyfford Still, and Sonia Gechtoff, the first woman to have a solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which later hosted Warhol’s exhibition. Beat poetry readings were also an important part o the gallery’s history. On October 7, 1955, the gallery hosted Alan Ginsburg first reading of his poem “Howl”. Everyone present understood they had been present at one of those moments when everything changes.

Cui XiuwenEli Klein SoHo[through Feb 27]

Cui Xiuwen, one of China’s foremost fe-male photographers, is featured in her first solo exhibition in New York City. Her lat-est series, Existential Emptiness, pursues her reflection on the woman as individual in modern China. This body of work fur-thers her focus from physical to spiritual and illustrates her examination and analy-sis of the woman’s psyche. The girl protag-onist, considered the artist’s alter ego, has matured and is accompanied by a life-size doll resembling her. Inspired from her own experiences, the appearance of the puppet without strings recalls Japanese Bunraku theatre. Companion, reflection, and bag-gage of the now familiar character, the doll-complements the girl and acts as alter ego as well. The two figures evoke the duality

of body and soul, life and lifelessness. The presence and absence, posture, closeness or distance of the doll in each work capture the relationship between the two. The digi-tal photographs are mostly monochrome. The palette and format are inspired by tra-ditional Chinese ink painting. The scenes take place in the ice- and snow-covered mountains of Northern China. The quiet, ethereal landscape acts as a perfect set-ting for exploring the mind. The physical appearance of the doll — obvious joints, revealed ribcage bones and scarred womb — alludes to the violence of a woman’s ex-periences and how they impress upon her spirit. The sparseness of the scenes creates an absence of temporal sense, emphasizing the subjectivity of existence.

Cui Xiuwen, (above) Existential Emptiness No. 18, c-print, 56.7”x118”; (below) Existential Emptiness No. 20, c-print, 37.4”x118” (pg. 6).

(top) Sonia Gechtoff, detail of The Angel, 1955, oil on canvas, 72”x67”; (bottom) Deborah Rem-ington, detail of Blasted Beauty, 1954, mixed

media on paper, 30”x24”.

Exhibitions 39

EXHIBITIONS

The inspiration that Seattle-based artist John Dempcy finds in molecular structures is greatly evident in this new body of work, Wild Type. The forms closely resemble that of cells; small bodies working together to make a more complex, advance image. The colors are brighter than past work, the forms clearer, and throughout all is a new addition of white, which was not quite as abundant before. The white offsets the brightly colored paint, creating a contrast

to the presence of intense color with its more absent qualities. The white space adds a shimmering quality to the work, despite it's being a matte finish. It interrupts the business of the work and instills a sense of calm amongst the beautiful chaos. The or-ganic forms float together, sometimes like flower petals along a stream. In it's abun-dant simplicity, there is an overwhelming sense of connectivity between the works, each presenting a new yet familiar image.

John DempcyWalker Contemporary Boston

[through Feb 12]

BOSTON / PHILADELPHIA

Al LovingSande Webster Philadelphia

[through Jan 29]

Al Loving (1935-2005) is one of the most intriguing artists of the 20th century. His work had a personal trademark created by extending the ideas of abstract expression-ism in truly original and groundbreaking ways. His distinctive work united influ-ences from the abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, colorist Josef Albers, and opti-cal illusionist Viktor Vasarely. He was not simply an abstract painter but rather an artist who redefined the boundaries of ab-straction throughout his career. A native of Detroit, Loving burst onto the New York scene painting hard-edged geometric ab-straction in the late Sixties. Loving was the first African-American artist to have a one-man exhibition at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. In this landmark exhibition, Loving succeeded in breaking racial barriers and opened doors for other African-American artists, prov-ing that abstraction was a viable way of working. Inspired to create work beyond the boundaries of geometry and traditional

painting on a stretched canvas, Loving be-gan moving toward the expressive freedom found in the collage process. These later works were more fluid and freeform: lay-ered constructions of rag paper painted in vibrant acrylics and crafted into elaborate compositions. Loving referred to these as-sembled works as material abstraction. This body of work introduced the iconic spiral-ing forms. The spiral affirmed a personal connection to the natural cycle of continu-ous growth and defined time and space ex-tending out towards infinity. The driving reference for all of Loving’s work is the is-sue of space. He succeeded in expressing a new and dynamic spatial and aesthetic ex-perience that pushed his work beyond the limitations of perspective and the modern-ist notion of the flat picture plane. This rare exhibition which will include a wide variety of mixed media works and prints. Al Lov-ing has exhibited internationally and his work is held in numerous major collections in museusms throughout the world. Al Loving, Life & Continued Growth #12,

mixed media on paper, 29” x 22”.

Dempcy, Coronado, acrylic on clayboard, 30x30”

For his new group exhibition of digital media, alterations, curator and artist Peter Campus sought to understand "the trans-formation of our society to an age of elec-tronics,” He writes that “it was so rapid and unexpected that the time elapsed to allow retrospective thinking is almost non-exis-tent in its brevity. We don’t know the dan-gers contained in this age; it is too soon to know, and too integrated to identify. In this presentation there are five different messag-es, five different points of view, that present

only a fraction of the message." The videos of Peter Campus provide hopeful images as a remedy for the anxieties of contempo-rary life, while Nayda Collazo-Llorens creates multi-media video and installa-tions to underscore the complexity of the mind and the obstacles of communicat-ing thought. Kathleen Graves combines current technology with objects from the past. Jason Varone is inspired by the advancement of society through technol-ogy and its decline from eroding resources.

“alterations”Locks Philadelphia

[through Feb 5]

Peter Campus, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay, 2009,

high definition multi-screen video installation.


EXHIBITIONS

WASHINGTON DC“Bound”Hamiltonian Washington[Jan 22 - Mar 5]

“Saturnalia”Irvine Washington[through Feb 12]

Simon Gouverneur and Andy Moon WilsonCurator’s Office Washington[through Feb 15]

Bound, an exhibition of new works by Katherine Mann and Selin Balci, exam-ine the limits of their medium, as well as notions of humanity within an expanded ecologic understanding of the living world. Whether in Balci's laboratory approach or Mann's painterly exploration, both art-ists create vivid abstractions, ripe with no-tions of growth, wonder and subjugation. Katherine Mann's oversized, abstract works on paper consist of accumulations of se-quins, paint and ink, which illustrate the potentiality of growth, as well as the peril of overabundance. “I think of my work as baroque abstract, a celebration of the dispa-rate” says Mann, who creates carefullycom-posed fields with moments that are at once

chaotic, organized, thriving and decaying. Katherine Mann elegantly builds her paint-ings with hoards of ambiguous forms re-calling elements found in systems of nature and in the highly-decorative, resulting in a menagerie of depth and color. By utiliz-ing traditional lab procedures, Selin Balci creates microenvironments by incorporat-ing biological material as a new art media to explore the literal process of life. From sterile beginnings the growth of microbes demonstrate a turbulent arc of life within a largely imperceptible world. Balci's simple living organisms live and die within a net-work of biological exchanges highlighting a wide range of behaviors similar to the hu-man equivalent of social exchanges.

Katherine Mann, Net, 2011, acrylics and sumi ink on cut paper, 90”x102”.

Saturnalia is a group exhibition of new by Teo González, Melissa Ichiuji, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Akemi Maegawa, Alexa Meade, Susana Raab, and Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick. Teo González’s new paintings challenge the boundaries of or-ganic and geometric form through a pro-cess of abstraction from the colors of skies over specific city locations. González’s new series of works are based on photographs of skies, which he uses to map a color palette in Photoshop. Melissa Ichiuji’s new work expands on her approach to materials, identities, domestic space, and sexualities.

Her sculptures and installations are per-formative works and staged fantasies that often explore the boundaries of childhood innocence and adult self-consciousness andrepression. Each sculpture is sewn and assembled from many materials. Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi presents new mixed media paintings on Mylar as provocative visual essays on Persian, Iranian, and American cultural identities. Ilchi uses militarist icons of the current Iranian regime as invasions and disruptions of a possible cultural co-existence and mines imagery from both Persian culture and Western abstraction.

Debt, a new exhibition featuring Simon Gouverneur and Andy Moon Wilson, is not about money. Rather, it is about the slippery terrain of artistic debt. In 2006, artist Andy Moon Wilson was introduced to the work of iconoclastic and abstract symbolist painter Simon Gouverneur, who had been based in Washington, DC, for the last decade of his life prior to his suicide in 1990. Andy Moon Wilson has spent his ar-tistic career exploring the infinite possibili-ties of visual design and ornament both as an artist and in his day job as a carpet de-signer. Simon Gouverneur also investigated global visual design motifs in his paintings and notebook sketches. Both artists share

a fascination with archetypal abstracted forms that can communicate on both eth-nographically specific and universal lev-els. But there is where the similarities end. While Gouverneur intended a profound and rigorous spiritual engagement with his artwork, Moon Wilson rejects this spiritual quest in favor of an exploration of the in-tensely visual as it expresses itself both his-torically and, more importantly, in contem-porary culture. Mostly, the artist just draws compulsively. But it is an intoxicating visual experience to present these two artists to-gether. Gouverneur's two large paintings are flanked by hundreds of Moon Wilson's small intense works on paper.

Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled, 2010ink and acrylic on paper, 10” x 10”

Courtesy of Curator’s Office, Washington, DC.

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, detail of As we waited we were longing for Spring’s sun, 2010, acrylic and mixed media on Mylar, 78”x60”.

Courtesy of Irvine Contemporary.

Exhibitions 41

EXHIBITIONS

SOUTHWESTTony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. Cragg’s main artistic expression is sculp-ture; however prints are also a strong show-case in his oeuvre. The works included in his series Test Tubes and Bottles are some of the most recognizable and are being repre-sented in the show. In sculpture, he works in metal, glass, and plastic fabrication, as well as in traditional sculpture materials, and applies a casually exquisite draftsman-ship to drawings and prints. In the late 1970s, he began making wall sculptures of assembled found objects, and has said, sur-prisingly, that in doing so he was thinking of van Gogh. Van Gogh, Cragg explained,

wrote about going through the trash as “a fantasy journey through a land of strange forms and colors.” Cragg was elected Roy-al Academician in 1994. His works are in many private collections but also found extensively in many public collections, in-cluding The Tate Gallery in London, the New York Public Library and Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Alber-tina Museum in Vienna, and several corpo-rate collections among them Estee Lauder. In 2007 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, a major prize for outstanding achievement in the arts that is given by the Japan Art Association.

Tony CraggZane Bennett Santa Fe

[through Jan 28 - Feb 18]

Cragg, Spores, T.P.E., 1988, etching, 23”x24.5”.

Terence La Noue's uniquely riven and reas-sembled sculptural-paintings have gained him worldwide recognition and over a hundred and forty acclaimed solo exhibi-tions throughout London, Paris, Tehran, Stockholm, Cologne, New York, Los Ange-les, Atlanta, Tucson, and Scottsdale. Muse-ums such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern in London, and others in Japan, Singapore, France and Australia, have in-cluded his work in their permanent col-lections. One of the most intriguing quali-ties behind La Noue's brilliantly colored mixed-media paintings, is the way La Noue

creates them. He starts by combining lay-ers of colored acrylic with cotton netting and acrylic saturated canvas into low-relief molds, and allows them to dry overnight. La Noue then proceeds to cut the dried reliefs into sections and shards, which he later unites in various ways to make up a finished work. The ending effect is a multi-dimensional art piece that is part mosaic, part tapestry, part painting, and even part sculpture. The diverse shapes, colors, and textures that are created invite the viewer to divulge into the intricacies of the painting, while at the same time, enjoy the work of art as a whole.

Terence La NoueBentley Scottsdale AZ

[through Feb 6 - Feb 26]

Terence La Noue, Return to Dakar, multimedia on wood, 33”x46”.

Mike Stack & Steve Murphy Davis Dominguez Tucson

[through Feb 26]

(above)Michael Stack, Pilot, 2010, oil on linen. (left)Murphy, Big Brother, 2007, leadened wood.

Mike Stack constructs paintings of thin hor-izontal strips of oil paint, for a color field that shifts vertically in shimmering optical effect. Like so many modern painters, his works are fundamentally two–dimensional yet convey a subtle illusion of depth. His drawings are highly worked, spontane-ous exercises in process, where order is wrought from non-specific gesture. In his introductory exhibit, Steve Murphy takes the Minimalist road to expression in highly refined, severely reduced metal sculpture. His simple shapes are proportioned to cre-ate substantial volumetric weight and se-ductive 360 degree views. Both these art-

ists have accomplished the abstract ideal of provoking thought and emotion through non-definable form.

Luc LeestemakerSongs of the Unconscious

1020 Prospect, Suite 130, La Jolla, CA 92037 • (858) 459-0836

www.madisongalleries.com

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EMIL NELSON GALLERY2864 COLORADO AVE

SANTA MONICA, CA 90404310-266-9904

FROM THE BAYER FAMILY COLLECTION

KOKAYCEEOLSENGALLERY

“Xicana Pop” Peyote Earring

2008 86”(h) x 14” (w) x 16” (d)

exhibitions and special projects 2011

The California/International Arts Foundation’s

New Encyclopedia

L.A. Rising: So Cal Artists Before 1980 written by Lyn Kienholz

and overseen by Joan Weinstein, Associate Director of the Getty Foundation

L.A. Xicano “Mapping Another LA: The Chicano Art Movement”

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with Getty Southern California Research initiative

Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas

scheduled to open at the Fowler Museum, Fall 2011

Doin’ It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman’s Building

as part of the Getty Southern California Research initiative

Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 scheduled to open at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art

October 2011

Fierce Beauty: The Art Work of Linda Vallejo GO TO www.lindavallejo.com TO PREVIEW

full color 220 page book

with over 100 color plates

with essays by Betty Ann Brown, Peter Frank, William Moreno,

Gloria F. Orenstein and Sybil Venegas

Make ‘Em All Mexican Two Solo Exhibitions

Ave 50 Studio Highland Park, CA

curated by Dr. Karen Mary Davalos opening in April 2011

ChimMaya Gallery Montebello, CA full color catalog

opening in October 2011

PAST PRESENT FUTURE G. B. JONES CURRENTLY SHOWING THROUGH 2011

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american contemporary art (january 2011)

Documents