Monday, June 30, 2008
Jamison Brosseau, Bendix Harms, Federico Herrero, and Ulrich Wulff
Jamison Brosseau, Bendix Harms, Federico Herrero, and Ulrich Wulff
Curated by Eddie Martinez
June 27-August 1, 2008
Reception: Friday, June 27, 6-8 pm
Artist and curator, Eddie Martinez brings together four painters who each translate his visions of the world onto canvas with bold tones, expressive strokes and an idiosyncratic visual language.
Jamison Brosseau was born in Iowa in 1976. He received his masters from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He currently had his first solo show at Galleri Loyal, Stokholm.
Bendix Harms was born in Münster, Germany in 1967 and now resides in Hamburg. He shows with Anton Kern Gallery, New York and has been included in exhibitions at Galleri Faruschou, Copenhagen, Denmark and Sabine Knust Gallery, Munich, among others.
Federico Herrero was born in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1978, where he lives and works. He shows with Pablo Leon de la Barra in London and Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf. Group exhibitions include biennials in Moscow, Prague, Singapore, and Venice, where he won the 2001 Golden Lion for the best artist under 35.
Ulrich Wulff was born in Kempten, Germany in 1975. He lives and works in Berlin. His work has been seen recently in group exhibitions at Salon 94 and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and Gio Marconi, Milan, among others. He currently has a solo show at Galerie Gernd Kugler, Innsbruck.
zieher Smith
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Repeat after me: I AM a Revolutionary
Repeat after me: I AM a Revolutionary
Michele O'Marah and Henry Taylor
Javier Peres is pleased to present Michele O'Marah and Henry Taylor's Repeat after me: I AM a Revolutionary. The exhibition is comprised of painting, sculpture, works on paper, and video, centering around the revolutionary figure and Black Panther leader Huey Newton.
Michele O'Marah approaches the subject through a video recreation of a 1973 interview between Newton and William F. Buckley, which took place at Trinity University as part of Buckley's television program Firing Line. Interested in the drastically disparate backgrounds of Newton, a black, grass roots political icon, and Buckley, a wealthy, conservative blue blood, O'Marah dissects and pieces back together their substantive and unglamorous discussion about the broad topic of revolution. Using the original dialogue, O'Marah enlists non-actors, artists Henry Taylor, and Maynard Monrow to play the parts of Newton and Buckley. In addition to the video piece, O'Marah will display hand-made set pieces, works on paper, and photographic portraits of each character.
In addition to playing the role of Huey Newton, Henry Taylor will present several paintings inspired by the tumultuous life of the former Black Panther leader. Growing up in California at the height of the Black Panther movement, Taylor has had an ongoing interest in and connection to black political movements. Taylor's paintings frequently address class struggle and racism often incorporating found objects and scraps into his frenetic and often biting painting. Taylor's work will focus on the mythic political figure of Newton, as well as the equally controversial aspects of his storied, sordid personal struggle with violence and substance abuse.
Peres Projects
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
SUMMERTIME 08
SUMMERTIME 08
26. juni – 9. August 2008
Once again Galleri Christoffer Egelund is proud to open the big group show SUMMERTIME 08. Visitors will be presented for a fantastic diversity of works by the manifold artists of the gallery.
Rikke Benborg, who just received the 3-year work grant of the Danish Arts Foundation, will among others exhibit one of her newest video works. And Anders Brinch has just finished some brilliant large scale paintings, that can be seen as well. Furthermore the exhibition will be displaying new fascinating works by Christian Finne, Jon Stahn, Melou Vanggaard, Karin Kaster, Rasmus Rosengaard, Morten Steen Hebsgaard, Christina Hamre, Thierry Feuz, Maria Torp and Theis Wendt.
Furthermore Galleri Christoffer Egelund presents a line of specially invited guest artists. On this occasion it will be possible to experience the Cuban artist, Odey Curbelo Urquijo’s paintings, who gives a little foretaste of what to expect in the Fall, when he on September 26th opens his soloshow in the project room of the gallery. Moreover, visitors will be introduced to the young promising Swiss video artists, Katja Loher, who for the first time in Denmark will show her unique video sculpture ”Video Optica”. Besides this visitors will be able to see new interesting works by René Holm, Crystel Ceresa, David Dellagi and Mikkel S. Andersen.
Galleri Christofher Egelund
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Morten Buch – The Last Resort
Morten Buch – The Last Resort
Has the depiction of reality become the last bastion of contemporary art and where painting will triumph over other media? Of course the Avante-garde movement had already rendered the genre given to the representation of things – the still life - especially fertile ground on which to experiment with new techniques and forms of representation. Pablo Picasso was not painting still lifes around 1907; “he was making a picture” (Margrit Rowell) and thereby revolutionising modern art.
Morten Buch, born in 1970 in Copenhagen, belongs to a generation of Scandina-vian painters, who combine the legacy of Danish Expressionism with the coolness of American Pop-art. Buch magnifies banal, commonplace objects, which also have a place in the repertoire of still life painting, and produces paintings of enormous proportions: vases, pipes, shoes, and tins. His heavily layered oil paintings reveal a veritable feast of sensuous paintings that confront us directly, carry us along, lull us, but still leave us bemused. As a result of their exaggerated formats of up to 300 x 300 cm, supposedly familiar things become divorced from their familiar and quintessential form and appear alien to us; as alien as some of the bizarre manipulations we see in today’s culture of digital imagery. For this young generation of artists, ‘The Last Resort’ is not a matter of depicting reality, but rather its ambiguous extension into other possible visual worlds.
Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven is launching Morten Buch’s first solo exhibition outside Denmark and, in cooperation with Horsens Kunstmuseum in Denmark, the second venue between 4.10. and 7.12.2008, will show works from recent years as well as the very latest paintings.
Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven
UNA ESTACA EN EL LODO, UN HOYO EN LA CINTA.
A Stake in the Mud, A Hole in the Reel. Land Art's Expanded Field 1968–2008'
Borrowing its title from the writings of Robert Smithson, the programme revisits a selection of moving-image works that form part of the historical memory of Land Art, through and alongside more recent productions by contemporary artists. Indeed a concern with remoteness, together with the powerful allure of specific sites, weaves throughout the films’ itinerary, which includes the sewers of New York and Vienna (Gordon Matta-Clark, Hans Schabus), the deserts of California (Mario Garcia Torres), the mountains of the Basque country (Ibon Aranberri), and the beaches of Taveuni (Nikolaj Recke).
Maria Thereza Alves · Francis Alÿs · Ibon Aranberri · Marinus Boezem · Donna Conlon · Jan Dibbets · Barry Flanagan · Cypriem Gaillard · Mario García Torres · Nancy Holt · Richard Long · Walter de Maria · Gordon Matta-Clark · Dennis Oppenheim · Damián Ortega · Nikolaj Recke · Thiago Rocha Pitta · Hans Schabus · Gerry Schum · Robert Smithson · Jordan Wolfson
Curated by Latitudes
Caac

Monday, June 23, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Naoto Kawahara
Naoto Kawahara
“Ouroboros”
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth solo exhibition
“Ouroboros” with Naoto Kawahara. Around five new paintings will be shown
in this exhibition.
In 2005 Taka Ishii Gallery hosted Kawahara’s “NU” exhibition. Kawahara
then participated in the group exhibition “Attention to Detail” (The FLAG
Art Foundation, New York) curated by Chuck Close in 2008. Kawahara will also
participate in the group exhibition “Diana und Aktaion: Der Verbotene Blick
auf die Nacktheit” (Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf) this October. He has
been active internationally and his works have attracted increasing
attention in recent years.
“This time, I worked as though painting an unorthodox Vanitas while
thinking about the ominous atmosphere in daily life and the compelling
instinct that enables us to constantly forget and paralyze it. Although my
expression is realistic, rather than depicting the subject itself, I hope to
express it like an image emerging in the mind.”
Naoto Kawahara
In this solo show entitled “Ouroboros” (referring to a serpent that formed
a circle by swallowing its own tail, and a symbol of Ancient Greece),
Kawahara quotes the works of Munch, an artist whom he feels “paradoxically
depicts images of death, whilst also expressing life through themes such as
sexuality and puberty.” In this exhibition he reexamines these paintings,
which are infused with both energy and despair.
Kawahara has produced distinctive realist paintings that precisely reproduce
photographs of people and landscapes drawn from his surroundings or scenes
from films. In recent years, he has been creating paintings that reinterpret
scenes extracted from classic masterpieces by artists such as Durer,
Balthus and Rembrandt. Through such “re-envisioned paintings”, Kawahara
pursues the theme of “creating a sense of deja vu through the repetitive
use of old masters’ themes, while reflecting on archetypes of images valid
today,” and presents this theme in his exhibition.
Taka Ishii Gallery
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
New works from Stephen Palmer
Hi Jens-Peter
I just thought you might like to see some images of new paintings by Stephen
Palmer that we have at the gallery:
Stephen Palmer, Self portrait with badges, 2008, oil on canvas.
Stephen Palmer, Make of free at last, 2008, oil on canvas.
Vane


Bettina Buck
German artist Bettina Buck's first solo exhibition at the gallery opens 27.06.2008.
Using such diverse and commonplace materials as foam, carpet, latex and clay the artists’ recent sculptures oscillates between beauty and repulsion and structure and formlessness to create intimate, delicate moments of uncertainty.
An conversation between the artist and Vincent Honoré, curator of the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, is available to read on the website.
Axel Antas has new work included in Nowhere is here at The Drawing Room. The exhibition which also includes Nogah Engler, Franziska Furter, Reece Jones and Damien Roach, taps into the capacity of drawing to capture the contingent quality of the natural environment and our complex relationship with it.
Nowhere is here runs till 21.07.2008 at The Drawing Room, London.
Antas' solo exhibition at Spacex, Structures for the Unseen runs till 12.07.2008. The exhibition consists of a new body of work including film, large scale drawings and a series of photographs alongside a selection of earlier works from Antas’ Intervention series.
Erica Eyres is currently included in a group exhibition NO BORDERS (JUST NEWS) at the Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece. The exhibition gathers the works of twenty nine young artists from twenty two European countries and will close its tour in Lisbon later this year.
which inverts the truisms of the contemporary imagination.
Rokeby Gallery


Monday, June 16, 2008
Ciaran Murphy & Jason Loebs & Andrew Falkowski
Ciaran Murphy, Monkey with Eyeshadow, 2008, oil on cotton, 19” x 16”
Kavi Gupta gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States of Dublin-based artist Ciaran Murphy.
Ciaran Murphy creates paintings that borrow their imagery from a myriad of sources spanning subject matter that can reach from a tropical landscape to an animal eating its prey. His choice of disparate and sparse singular vignettes alludes to the intrinsic and imperative connection of Murphy’s world of images as they relate and interact as a whole. Though quiet and poetic, his subject matter encompasses humor and violence, romance and utter mystery all at once.
Murphy’s paintings are predominantly modest in size and are marked by a subdued palette of neutral painterly and often gestured mark making. Some images are barely recognizable such as a painting of a cloud of passing smoke while others are as straight forward as a perched monkey showing off her blue eye makeup. The array of imagery does seem to eventually focus on a few recurring motifs as Murphy gravitates towards scenes of nature. Piles of twigs, uprooted trees, animals and lightning storms describe a few of these examples though this tendency does not reveal to the viewer a sign of a clear narrative, or a key to unlock a specific story. It leaves one to imagine Murphy’s paintings as a trail on an infinite journey of one artist to define for himself his own world and its surroundings.
Ciaran Murphy (b. 1978) lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Murphy has had solo exhibitions at mother’s tankstation in Dublin, and has exhibited and been an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Selected group exhibitions include shows at Massimo Carasi in Milan, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin.
Andrew Falkowski and Jason Loebs
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present the work of two painters whose work divergently explores the histories of painting through fundamentals of both art history and the personal mythologizing and readings of past events, objects, images and reference points.
Andrew Falkowski creates hyper-realistic paintings of lost historical prerogatives. Several works in this exhibition describe delicately flowing and thoughtfully specific arrangements of sheets of cloth. The images are taken from photographic backdrops yet naked of their posed subject becoming “portraits” in themselves. They are placeless, 'nowhere', evoking melancholic atmospheres, while their centrally focused light emphasizes the absent portrait, the missing still-life. As a counterpoint, a seductively romantic portrait of a heroic persona harkens to a sense of displaced optimism.
Jason Loebs works with painting as well as collage and other mixed media to explore the way one constructs the present by reconfiguring our past. Some images Loebs is drawn to are iconic such as those taken form art history textbooks where faint stains and imprints of paintings such as Manet’s Olympia can be deciphered. Others hint to our history through their use of old pages from books culled from many sources spanning science, literature, law and art. Materiality also comes into play as often linen is left uncovered, tape is visible, and cracks and stains take the form not only of a symbol of deteriorating ideals but also of one’s relationship to the retelling of what has already been.
Andrew Falkowski (b. 1973) lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at The Suburban in Oak Park, IL and Rosamund Felsen in Santa Monica. Recent group exhibitions include Kristi Engle Gallery, Los Angeles; and MK12 Gallery in Kansas City. An upcoming show at Hudson-Franklin in NY is also scheduled for 2009. Falkowski received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
Jason Loebs (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn. Loebs recently received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been included in exhibitions at Jack the Pelican Gallery, Brooklyn; and Voxpopuli, Philadelphia.
Kavi Gupta

Sunday, June 15, 2008
Boys of Summer
Boys of Summer June 20 – August 2, 2008
A group show featuring work by:
Nick Cave, James Gobel,
Zane Lewis, Ebony Patterson + more!
From Jamaican gangstas to a hopeful United States presidential candidate, the group exhibition Boys of Summer considers the representation of the male in contemporary art. The work, done in a variety of media by a diverse range of artists, depicts a multitude of men, some identifiable, others stereotypical or purely imagined. Issues of sexuality and power are present, but these contemporary representations go beyond to also investigate questions of race and class. Whether these artists portray men as objects of desire, symbols of hope, or signs of otherness, their loaded work underscores the power of representational images and our society’s cultural consumption of them.
Nick Cave (American, born 1959) is a Chicago-based multimedia and performance artist and fashion designer. His large color photographs feature the African American artist dawning ambiguous masks. Immediately questioning the viewer’s race assumptions, the masks look at once like a robber’s ski mask and an ethnographic object. Cave earned his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a tenured instructor at the School of the Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, FL 2007, the Chicago Cultural Center 2006, and Jack Shainman Gallery NY 2006 among others. His work has been in important group exhibitions including Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African-American Art at The Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland 2006 and Frequency curated by Thelma Golden and Christine Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2005. In 2006 he was a recipient of the coveted Joyce Foundation Joyce Award. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, OR, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Seattle Art Museum, WA.
James Gobel’s (American, born 1972) vibrantly elaborate paintings of “bears,” or heavyset gay men, balance a gentle humor with sensuality and a loving sensitivity. Adorned with felt, yarn and fabric, the delicately pieced together paintings recall traditionally feminine crafts like quilting, yet their imagery is typically masculine. Gobel begins his creative process with photographs of people, but his final images are hybrids, portraying types rather than specific individuals. Gobel earned his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gobel has mounted solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, and Kravets/Wehby Gallery, NY. Gobel's work has been reviewed and featured in Art in America, ARTnews, Artforum, Flash Art, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Metro.Pop, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Beautiful Decay, Flaunt, Zink, and The Believer, among many other publications.
Zane Lewis (American, born 1981) creates large scale images of pop culture icons, ranging from the Pope to Brangelina, begging questions of modern day worship. For Obama, 2007, he carefully spilt, pooled and mixed paint before fashioning the politician’s head with a knife. Baraka Obama, Charles Manson and Kim Jong II are three of Lewis’s portraits in his newest series Apostles. Lewis received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. He has mounted solo exhibitions at galleries such as Mixed Greens, NY; Romo, Atlanta; Finesilver, San Antonio; and Saltworks, Atlanta. His work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Art, GA.
In her Gangstas for Life series, Ebony Patterson (Jamaican, born 1981) depicts well-known Jamaican criminals. In doing so, she explores contemporary notions of male beauty within a Jamaican context. Specifically, the series highlights that fashionable practice of skin bleaching within the culture of the dancehall, a place of major cultural significance among young working class Jamaicans. Patterson earned her MFA in 2006 from the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2005 she has had solo exhibitions at See Line Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Mutual Gallery, Jamaica; and the UC Gallery, University of Montana. In 2007 her work was featured in the group exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean curated by Tumelo Mosaka at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 2006 she was included in the Jamaica Biennial at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She is currently in residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.
The exhibition continues into mmg’s project space with works by Carlos Aires (Spanish, born 1974), Oscar Cueto (Mexican, born 1976), Russell Nachman (American, born), and more!
Moniquemeloche
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
We dare you, if you are in NYC this weekend....
TROJAN HORSE INTERNATIONAL INVITES YOU AND COMPANY TO ATTEND TRUTH OR
DARE.
A LIVE PERFORMANCE SHOWDOWN IN 3 LOCATIONS. EUROPE MEETS AMERICA.
ACCESS IS LIMITED, SO PLEASE WRITE NOW TO: truth-dare@live.com TO
RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS.
FRIDAY THE 13TH OF JUNE
7PM - 11PM
THE ROOFTOP
85 SOUTH 6TH STREET
BROOKLYN
SATURDAY THE 14TH OF JUNE
HIGH NOON - 4PM
THE BELVEDERE CASTLE
CENTRAL PARK
79TH STREET MID-PARK
SUNDAY THE 15TH OF JUNE
7PM - 11PM
THE SKY ROOM
NEW MUSEUM
235 BOWERY
PLEASE WRITE TO: truth-dare@live.com to reserve free tickets for any
one, or more of these events! Include your name, contact number, date
you would like to attend, and the names of your party. Hope to see
you there!
Sincerely,
Trojan Horse International
PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR: TED PIERCE
CURATOR: JESPER ELG - V1GALLERY.COM
CO-CREATORS: JEFF SUGG AND JIM FINDLAY
PLAYERS:
STEVE CUIFFO (USA)
MAGGIE HOFFMAN (USA)
JOEN HØJERSLEV (DENMARK)
ÖZLEM SAGLANMAK (DENMARK)
IDA WALLFELT (SWEDEN)
AND MORE!
TRUTH OR DARE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE DANISH ART
COUNCIL- DaNY ARTS
WWW.TROJANPROJECTS.COM
TRUTH OR DARE is part of a series of events to be produced in New York
City by the art collective, TROJAN HORSE INTERNATIONAL (Copenhagen/New
York), that explore the political and ethical relationship between
Europe and the United States.
Truth: What is the capital of Finland?
Dare: Sing your national anthem as loud as possible.
Truth: Do you see your own opinion as more important than the majority?
Dare: Do a strip number.
Truth: Do you believe in angels?
Dare: Pray out loud for someone in the audience.
Truth: What do you wish to be done with your body when you die?
Dare: Perform your death scene.
TRUTH OR DARE is a durational performance work based on 1000 questions
and dares composed by the group Trojan Horse International, and boils
the situation of performer and spectator down to its essence. The
piece lasts four hours, and the audience is free to come and go
throughout the duration of the show.
Played by two teams representing Europe and the United States, TRUTH
OR DARE uses the universal teenage game to challenge stereotypical
views on culture, and question the spectator’s own relationship to a
cultural identity. There are limitless narratives that arise out of
the juxtaposition of various truths and dares, and through the act of
attempting to answer or perform, the limits of human knowledge and
physical existence begin to unravel.
As new questions and dares unfold, the mood of the room can change
from intellectual theorizing about sex, politics, and religion – to
embarrassingly comic interludes – to harsh interrogation and
humiliation. This is the stuff that nations are made of.

Thursday, June 12, 2008
Interior | Group Show
Hales Gallery is delighted to present Interior, a group show by six female artists. The exhibition focuses on the use of the enclosed, decorated space as a metaphor for a deeper probing of the thought process or an exploration of materiality.
Each artist has approached this in a unique and personal way through a range of media; stop motion animation, painting, diagrammatic drawing and sculpture.
Beth Campbell was born in Illinois and now lives and works in New York. Following Room, a recently completed site-specific installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, consists of a series of multiples of a reading room in a grid of mirrored pairs. For this exhibition, Campbell shows several flow diagram drawings entitled My potential future based on present circumstances and a large related mobile piece It's largely unresolved. Each work explores Campbell's internalised thought processes and anxieties as a mental interior with the drawings acting rather like the mycelin of a fungus which occasionally throw up fruiting bodies in the form of sculptural manifestations.
Canadian born Laura Letinsky is well known in her adopted home city of Chicago for her seemingly accidental 'table top' photographs of the remains of meals and domestic activity. Letinsky's elegant use of light and colour is reminiscent of the Golden Age Dutch and Flemish still life painting. The subject matter is contemporary and the metaphorical content is enigmatic.
Laura Oldfield Ford lives and works in London. Her work consists of regularly published 'Zines' under the title of Savage Messiah which are formed from her drawings and texts. Also part of Oldfield-Ford's oeuvre are large-scale paintings in which she is the protagonist in a developing narrative based around her experiences of London's East End subcultures. Oldfield-Ford presents a painting which explores the dereliction of the soon to be transformed site for the 2012 Olympic Games. The area, with signs of recently abandoned domesticity such as sofas and TVs acts as a commentary on past interior spaces.
Courtney Smith began making a variety of sculpture with defunct wooden furniture whilst living in Brazil. Now residing in Williamsburg, New York, she continues to reconfigure existing furniture and reinvent practical objects with paradoxical purposes. On this occasion she shows a screen made with wooden bricks, which in turn have been made by Smith from an elaborate and highly decorative piece of lacquered oriental furniture.
Jessica Stockholder is known for her assemblages of everyday objects. Born in Seattle and now living and working in New Haven, Connecticut, her work references cubist interior paintings from the early 20th century. Stockholder uses familiar household items in her pieces in ways that disorientate the viewer's ordinary relationship with them. Untitled 1998 is made up of metallic flooring and mosaic tiles commonly found in washrooms, a light and other plastic household items.
Amy Yoes who was born in Chicago and now lives and works in New York, uses animated film to create odd roomscapes that metamorphose in to strange spaces that are reminiscent of the amazing
Hales Gallery
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Brian Griffiths
Vilma Gold is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Brian Griffiths.
Brian Griffiths views art as a means of escape, a repeated and heroic attempt to leave the here and now and be transported to other places, other times and by extension, other psychological states. Through past works we have been asked to journey into space (via cardboard super computers), to travel to mysterious lands (via a galleon made from wooden furniture) and promised all kinds of imaginary excesses with his varied material transitions.
In a new series of sculptures ‘Another End’ presents a drama where a resigned ‘lostness’ and ‘used up-ness’ is rampant. It infers a kind of relentlessness, a laughable existential angst butted against the optimism of a new improved conclusion. The sculptures appear as distinctive players: A bear head with its roughly patched concrete surface and painterly graphic face has an air of an old school entertainer, a wooden box with its numerous openings and gleaming tan brogue shoes is enigmatically quiet, an over-plated concertinaed metal car lump is a somewhat comical showy beast. They all desperately want to be more, to be back performing in another place – instead they sit, wait and put on a brave face. The over zealous lick of brightly coloured paint on the banger car, the daft smile of the bear, the over polished wooden surface is a bravado that is disturbingly fragile.
In Griffiths’ work traditional genres of sculpture are reworked and rethought predominately through the assisted readymade or the fabricated found object. The stone monument, the wooden carving and metal sculpture are all revisited with disarming directness and ingenuity. For Griffiths, conceptual rigor is bound up with processes of making, so everyday materials and objects are selected for their potential to transform and to create rich, evocative experiences. In part Griffiths uses sculpture to inquire into ideas of the flawed and the failed. Employing complex sculptural languages and diverse references Griffiths skillfully confuses categories of the found and the made, the everyday and the fantastical, the humorous and the melancholic. The deliberate bluntness of the work propels the viewer immediately into a landscape where the supposedly familiar is scrutinised. Griffiths transforms everyday objects and base materials into remarkable encounters that question our experience of the contemporary world. Aspirational, and yet tragically flawed, Griffiths’ works are charged with humour, discontent and sadness.
Brian Griffiths was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1968, and lives and works in London. Last year Griffiths produced a major installation for The Furnace Commission at A Foundation, Liverpool. He has exhibited widely including important solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2007), Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paolo (2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2004) and The Breeder, Athens (2004). Later this year Griffiths is exhibiting at Lustwarande 08 – Wanderland at the Fundament Foundation, Tilburg and is also taking part in a series of commissions at the Royal Academy.
Vilma Gold
A Kassen & Fleron
A Kassen & Fleron
It is a pleasure to invite you to the opening of two solo shows in the gallery on Friday June 13th from 6-9 pm. The artist group A Kassen exhibits in the main space and Thomas Fleron’s show ”Det fede Læskur” is in the project space. Exhibition period is June 14th – July 19th.
A Kassen work with performativ installation and sculpture. Actions, discretely part of the exhibition space, are characteristc of A Kassen’s works. The actions may even be so discrete, they don’t get noticed. But if they do get noticed, they contain strong elements of humor and surprise. Once in a while, A Kassen perform the actions themselves, but mostly they are performed by supernumeraries or even by monstrous machines, constructed by A Kassen.
A Kassen’s works refer to the objectless, conceptual art of the 60s, to performances and pop art. They examine and experiment with the borders between art and non-art, as well as self invented systems that change the functions of things within a given space. The works are absurd, subtle and often very elegant due to their seamless adaption to their context. In this sense, they form a critique of the institution and draw attention to how we act and navigate in a certain context.
The exhibition consists of a large interventive and performative work, which shall not be revealed here. A Kassen also present their new artist book, ”Damaged by Water, Financed by Insurance”.
A Kassen are Christian Bretton-Meyer (b. 1976), Morten Steen Hebsgaard (b. 1977), Søren Petersen (b. 1977) and Tommy Petersen (b. 1975). They graduated last year from the Royal Danish Art Academy and have earlier studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt. A Kassen have been selected for LISTE 08’s official performance program and have recently exhibited at Vega Basement (Copenhagen), at Brøndsalen (Frederiksberg) and Gammelgaard (Herlev, DK). They will exhibit at Overgaden (Copenhagen) in August, be part of the ”U-Turn Quadrennial” and Grafikernes Hus (both Copenhagen) in September, Kunsthallen Brandts (Odense) in October and will show solo at Brænderigården (Viborg) in the beginning of 2009.
The exhibition is supported by The Danish Art Council.
Thomas Flerion’s show ”Det fede Læskur” presents objects, drawings and a cross stitched curtain with the text ”player 8000c”. His elegant and tactile objects are reminiscences of ritual symbols from tribal ceremonies, e.g. the barked cherry tree stick with inlaid sealskin which hangs on the wall from a thread. The works are both hermetically closed and interreferential, and yet they question historical and political issues such as why a language is forgotten, a population becomes extinct, a ritual is dropped. These questions are incorporated in a mixture of acquired knowledge and personal experience.
A modern penis case, constructed as a sheath of leather with one meter long fringes and an aluminum warship on top, is hanging on the wall. Poetic inscriptions on the ship function as a contrast to the humorous sheath and the references to boys’ toys, masculine trial of strength, and war feverish display of power. The works’ decadent look and choice of material comment on cultural and historical power relations.
Thomas Fleron (b. 1972) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 2000.
Kirkhoff
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Monday, June 09, 2008
"TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS" / CURATED BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND
“TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS”
OLAF BREUNING, ROE ETHRIDGE, UWE HENNEKEN, MONICA MAJOLI, LUCY MCKENZIE & RICKY SWALLOW / CURATED BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND
Here is a question for Chuck Berry: Why tell Tchaikovsky the news? If you’re a black American in the 1950s and your revolution is vulgarity, why bother with Beethoven; why even address Tchaikovsky?
”Leopards break into the temple,” Kafka wrote, ”and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
Since Kafka wrote this parable, contemporary art has been both criticized and celebrated for having the characteristics of a leopard show. The celebration is an integrated part of our Romantic heritage. After Romanticism, who cares for the endless repetition of ceremonies? Bring on the events; the wildcat-burglary! Rock cemented the romantic revolution for all social classes. Testifying to the scope of his ambitions, Chuck Berry needed to tell the world that he was kicking Tchaikovsky’s pitcher.
Some artists who grew up with rock as a dominating cultural force, now see history as a mysterious hall of knocked-over pitchers or half-forgotten truths. “Tell Tchaikovsky the News” is relating everyday affective life to themes or artistic techniques from the past, while searching for a more nuanced and correct understanding of its post-rock borrowings and primitivisms.
– In sculpture, installation, video and photography, Olaf Breuning [b. 1970 in Schaffhausen, lives in New York] subverts the idea of true progress from archaic to contemporary culture.
– Roe Ethridge [b. 1969 in Miami, lives in New York] reconsiders archetypes of 20th century American photography. But motifs like The Moon are as old as the human imagination.
– The kooky figures of Uwe Henneken [b. 1974 in Paderborn, lives in Berlin] are 19th century dreamers, reanimated by a rock mentality. If they in fact represent the “Vanguards Of The Elite [V.O.T.E.]”, you might want to ask where we’re heading.
– In the watercolours of Monica Majoli [b. 1963 in Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles], sadomasochistic hardness and gouache softness balance each other out beautifully.
– Majoli’s work is installed over a hand-painted wall-piece by Lucy McKenzie [b. 1977 in Glasgow, lives in Brussels], who looks to trompe l'oeil wood paneling and Art Nouveau for a New Art. An unsuspected love for the ex-mainstream is a sign of true individuality.
– Ricky Swallow [b. 1974 in Melbourne, lives in Los Angeles] has crafted a paradoxical bronze couple: Donatello’s undernourished Mary Magdalene side by side with California’s unrestrained ’wolfking’ John Phillips – the former leader of The Mamas & The Papas.
-Torbjørn Rødland
Standard Oslo
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Friday, June 06, 2008
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Mail Order Monsters
This Tuesday Andreas Melas Presents opens its doors in Athens GREECE with
a show i have curated called Mail Order Monsters.
This is the third instantiation of the theme, which started in Berlin at
Peres Projects, traveled to Deitch in New York, and continues here in
Athens.
this version features:
MAT BRINKMAN
TOMOO GOKITA
EVAN GRUZIS
BEN JONES
DAN MCCARTHY
TAYLOR MCKIMENS
EDDIE MARTINEZ
TAKESHI MURATA
AUREL SCHMIDT
FRANCINE SPIEGEL
JUNE 10 – AUGUST 15, 2008
ANDREAS MELAS PRESENTS
Epikourou 26 & Korinis 4
ATHENS, GREECE
Andreas Melas Presents announces a group exhibition curated by Kathy
Grayson exploring new trends in fucked-up figuration. Every generation
has its unique take on the figure and the freshest figurative art seems to
portray the figure as broken, decaying, uncanny, and monstrous! While the
Fractured Figure exhibition recently at the DESTE Museum explores a
prestigious array of established artists practicing in this mode, this
exhibition focuses on the younger generation of monsters bred out of our
strange and unique NOW. Each artist in this exhibition forges their
monster in a unique way:
Francine Spiegel’s soupy, sloppy women protrude from and are engulfed by
pop slime piles. Rapper’s girlfriends, socialites, and pin-up girls are
all thrown into the stew of mylar, goo, glitter, and chewing gum. Their
glammy/gory juxtaposition, coupled with the analog and digital moments of
her distortions, presents an interesting visual conundrum of seduction and
repulsion to these primordial females. In this exhibition she includes a
melancholy fetish figure slumping in a landscape of post-apocalyptic goop.
Ben Jones, a member of east-coast art collective Paper Rad, takes neon and
comic to new oddities of meaning. With the hand style of the best graffiti
artist and the conceptual, absurd rigour of a dada-ist, his paintings,
sculptures, videos and comics take a fresh look at figuration with their
subtleties of form and make you think about a face in new ways. His piece
in this exhibition, “Facemaker”, is a Mr. Potato Head scrolling spree of
morphing faces.
Tomoo Gokita favours creepily still portraits of women and wrestlers
executed exclusively in black and white. These faces occasionally escape
his brush unscathed, but more often are tangled into knots, unearthed by
abstract machine-like forms, or obliterated in one big gesture. With the
existential angst of a Bacon sous-rature but the pop-comic chicanery of a
gifted graphic artist, his portraits are more than silly; less than
tortured. His abstract work recalls Yves Tanguy in its intestinal tangle
and odd polygons.
Eddie Martinez loves men in hats, potted plants, parrots, and patterns.
Drawing with paint, and often hastily, he configures ambiguous scenes of
interaction played out equally between barely-held together figures and
the inanimate objects that decorate their interiors. In this show he
exhibits a new painting of a terrifying clown.
Taylor McKimens’ monsters are not terribly other-worldly or fantastical
but are rather the folks next door, down the street, or on the wrong side
of the tracks. Deadbeats and derelicts roam sparse, harshly lit worlds of
soggy bread and Band-Aids, bologna and knotted garden hose. The palette is
a dulled Fixin’s Bar of mustardy yellows, graying tomatoes, and limpid
greens. Taylor has a predilection for the entropic—splatters, drips,
tangles, messes and decay, rust and ruin—all the corners where disorder
begins to reclaim our fabricated environment and our bodies. No one is
smiling and everyone is somehow sweaty. In this exhibition, his two saggy
lumps come from a series he made called ‘The Drips’ who seem to trade in
poo and live where everything has many, many crotches.
Dan McCarthy focuses on form and color, texture and layer, only
incidentally, sometimes, focused on his menagerie of blue babes and
red-eyed gymnast guys. His figures are softly grounded in minimal
settings with gentle gouache-like layers, their limbs sculpturally
suffused and comically cylindrical affecting poses from classical Greece.
But then! Everyone’s pubes show through their underwear, their foreheads
are all too large, and somewhere a slosh of paint has mutated a limb or
two. Everyone has liver disease and at least a few kinds of skin
pigmentation problems. Without the breakdowns though, how could we call
the rest perfection? In this exhibition two monstrous women tantalize us
from behind the painted veil.
Takeshi Murata’s videos are seething masses of data distortion and
fractured figuration. Humans, monkeys, and monsters slog through and come
apart in a beautiful complex pattern of disrupted video. By hacking the
way a computer reads a DVD, Takeshi is able to painstakingly create frame
by frame an image of both painterly abstraction and technological
fragmentation. He has recently exhibited at Barbara Gladstone, Ratio 3,
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Hirschorn Museum in DC. In
this exhibition, Takeshi exhibits his longest and most painstakingly
wrought work, Silver, and one of his new video paintings.
Aurel Schmidt builds terrifying Archimboldo babes out of the punkest junk
around. With exquisitely rendered colored pencil and graphite, her
drawings have ranged from forests of maggots and busts of tangled snakes,
to faces and figures made of spiders, cockroaches, cum and discarded
hamburger. Her spectral junk masks are sometimes haunting in a few too
many ways at once. In this exhibition are drawings from the series called
Party Monsters who seem to have caught their monstrous ugliness from a few
different types of very long nights.
Evan Gruzis is not from LA but looks like he just returned on the red-eye:
a malaise straight out of the Hollywood hills seeps into his portraits and
landscapes channeled through Ed Ruscha. With the sardonic wit of
Wayfarer-toting Brett Easton Ellis, and a unique technique of manipulating
inks to keep you guessing, Gruzis’ works stick with you like a
half-remembered name or intangible word. What you see is often only half
there, or mockingly not there at all. Three new works are included in this
exhibition, including his spectral portraits of anonymous monsters.
Mat Brinkman is a legendary underground artist with a graphic and comic
focus who is at the center of a very influential force in new artmaking
coming from Providence, RI. Though seldom exhibiting in galleries, his
works are known and loved by a generation of young people who circulate
his zines, posters and books with fervent admiration. He was a member of
epic art collective Forcefield, who was included in the 2002 Whitney
Biennial but broke up shortly after. These new ink paintings were bred
somewhere in Texas and come to us via Gallery Loyal in Stockholm. In this
rare show Mat’s molting monsters skulk about in deeply-furrowed burn suits
of gore, rage from behind fused flesh mask faces, and curl up in the
corner to stroke their horns.
Picture Boxinc
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
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