Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Japanese Whispers
I have a couple of shows coming up In Tokyo.
Together with Yoshiaki Kaihatsu I'm doing the show "Keeper". We'll do a performance on the 3rd, and on the 6th we'll open the show, where we will be showing a video from the performance together with our drawings. At the CCAA.
I'm also participating in the exhibition "Book Microcosm". With my new one of a kind book "What Was It You Wanted?". The show has unique books by 40 artists. It's also at the CCAA.
And I'm in the Art Fair Tokyo with Galleri Susanne Ottesen, stand no. F1, where I will show some of my brand new drawings.
If you're in Copenhagen, then Cut & Paste is still on until the 18Th, at Galleri Susanne Ottesen in Copenhagen.
I hope to see you there
Cheers
Jasper
Keeper
Yoshiaki Kaihatsu & Jasper Sebastian Stürup
Performance April 3
April 6-16
CCAA
4-20 Yotsuya Shinjyuku-Ku
Tokyo
Japan
Book Microcosm
CCAA
April 6-16
4-20 Yotsuya Shinjyuku-Ku
Tokyo
Japan
Cut & Paste
Martin Erik Andersen
Peter Callesen
Auturo Herrera
Emil Westmann Hertz
Yoshiaki Kaihatsu
Ann Lislegaard
Pernille With Madsen
Per Mølgaard
Rosemarie Trockel
Jasper Sebastian Stürup
Laerence Weiner
Troels Wörsel
Susanne Ottesen
Jasper Sebastian Sturup
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Større horisonter i nabolaget
Større horisonter i nabolaget
(Larger Horizons in the Neighbourhood)
Soloexhibition by Sofie Hesselholdt & Vibeke Mejlvang
Charlotte Fogh Contemporary has the great pleasure to present Vibeke Mejlvang and Sofie Hesselholdts second solo exhibition at the gallery, “Larger Horizons in the Neighbourhood”. The exhibition features new sculptures, tableaus and installations and takes the temperature of the mental climate here and now.
The artworks investigate our Western lives and values in the beginning of the millennium and how they are affected by the mass media, consume, fear of terrorism and the aliens.
By different tableaus of ceramic sculptures, installations and objects like Persian carpets, small living rooms and a stuffed alligator, the viewer is led trough a mental and physical trip in the humorous and critical landscape of the exhibition.
The exhibition also offers a new book : ”Hesselholdt & Mejlvang - Uorden / Disorder” – a book of the artworks of the previous years and with text in Danish and English by art historian Inger Marie Hahn Møller.
Charlotte Fogh
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Alex Hubbard
Oscar Tuazon (b 1975) lives and works in Paris. This is his second solo exhibition at STANDARD (OSLO). Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: David Roberts Foundation, London (2009); Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2009); Michele Maccarone, New York (2008); Seattle Art Museum (2008); and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (Marco), Vigo (2009); Kunsthalle St Gallen, St Gallen (2008); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St Louis; Sculpture Center, New York (2008); Kadist Foundation, Paris; and Documenta 12, Kassel (Magazine Projects, under the auspices of Metronome, Paris). Tuazon will together with gallery artist Emily Wardill form STANDARD (OSLO)’s two-artist presentation at the Premiere section of Art Basel in June.
Standard Oslo
Venske & Spänle Coming Together
Venske & Spänle
Coming Together
Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Coming Together an exhibition of sculptures by the Munich and New York-based duo Venske & Spänle. Defying the confines of their marble medium, the artists' amorphous works evoke the forms of primordial creatures.
Like a newly discovered species, Venske & Spänle's carved marble organisms give rise to a distinct nomenclature and genealogy. Smörfs, gumpfoten, helotrophen, sauger, orophyten and a variety of other characters populate the marble family of Venske & Spänle's sculptural world. Bulbous and swelling, or stretching and slinking, the forms seem poised at the point of motion, almost capable of expanding beyond their marble skin. Disarmingly organic, the sculptures exude individual identities and personalities. With human-like characteristics, Venske & Spänle's marble life forms radiate an undeniable appeal that probes the concept of the human as a companion to these marble sculptures and consciously explores the interaction between human beings and the sculptural environment created by the artists. The installation will incorporate a 3-D animation, linking the actual sculptures to their cyber-space counterparts, blurring the real and the digital worlds they inhabit.
The sculptures have been exhibited and placed in collections throughout the globe; including the U.S. and Europe, India, Australia, and Japan. Coming Together marks Venske & Spänle's third exhibition at Thatcher Projects. A recently published hardcover catalogue, Guide Through the Sculptural World of Venske & Spänle, is available at the gallery.
Margaret Thatcher Projects
Sage Vaughn I Nobody’s Young
Sage Vaughn I Nobody’s Young
It gives us great pleasure to invite you to our first solo exhibition of the American artist Sage Vaughn.
Sage Vaughn (born 1976 in Jackson, Oregon) lives and works in Los Angeles. The Californian by choice began his artistic career with graffiti and street art in the streets of Los Angeles. Over recent years, street art has grown into a globally networked scene in which applied architecture and city criticism, design and art in public spaces merge to create new, experimental forms of expression. This is where Vaughn, who knows the scene well, comes in. His pictures not only reveal the influence of the genre, they translate motifs from design, art or street lives into classic oil paintings.
In terms of content, the "Nobody’s young" exhibition revolves around questions of identity as well as the psychological background and conditions of human existence. Vaughn's protagonists seem to be searching for themselves against the background of their urban, often problematic life reality. The "Wildlives" series of pictures, a work in progress since last year, takes up the magic and the peculiarity of everyday American life on the West Coast. Just as ornithologists study their winged wonders in peace, Vaughn examines the astounding and enigmatic personalities that people carry within themselves. He is particularly interested in children. He puts them in costumes and masks which do not, however, hide their personality, but rather underline their individuality and vulnerability.
A second series entitled "Migration" reverses the perspective. A crowd of shouting, screaming, gesticulating people can be seen as a grey background. The crowd appears driven, hurrying after fluttering, colourful butterflies. The brightly coloured specimens are portrayed in the foreground with clearly dripping paint as a luring, fleeting phenomenon in keeping with their nature.
Art Agents
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Raúl Ortega Ayala
Raúl Ortega Ayala’s art focuses on varied habitual themes which he explores through a detailed and absorptive process. Once this process of direct exploration is over, he uses the materials and experiences that he encounters to produce a group of works which the artist calls, souvenirs.
Having spent over two years working as a gardener in London the artist’s new series of work entitled, An Ethnography on Gardening, will feature a selection of artworks which were first presented at his solo exhibition at the Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico in December 2008.
Through positioning himself as a practicing gardener within a team employed in both private and public spaces in London Ortega Ayala covertly undertook research into the world of gardening. Enabling him to take this culture as his subject he embarked upon an interdisciplinary and contextual approach to fieldwork in the everyday. The series of work is spilt into groups such as, The Public and Private, From the Imaginary to the Monstrous and Control and Compartmentalization; referring to the artists experiences and past histories associated with gardening as a cultural phenomenon.
If an ethnographic model tends to adopt the role of both cultural observant and assimilation into the world in which you are studying, Ortega Ayala does this by deliberately immersing himself in these conditions, engaging in the uncertainty of proximity and critique. Utilising a variety of media, the materials and issues raised by his work, are driven by the context in which they are set. A progression from the traditional ethnographic model, where the subject is turned into objects and then theory, Ortega Ayala transforms the context into his subject and produces complex enquiries and statements that infer his concomitant relationship to a certain field. By referring to the works as souvenirs, he allures to curio as documentation and display, interrogating representation and the (re)presentation of artistic enquiry.
Ortega Ayala was born and currently lives and works in Mexico, he completed his MA at Glasgow School of Art and Hunter College, New York in 2003, he has exhibited both in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions both in London and Mexico City.
Rokeby Gallery
VAGUELY PAPERLY curated by Chris Johanson
VAGUELY PAPERLY
curated by Chris Johanson:
featuring: Randy Colosky, Dana Dart-McLean, Brendan Fowler,
Tom Greenwood, Randy Moore and Max Schumann
Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Vaguely Paperly, a group exhibition curated by Chris Johanson.
Vaguely Paperly brings together a diverse group of artists who create works on paper utilizing varying mediums and techniques. The artists in this exhibition approach paper as a painting surface as well as a sculptural medium and address issues of re-use, repetition, memory, and personal politics.
Randy Colosky lives and works in Oakland, CA and has exhibited at White Box Gallery (New York) and Alston Skirt Gallery (Boston).
Dana Dart-McLean lives and works in Portland, OR and has shown her work at Small A Projects (New York), Laura Bartlett Gallery (London), Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen), Wrong Gallery (New York).
Brendan Fowler lives and works in Los Angeles and has had solo exhibitions at Rivington Arms (NY) and Mesler&Hug (Los Angeles). Fowler will be included in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum (New York) and has performed as BARR at various venues including John Connelly Presents (NY), The Kitchen (NY) and the Orange County Museum of Art.
Tom Greenwood lives and works in Portland, OR and has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Jack Hanley (Los Angeles), Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen) and is the founding member of the band Jackie-O Motherfucker. Some works in the exhibition are original art included in the upcoming record titled Ballads of the Revolution.
Randy Moore lives and works in New York and has had solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater (New York), Sprovieri Gallery (London) and has been included in shows at Arndt & Partner (Berlin), Printed Matter (NY) and The Drawing Center (NY).
Max Schumann lives and works in NY and has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis and Taxter & Spengemann (New York).
Kavi Gupta
Anna Sørensen
With the exhibition DAISY DIAMOND, Anna Sørensen once again fills the walls of Gallery Tom Christoffersen. In her new paintings, the artist continues her wrestle with the abstract colouristic mode which has resulted in a series of dynamic, intense and inviting paintings.
Colours and forms again play the leading roles on the big canvases, while there is an increased concentration in the still more complex compositions. The paintings are constructed in a democratic order with encounter as the central focus – the meeting between lines, forms and colours. Space is suspended and everything is drawn forward in balanced, lyrical compositions, where you seem to find yourself in either an aerial view or with the detail close up in a sort of mechanical structure. The striking colour range in the paintings creates an enchanting harmony, in which dark and heavy 70s’ tones are safely mixed with fluorescent 80s’ neon.
Anna Sørensen’s paintings are like frozen moments, where a controlled chaos of organic and geometric forms are held together by the square shape of the canvas. If you were to shake them, one could imagine the painting’s elements being pushed around between one another in order to melt into a new whole and fall into a new shape. Anna Sørensen keeps her art in play and creates paintings in a serial process – every new painting is created by the pillars of a visual vocabulary that seems to come from a kaleidoscope run wild.
Anna Sørensen (born 1968) graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1996 and has been at Gallery Tom Christensen since 2002. DAISY DIAMOND is her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Anna Sørensen has participated in several group exhibitions and last year also had the solo exhibition COLOUR GROOVE at Holstebro Kunstmuseum. She lives and works in Copenhagen.
Tom Christoffersen
Monday, March 23, 2009
MARC RÄDER
From XL to xs
There's no spectacular movie scenery in Marc Räder's colour landscape photographs of California. The Berlin-based photographer has chosen views which range from the natural (a lush forest) to the man-made (a metal bridge), from the urban (a parking lot) to the suburban (a sprawling housing development). Yet whatever the view, each one is marked by tunnel vision. Far from manipulating the images, Räder uses a large-scale architectural camera, which creates a zone in each photograph where the objects and the subjects remain in focus, regardless of their actual position in the landscape. Räder's photographs are both sharp and blurry, like the popular studio portraits where the face is encircled by a hazy halo. But instead of being transported to a nostalgic familiar past, the viewer becomes a kind of Gulliver, peering through a keyhole at the land of Lilliput. Each California landscape, although resolutely real, looks like an architectural model, if not a child's toy.
Most landscape photography offers a view from afar, which positions the viewer without giving him a sense of the size of his own body. Yet Räder's landscape photographs – in and out of focus – play more explicitly with notions of human scale in a way that recalls the effects of sculpture and installation on the viewer's perceptions of size and self. We measure ourselves against Räder's views of California and end up experiencing them as miniature, and ourselves as gigantic. Is that little car real? Are those tree-tops bits of sponge? Are those toy people? The closer we come to look – the more intensely we examine each photograph – the more real the scenes become. Indeed, the car, the trees and the people turn out to be as real as our gazing selves. Nothing has been manipulated. In that moment of close inspection, the figures frozen in the photograph briefly, magically come to life as the inhabitants of Lilliput, living somewhere in California.
That moment – when the gaze alone can animate the inanimate – recalls the uncanny experience of the automaton. Think of the film Blade Runner (1982), when Deckard inspects the replicant Pris dressed up as a life-size doll, only to have her suddenly spring into action. While Räder's figurines never quite come to life – and never attack – their diminuitive size transforms every viewer into a giant who could never inhabit their world without causing mass destruction. Gulliver's feet are large enough to crush Lilliput with but one step. While anthropocentric, Räder's landscapes offer a sense of containment and exclusion. The outside comes to look like a mini-interior; even the beach has the feel of a dollhouse which might be packed up and carried to a new location. While we might fit these landscapes into our hands, we could never inhabit them, except with our gaze.
Of course, that's the goal of all photography: to transform life into endless images which can be experienced only by the gaze. Räder's colour landscape photographs confront us with the legacy of the medium: We look at the world as giants who can never quite fit into the picture.
Galerie MøllerWitt
Carl Weston/Video Graf Productions
This is the first video installment from rapper and graphic artist Bisc1’s multimedia album The Strange Love Project. Bisc, a native of Massachusetts by way of Connecticut, moved to NYC 10 years ago and quickly made a name for himself in music and graffiti circles. For The Strange Love Project, Bisc joined forces with twenty visual artists and ten producers to reinterpret his 2008 album When Electric Night Falls. The video was shot, directed, and produced by Carl Weston, who you may be familiar with. Weston has been a producer of graffiti videos for over two decades and is the co-founder of Video Graf Productions. In this video, Weston follows Bisc, equipped with an arsenal of supplies, as he leaves lasting impressions on the dark abandoned streets and alleyways of lower Manhattan.
Carl Weston Video
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains
Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains
Bad Brains are one of my favorite punk/hardcore groups of all time. If you don't have their self titled debut, "Rock For Light", "I Agaist I", or "Quickness", they are all essential. I first heard Bad Brains at the beginning of 1984 when my friend lent me the brilliantly curated and titled Alternative Tentacles compilation "Let Then Eat Jellybeans"(A Reagan dessert favorite update to the Marie Antoinette slogan "Let them eat cake"). The Bad Brains song "Pay to Cum" from their first album was on the comp along with songs by Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Flipper, etc.. I then went out to find full length records by all those bands. I soon discovered Minor Threat as well, and learned that Bad Brains had influenced their vocalist Ian MacKaye and Black flag vocalist Henry Rollins who were from Washington DC where Bad Brains had started as well. The Bad Brains were also a huge influence for the Beastie Boys. This collaboration ties into almost all of the bands I mentioned because they were almost all iconically shot at various times by photographer Glen E. Friedman. Glen shot a lot of great photos of Bad Brains and a few different shots were spliced together as the reference for this poster illustration. If you don't know Glen's work, and you should... go to burningflags.com. This poster is signed by Glen, me, and all the original members of Bad Brains. Keep that PMA.
-Shepard
Bad Brains Collaboration Print
Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains
24 x 18, 3 Color Screen Print
Edition of 425
Signed by Shepard, Glen E Friedman, and all the original members of Bad Brains
$120
ON SALE 3/26/09
Obey
Saturday, March 21, 2009
// Clare Rojas // "Lydia Fong" // Andrew Jeffrey Wright
Clare Rojas:
San Francisco painter, singer, and filmmaker Clare E.Rojas is not a folk artist. In Clare Rojas' works, women, men, nature and animals are strong and weak caring and connected to one another in their struggle to find harmony and balance. She celebrates women for their traditional and most basic differences and strengths. While the characters are often imbued with feelings of loss and nostalgia, one gets the sense that they will not back down. They will ultimately beat their predators at their own game.
Rojas's appropriation of folk imagery addresses contemporary female social concerns "The feeling of loss in my work, is my feeling of loss of hope. The struggle to find the good and the beautiful and represent it is my challenge. Understanding the ugliness that finds its way into our culture is crucial." Rojas's beautiful uses of allegory and of an imagined cultural landscape in her paintings act to subvert our current accepted perceptions of women. It allows the spectator an engagement with an alternate evocative world that is both funny and sad and that points to the complexities of being a resilient female in the twenty-first century. Rojas often depicts women alone, standing amid a flattened forest landscape, but this is not to suggest that they are lonely. No, Rojas's women exist in their own reality, feeling peaceful, protected, and quiet.
Selected exhibitions include a group exhibition with the Luggage Store, San Francisco in 2003 for which she won a Louis Comfort Tiffany award. In 2004 Rojas had a solo show at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver. Her work was included in the travelling exhibition, Beautiful Losers. She has exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and was most recently a featured artist at the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial.
*Partial Text Credit to : Dietch Projects, and Katie Geha Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Andrew Jeffrey Wright:
Andrew Jeffrey Wright is a current and founding member of Philadelphia's Space 1026 art commune. He has a BFA in Animation. The collaborative animation "the manipulators", which he made with Clare E. Rojas, has won the top prize for animation at the New York Underground Film Festival and the New York Comedy Film Festival. Wright's highly limited edition handmade books have gained an international following. His works include painting, animation, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, video, installation, screen printing and performance. He has shown at Lizabeth Oliveria(LA), New Image Art(LA), Spector(Philadelphia), The Luggage Store(San Francisco), Lump(Raliegh), The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts(Philadelphia), ICA(Philadelphia), Giant Robot NY(NYC) The Corcoran(DC) and Foundation Cartier(Paris). He has shown with Barry McGee, Paper Rad, Leif Goldberg, Clare E. Rojas, Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier.
New Image Art Gallery
Friday, March 20, 2009
Mark Flood
"Wart Exhibit," a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood, will include mixed media drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation.
Flood has been making and showing artwork for 30 years and has worn many different hats along the way: punk rocker, corporate lackey, author, identity illusionist. His work introduces the idea of a defeatist hermeticism: total, and yet not reassuring. A search-and-deface tactic serves the artist's needs; collected Hurricane Ike debris, glossy celebrity posters, road signs and bolts of chintzy lace are transformed to cut a swath through the usual. This would seem to be the point of artwork at large.
But, in Mark's case, the swath is not born from the withdrawn nobility of stereotypical studio practice. Instead the self-described "multi cellular invertebrate recently discovered under the slimy rock of obscurity" exists squat in the mix, if only to adjust it. Even beauty is re-mapped to become, as Flood says, "the sort that bypasses art bureaucrats, would-be authoritarians and the gut-shielding, gate-keeping functions of the human mind." The surface of a text panel or lace painting still holds all the irregularities and shiny moments prone to seduction: if one is seduced by important words misspelled, does it still count? In the artist's words, "Using the finest retail display technology, Wart Exhibit assembles a sampling of these problematic exercises into a walk-thru experience for casual viewing." This is the first solo exhibition by Mark Flood in Berlin.
"Like A Turkey Thru Corn" is Bradley's third solo exhibition at Peres Projects and his first at the new Culver City gallery location in Los Angeles.
Until recently Bradley has been known primarily for his minimal, rectilinear "figures" composed of monochrome panels. The paintings presented here, however, continue the artist's beloved and maligned new Schmagoo series, first presented in New York last fall. A somewhat ridiculous word, "Schmagoo" originates from the Beat-era street slang for heroin. It is this wry semiotic pairing that compels the artist to take a primitive approach:
"The word stuck with me, and I began to think of "Schmagoo" as short hand for some sort of Cosmic Substance... Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything∑I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act." (JB, 2008)
Bradley drafts many versions of each gesture before hitting the finished note on raw canvas, as if to imply that automatic writing can be made repetitive (picture a grade school notebook cover) and, as such, eventually reveals potent mutations: slang for heroine (Super Schmagoo), a faceless mouth, the Jesus fish who swims downstream. Perhaps as Jungian children, we've been inbred by appropriation and pop overexposure. Bradley titles the show after late Houston blues legend Lightnin' Hopkins' 1959 tune of a similar name. Hopkins sings about fleeing through the corn fields like a turkey in pajamas: "Just had to get away from there!" Bradley's work shares this kind of endearing resolution of a fix.
Peres Projects
BARRY McGEE / ED TEMPLETON / RAYMOND PETTIBON
This exhibition serves to focus on the recent artistic output by three underground heroes from the worlds of skateboarding, graffiti and punk. Even though each of these artists has now firmly established themselves in the world of contemporary art, there are still common themes between them that hail back to their subcultural roots. It could be described primarily as an overriding sense of concern for and representation of the downtrodden, the outsider, the anti-hero. McGee’s sad, sullen faces and neon-colored geometric panels reflect the archetypal image of man overpowered by omnipresent media, Templeton’s portraits of suburban youths perfectly illustrate the harsh alienation of teenage life, while Pettibon’s drawings and paintings focus sharply on issues of personal/social unrest, life during war and the constant power struggle between a man and his destiny. The fact that this is the first time an exhibition has featured all three artists in such direct proximity to each other will be an interesting statement not only on each artists’ individual style, but also the unique similarities that run through all of their works.
Barry McGee (1968-) comes from a background of creating unsanctioned work on city streets in his native San Francisco. Originally signing his works with the tag “Twist”, the artist draws his force and inspiration from the contrast and tension that exists between the city center and the suburbs, between wealthy districts and the slums. McGee’s signature tags and markings have inserted an element of the individual and the handmade into a depersonalized urban landscape that has become increasingly crowded with corporate logos, trademarks and advertisements. McGee’s complex installations convey a sense of vitality and chaos, juxtaposed with a precarious nature and sense of alienation. Large-scale wall murals, clusters of small, framed drawings and snapshots, various tools and other street detritus make their way into his installations in an almost symphonic fashion. McGee has exhibited his works internationally including Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Foundation Cartier, Paris, and Fondazione Prada, Milan. McGee currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Ed Templeton (1972-) was born in Orange County, California. He grew up in Anaheim, then his family moved to a trailer park in Corona. His father ran off with his babysitter. He eventually moved to Huntington Beach and began skateboarding when he was 13. By the time he was 18 I had started skateboarding professionally and left high school to enter skate contests in Europe. Upon his return he started painting and taking photographs. In 1994 he had his first solo exhibition at Alleged Gallery in New York. Since then he has exhibited his work internationally including exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunsthalle, Vienna, ICA Philadelphia, Modern Art, London and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. His first hardcover monograph, Deformer, was published in 2008 by Italian publisher Damiani. To this day Templeton still skates professionally and runs a skateboard company, Toy Machine. He lives and works in Huntington Beach, California with his wife Deanna and their cat Ptah.
Raymond Pettibon (1957-) was born in Tucson, Arizona. The fourth of five children, Pettibon earned a degree in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating from college, Pettibon worked briefly as a high-school math teacher, but soon after set out to launch a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2002, an exhibition of his drawings, Plots Laid Thick, was organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, and traveled to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands. Pettibon’s work was also featured at Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany. Pettibon lives and works in Venice Beach, California. (All works by Raymond Pettibon are shown by courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin und Regen Projects Los Angeles.)
CIRCLECULTURE GALLERY
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Todd Schorr The World We Live In
Todd Schorr
The World We Live In
Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new works by renowned American artist Todd Schorr. One of the most prominent pop surrealist painters working today, Schorr uses the exacting techniques of the old masters to paint colorful cartoon characters, corporate mascots and other pop culture icons in a unique style he calls "cartoon realism."
The Opening Reception on March 28 will be hosted by actor David Arquette, and a portion of the evening's sales will go to Feeding America, the nation's leading domestic hunger-relief charity.
Schorr's work is highly influenced by the popular culture of his childhood: post-war 1950's America. His formative years were spent watching countless horror, sci-fi, war, cartoon, cowboy, and puppet shows on a black-and-white TV set, building styrene plastic models, reading comic books, and leafing through his parents' National Geographic magazines.
The compulsion to replicate the characters he saw in cartoons, commercials, comic books and magazines led to a formal education at The Philadelphia College of Art. Schorr began his career as an illustrator in New York City, which exposed him to a new set of influences from the world of advertising and commercial art. Though his career as an illustrator was successful (his work appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1982), Schorr soon left the commercial world and began expressing his ideas on canvas.
Schorr says: "Like any artist of worth, it took many long years of struggle and investigative thought along with trial and error as well as constant honing of technique to reach the point where I felt I had created a language which, when spoken well, would command some semblance of purpose. I work in what is best described as a surreal style but filtered through the mind and eyes of what is, for better or worse, uniquely American."
In 2008 Schorr's work was shown at the Laguna Art Museum as part of "In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz School," and a solo retrospective exhibition will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2009.
Schorr's work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Dangerous Ink, and in the documentary film, The Treasures of Long Gone John. Schorr's most recent monograph is Dreamland, 2004, published by Last Gasp Press. His new book, American Surreal will be released in 2009. Schorr currently resides with his artist-wife Kathy in Los Angeles, CA.
MK Gallery
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Robert Longo
Metro Pictures presents "Surrendering the Absolutes," an exhibition of new work by Robert Longo. Featuring a group of Longo's signature large-scale charcoal drawings, the works represent a departure from his recent serial approach to a subject and instead are linked by atmospheric sensations of light and abstracted imagery.
As the title of the show suggests, Longo is focused on the shifts of perception that an image can at once evoke and extend in relation to its environment. The centerpiece of the show is a five-panel 25-foot drawing "Untitled (Cathedral of Light)," an image of glaring sunlight flooding through massive cathedral windows. Other images include a satellite view of Tokyo, its radiating roadways appearing as shattered glass; an immense concert stage where light physically engulfs the musicians; an exterior view of the hull of an airplane, its lighted windows revealing the isolation of people in close confinement; and a lone figure walking through an eerily illuminated forest. With this group of drawings, Longo extends his unique drawing method that employs deep blackened expanses with sharply contrasting whites to include nuanced gray tones that evoke smoky hazes and softened elusive forms.
Longo will also include a new sculpture, a 12-foot tower of four black charcoal drawings framed behind glass making explicit his interest in the cacophony of reflections created in the rooms where his works hang, by both mirroring the objects in its presence and co-opting them into its black void.
Robert Longo has had retrospective exhibitions at Hamburger Kunstverein and Deichtorhallen, Menil Collection in Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hartford Athenaeum and The Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo. Group exhibitions include Documenta, the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale.
A survey exhibition of Longo's work will open at Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, in June of this year. His work is featured in the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984," April 20 to August 2.
In addition to the catalogue accompanying the Nice exhibition, a book of Longo's recent, large-scale drawings (from 2000 to present) from Hatje Kantz and a publication of the original photographs used for Longo's seminal "Men in the Cities" drawings from Schirmer/Mosel, are both forthcoming.
Metro Pictures Gallery
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