Jem & Bates
Another Jem & Bates piece:::
Great & Bates
Friday, July 31, 2009
Annie Kevans:
New York, July 30, 2009 — Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York is pleased to announce the representation of British painter Annie Kevans. Perry Rubenstein Gallery will present a selection of the WAMPAS Baby Stars this summer in conjunction with Richard Woods' exhibition The Nature Show. In February 2010, Kevans will have a solo exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, marking her first large-scale solo exhibition in the US. Kevans has been exhibiting regularly throughout Europe since 2004.
Annie Kevans uses bright oil paint with a loose brushstroke and carefully composed negative space. Her technique allows her to portray an innocence to her subjects alongside a power; her characterization and style speaks to fantasy rather than realism. Kevans is fascinated by the representation of power and sociopolitical systems, and does extensive research for each series in order to craft and then visualize characters both real and imagined (often times the combination of the two). Kevans paints portraits of the famous and the infamous, the seen and the unseen. Her paintings are intimate in scale but epic in subject matter. "My paintings reflect my interests in power, manipulation and the role of the individual in inherited belief systems," she says. "It is important for me to examine the duality of truth and falsehood throughout my work."
In the series Boys (2004), Kevans depicts infamous 20th Century dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as wide-eyed toddlers. In Vamps & Innocents (2007), she focuses on portraits of silent film stars of the 1920's. For All the President's Girls (2008-2009), Kevans painted all of the Presidential mistress on record, some of whom are household names (Marilyn Monroe, Monica Lewinsky), others who are little known or even unnamed (George Washington's mistress, one of his slaves, just goes by "Venus"). WAMPAS Baby Stars is the London based painter's most recent series. Kevans culled from Hollywood image archives of a selection of starlets who were elected by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers in the 1920's and 30's as faces of the future, idealized celebrations of American beauty destined for stardom. With the exception of a few Hollywood legends (Joan Crawford, Mary Astor, and Fay Wray among them), most of the girls did not end up crossing the threshold into movie stardom; Kevans portraits map those who were forgotten.
Annie Kevans was born in Cannes, France and lives and works in London. She earned a BA from Central St. Martin's School of Art & Design in London, 2004. This fall she will have a solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London (November) and will be included in the much-anticipated exhibition The Power of Paper at the Saatchi Gallery (dates TBD). Past solo exhibitions include Vamps & Innocents, Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Vienna (2007); Swans, Art Work Productions, London (2007); and Girls, Studio 1.1, London. Kevans' work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, notably at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (2001); Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich (2008, 2007); Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Italy (2007, 2006); Contemporary Art Projects, London (2007). Kevans was a finalist for both the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2006) Women Of The Future award (2007) in the UK.
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Alex Schweder "Ours"
The Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco is pleased to announce an exhibit of work by Alex Schweder, titled Ours. The show will include the large-scale pieces Plumbing Us, Our Weight Around Us, and an installation of scratch-and-sniff wallpaper.
Schweder, an architect turned artist, is among a new group of emerging practitioners in which the gallery is invoked no longer as an area of display, but as a testing ground to formulate new paradigms of spatial practice. Here, architecture functions as a medium or spatial protagonist, through which forms of agency may be invented, negotiated, provoked, uncovered, eschewed, or displaced.
In the three works included in the exhibit, Schweder addresses the domestic while redefining the prescribed roles of objects such as toilets, furniture and décor. In Plumbing Us, man and woman share a drain on a conjoined urinal. Straddling the wall that normally segregates them, this work requires bodies to mix prior to their removal. Similarly, with only enough air to fill one of the two conjoined sofas in Our Weight Around Us, users of this furniture must work cooperatively. If not, and one person stands while the other is still seated, the seated person will fall to the floor. Schweder’s scratch-and-sniff wallpaper explores color and scent in relation to their construction of a "succulent" space. Set up with different ratios of scented scratch n' sniff varnishes and colored inks, the wallpaper is transformed to have an olfactoral effect in addition to its characteristic visual impact.
Alex Schweder is the 2005 – 2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture. Since this time, Schweder has been experimenting with time and performance based architecture including Flatland at the Sculpture Center in New York; This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used to Smell at Western Bridge in Seattle; Melting Instructions at the Tacoma Art Museum; Its Form Will Follow Your Performance at Gallery Magnus Muller in Berlin; Stability at Lawrimore Project in Seattle; and a yet to be titled exhibition on performance architecture scheduled at the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA in 2010. Schweder’s projects have been collected by several eminent individuals and institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is a three time artist in residence at the Kohler company and will be in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Fall 2009.
Jack Hanley
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
ARCHITECT TOKYO 2009
ARCHITECT TOKYO 2009
- 6 architectural exhibitions by 6 galleries
Akihisa Hirata “Flame frame”
Taka Ishii Gallery
August 1 – the end of 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, August 1, 18:00-20:00
Taka Ishii Gallery
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sebastiaan Bremer
Hales Gallery is pleased to announce Sebastiaan Bremer’s second solo show at the gallery.
Small Wonders’ focuses on Bremer’s jewel like miniature painted photographs, drawing the viewer into his clever interplay between then and now. Using primarily old family snaps, Bremer creates intricate etched windows from the present into his own cultural background and family history.
Bremer works each contact sheet, c-type or exposed black photographic paper with surfaces that spread organically, like the mycelia of a fungal growth. Some are made with inks and paint, others with Exacto knife tip cuts. Occasionally, Bremer applies thin washes of coloured Indian ink which has the affect of penetrating an inner world of the minds eye. The visceral quality evident in the pieces lies in their inventivness and technical complexity, whilst these tiny compositions are poised nicely between the detailed and the bold.
Bremer is now based in Brooklyn, New York. As with so many earlier artist immigrants to the USA, it has given Bremer a distance with which to explore the rich artistic heritage of, in this case, his native Holland. In his current work, Bremer has singled out the Golden age of Dutch painting of the 17th Century to rework and re imagine. Inspired particularly by David Bailly’s Still life ‘Self Portrait with Vanitas Symbols’ 1651 and more generally by Ruysdael’s landscapes and Dirk de Bray’s still lives, Bremer’s abstracted, rhythmical overlays from earlier works now take on form. These new figurative elements become in turn, vessels into which Bremer can pour his own jogged memories and fleeting emotional responses.
The Dutch Vanitas paintings and other Dutch Golden Age works are for me also a depiction of a decadent culture at its highest and most rarefied and strange. Sebastiaan Bremer
The black and white miniatures shown as part of Small Wonders are from an ongoing series. This new work is a departure from his earlier work. Not restraining himself with the photographic underlay of past pieces, Bremer has a new freedom. Each piece is like snapshots of history, a landscape or interior from hundreds of years go. The question of whether a piece is based on reality or fantasy, or whether a work has an underlying photographic image dissolves. The picture becomes a catalogue, a beginning of an atlas created by Bremer of images of the world, real or imagined, remembered or forgotten.
Sebastiaan Bremer was born in Amsterdam (1970) and moved to New York in 1992. His work is part of several important collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Zabludowicz Trust, London, the Rabobank Collection, The Netherlands and Lodeveans Contemporary LLP, London. Bremer’s art work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut, PS1/MoMA, New York and Het Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. He has recently shown at Barbara Thumm, Berlin (May 2009), and James Fuentes LLC in Chinatown, NY (June 2009) and in 2008 completed a large commission for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which he referenced LACMA’s collection of Dutch Master paintings. During August 2009 Bremer will be artist in residence at Het Vijfde Seizoen, Netherlands.
Hales Gallery
Saturday, July 25, 2009
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