Month: March 2008

Kendell Carter


Looking to hip-hop as a model for a postmodern practice, Kendell Carter refuses the classification of a “high” discourse against a street or pop culture. Carter’s sculptural installations and recent works on paper blend urban street culture with traditional decorative elements — Kangol hat lamp shades, Wassily chairs upholstered in puffy jackets, graffiti tag coat racks. The result is clever and playful, yet the superficial humor of these cultural juxtapositions only briefly conceals the historical conflicts and contemporary issues that they ultimately reference and reveal. This decorative sampling and re-mixing acts as both a celebration and parody, embodying a society where social distinctions are becoming increasingly indiscernible; traditional luxuries are antiquated, urban becomes desirable and street culture is glamorized through songs, television and music videos. Carter’s interiors highlight the idea that even the most intimate aspects of our lives are reduced to the superficial, their sole purpose being to project the desired image. The viewer, such as in life, must consider and question how to interact with these uncanny spaces. His work acts as a catalyst, spurning a dialogue involving race relations, consumerism, wealth and utility.

Kendell Carter was born in New Orleans and lives in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1994, studied environmental design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received a MFA from California State University, Long Beach, CA in 2006, Kendell Carter had his first solo show at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006/07 and received critical acclaim in publications such as Art In America, Sculpture Magazine, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Recent exhibition include solo shows at Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles and Finesilver Gallery, Houston, and the group show “Blacks in and out of the Box” at The California African American Museum, LA.

Monique Meloche

MIT LEICHTEM GEPÄCK


MIT LEICHTEM GEPÄCK at Galleri Tom Christoffersen is the first solo exhibition in Denmark by German sculptor Alexander Laner.

On show is contemporary sculpture with a twist of noise and humour. Presented are previous works such as Für Elise; a grand piano made of pre-fab materials and build without the precise knowledge of how to do it but with an imagination of how it could be, and La Traviata; a modified racing bicycle, which functions as a record player and plays a single, the overture of the Italian opera La Traviata. These are juxtaposed with eye catching new sculptures such as Viva Las Vegas; a rotating light sculpture revolving 75 times per minute.

Most works demonstrates a fascinating disproportion between effort and outcome, which in general imbues Alexander Laner’s works with a cheerful yet distressing character. In all his works, improvisation is an important formal element, so that they often take on the charming ease of the unpredictable and chance.

During the opening a trained pianist will play (or at least try to play) the sculpture Für Elise …

Alexander Laner (1974/D) graduated from Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich in 2004. Of previous exhibitions the following can be mentioned: Merkwürdige Maschinen, Kunstverein Wolfsburg 2008, Made in Germany, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover 2007, Schöner Wohnen, solo exhibition at Galerie Klüser 2, Munich, 2007. In 2007 Alexander Laner won a competition concerning the production of a large-scale public commission in Munich. For more information on Alexander Laner please consult the website of Galleri Tom Christoffersen.

Tom Christoffersen

Eddie Martinez




In his new suite of paintings, Eddie Martinez finds a suitable platform for unloading his abundant imagination and blurring the line between traditional modes of painting. Sometimes uninhabited, otherwise replete with boxers and ping pong warrior-saints, tabletop landscapes are littered with an accumulation of studio detritus including a bowling ball, sunglasses, shoes, bottles, skulls, birds and plants that combine to become a disheveled portrait after a late night of work or perhaps some contemporary Brooklyn Belshazzar’s feast.

In his essay “A Paradox of Genre,” João Ribas asserts that Martinez’s work suggests “the reconciliation of the principles of modern painting – flatness and self-referentiality among them – with the seemingly pre-modern function of genre as a communicative form.” Moreover, he states: “His drawings and paintings both look to genre painting to enact a confrontation with tradition, negotiating a set of pictorial conventions drawn from the vocabulary of genre, yet through the modernist logic of subjective, individual style. It is through the reworking of the genres of portraiture, still-life, and allegorical narrative, these symbolic eighteenth and nineteenth century forms, that Martinez pairs traditional structure with self-generated imagery. The result are dense, playful, but considered paintings, revolving around the iteration of his signature motifs.”

The artist delineates the tone of each work by its background; whether thickly scumbled off-white voids or the foreboding weight of a burnt umber sky, each canvas is besieged by the over-riding vitality of the artist’s unmistakably raucous versatility. The artist’s lively vocabulary of subjects is matched in exuberance only by his endless palette and vibrant, effortless variation in paint application. Thin washes overlay lush impasto as spray-paint underlies oil stick — a vast array of mark-making further attesting to Martinez’s artistic bounties.

Martinez’s paintings and drawings have been featured in shows at the Athens Biennial; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Deitch Projects, New York; and Peres Projects, Berlin, among others. This exhibition coincides with the release of a two-volume, dual-artist hardcover catalogue featuring Eddie Martinez and Chuck Webster, co-produced by PictureBox Inc. The Martinez volume features “A Paradox of Genre,” by João Ribas, curator at The Drawing Center, New York.

Ziehersmith