Month: March 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

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