Month: March 2009

Hales Gallery

Mohs

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

Martin Asbæk

WOW

BRUNO SERRALONGUE
VERNISSAGE AU WIELS
LE VENDREDI 21 MARS 2009 DE 18H A 21H
EXPOSITION DU 21 MARS AU 31 MAI

Wiels

The spring exhibition at Faurschou CPH borrows its melancholic title from a line in Shakespeare’s beautiful spring sonnet #98. Springtime has come to give rebirth and everything blossoms, yet for the person in the sonnet, it is winter still, and the separation from the beloved is painfully felt.

The sudden awakening from winter’s darkness, the celebration of youth and life makes springtime a period of strong emotions. The contrast between death and life, the difference between being alone or together is strongly felt. “April is the cruellest Month” as T.S. Eliot says.

The exhibition displays recent works by artists represented by the gallery. Life and death; beauty and decay, joy and melancholy; existential questioning and black humour are reappearing themes in their art works, often presented in frapping aesthetics.

The exhibition is an opportunity to mention the artist’s other current activities.

Michael Bevilacqua
With his two current solo shows in New York (Gering-Lopez), and Milan (The Flat) Michael Bevilacqua is showing a new stylistic phase.
His recent works are as always multilayered, consisting of a combination of different painting techniques including free-hand brushstrokes, collage, masking and stencilling – however more wild, energetic, and rebellious than ever. Sarcasm, heavy metal, punk, and 1980’s bands fill his paintings together with skulls, body parts and poisoned apples. These darker elements are subdued by more subtle images.
The most remarkable about Michael Bevilacqua’s paintings is that they encompass a visual power that knocks over the viewer. His paintings almost shout at you. His “contemporary still lives” have catching imagery. They are diaries of everyday encounters with the world as well as abstraction and clear colours. The tactile surfaces of the canvases are aesthetically appealing; and most of all Michael Bevilacqua has an extremely intelligent talent for composing colour – all making him a unique and very vital contemporary painter.

Erik A. Frandsen
Upon his recent successful show at ARoS, Aarhus, with more than 60.000 visitors, Erik A. Frandsen will now be showing at Faurschou Beijing from March 21. – May 17. The exhibition title is “Frozen Moment Desert”.
The works for this show will be new steel works and selected large paintings.

Erik A. Frandsen will have a solo show at Galerie Hof & Huyser in Amsterdam in May.

Also Erik A. Frandsen has been invited to exhibit at the Guan Shanye Art Museum, Shenzhen as well as MoCA Shanghai in the fall/winter of 2009 and 2010.

Erik A. Frandsen’s works are in his own words “frozen moments” something seen and experienced being expressed in a medium that will hold on to the memory of these seen things and moments. With their humorous, unconventional, and astonishing contents, Frandsen’s works are thought provoking and his choice of aesthetically beautiful materials such as mosaics in Venetian smalti, large scale paintings, or shiny engraved steel plates makes these existential moments an aesthetically pleasurable experience.

Christian Lemmerz
Christian Lemmerz is busy preparing his solo show “Largo” for Statens Museum for Kunst /The Danish National Gallery.
This will be an exhibition of all new works.

The installation draws on theatrical and ritual performances, connections are drawn between the exhibition space and the ritual space of the church. A major theme in the exhibition is death, not only understood as the physical termination or the end of life, but also philosophically and existentially as absence, emptiness, and silence on the one hand side – and as the origin of culture on the other.
The exhibition will open May 16th 2009 – and run through March 6th 2010.

Coinciding with “Largo” at Statens Museum for Kunst – Faurschou CPH will host a show with new works.

Christian Lemmerz has just been awarded with the Thorvaldsen Medallion, after the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, given to him for his excellent work of art. The medallion is the highest distinction that can be given to an artist by the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Michael Kvium
Michael Kvium is currently working on both gallery and museum exhibitions in The Netherlands and China.

Although to a greater extent Kvium chooses to paint landscapes over figuration nowadays, his paintings are as grotesque, thought provoking and painfully beautiful as ever. They are what he calls “tales for the eye” – and death always seems to be lurking in Michael Kvium’s works.
We meet just a wintry bog, a Scandinavian Waste Land abandoned for the omnipresent, lurking crows, and the thin naked oak and birch trees, and the continual “dead ends” – leading nowhere.
It is beautiful in an alarming manner. To the viewer these trees almost seem like little human figures, lonely as they stand in the landscape.
The most significant characteristic of Kvium’s landscapes is absence, even though we do from time to time meet a lonely naked human figure. And with the traces of human existence, the viewer suddenly becomes conscious of his own presence – and conscious of the painters presence as well.

Erik Parker
Erik Parker is currently showing new paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The show is entitled “Crisis Creation” and runs from February 26th- March 28th.
Parker is well known for his vividly colourful anthropomorphic figure, composed of various shapes. While maintaining his individual sense of space and dynamism, Parker is deeply influenced by a variety of subcultures ranging from underground comics, illustration, graffiti and music. The fluid, intense visuals of Parker’s works are informed in part by the patchwork of musical sources he listens to, none more evident than psychedelic rock. Consequently, the obvious shapes and colours, with cartoon-like doodles combine to create a vocabulary of “ordered disorder” – here, Parker’s talent continues to blossom in this new collection of work.

Nina Sten-Knudsen
Nina Sten-Knudsen has moved to Berlin working in a spacious studio, necessary for her large formats.

Nina Sten-Knudsen is preparing her upcoming museum show at Nivaagaard Art Museum, Denmark, in the fall of 2010. To be included in this exhibition is four large new works 200 x 400 cm and several smaller works.

Nina Sten-Knudsen is experimenting with perspectives in her recent landscape paintings; changing format from the smallest possible – to the full wall monumental landscapes, where the viewer feels he can actually walk into the scenery.

“Yet seemed it Winter Still” will present new works in a moderate size that show the essence of her painterly skills: the layers upon layers of imagery, from land- to city-scapes, from ancient times to our contemporary, blending dream, reality, art history and film.

FAURSCHOU

MOGADISHNI proudly presents new works by the British artist Simon Keenleyside (B.1975). Lives and works in London, England). Simon Keenleyside will be presenting his colourful and intriguing works on linen.

For years Simon Keenleyside has explored the suburban gardens and woods in Essex. Unlike artists traditionally working with landscape in the great English tradition, Keenleyside transforms his scenes into fantastic escapist backdrops which blend memories. The romantic, imaginative settings which unite the artist’s colourful, vivid recollections with both art historical references to British landscape painting and children’s literature entice the viewer in a magical way and create a space filled with colour to get lost in or flee into. Keenleyside’s impasto way of painting makes the sceneries highly present.

Keenleyside creates an universe, which is both recognizable and unreal – a fascinating landscape for reflection. The strange beauty of the deserted landscapes is not only exquisite and seductive but also contains elements of anxiety and desire. Keenleyside’s paintings are to enjoy, intrigue and draw us in to a different world.

MOGADISHNI also proudly presents the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia by the American artist J.J. Garfinkel (B.1973 in Raleigh, North Carolina). Lives and works in Brooklyn, USA). Garfinkel will be presenting new works on linen and board.

Garfinkel presents scenes that merge various methods and media to depict highly staged visions of the natural world. The works hint at an amalgam of sources including plants, rocks, gates, and nests.

Garfinkel creates fictive structures that reference architecture and ornament but also allude to natural forms. Primitive and technological constructions fuse into a framework engulfed by organic growth. He reaches the final image when the natural and the synthetic combine and when these elements fluctuate between discord and harmony.

Recent shows include “Future Dialogues”, Dean Project, Queens, NY & “View Sheds”, Hogar Collection

Mogadishni

Galleri Signe Vad

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Thomas Lawson: 1977-1987, a selection of paintings and works on paper by Thomas Lawson. Early drawings, collages and ad hoc models, often created alongside his seminal paintings, will offer new ways of considering the historical importance of Lawson’s work. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 28th from 6 to 9pm, and the exhibition will be on view at David Kordansky Gallery’s Culver City space through May 2, 2009.

Born and raised in Scotland, Thomas Lawson established his career in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. His associations with and chronicling of the Pictures artists has provided a context for much of the painting he did in his youth. As he explains in a 2005 interview “I didn’t really start thinking about the theoretical side of painting until after the “Pictures” essay [by Douglas Crimp] came out, in trying to think out what that meant in some way as a painter.” Lawson was active amongst artists who sought to infuse painting and photography with both a political critique of representation, and an ironic acknowledgement of the pleasure of looking at mass media.

Through an awareness of the ideological structure of image making, and his use of appropriation, Lawson’s works became an influential alternative to conceptual art and newly popular neo-expressionist painting. As Lawson said in 1984 “it is difficult to make art in a period like this . . . if you are burdened with a critical consciousness.” In Lawson’s case, however, the burden of critical consciousness was always tempered by a belief in gesture, intuition, allegory and narrative; expressive tools that balanced the ironic and detached tone so often associated with the Pictures artists.

Spirit of the Museum (1987), one of the paintings included in this exhibition, exemplifies these concerns. A field of blue brushstrokes acknowledges abstraction’s art historical precedents (impressionism, Yves Klein’s blue, Rothko and Newman’s color-fields), but is paired with the shadowy image of a classic architectural space containing a lone yellow central figure. Here, the primary subject of most Western painting—the human figure—is shown as a golden idol that hovers. Likewise, one imagines the spirit of the museum as the Geist of aesthetic philosophy, at once overworked and submerged through the act of painting, suspended in the ruins of art historical lineage. In To Those Who Follow After (1983), the image of classic statues on opposing platforms along with the title reflects the hope and ambivalence of an ambitious young painter reckoning with the monumental weight of the past, and the airy insubstantiality of an unknown future.

Other works show a degree of experimentation and process not often seen in the Pictures Generation artists. The Figures series of drawings show multiple perspectives of a figure inside a mirrored room; compositions based on dioramas constructed by Lawson in 1976. A blue and red clothed man is seen interacting with his reflection, Scottish bagpipe players and highland dancers in box-like settings that recall Dan Graham’s glass pavilions. These images depend on low-tech processes of construction and replication, and echo the seriality of Lawson’s photocopy-based multiples, also included in the exhibition.

Thomas Lawson’s exhibition coincides with the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s survey of artists of the Pictures Generation. Lawson’s early works contribute to this important historical reevaluation by broadening the parameters of what we think of as appropriated images, and also shows Lawson’s particular influence on a younger generation of artists who employ appropriation as just one of many tools available in the construction of multivalent works.

Thomas Lawson is currently the Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at MetroPictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London and LAXART in Los Angeles. Surveys of his work have been organized by the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art at La Jolla, the CCA in Glasgow and the Battersea Arts Centre in London. He has created temporary public works in New York, New Haven, Glasgow, Newcastle and Madrid. An anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2005 by JRP/Ringier. From 1979 until 1992 he, along with Susan Morgan, published and edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an irregular publication by and about younger artists interested in the relationship between art and life. He has received three Artist Fellowships from the NEA, project support from Art Matters, Inc., and Visual Arts Projects, and a residency fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

David Kordansky Gallery