Adrian Norvid – DUMMKOPF

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‘DUMMKOPF’ features for the first time in Germany, works of the Canadian artist Adrian Norvid. Small works, sculptures, and wall-filling drawings, echoing the so-called ÒWimmelbilderÓ, all drawn on or made of paper, are Adrian Norvid’s genre. Born in 1959 in London, the Canadian has taught drawing at Concordia University, Montreal since 1989. His works are represented in important Canadian collections, such as the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Musee du Quebec.

Norvid’s wall-filling works are overloaded with imagery. Often excessive and graphically distorted, they occasionally take on the character of pattern or wall-paper. Typical for a ‘Wimmelbild’, the onlooker has to make their way through the complex contents of the picture. A whole host of image- and word-quotations, ranging from humorous to sarcastic, are set against each other. Association-rich, Norvid’s works have an often obscure, narrative character, analyzing popular knowledge, cliches, folksiness, or nostalgia and debunking them.

The largest work of the exhibition is ‘Tom Dick and Harry Haus’, 274 x 635 cm: A half-timbered house with ramshackled roof is populated by strange figures such as a bosomy maiden with ‘Weisswurst’ chain, a stork with telephone receiver, a ‘Rumpelstilzchen’ with giant toothbrush, and Van Halen with Volkswagen emblem. On the left side of the house, right over the entrance door we read: ‘The yummification of Germany’, a multilayered wordplay. Norvid is tracing Germanness: politics, Weisswurst, Volkswagen, Birkenstock-sandals, history, fairy tales, language. Once access is found, the work, in the manner of the ‘Wimmelbild’, consumes our attention and drives us to seek out further discoveries. The artist takes us on a journey into Germanness. Like the joint smoking Snoopy on the roof he takes us on a ‘trip’. But at the end all mysteries remain unresolved. In ‘out of stock’-sandals the artist, absorbed in a book, leaves the ‘house Germany’ in a hopeless mix up behind him. Whirring chaos remains.
In contrast to the overloaded, huge drawings are Norvid’s smaller works on paper. Here individual aspects, which could have sprung from one of the ‘Wimmelbilder’, get their own forum and are brought to a point.

Norvid’s sculptures form a third facet of his work. Built of paper, everyday life articles, such as school milk cartons, are snatched from their usual context and, by mere inscription set into a completely new one. Such surprising turns typically reveal themselves to the onlooker only on closer inspection. Formally close to cartoon or comic, Norvid works with sarcasm, irony and plenty of humor. While keeping their autonomy, small drawings along with wall-filling works, paper sculptures and revised, found objects, form installations of baroque extent. They let the onlooker dive into the complex thoughts of the artist, which lead our subjective expectations and moral conceptions ad absurdum. Whoever allows themselves to get involved, will find himself at times with a bashful smile, a furrowed brow, or even roaring a laughter.

Julia Garnatz

KAVI GUPTA BERLIN – Carola Ernst – Gatl, Rott & Vertigo

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Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin is proud to announce a new solo exhibition by German artist Carola Ernst. Working from a litany of potent literal and abstract images, Ernst’s works draw a correlation between different turning-points, specifically the events when revolution hardens to become its own enemy or when hegemony dissolves to become all that it once sought to displace, and those same moments in aesthetics, when the order of composition is on the brink of yielding to chaos. Form and content taken together, Ernst’s works are the embodiment of how the consitution of anything new always arrives with the knowledge that it too will grow to govern.

Included in the exhibition are the above pictured Challenger (2009) and two other graphite, ink, and watercolor on paper works. These works are accompanied by two sculptures made from found wood and miscellaneous antique parts, a graphite on paper drawing, and a single oil on canvas painting. In addition, Ernst has made especially for the exhibition a signed hand-made catalog in an edition of 100 entitled Das Panoptische Reich.
Carola Ernst (b. 1981 in Stuttgart) lives and works in Berlin. Ernst completed her Meisterschüler degree at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2009, where she worked under professors Válerie Favre and Thomas Zipp. She has recently exhibited her work at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin, Galerie Andreas Höhne in München, and powergallery in Hamburg.

Kavi Gupta

Bjorn Copeland

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The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of work by Bjorn Copeland.  The show will include new work by the New York-based artist and Black Dice founding member.

The sculptures and works on paper included in the exhibit are the products of accumulated, found detritus and debris, collected over the last few years along the artist’s route to his studio.  By surrounding himself with large amounts of stimuli (trash), Copeland creates a studio environment for filtering and soaking up information.  Decisions that were made by the original designer of the, now discarded, products or product packaging that he collects, become the starting point for Copeland’s assemblages and collages.  These works, in turn, begin to inform and dictate the outcome of the next pieces he produces.  With one idea based on the last, an alternate version of the environment that the work was drawn from is presented.

Bjorn Copeland’s work was shown at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York in 2008 and has been exhibited at P.S.1, Daniel Reich Gallery and D’Amelio Terras in New York, at Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles and at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.  Copeland received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jack Hanley

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BONNIE CAMPLIN

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BONNIE CAMPLIN

Michael Benevento is pleased to present SAS, an exhibition of recent works by London based artist, Bonnie Camplin. This will be her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Bonnie Camplin continues to provoke questions about survival, emergence, becoming and the feminine.  Known for her thought provoking videos and HB drawings, SAS will consist of pencil drawings, watercolors and sculpture.

The title of the show SAS is in reference to a survival handbook written by John “Lofty” Wiseman, a former special air serviceman of the British army. SAS is an exhibition of works incorporating Camplin’s ongoing fascination with survivalism; growing up, as she did with the cold war and “mutually assured destruction” or “mad” and being affected deeply by her father’s obsession with it. She now looks at the prospect of catastrophic climate change and resource wars expressing her own sense of pessimism by taking the survival “basics” (as laid out in Wiseman’s book) and interpreting each irrationally through (significantly) the medium of watercolor. Here they express that the idea of survival in such extreme circumstances in her own case is absurd. Therefore these watercolors, in common with the survivalist culture of emergency-preparedness rituals are merely a symbolic way of processing deep deep fear.

Bonnie Camplin was born in 1970 in London. She received her BA in film and video and her postgraduate degree in advanced photography from Central St. Martin’s School of Art. She is represented by Cabinet Gallery in London and Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender in Berlin. She currently teaches film at Stadelschule Frankfurt. Her upcoming show titled Railway Mania will be held in 2010 at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

Benevento Los Angeles

Slater Bradley @ Team Gallery

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Slater Bradley
if we were immortal

Team is pleased to present a show of new work by Slater Bradley. Entitled if we were immortal, the exhibition will run from the 12th of November through the 19th of December 2009. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

Slater Bradley’s latest exhibition finds the artist, primarily known for his videos, moving into painting. Although Bradley has never stuck strictly to videomaking – he has curated exhibitions, shown sculptures, mounted performances, taken photographs, and made tender drawings – these paintings, whose exhibition here marks the culmination of a two-year long process, will clearly surprise anyone who has followed the work since his debut at Team ten years ago.

Although this show marks a radical shift, the continuity of the paintings with his past work is also quite strong. As is usually the case, Bradley is concerned with the melancholic, bordering on a fecund morbidity, with death taking center stage. There are never any absolutes when talking about Bradley’s practice, but most of the work in this exhibition came out of his interest in the vast array of sentimental ephemera produced by, and around, the band Joy Division.

Among the paintings shown are a series of foot square portraits of some of the best-known Joy Division bootlegs, along with a few that Bradley himself invented. Images from rare promotional fliers, LP inserts, video recordings, and cassette-only releases have been re-cropped, re-sized, and re-combined. After being painstakingly rendered, usually on grounds of palladium leaf, they have been brushed over with numerous washes, making the paintings appear oddly timeless. The preservation of life – the mummy complex – has always been Bradley’s concern. The fact is that either as a documentarian or as a fantasist, Bradley’s work has always stemmed from his desire to preserve, or otherwise re-animate, a cultural artifact.

As is typical for a Bradley exhibition, however, there are works which will destabilize a closed reading – mysterious elements, unplaceable. Included, for example, is a single four-channel video of sea foam formed by gently lapping waves. There are also a few photographs of models that are meant to represent emotional states, such as loneliness and longing. These pieces move the show away from a Joy Division centered nostalgia and towards a more open tale of remorse.

Bradley’s work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has also shown his work at such venues as The Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, the Reina Sofia, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Schirn Kunsthalle, the De Appel Foundation, the Chicago MCA, and the Palais de Tokyo. Bradley has had solo gallery shows in London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Vienna, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tokyo, among others. Solo museum shows include the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, The Netherlands; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Saint Louis; the Berkeley Art Museum in California; Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

This is Bradley’s sixth solo show at Team. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs, please call 212.279.9219.

Team Gallery