V1
SMK

Oscar Tuazon (b 1975) lives and works in Paris. This is his second solo exhibition at STANDARD (OSLO). Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: David Roberts Foundation, London (2009); Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2009); Michele Maccarone, New York (2008); Seattle Art Museum (2008); and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (Marco), Vigo (2009); Kunsthalle St Gallen, St Gallen (2008); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St Louis; Sculpture Center, New York (2008); Kadist Foundation, Paris; and Documenta 12, Kassel (Magazine Projects, under the auspices of Metronome, Paris). Tuazon will together with gallery artist Emily Wardill form STANDARD (OSLO)’s two-artist presentation at the Premiere section of Art Basel in June.

Standard Oslo

Venske & Spänle
Coming Together

Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Coming Together an exhibition of sculptures by the Munich and New York-based duo Venske & Spänle. Defying the confines of their marble medium, the artists’ amorphous works evoke the forms of primordial creatures.

Like a newly discovered species, Venske & Spänle’s carved marble organisms give rise to a distinct nomenclature and genealogy. Smörfs, gumpfoten, helotrophen, sauger, orophyten and a variety of other characters populate the marble family of Venske & Spänle’s sculptural world. Bulbous and swelling, or stretching and slinking, the forms seem poised at the point of motion, almost capable of expanding beyond their marble skin. Disarmingly organic, the sculptures exude individual identities and personalities. With human-like characteristics, Venske & Spänle’s marble life forms radiate an undeniable appeal that probes the concept of the human as a companion to these marble sculptures and consciously explores the interaction between human beings and the sculptural environment created by the artists. The installation will incorporate a 3-D animation, linking the actual sculptures to their cyber-space counterparts, blurring the real and the digital worlds they inhabit.

The sculptures have been exhibited and placed in collections throughout the globe; including the U.S. and Europe, India, Australia, and Japan. Coming Together marks Venske & Spänle’s third exhibition at Thatcher Projects. A recently published hardcover catalogue, Guide Through the Sculptural World of Venske & Spänle, is available at the gallery.

Margaret Thatcher Projects

Sage Vaughn I Nobody’s Young

It gives us great pleasure to invite you to our first solo exhibition of the American artist Sage Vaughn.

Sage Vaughn (born 1976 in Jackson, Oregon) lives and works in Los Angeles. The Californian by choice began his artistic career with graffiti and street art in the streets of Los Angeles. Over recent years, street art has grown into a globally networked scene in which applied architecture and city criticism, design and art in public spaces merge to create new, experimental forms of expression. This is where Vaughn, who knows the scene well, comes in. His pictures not only reveal the influence of the genre, they translate motifs from design, art or street lives into classic oil paintings.

In terms of content, the “Nobody’s young” exhibition revolves around questions of identity as well as the psychological background and conditions of human existence. Vaughn’s protagonists seem to be searching for themselves against the background of their urban, often problematic life reality. The “Wildlives” series of pictures, a work in progress since last year, takes up the magic and the peculiarity of everyday American life on the West Coast. Just as ornithologists study their winged wonders in peace, Vaughn examines the astounding and enigmatic personalities that people carry within themselves. He is particularly interested in children. He puts them in costumes and masks which do not, however, hide their personality, but rather underline their individuality and vulnerability.

A second series entitled “Migration” reverses the perspective. A crowd of shouting, screaming, gesticulating people can be seen as a grey background. The crowd appears driven, hurrying after fluttering, colourful butterflies. The brightly coloured specimens are portrayed in the foreground with clearly dripping paint as a luring, fleeting phenomenon in keeping with their nature.

Art Agents

Kurimanzutto

Blondeau Fine Art Services

Tanja Pol

Specta
Aros

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:

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