GALERIE GRITA INSAM

This exhibition serves to focus on the recent artistic output by three underground heroes from the worlds of skateboarding, graffiti and punk. Even though each of these artists has now firmly established themselves in the world of contemporary art, there are still common themes between them that hail back to their subcultural roots. It could be described primarily as an overriding sense of concern for and representation of the downtrodden, the outsider, the anti-hero. McGee’s sad, sullen faces and neon-colored geometric panels reflect the archetypal image of man overpowered by omnipresent media, Templeton’s portraits of suburban youths perfectly illustrate the harsh alienation of teenage life, while Pettibon’s drawings and paintings focus sharply on issues of personal/social unrest, life during war and the constant power struggle between a man and his destiny. The fact that this is the first time an exhibition has featured all three artists in such direct proximity to each other will be an interesting statement not only on each artists’ individual style, but also the unique similarities that run through all of their works.

 

Barry McGee (1968-) comes from a background of creating unsanctioned work on city streets in his native San Francisco. Originally signing his works with the tag “Twist”, the artist draws his force and inspiration from the contrast and tension that exists between the city center and the suburbs, between wealthy districts and the slums. McGee’s signature tags and markings have inserted an element of the individual and the handmade into a depersonalized urban landscape that has become increasingly crowded with corporate logos, trademarks and advertisements. McGee’s complex installations convey a sense of vitality and chaos, juxtaposed with a precarious nature and sense of alienation. Large-scale wall murals, clusters of small, framed drawings and snapshots, various tools and other street detritus make their way into his installations in an almost symphonic fashion. McGee has exhibited his works internationally including Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Foundation Cartier, Paris, and Fondazione Prada, Milan. McGee currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

 

Ed Templeton (1972-) was born in Orange County, California. He grew up in Anaheim, then his family moved to a trailer park in Corona. His father ran off with his babysitter. He eventually moved to Huntington Beach and began skateboarding when he was 13. By the time he was 18 I had started skateboarding professionally and left high school to enter skate contests in Europe. Upon his return he started painting and taking photographs. In 1994 he had his first solo exhibition at Alleged Gallery in New York. Since then he has exhibited his work internationally including exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunsthalle, Vienna, ICA Philadelphia, Modern Art, London and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. His first hardcover monograph, Deformer, was published in 2008 by Italian publisher Damiani. To this day Templeton still skates professionally and runs a skateboard company, Toy Machine. He lives and works in Huntington Beach, California with his wife Deanna and their cat Ptah.

 

Raymond Pettibon (1957-) was born in Tucson, Arizona. The fourth of five children, Pettibon earned a degree in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating from college, Pettibon worked briefly as a high-school math teacher, but soon after set out to launch a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2002, an exhibition of his drawings, Plots Laid Thick, was organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, and traveled to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands. Pettibon’s work was also featured at Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany. Pettibon lives and works in Venice Beach, California. (All works by Raymond Pettibon are shown by courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin und Regen Projects Los Angeles.)

CIRCLECULTURE GALLERY

  

New piece from Soe the man:::….
Dozo

Todd Schorr
The World We Live In

Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new works by renowned American artist Todd Schorr. One of the most prominent pop surrealist painters working today, Schorr uses the exacting techniques of the old masters to paint colorful cartoon characters, corporate mascots and other pop culture icons in a unique style he calls “cartoon realism.”

The Opening Reception on March 28 will be hosted by actor David Arquette, and a portion of the evening’s sales will go to Feeding America, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity.

Schorr’s work is highly influenced by the popular culture of his childhood: post-war 1950’s America. His formative years were spent watching countless horror, sci-fi, war, cartoon, cowboy, and puppet shows on a black-and-white TV set, building styrene plastic models, reading comic books, and leafing through his parents’ National Geographic magazines.

The compulsion to replicate the characters he saw in cartoons, commercials, comic books and magazines led to a formal education at The Philadelphia College of Art. Schorr began his career as an illustrator in New York City, which exposed him to a new set of influences from the world of advertising and commercial art. Though his career as an illustrator was successful (his work appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1982), Schorr soon left the commercial world and began expressing his ideas on canvas.

Schorr says: “Like any artist of worth, it took many long years of struggle and investigative thought along with trial and error as well as constant honing of technique to reach the point where I felt I had created a language which, when spoken well, would command some semblance of purpose. I work in what is best described as a surreal style but filtered through the mind and eyes of what is, for better or worse, uniquely American.”

In 2008 Schorr’s work was shown at the Laguna Art Museum as part of “In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz School,” and a solo retrospective exhibition will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2009.

Schorr’s work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Dangerous Ink, and in the documentary film, The Treasures of Long Gone John. Schorr’s most recent monograph is Dreamland, 2004, published by Last Gasp Press. His new book, American Surreal will be released in 2009. Schorr currently resides with his artist-wife Kathy in Los Angeles, CA.

MK Gallery

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