TOM SANFORD
“Mr. Hangover”
May 9th through June 14th, 2008,
Opening reception, May 9th, 6-8pm
 
Maybe we should just forget the whole statesman, warrior scientist, artist, thinker, businessman- idols of that type are dead or dying surely? People who cling to such figures- are they just slave to nostalgia, nostalgia for the real, for the heights and depths to which earlier ages aspired? Are they epochal snobs, so to speak, anachronisms clinging to the judgment that pop culture is just too pop to be taken seriously? Are they just refusing to believe that the place of real heroes could be usurped by mere performers-when in fact, that is exactly what has happened? – Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It
 
I like people who are really f—ed up. … I am very high strung and suffer from multiple personalities. Jane. She’s crazy and she always wants to kill me. Tila. … Poor Girl. … She deserves a break. … I do a lot of things that are self-destructive. … I’ve always been a nerdy geek trapped inside a umm … woman’s body. Yea. … That’s me. People love me for some reason. I don’t know why. … I do but I just say I don’t know why just to be modest. – Tila Tequila, star of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, in a post on her MySpace page
 
Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of by Tom Sanford entitled “Mr. Hangover.” Featured in the exhibition are new works modeled after ubiquitous street posters that are plastered around most cities to advertise events, movies and products. Comprised entirely of hand painted posters that are unframed and tacked to the wall, they suggest influences that come as much from the broader consumer culture as they do from the arena of fine art. In “Mr. Hangover,” Sanford references a world of disposable cultural objects and ephemera, and the glut experienced after being inundated by these elements.
 
Tom Sanford’s work is littered with the icons and detritus of pop culture obsessions. In this exhibition, these references become a fractal projection of his identity. Personal identification mixes with celebrity iconography offering glimpses into a lexicon of the artist’s experience. These images exude a curious combination of veneration and disdain for the subjects depicted, even when (or especially when) the subject is the artist himself.
 
Alternately sweet, sarcastic, caustic and mundane, Sanford briefly attempts to share a personal aside only to shout “gotcha!” with the next image. Tarnished sports heroes share the walls with portraits of cheap beers and even cheaper pop stars. Sometimes the stars are depicted as themselves, other times they are depicted as a character they play in a film or TV show. All the while, the quintessential New York paper coffee cup proclaims ”It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You.” In the artist’s own words, Sanford calls this his “mad magazine version of Marxist critique-and a subtle acknowledgement of the position of the artist in the culture economy.” This presentation induces a dizzying push/pull, mimicking the schizophrenic nature of our contemporary surroundings and the way competing imagery and attitudes incessantly vie for our attention.
 
Tom Sanford has a BA from Columbia University. This is his second solo exhibition at Leo Koenig Inc. Sanford recently exhibited his exhibition at Galleri Faurschou in Copenhagen and he is preparing for a solo exhibition with Galerie Erna Hecey in Brussels. His work was seen in the group exhibitions “The Incomplete” at the Chelsea Museum and “Heroes!…like us?” at the Palazzo Delle Arti in Naples, Italy. He lives and works in New York City.
 
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6 pm. For more information or visuals, please contact Elizabeth Balogh or Nicole Russo.
Leo Koenig
Tom Sanford
Faurschou

Nobuyoshi Araki
“Hana Kinbaku”

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our twelfth solo exhibition with Nobuyoshi Araki, “Hana Kinbaku”. For this exhibition, the gallery will present works in which two positives are printed simultaneously as one photograph – a first for Araki. Approximately 100 photographs from the series will be exhibited.

Hana (Flower)

In my childhood neighborhood, there was a “temple for sanctuary.” This was a familiar place where I often played as a child. There, I found dying cluster of amaryllis (spider lilies), and was astonished by their beauty. I used a white background and shot the flowers until it got dark. This experience was the start of my “flower life.”

“ARAKI by ARAKI” 2003

Kinbaku (Bondage)

There is the “aesthetics” of bondage, like bondage masters’ Kikko Shibari (bondage in a testudinal form.) But I don’t need perfection like that in photography. Nor does the bondage have to be good. By not pursuing perfection, I try not to make it too much of an “art work.”
When I tie-up women, I tell them “I’m binding your heart, not your body.” A woman can slip out of my bondage. It doesn’t have to be accomplished.

“Subete no onna wa utsukushii (All women are beautiful)” 2006

According to his words, Araki is “always thinking about Eros (sex/ life) and Thanatos (death).” As such, Araki’s works always embrace Eros and Thanatos as inextricably linked elements. In the exhibited works, Araki photographed Kinbaku (bondage) to express Eros, and Hana (Flower) for Thanatos, allowing them to coexist in the prints, conjoining them in a way that he has never tried before.

Taka Ishii Gallery


I See Darkness
Jasper Sebastian Stürup & Mikkel Olaf Eskildsen

Imonlysleeping

Jesper Rasmussen new show.
Susanne Ottesen

We are very pleased to announce Seonna Hong’s show, “Viscery Loves Company” at Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo. The show features 15 new paintings and a site specific installation.

The exhibition runs from May 8th, through June 1st 2008 at Kaikai Kiki’s new exhibition space at Motoazabu Crest Bldg., B1F, 2-3-30 Motoazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0046, Japan.

Seonna and I have been working with Takashi for over two years to bring this show to Japan, and it represents an enormous collaboration between Seonna, myself and the Kaikai Kiki staff both here and in Tokyo. I first saw Seonna’s work in 2002. Having worked with Takashi previously, I was informed of his ideas of “Superflat” and saw in her work the ideas he was putting forth and became tremendously excited about it. Seonna and I did our first show together in 2004. The show was titled “Animus” and became a book of the same name. About two years later I ran into Takashi and invited him to come into the gallery to see the work. His initial excitement about Seonna’s work has never wavered, and I am overjoyed that it has translated into the show that opens in May. This is Kaikai Kiki’s first solo show of a US based artist.

This is also Seonna’s first solo show in Japan. She was previously seen in “Kaikai Kiki Artists” at the Kaikai Kiki gallery in Tokyo. In 2006 she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and had her solo museum debut at The Knoxville Museum of Art.

Kaikaikikiny

5be Gallery

Dan ATTOE, Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals

Also on Friday, we celebrate the launch of the sixth issue of our quarterly publication: OCCULT DADDY. Bratwurst will be served.
During GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN, the gallery will be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 – 6PM
Javier Peres is very pleased to present the second Berlin solo exhibition of Dan ATTOE, “Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals,” featuring new works in painting and mixed media sculpture.

It is no small feat to make a series of landscape paintings that reflect a coherent and specific vision almost 100 years after Ernst Ludwig Kirchner interpreted the aura of his beloved Swiss mountains, but Attoe accomplishes this part of the program with characteristic humility. In “Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals,” Dan Attoe reveals his ritualistic landscapes by taking us along on that most American of past-times: the road trip.

From inside the coals of a ghastly fireside biker ritual to the now-not-so-remote arctic by way of the monolith, New Year’s (rocking eve variety), sexualized angels and ubiquitous roadside motel death scenes, reassuring, paradoxical and sometimes-yes-simple thoughts in good ol’ plain English are there to guide, or to obscure. “Everything is grist for the mill,” the artist admits of his prodigious exterior monologue. There is a sub-lingual quality to Attoe’s work that Burroughs would appreciate.

Dan Attoe’s truck once broke down just as he was pulling into the parking lot at Devil’s Tower. The artist lives and works in Washington and will be present for the opening. His first solo exhibition in a European institution, “American Dreams,” opens at MUSAC in Leon, Spain, will be on view from May 17 ˆ July 6, 2008.

Peres Projects

Forreningen Pakhus

„Time is not suspended but infinitely slowed down.” E. During

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of french artist Tatiana Trouvé , coinciding with the Gallery Weekend opening. Trouvé will be showing, besides various new drawings and bronze sculptures, a space encompassing installation. With this work, she was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, the most important recognition for emerging french artists.

The exhibition „ Density of Time“ adopts the construction principles from the honored work and transfers as well as expands them within the entire exhibition space. Two walls enclose an in-between world, in which objects seem to obey unusual physical characteristics and laws. A pool table and a chair are suspended as they fall; perspectives open up and elongate into infinity as if the time and space coordinates had been shifted. Time marks the attempt at a fourth dimension, produced by the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the three-dimensionality of the objects installed. Interventions on the gallery walls dilate the space as the building’s foundation penetrates one wall while burnt out air vents blur the limits between inside and outside, alluding to the hidden presence of a peculiar world.

Trouvé also plays with these intensities in her sculptures, in which the transformation of matter and form attempt to freeze time. Instead of gas, copper pipes come out of pressure tanks, a cord’s swinging movement is immortalized in bronze. In the series of drawings „Remanence“, forms disappear into the black paper background as if swallowed by a black hole. Once again, the passing of time in space has been disrupted. The place disappears, leaving only its shadow.

Tatiana Trouvé’s site-specific constructions of mundane objects, plexiglass, metal, wood, drawings and sculptures recalls the cold halls of bureaucracy, the fitness studios, hairdresser salons, cloak rooms or torture chambers. These spaces consist of architectural modules, which the artist calls ‘polders’. In the Netherlands, a polder denominates an area near the sea protected by dikes from flooding. Permanently threatened by flood, the protective function of the dike proves quite deceptive. Trouvé’s polder makes reference to the psychoanalytic connotation of this phenomenon: „ Each polder wins ground within a space, a piece of tangible territory, which obliges it to show itself as an imaginary figure, a mental space, an atmosphere or formation of memory“. ( Jens Emil Sennewald)

Tatiana Trouvé (*1968) lives and works in Paris. A retrospective of the artist will open on the 24th of June, 2008, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The works of the french artist, until now not sufficiently acknowledged in Germany, were to be seen in the 52nd Biennial in Venice (Arsenale) as well as in the show „Airs de Paris“ curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Christine Marcel in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Tatiana Trouvé’s work was also shown at solo exhibitions in The Villa Arson in Nice, the museum Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris last year. Until now, five monographs on her work have been published.

Johann Koenig

DUNK! / ITEMS OF HIGH STYLE AND PRESTIGE
A solo exhibition by Daniel Milan

DUNK! is ready with a fabulous new solo show.
DUNK! is proud to present ITEMS OF HIGH STYLE AND PRESTIGE.
ITEMS OF… are drawings, paintings, sculpture, photos, collage and objects.
ITEMS OF… is a total installation full of sharp and visual reflections.
ITEMS OF… is a critical assault on the brutal and narcissistic aspects of present culture.
ITEMS OF… is Daniel Milan’s first solo exhibition in Denmark.

DANIEL MILAN unfolds his work in different mediums with a solid focal point in his elaborations into the fields of drawing which is led by a sensitive and sublime controlled black line on white paper by which he merge different, and often opposed, aspects of reality into poetical disturbing works with a critical and political magnitude laden with a magical narrative strength. With take-of from the themes he develops and elaborates in his works of drawing Daniel Milan take on exiting ventures into other medias of the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, collage and objects and he joins these different means of expression together with his drawings in dynamic and visual thought-provoking installations.

EXTRA:
At the opening there will also be a reception for the release of Daniel Milan’s new graphic book HUMAN DINOSAUR SPAM. It is printed on election posters for the Danish Conservative Party and it comes in an exclusive edition of 25 – signed and numbered.

Dunk

A Gallery