Tag: Group show

Group Show in NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery

i_sanford_tiger_smlg

Group Show in NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery

Currents, at NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery from June 5 to September 12, features the work of three artists: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Benjamin Edwards and Tom Sanford. The exhibition is organized by Elaine Berger for the museum’s Contemporary Collectors Circle.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins is a sculptor whose work is included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. She has shown in many group and solo exhibitions in this country and the UK. Her work explores the relationships between people and objects and how they both form and inform each other (Artforum). Benjamin Edwards has been exhibited widely throughout the New York area and other US cities. Working in oils, acrylics and digital inkjet, his paintings and drawings hold a mirror to contemporary society, reflecting it back as hallucinatory and visionary landscapes. Tom Sanford paints vibrant representations of pop objects and celebrities. His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Copenhagen.

Nassau County Museum of Art

Tom Sanford

“Not For Sale”

CB025587

ME contemporary will present its second group show, titled ”Not For Sale.’ Each of the six artists featured in the gallery this year has been invited to exhibit a piece from his/her own collection, which as the title of the show implies, is not for sale.

In a time of unstable global economy and shaky markets whose success or downfall greatly affect the art world, ME contemporary’s newest exhibition looks introspectively at this relationship and challenges the traditional role of the art gallery as a commercial space. The exhibition will be on view through July 3.

‘Not For Sale’ poses the question: ‘What makes a piece of art off limit?’ To the artist, the decision is often of a personal nature – a strong emotional connection to the work. To the market, gallery and collector, the experience of desiring a work of art that is off-limits can be both highly exciting and incredibly frustrating. Utilizing the traditional art-historical tool of story-telling, ‘Not For Sale’ explores some of these reasons by exhibiting the artwork alongside a narrative inspired by each artist.

The displayed works in ‘Not For Sale’ range from an early piece by Ursula Reuter Christiansen upon which her teacher, Joseph Beuys placed the finishing touches, to an intimate music video recorded by Nin Brudermann to her husband, during her stay aboard an ice breaker in connection with the project, ’12 O’clock in London.’ Also exhibited is Morten Viskum’s first painting, created by ‘the hand that would not stop painting,’ and a work from Marco Evaristti’s ‘Crash’ project from 1995, painted with the blood of Bangkok traffic accident victims. Artist Milica Tomic’s most prized pieces are empty sketchbooks whose pages, filled with drawings of  victims of the Srebrenica Massacre, remained with the relatives who described their loved ones from memory. Mathias Kessler shows a photograph of an amorphous shape surrounded by white. Upon closer inspection, the amorphous form reveals itself as an obese body mired in thick rice pudding. Each work is followed by a story of the work’s origins and an explanation why the specific piece is not up for sale. In this way, the exhibition also provides a glimpse into the artists’ psyches – into their way of working and how they view their own art.

ME contemporary

MEANING OF VOID

braskartbloggce

Christoffer Egelund Gallery proudly presents the group exhibition ”Meaning of Void”, showing works by artists; Michael Johansson (SE), Pind (DK), Thomas Fleron (DK), Anna Fro Vodder (DK), Ulrik Heltoft (DK) og Melou Vanggaard (DK). Through various installational approaches, the represented artists explore the void and its’ meaning – some avoid the empty space others applaud it. The works move between the empty and the compact space, between order and chaos, between significance and insignificance.

Despite the artists’ point of departure in different media such as installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and painting, the six artists share a strong fascination with exploring new depths, patterns and meanings in one type of detail. In the same way as the collector, the six artists enjoy to carefully select a particular object among a jumble of objects, then emphasizing and reinforcing their significance through accumulation and repetition.

Michael Johansson (b. 1975) is fascinated by repetition and likes to find similar items. He selects, sorts and orders the collected objects in dense compilations. His compact sculptures indicate a ‘Horror Vacui’, a fear of the empty space. Michael Johansson was educated at Malmö Art Academy in 2005 and has several solo exhibitions behind him and he is for instance represented at Malmö Art Museum. Pind (b. 1975) removes seemingly useless – however for him significant – objects from their context and ascribes them new meaning and value. Pind graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. He has had a solo exhibition at Overgaden and participated in several group shows in Copenhagen. Thomas Fleron (b.1972) draws objects whose meaning is not immediately readable. But the stories behind the objects reveal that they refer to political and historical rituals. Thomas Fleron graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 200 0. Anna Fro Vodder (1974) explores origin and valuation in her paintings. The void shows in the form of abstraction and unpainted arias. In her paintings the empty space becomes the element, that gives everything else meaning. Anna Fro Vodder graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 and she is represented at Horsens Kunstmuseum. Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) explores space as a ‘locus’ for anxiety. His photos show how claustrophobia, fear and nightmares relate to the directionless space. Ulrik Heltoft graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and MFA Yale University in 2001. He has had solo exhibitions at Raucci e Santa Maria in Naples and Willfried Lenz in Rotterdam. Melou Vanggaard (b. 1969) mixes the figurative and the abstract in both her paintings and sculptures. In her works the void becomes a balancing force to the figurative and compact, thus creating a resting place in a space otherwise heavily saturated with meaning. Me lou Vanggaard graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2001.

Christoffer Egelund

MAKING SHIPS IN BOTTLES

Suzanne-Treister-1
CGP London are proud to present Making Ships in Bottles at Cafe Gallery, curated by Claire Shallcross.

Making Ships in Bottles explores the process of gathering research and the manipulation of information, the ways artists display their work and the methods they use.

With research obtained from varied sources, libraries, the internet, newspapers or lived experiences, each artist merges obscure or radical ideas and movements from the past within the present. Using a museum-like aesthetic, documentary techniques or design formats they scrutinize different approaches to forms of communication.
Bureaucratic procedures, belief systems or site-specific investigations are researched and revised but the artists rarely conclude any raised issues for the viewer.

Secondary and tertiary sources play with fiction and narratives, often with wry humour or a questioning of the impossible. Making Ships in Bottles highlights alternative political and social perspectives encouraging us to reflect on the present.

The exhibition features selected works from HEXEN 2039 by Suzanne Treister, the 2006 incarnation of the Rosalind Brodsky project described by Art in America as ‘one of the most sustained fantasy trips of contemporary art’, the first London showings of Ken Russell in Conversation with Olivia Plender and Past Imperfect by Bik Van der Pol, alongside new video works from Rebecca Lennon and Gail Pickering.

CGP London