Tag: Kavi Gupta
Adult Contemporary – Dirty Black Summer
Kavi Gupta is proud to present Adult Contemporary – Dirty Black Summer, a diptych screening of film and video works spanning from the mid-nineties to the present. Created with a siamese approach that interposes the renowned musical genre typified by Barry Manilow or Olivia Newton-John with ”Dirty Black Summer”, a song from metal crooner Glenn Danzig’s album, How The Gods Kill (1992). Taken together the videos confuse genre to question how viewers perceive aesthetic category and distinguish specific forms. Each work represents this dilemma inherent in the double title; whether it is the ultra-gratuitous raw snuff of Los Angeles artist Julian Hoeber’s Killing Friends (2001), where a teen slowly murders his friends or Landon Wigg’s Riot On The Unset Trip (2010), a cropped appropriation of Mimsy Farmer’s freakout in exploitation classic Riot On The Sunset Strip (1967), the works appear just as sordid, self-interested, and dramatic as they are modest, populist and subliminal.
Adult Contemporary – Dirty Black Summer was organized by James Krone and Marc LeBlanc with special thanks to Blum & Poe, Patrick Painter Inc. and John Knuth. All videos come courtesy of the artists and their representative galleries.
Tony Tasset //
Melanie Schiff & Sterling Ruby
Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin is proud to present an exhibition of two video works, Melanie Schiff’s “Perfect Square” (2006) and Sterling Ruby’s “Dihedral” (2006).
Shot during a residency in Florida, Schiff’s “Perfect Square” (2006) uses marsh pools formerly explored by ecologist Jacques Cousteau as the setting for the artist’s elegant idea of swimming in a perfect square. Shot upwards from the bottom of the pool, the work is a rhythmic meditation on the relationship between nature and the basic shapes that are held ideally in the human mind.
In Sterling Ruby’s “Dihedral” (2006), plumes of liquid color slowly diffuse and absorb each other. A narrator with an ambiguous voice provides the work’s audio as he reads Roger Callois’ “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, a text originally published in 1935 in the Surrealist publication, Minotaure. The text references mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis – to discuss how an organism distinguishes itself physically and psychologically from its surroundings.
Melanie Schiff (b. 1977 in Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. In addition to her inclusion in 2008 Whitney Biennial, Schiff’s work has also been recently exhibited at the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Chicago, P.S.1 MOMA in New York, and Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado. Other group exhibitions include Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows at Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe, Germany, Autonomy at Foxy Production in New York City, and Too Strong To Stop, Too Sweet To Lose at Cohan & Leslie in New York City. This past fall Schiff presented her third solo exhibition with Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago; it was entitled The Mirror.
Sterling Ruby (b. 1972 in Bitburg, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include 2TRAPS, Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York, Sterling Ruby/Robert Mapplethorpe, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and The Masturbators, Foxy Production, New York. His recent group exhibitions include New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Beaufort 03, Art by the Sea, Ostend, Belgium, New York Minute, Depart Foundation, Macro Future Museum, Rome, Italy and the Moscow Biennial. In Germany, Sterling Ruby is represented by Sprüth Magers, Berlin.
Susan Giles @ Kavi Gupta
Kavi Gupta is pleased to announce it’s fourth solo exhibition Buildings and Gestures with Chicago artist Susan Giles.
Susan Giles’ work considers the relationship between memory and architecture. Recently, new works like “Memory Palace II” (2009), “The Sydney Opera House and The Taj Mahal” (2008), and the multi-part project “Buildings and Gestures” (2009) have specifically employed cathedrals, castles and other monuments build by cultures of the world over centuries. At the crux of Giles’ work is questioning why we built these massive objects and what impact do they have on the life of an individual. Often working with models, Giles’ creates these structures anew, integrating them together and in the process drawing connections between the different ways an individual form can hold significant meaning in the memory of individual and culture as a whole. The most evident demonstration of this may be in Giles’ video for the “Buildings and Gestures” project. In the work, individuals one after another stand before the camera and outline with their hands a structure that over their life has embedded itself so finely into their mind that they can trace it easily into the air; their simple visual descriptions are a testament to the power monumental architecture has in informing memory and meaningful experiences in life.
Giles’ work has recently been exhibited in major solo or group exhibitions in , Leipzig, Germany, Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL, Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, and David Risley Gallery, London.
Angel Otero
Kavi Gupta is pleased to annouce it’s first solo exhibition of Angel Otero’s work. Angel Otero is quickly becoming well known for his textured canvases that weave between abstraction and representation taking their subject matter from an ongoing personal and often autobiographical narrative from his childhood in Puerto Rico. Memories, particularly those from his grandmother, parallel what he is now embracing in contemporary art.
Otero’s paintings and sculptural assemblages also engage directly with a process-based art making. His works are extremely intuitive and often address the idea of failure and the push/pull of painting an inventive space that also relates directly to his own personal history. Structures attempt to balance the slippage between subject and object. Layers of silicone become fluid doilies floating on table tops and thick shapes of dried oil paint are glued into simple patterns recalled from memory.
The work doesn’t operate as a presentation but rather as a self-generating proposition with which to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct meaning over and over again. Unusual materials and aesthetic extravagance have been inspiring his recent work. Scale is expanding to comment of monumentality, surrounding the viewer and transforming the work to become physically accessible and present. His explorations of personal symbology as well as abstract expressionism that brings to mind painters that continue to influence his work such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, and Joan Mitchell.
Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico) was recently including in the Constellations exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the 2009 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund in the Performing and Visual Arts. Otero has an upcoming solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center.
KAVI GUPTA BERLIN – Carola Ernst – Gatl, Rott & Vertigo
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.
James Krone and Jason Loebs
Kavi Gupta is proud to announce the opening of his new gallery in Berlin featuring a two person exhibition of new works from gallery artist Jason Loebs and Berlin-based painter James Krone.
Jason Loebs’ works are studies in historiography and the shape of time. Drawing from images throughout art history as well as the artist’s own developed formal processes, the work describes how the present is comprised of a fragmented and reconfigured past to show how the artist wavers between being the determined object of history and the autonomous agent capable of constituting the new. Five of Loebs’ grey and cracked “Untitled” paintings will be on view.
James Krone’s paintings are geometric abstractions built through an impressive palette of violet, crimson and black washes. Casual about their rigor they demonstrate the grand effect of making little effort. For an artist whose other bodies of work include collages of himself and Jim Morrison and ashtrays made from long birch branches, it is a painting practice that speaks of a hollow world and solipsistic living.
Jason Loebs (b. 1981 in Hillside, New Jersey) lives and works in New York City. His work has previously been exhibited at Loop Raum für Aktueller Kunst in Berlin, Voxpopuli in Philadelphia, and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York City. Loebs received his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.
James Krone (b. 1975 in Chicago) lives and works in Berlin. His work has previously been exhibited at venues in Europe and America including Circus Gallery in Los Angeles, Gallery Gerersdorfer in Vienna, and Schalter in Berlin. He received his BFA from the The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1998.
Melanie Schiff
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present a new series of photographs by Los Angeles-based artist Melanie Schiff. Her latest exhibition titled The Mirror presents the artist’s first solo exhibition in Chicago since her inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Melanie Schiff has become known for her constructed narrative photographs that are imbued with a poetic use of light to explore ideas of spirituality as well as personal and collective experience. Schiff’s previous photographs spanned classic genres of portraiture, still life and performance as they found their footing within multiple histories of photography. Often subtle references to youth culture and popular music came to the surface and objects like empty beer bottles, CD cases, and record covers became minimal forms which were arranged and manipulated placing them within a mystical happening.
The photographs that make up The Mirror maintain this spiritual aura that enveloped the previous work along with a personal anthropological study of ones’ surroundings but now from a more solitary perspective. An almost science fiction type quality is evoked by the lack of the figure and the alien landscape that ranges from a natural environment to depictions of manmade architecture. The photograph titled Mastodon shows a large field in which an odd fallen or uprooted tree eerily resembles the petrified body of this extinct mammal. Several photographs depict long corridors, canals and drain pipes covered in graffiti that lead to a white light or a geometric shape heading into another anonymous structure. The repetition of this motif references a narrative that involves a birthing story that may be a human birth, the beginning of the world or a new world altogether.
The mirror provides a personal reflection, albeit distorted, a semi-truth. This filter parallels that of the camera as a skewed lens. What can be contextualized by its surroundings is edited and disjointed by the act of cropping and matting. The photograph Cave Painting depicts a closed in view of a river wall. Scuffs, cracks, residue and debris create a minimal abstracted image reminiscent of a primitive painting. These marks, along with the recurrence of graffiti and the repetition of circles and triangles become symbols that feel as though they have been left for us to decipher.
Melanie Schiff (b. 1977) lives and works in Los Angeles. Upcoming museum exhibitions include P.S. 1 MOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Seattle Museum of Art. Schiff has also exhibited at Aspen Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
