Tag: Stephen Friedman Gallery

TASTERS’ CHOICE

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Stephen Friedman Gallery is delighted to present ‘Tasters’ Choice,’ an exhibition of art and design.

Six internationally renowned private collectors have been asked to act as curators and to each choose four artists who play key roles in the formation of their collections. To showcase each selection, six separate domestic environments have been especially created by American interior designer and private furniture dealer Vance Trimble. They include an entrance hall, a study, a library, a bedroom, a sitting room and a dining room.

Every room is carefully furnished with specially chosen and rare mid-century design pieces, most from Scandinavia, including a rare unique Finn Juhl sideboard, wooden tables by Poul Kjaerholm, four-shade pendant lamps in amber glass by Poul Henningson, carpets by van da Silva Bruhns and Marion Dorn and works by female designers such as Grete Jalk and Eileen Gray. The wide range of established and emerging artists included suggest some of the idiosyncrasies of personal taste and the influence the artists themselves have played in the structure of these six collections.

‘Tasters’ Choice’ offers an insight into the private worlds of the tastemakers, whose influence can be seen in the evolution of museums and collections worldwide. Each of these collectors plays a different but instrumental role in the wider art context, as foundation directors, private benefactors, patrons and confidants. By participating in this exhibition, the ‘tasters’ share with us their depth of knowledge and contribute a highly intimate but personal curatorial vision.

Collectors:
Dimitris Daskalopoulos (Athens)
Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman (New York)
Agnes and Edward Lee (London)
Cindy and Howard Rachofsky (Dallas, Texas)
Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch (Sao Paulo)
Joel Wachs (New York)

Artists:
Franz Ackermann, James Lee Byars, Paul Chan, Savvas Christodoulides, Marcelo Cidade, Raoul de Keyser, Carroll Dunham, Tom Friedman, Ewan Gibbs, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jim Hodges, William Kentridge, Tetsumi Kudo, Andrew Lord, Agnes Martin, Katy Moran, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Ed Ruscha, Alan Saret, Mira Schendel, Rudolf Stingel, Christopher Williams and Steve Wolfe.

Stephen Friedman Gallery

Wayne Gonzales

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Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by American painter Wayne Gonzales.

Returning to the gallery for his second solo exhibition, Gonzales presents an innovative group of new paintings composed of both abstract and figurative work. Contemplative, evocative and mysterious, the work uses a rigorous formal structure to mine the processes of painting and perception. With this new body of work the artist draws parallels between the figurative and the abstract and suggests that the distinction may not be so fixed and rigid. Rather, the artist proposes two manifestations of the same reality, two parts of the same, larger whole.

Like Gonzales’s earlier crowd scenes, the figurative paintings are based on anonymous source photographs. However, the mood has now shifted; here, the crowds are thinner and the brushstrokes are looser and more urgent. The palette of earthy browns and the soft focus give the sense of peering through a cloud of dust or smoke. The works play with scale to great effect; from afar, an image crystallises and can be viewed as a whole. However, up close, the figures break down into painterly brushstrokes and small gestures.

The abstract works also engage with the idea of scale, albeit to different effect. Following a consistent and repeated structure, each painting is determined by a grid of white orbs surrounded by concentric bands that become darker in graduating tones of grey through to black. Appearing to hover inside the canvas, the bright white orbs float on the ground, almost glowing, or become more pronounced, the distinct rings crisp and clear, depending on viewing distance. The technique is mechanised and devoid of gesture. We are left with light and its absence.

Gonzales’s grid compositions are tightly structured, but the effect on the viewer’s eye is a highly fluid and evocative visual experience that differs from viewer to viewer. This effect calls to mind the blinding spotlights on a film set, threatening searchlights roaming the streets, or the sun’s after-image on the back of your eyelids. From up close the concentric striations may recall images of sound waves or topographical maps. A stark white glow can evoke the sense of a godly presence, or the moment before passing into the afterlife.

The work in the exhibition moves between two states, shifting from solid material being into a ghostly intangibility, and back again. In fact, it relies on the viewer to initiate this movement and to imbue it with meaning. Refuting any tangible reading, the artist asks us to interpret our own response to these mute but highly charged images.

Wayne Gonzales (b. 1957, New Orleans) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include: Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2009); Seomi Gallery, Seoul (2008) and Patrick de Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2008). Recent group exhibitions include: Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, curated by Bob Nickas, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2009); Reflections, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (2008); Say Goodbye to…, The Clifford Gallery at Colgate University, Hamilton NY (2009); Empires and Environments, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham MA (2008).

Stephen Friedman Gallery

Cornelius Quabeck

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Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present ‘Short Straw’, a body of new work by German painter, Cornelius Quabeck.  This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Quabeck combines process-led, intuitive painting with figurative compositions.  His previous works have portrayed rock stars and fictional characters in energetic portraits that relay the artist’s painterly skill.  In this vibrant new body of work Quabeck shifts the focus of his attention to the natural world, partly inspired by a recent residency in Marin County, California.

Neither abstract nor wholly figurative in style, these works combine explosive tonal planes with fractured depictions of flora and fauna. Overlapping layers of paint bleed into one another and saturate the surface of the canvas.  A kaleidoscopic fusion of colour and tone ensues.  From the depths of this chaotic mixture of turquoise blues and ocean-like greens, reds and yellows, the faint markings of tangible forms appear.  Fragmented brush strokes suggest the outline of a fruit tree, the impression of a paintbrush, or the hint of a wild beast.

These fractured forms resonate in the foreground of the paintings.  Beneath them remain the faint traces of older marks that have since been worked over.  This process reveals a palimpsest; the foreground, background and layers in between manifest themselves simultaneously.  Readily discernible in certain works is the motif of a Dodo’s head.  Rising out of the paintings’ colourful midst, the portrait of this emblematic bird interrupts the figure-ground relationship, where extinction and reinvention coalesce.

Cornelius Quabeck (b. 1974, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany and has exhibited widely in Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include: C Monster, Taro Nasu, Tokyo (2009); Workout!, Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2008); Capital C, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin (2008) and Critical Mess, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2008). Recent group shows include: Malen ist Wahlen 1981-2009, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin (2009); Any kind of cruelty, Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2009) and Self Portraits, James Fuentes, New York (2008).

Stephen Friedman Gallery