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RATIO 3, San Francisco

Geof Oppenheimer
Anthems (still), 2011
HD Video, 4 minutes, 42 seconds
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco
 
 
GEOF OPPENHEIMER
Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house
 
October 28th - December 10th, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, October 28th, 2011, 6-8pm
 
Ratio 3 is pleased to present Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house, a solo show of new work by Geof Oppenheimer, October 28th to December 10th, 2011.
 
Working with diverse media, Oppenheimer takes the formal manifestation of civic value as his subject, interrogating the ways in which political and social structures are encoded in images and objects. It is a practice situated at the intersection of art and politics, but in such a way that neither art nor politics is reducible to the other term.
 
Included in this exhibit is a new suite of sculptures, collectively titled Modern Ensembles. Working with a pyro-technician formally with the Disney Corporation, Oppenheimer developed a series of custom made charges of various explosive chemicals that where detonated within the voids of ballistic Plexiglas cubes. Having been set off, the detonations leave a residue of the explosion within each cube. It is an aesthetic of violence — a violent history but one that is unmoored from context to become free-floating signifier. This disconnect between violence and context renders the experience of violence abstract as it is freed from politics and morality. With a seductive beauty, these sculptures conflate the traditional ideologies of minimalist sculpture with notions of the corporeal pull of violence that pervades our contemporary world.
 
A suite of five pigment prints titled Social Failure and Black Signs will be on view as part of the exhibition as well. This project was a culmination of a yearlong research project undertaken at the Special Collections Research Center center at the University of Chicago into the history of twentieth century political interviews. The prints feature excerpts from interviews with political luminaries such as Castro, McNamara, and Reagan, where they discuss the failures in their own ideological systems. The resulting texts, removed from context and held aloft by a hand model become a kind of broadcast as well as poetry of fallibility.
 
Also on exhibit is a high definition video, titled Anthems . This four minute and forty-two second video is an investigation into social mapping and pattern-making. For centuries, the pageantry of military spectacle has been an umbrella for people to come together under one body politic. The drum core is a holdover from this cultural history. In the video, a confrontational situation, both visually and sonically, is set up between groupings of musicians marching in formation on screen. Shifting formation, and with superimposed images, the marchers are simultaneously playing four different national anthems. The audio tracks of the performance are highly edited and mixed so that the sounds of the individual anthems are lost in a wall of sound. Over the course for the video the sound and imagery build to a crescendo of incomprehension and then fades out to pure abstract blur that is devoid of any kind of representational mark. It is a violent imposition of different social structures upon one another. Produced with the drum and marching core of Rickover Naval Academy in Chicago, Illinois, Anthems was commissioned by SITE, Santa Fe for the exhibition Agitated Histories.
 
Geof Oppenheimer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1973. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1996) and his MFA from University of California, Berkeley (2001). He has exhibited at The Project, New York (2006 and 2008), Aspen Art Museum (2010), LAX><ART (2009), PS1 Contemporary Arts Center (2006), The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2011), and SITE Santa Fe (2011). He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. This is his first solo exhibition at Ratio 3.
 
 
RATIO 3
1447 Stevenson Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
T: +1 4158213371
 
RATIO 3
 
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MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS, New York

Freddy Chandra
Guise, 2011
Acrylic and resin on cast acrylic
11 x 36 "
Courtesy of Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York
 
 
FREDDY CHANDRA
Synthetic Resonance
 
October 27—December 17, 2011
Reception: Thursday, October 27, 6-8 pm
 
Constructed of luminously painted bars of cast acrylic, Freddy Chandra’s work invites the viewer into a seamlessly crafted sensational experience.  Working within the confines of a logical structure, color is drawn across the surface of the bars in such a way as to create an illusion of depth and an inner light that lend the pieces a lyrical flow. Though static, the pieces imply movement as the colors vibrate off one another, and the bars engage with the negative space of the wall that drifts between them. External space punctuates and disrupts the internal space of the work, and a rhythm is formed as presence relates to absence. This combination of structured form and fluid gesture raises the question: is one viewing an image, or an object?
 
Chandra, whose background in architecture strongly informs his work, views his process as one that is brought to fruition through a unique method of drawing-based mark making, rather than painting.  In a recent interview with Brent Hallard for Visual Discrepancies, the artist states, “Although my current work is usually referred to as paintings, I often feel they are more about drawing. Yes, they are obviously painted. Yes, my use of color recalls that of color field painting. But the work comes together through the physical process of drawing: pulling a mark across space. In this case, I am making a distinction between making a mark in painting, and making a mark in drawing. I think that mark making in drawing is about marking space, and marking time. The clarity of the structure itself and the rhythm it creates are important in relation to the resulting experiential quality.”
 
Though the work possesses a seemingly manufactured quality that recalls the streamlined forms of Judd or Flavin, it has an inherent painterliness to it that separates itself from the ranks of the industrial-cast forms. “I want to make something that does not look like it’s been made,” the artist explains.  Furthering the distance from industrial form, Chandra created a series of vertical works for this exhibition that reflect on the human figure in size and scale.
 
Freddy Chandra studied Architecture and Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, and obtained his M.F.A in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland where he is currently an adjunct faculty member. He is a recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and has been awarded various residencies and fellowships throughout the United States. He regularly exhibits work in the US, Canada, Germany and Italy. As a recent addition to Thatcher Projects’ program, this is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
 
Margaret Thatcher Projects is located in 539 West 23rd Street, ground floor (between 10th and 11th Avenues).  Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm.

 
MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS
539 W. 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212 675 0222
E: info @ thatcherprojects.com
 
MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS
 
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GALERIE CHRISTIAN LETHERT, Cologne

Jill Baroff
Southern Cross, 2011
Paint on Wood
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne
 
 
JILL BAROFF: Chameleon
 
05.11.2011 – 14.01.2012
 
Central to Jill Baroff’s artistic activity is the ever-changing nature of perception and our place within the world. Using the trinity of circumstance composed of the work, the viewer, and the environment, Baroff suggests possibilities and locations for us in the larger world.
 
The exhibition, Chameleon, begins with a monochrome floor work, Southern Cross, which occupies the front room of the gallery and explores the transitory nature of color and light. Like a clock in constant motion, the sculpture’s hues are perceived as shifting and changing color with each step of the viewer and the movement of the sun in the sky. Begun in 1996, this body of work was originally inspired by the changing appearance of the Japanese tatami floor in the traditional home Baroff was living in at the time. This will be the sixth project of this type that Baroff has completed in the past fifteen years. Unlike previous projects, which were, for the most part, constructed from corrugated cardboard, Southern Cross is the first in which the material is wood. Based on the star constellation of the same name, the floor work uses wooden discs of differing diameters and precisely cut corrugation to channel light from varying directions to produce a monochrome blue work that explodes with infinite hues of blue. The work takes advantage of the low autumnal light that enters the large plate glass window at the front of the gallery and is part of an ongoing project based on the constellations of the southern hemisphere.
 
In the second room of the gallery, a full wall of Floating Line Drawings confronts the viewer. The point of departure for these playful drawings is always one and the same, but, like the surprising variations of color discovered in the monochrome work, ends with an infinite number of results. Each drawing begins with the same premise: the edge of the paper is marked with a red oil pastel or graphite colored border and then is cut free and allowed to form line drawings in the space of the remaining field of the sheet of paper. The outcome is simple, lyrical forms determined by a line’s width, load of material and chance, resulting in surprisingly specific archetypes and structural epiphanies.
 
In addition to these drawings, the exhibition features a new series: Rotational Drawings. Referencing the motion of planetary revolutions, an arc is cut through a pre-drawn image and then the sheet of paper is rotated to form a new image.
 
We are also happy to pronounce our participation in this year’s NADA Miami from December 1st to 4th.
 
 
GALERIE CHRISTIAN LETHERT
Antwerpener Straße 4
50672 Cologne
Germany
T: +49 (0)221 35 60 590
 
GALERIE CHRISTIAN LETHERT
 
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WHITE FLAG PROJECTS, St Louis

Charlotte Posenenske
Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes) (Series D), 1967
Sheet steel, folded stereometric hollow volumes, dimensions variable
Image courtesy of Dr. Burkhard Brunn and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York 
 
 
DAY OF THE LOCUST
 
November 3 – December 10, 2011
Opening reception Thursday, November 3, 6-8 PM.
 
Katherine Bernhardt
Rochelle Feinstein
Jonathan Horowitz
Lee Lozano
Jon Pestoni
Charlotte Posenenske
Mamie Tinkler
 
Curated by Jessica Baran
 
"Day of the Locust" is a group exhibition exploring the notion of failed idealism. From the promise of major 20th Century art-formalist strategies (Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism) as historic and qualitative gate-keepers to the hope invested in artists to be uncommodifiable visionaries and agents of social change, our culture propagandizes certain idealistic myths as fervently as it reinforces their impossibility.
 
Democratic choice, for instance, is most saliently manifest in product diversity; every consumer has a right to Coke and Pepsi. The American Dream is a plot endorsed globally as the ultimate fantasy; its story is a hallucinatory road trip to celebrity, wealth and power. Exceptional citizens must be at once mavericks and conformists. Shades of political activism -- be it vegetarianism or environmentalism -- are stigmatized as soft, extremist or bludgeoning, while political apathy is chastised as unpatriotic. Rules beset even the anarchist. Affluence and eminence are celebrated but also immoral. Education is both a righteous necessity and a form of unwholesome elitism.
 
Navigating this bizarre climate of contradictions requires a certain resignation to failure, as failure is both inevitable and a productive antidote to being anything in particular. Failure can also be absurd and beautiful. Beginning with mid-Century artists Charlotte Posenenske and Lee Lozano, who both willfully resigned from the art world at the very moment that they were hailed as being at the vanguard of their respective movements, "Day of the Locust" drafts a brief contemporary narrative of the endorsement and critique of radical ideological investment.

 
WHITE FLAG PROJECTS
4568 Manchester Ave
St Louis, MO 63110
T: 314 531-3442
 
WHITE FLAG PROJECTS
 
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BOUROUINA GALLERY, Berlin

Jakob Kolding
When was the future, 2011
Collage on paper
40.5 x 28.6 cm
Courtesy of Bourouina Gallery, Berlin
 
 
SYNECDOCHE
 
(sɪn’εkdəkɪ) -n. a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for a whole or a whole for a part
 
Opening: 28 October 2011, 6 - 9 p.m.
Exhibition: 29 October - 22 December 2011
 
with: Tim Berresheim, Madeleine Boschan, Laura Bruce, Frauke Dannert, Peter Dobroschke, Mathew Hale = Alexander Voice, Eva Eun-Sil Han, Lothar Hempel, Jonathan Hernandez, Matthias Hesselbacher, Jakob Kolding, Zenita Komad, Hank Schmidt in der Beek, John Sparagana, Jacob Whibley.
 
Bourouina Gallery is pleased to present Synecdoche, a group show curated by Johannes Sperling.
The collage is one of the art forms most perfectly suited towards reflecting the present times: In an era where boundaries blur and the whole world is zapping, compiling and remixing it is not about deciding for one thing, but assembling from an endless pool of possibilities.
 
Synecdoche examines the question of what collage can constitute in 2011 and counterposes to the mediums most common present variations that are well-distributed by the persistence of a „retro-wave”. Beyond that, the exhibition is a search for the true heirs to the intellectual heritage of the pioneers of collage. Instead of a concrete definition this exhibition offers different approaches. Here the notion of collage is understood more as a basic practise and conceptual principle rather than any rigid or specific technique.
 
At times the attempt at overcoming the limitations posed by the pre-existence of appropriated material results in a broadening of the fundamental principles underlying the medium of collage, but it also gives rise to the combination of found material with newly created imagery. In some works, the big question concerning the sense and purpose of creating entirely new images before the backdrop of the aforementioned flood arises. But when some of the artists use historical imagery they are not interested in any comfortable journey through the past but much more in the impossibility of undertaking suchlike. The artists decide whether the focus of a given piece ought to be dedicated toward the common denominators or rather the differences between the individual components - whereby these elements can be homogeneously interlaced, or might be made to repel one another altogether.
 
The compositions created often play with our natural tendencies toward wanting to define or locate all that we perceive of within an ordered system. In so doing, they allow us to conceive of what is already known to us in new ways. The exhibited works thus upset the perceptual systems of their beholders, forcing them to engage themselves with their environments and rethink established notions.
 
The artists in Synecdoche are unified by their examination on the complex interplay - the notion to which the exhibition owes its title - between the individual elements with the larger whole which they comprise. In their works, the concept of collage is further developed, advanced, scrutinized, and expanded; new forms of expression are investigated. Consistently the artists refrain from limiting themselves to working with paper, the working material more classically associated with collage, so that the exhibition is also comprised of painting, sculpture, photography, installation and slide projection.
 
As the artists have not been presented yet in this constellation, Synecdoche itself constitutes an entirely new whole, which promises to engender hidden and magical revelations. Indeed, it is more than likely to make the yet unseen become visible.

 
BOUROUINA GALLERY
Charlottenstr.1-2
10969 Berlin
T: +49 (0)30 755 12 477
 
BOUROUINA GALLERY
 
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THREEWALLS, Chicago

Image: From the series "Weekend Houses" by Miklós Surányi
 
 
VOICES FROM THE CENTER
 
A multiform project and group exhibition, produced by Janeil Engelstad
 
Artists include Grafixpol, Oto Hudec, Magda Stanová, Miklós Surányi, Matej Vakula, and Tehnica Schweiz.
 
October 28-December 10th, 2011
 
Through the multiform project, Voices From the Center, an interactive web platform and group exhibition, Central Europeans reflect on their lives before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sharing these stories through the lens of social documentary and art, producer Janeil Engelstand has brought together emerging artists from across Central Europe to create a portrait of a people emerging from one political and cultural era into another.
 
Voices from the Center grew out of a series of conversations that Janeil Engelstad had with people, while living in Central Europe, about the post-Communist era. Interviewing former dissidents, writers, artists, politicians, teachers, young adults and villagers, her subjects talked about what freedom meant to them and expressed their dreams, fears and hopes for themselves, their country and the world. Working in dialogue with the other artists included here, Engelstad uses this work as the foundation for an installation that includes a timeline, portraits of the participants, and other images and fragments that are woven throughout the rest of the exhibition.
 
Polish design team Grafixpol created a poster portraying the illusions that people had during communism through the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, including excerpts from Engelstad's research. Artist Oto Hudec is reconstructing a life-size Skoda, referencing his grandfather's Skoda 100 MB model as a lens to examine the quality of life for a middle class family during socialism in Czechoslovakia. Prague based artist, Magda Stanová's site-specific, large-scale wall drawings provide insight into various socialist themes by dissecting language, official documents, newspapers and the nuances of humor from the communist era. Miklós Surányi’s portraits of Hungary’s iconic family, weekend houses, constructed from trash and post-industral materials and abandonded equipment at deserted construction sites, coupled with his interview with Engelstad, examine the confluence of history, time, place and the often failed promises of capitalism. Technica Schweiz (Gergely László and Péter Rákosi) project photographs of both the real and the imagined garage interiors side-by-side, referencing the Socialist era “garage-street” – which today are mostly meeting places for men or an escape family life or a scene of alternative youth culture. Reflecting on the use of public places to gather, commune and protest during communism and most recently in the Middle East and on Wall Street, Slovak artist Matej Vakula‘s audio installation incorporates interviews with people across the United States and Central Europe. The piece's basic, bare speakers echo the quality of broadcast sound and sound systems prevalent throughout the Eastern Bloc during communism.

 
THREEWALLS
119 North Peoria #2D
Chicago, IL 60607
T: +1 312.432.3972
 
THREEWALLS
 
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GALERIE JEANNE-BUCHER / JAEGER BUCHER, Paris

Yang Jiechang
Tale of the 11th Day, Mid-Autumn, 2011
Ink and mineral colours on silk, mounted on paper and canvas
104,33 x 111,81 in
Photo David Bordes
Courtesy of Galerie Jaeger Bucher Paris
 
 
YANG JIECHANG
Tale of the 11th day
 
13 October - 26 November 2011
GALERIE JEANNE-BUCHER LEFT BANK
 
Opening Thursday 20th October 2011 from 6 - 10pm
20 October - 30 December 2011
GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER RIGHT BANK
 
Following Yang Jiechang’s solo exhibition “On Ascension” at the gallery in 2008, we are pleased to present this coming autumn a two-part exhibition by the artist entitled “Tale of the 11th day” in our two Paris spaces, left bank and right bank.
 
The Galerie Jeanne-Bucher will present a selection of exceptional paintings from the 1990s including the 100 Layers of Ink series. This internationally acknowledged series, exhibited for the first time in the exhibition «Les Magiciens de la Terre» at the Pompidou Centre in 1989, was followed by a creative period in which his interest switched from contemplation to intervention and participation. Yang Jiechang endeavoured to question both social and political events of today’s societies, as well as those of his own life as a Eurasian artist constantly working between Europe and Asia.
 
Entitled Stranger than Paradise and Tale of the 11th Day, the latest series of works to be shown at the gallery Jaeger Bucher, furthers the artist exploration and questioning of our global world, calling into question the notions of control and instability that rule our collective systems of life. Basing his thinking on the idea that, in a media-dominated world where life has become unreal and fictional, authenticity has become a rare commodity, Yang Jiechang imagines “a landscape for a return to Nature” that he locates in Paradise.
 
By calling the exhibition «Tale of the 11th Day», Yang Jiechang deliberately extends the 10th day of Boccaccio’s Decameron with his paradise landscape. Here, people and animals frolic quite freely, reminding us that on the one hand humans may well be animals that have evolved, but that today they have become unnatural. Myths and legends, ancient narratives, the history of art, religion and customs and popular beliefs all relate stories of animals that have been a part of human history, accompanying our development.
 
The presentation of the two-part exhibition shows Yang Jiechang’s ability to alternately summon forth self-sublimation or active participation through works that are both traditional and yet completely of their time from the point of view of composition and the ideas they convey. By imagining a 10th Day for Boccaccio’s Decameron, Yang Jiechang has fundamentally gone back to the great Confucian scholars who thought their own ideals more important than any political system. He immerses us in a Paradise where all nature’s creations seem to live together in peace.
 
Yang Jiechang was exhibited in the Art Center in Rennes La Criée, and is currently exhibited at Palazzo Grassi - François Pinault's Foundation - in Venice in an exhibition curated by Caroline Bourgeois entitled "Le Monde vous appartient (The world belongs to you)" (through 31.12.2011)

 
 
ART FAIR - FIAC 2011
BOOTH O.D24, Grand Palais, Paris
 
Artists exhibited : Fermin Aguayo - Bissière - Jean Dubuffet - Zarina Hashmi - Henri Laurens - André Masson - Serge Poliakoff - Hans Reichel - Susumu Shingu - Nicolas de Staël - Mark Tobey - Fabienne Verdier - Vieira da Silva - Paul Wallach - Yang Jiechang.
 
From 19 to 23 October 2011, the gallery is pleased to present an exhibition at the FIAC entitled ESPACE LUMIERE (THE SPACE LIGHT) showing a collection of outstanding works by modern artists represented by the gallery. These works are of fundamental importance in the "oeuvre" of each artist besides being rare in the art market. Besides these historical works, we are presenting some of the latest creations of our contemporary artists and showing movies in the creation in the auditorium of the Grand Palais. 
 
 
GALERIE JEANNE-BUCHER
53 rue de Seine
75006 Paris France
T + 33 (0)1 44 41 69 65
E jeannebucher @ wanadoo.fr
 
GALERIE JEANNE-BUCHER
 
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GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
5 & 7  rue de Saintonge
75003 Paris France
T + 33 (0)1 42 72 60 42
E contact @ galeriejaegerbucher.com
 
GALERIE JAEGER BUCHER
 
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LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles

Mara De Luca
Odette, 2010
acrylic and collage on canvas
62 x 96 in | 157,4 x 243,8 cm
Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
 
 
MARA DE LUCA
saltus fidei | Leap of Faith
 
22 October 22 – 26 November 2011
Artist’s reception: Saturday, October 22nd, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m
 
LUIS DE JESUS is very pleased to announce MARA DE LUCA: saltus fidei | Leap of Faith, the artist’s debut solo exhibition at the Gallery, presented at our new location, 2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA.
 
Titled the Sipario series (Italian for theatrical curtain or scrim), Mara De Luca’s exciting new paintings are a reflection on a contemporary sublime that is profound in its absolute superficiality and theatricality.  The Sipario paintings are inspired by the aesthetic and emotional experience of daily life in Los Angeles, a city of visual contrasts and contradictions: stunning natural beauty coexisting in a cultural climate of facile content, saturated digital aesthetics and air-brushed, synthetic effects.  The works address the existential through a romanticized and hyper-analog translation of digital media and contemporary imaging tropes particular to mass media and visual culture.
 
In the Sipario paintings, constructed landscape and atmospheric imagery present a mirroring of process and content - their exaggerated artifice reveals and disguises the processes by which they have been made, and a relationship between picture and craft is evident.  Ranging in color from bright, glowing artificial to a natural and grayscale palette, the picture planes are vast and vacuous, evoking the emotional emptiness of unflinchingly optimistic, success-oriented Hollywood values and self-improvement ideology.  Iconographic elements - appearing as recurring texts, rainbows, moon and stars - point to themes of faith, hope and desire.  Visual “faith”, or suspension of disbelief, is required of the viewer throughout and is a thematic thread connecting the diverse works.
 
Paintings such as Albertine and Odette are generated through paint pours onto unprimed canvas; the poured image is then overlaid with a ready-made fade - a two-tone semi-transparent fabric. This innovative technique mimics the digital “pour” and “gradient” editing features common to Photoshop, yet achieves a dramatically low-resolution and analog effect, calling to mind an enlarged or “actual-size” print out of skies and clouds.  Other monochrome works such as Dusk Clouds and B/W Gradient are the result of an entirely different technical approach: a hand-generated gradient achieved through repeated layering of thin acrylic washes.
 
The resulting effect is one of seamless perfection evoking the digital fade backgrounds prevalent in mainstream media advertising (internet, cell phone and billboard graphics) or the subtle and vast gradient of a Los Angeles sunset.  The paintings make a direct reference to California Light and Space, sharing concerns of subtle light plays, monochromatic surfaces and atmospheric effects.  De Luca paradoxically cross-breeds this influence with a more conceptually-driven Modernist approach: ruptured pictorial illusionism by way of heightened technical processes (pours, stains, sprays, and collage), resulting in a critically self-referential picture plane.
 
Mara De Luca is a Los Angeles-based artist.  She received a BA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 1995 and her MFA from CalArts in 2004.  De Luca’s work is a reflection on contemporary mass media expressed though the diverse pictorial, conceptual and technical conventions of abstract and representational painting.  Recent exhibitions have included CERCA Series: Mara De Luca, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in March 2010.  Her work has also been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe at venues including Galerie Chromosome, Berlin; AbstruseSpace, London; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), among others.  From 1998 to 2003, she lived and worked in Berlin, Germany.  De Luca has received critical press in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Time Out London and Tip Berlin, and she was recently the recipient of a Durfee Foundation Artist’s Grant.

 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310-838-6000
E: gallery @ luisdejesus.com
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
 
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TACHE GALLERY, New York

Andrew Salgado
The Patience, 2011
oil on canvas
80 x 36 in
© the artist
 
 
ANDREW SALGADO
ANXIOUS
 
13 October to 18 November 2011
 
ANXIOUS, Andrew Salgado's first solo exhibition in New York City, sees the artist drawing upon historic masculine portraiture handled with an experimental, painterly sensibility, suggesting themes of displaced identity and an overriding technical love for the medium. Salgado’s paintings are an exploration of the concept of masculine identity through an assertive, gestural approach to figurative representation. The works reference Classical archetypes found in figurative masculine portraiture, while prioritizing a disregard for what Salgado views as the 'parameters' of figurative painting; Salgado himself recounts artists as diverse as Caravaggio, Veronese, Bjarne Melgaard, Francis Bacon, and Daniel Richter as influences. As a result, the works resonate with a frenetic, nearly schizophrenic energy, suggesting both a serene recollection of memory and convalescence (a number of the works feature mouthless boys, perhaps suggesting Salgado's victimization in a 2008 hate-crime assault in which he lost his teeth,) but move beyond mere solipsism in favor of metaphor, narrative and aggressive, abstract brushwork. ANXIOUS is a collection of nearly one-dozen, never before exhibited works (all from 2011) featuring portraits that loom from the canvas with a sensuous, aggressive painterliness and politically-charged narrative.
 
Conceptually, Salgado’s practice (re)considers the tangibility and impermanence of the body, but also inwardly comments upon the fragility of self. Accordingly, Salgado typically exploits the purely physical properties of media to inform resonating themes within his work. In an effort to surpass a literal (re)presentation of his subject-matter, he prioritizes a visceral, topographic painting surface and at times, a use of paint that calls attention to - and celebrates - its sheer materiality. The work asks for consideration of an evolving language of figuration and abstraction, calling attention to what is visible and what is suggested: pulling the viewer from the sutures of representation, and drawing attention to the painterly versus the metaphorical.
 
ANXIOUS runs October 13 - November 18 at Tache Gallery NYC. Reception October 13, 6-9pm with artist in attendance.
 
ANDREW SALGADO (b. 1982, Canada) lives and works in London, UK. He holds an MFA from London’s Chelsea College of Art (2009) and has exhibited in London, Berlin, Oslo, Vancouver, Toronto, Venezuela, and Niamey (Niger). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include The Misanthrope, Beers.Lambert Contemporary, London, UK, (2012); New Paintings, Dosi Gallery, Busan, Korea (2012); Black Paintings, MellerMerceux, Oxford, UK; and The Acquaintance, Art Gallery of Regina, Regina, Canada (2012). Previous solo exhibitions include Paint Your Black Heart Red, Galerei Atopia, Oslo, Norway (2010); and Boys Night Out, Interurban Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2008). Noteworthy group exhibitions include Transgression, Beers.Lambert Contemporary Art, London, UK (2011); Golden, La Petit Mort Gallery, Ottawa, Canada (2011); Art For Life [featured artist], Vancouver, Canada (2011); the 2010 Merida Venezuela Biennale; and the Courtauld Institute Academy Hang IX along Gary Hume and Tracy Emin (2010-11), London, UK. He was awarded Courvoisier’s Future 500 (2010), shortlisted for Art of Giving at London’s Saatchi Gallery (2010), and will be featured in the forthcoming Channel 4 (UK) documentary The Science of Art alongside Anish Kapoor and Bridget Riley (2011).

 
TACHE GALLERY
547 W 27 Street No.602
New York, NY 10001
T: +1 347 453 7903
 
TACHE GALLERY
 
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GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH, Berlin

Lea Asja Pagenkemper
The Magican, 2011
Oil, Spray on Canvas
200 x 170 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin
 
 
LEA ASJA PAGENKEMPER
The Lover and The Magican
 
29 October - 30 November 2011
Opening: 28 October, 2011, 6-10pm
 
“Extreme licence wedded with a joking mood is accompanied by a refusal to take the underlying truth of eroticism seriously: by seriously I mean tragically.” (Georges Bataille)
 
The exhibition “The Lover and the Magician” presents the latest works by Baselitz master student L. A. Pagenkemper. Her paintings focus on symbolically charged landscapes which, beyond any realistic illusionism, are committed to moments that lyrically render the atmosphere.
 
Pagenkemper’s paintings surprise viewers through the emphasis placed on the fleeting quality of the transparent colors and through the shadowless trees, animals and figures that look as if they want to flee the stagnation or dangerously close collapse of an established social order that is still in place. The new compositions are particularly harmonious since they are designed around a central subject. For example, the focus is on a tree, a magician, a pair of lovers, a cottage. These forms successively emerge from the network of large curved lines and areas of color that are hardly differentiated from one another, that seem to endlessly merge into one another. A way of painting that is related to surrealism’s “écriture automatique,” Pagenkemper’s painting often presents disrupted, reduced passages, which, having emerged from the spontaneity of the act of painting, appear like gestures on the canvas. The immediate and purist approach to form and color gives the images their open and associative structures: on the one hand, figurative forms symbiotically bond in the abundance of organic forms in the whole image and, on the other hand, these forms preserve their corporeal presence through the autonomous quality of the painting style and color in the image.
 
The artist places iconic elements from daily life in utopian landscapes. This is done to symbolically present human situations of love and Eros, magic and disillusion, excess and decay. In addition to these references to the painting of a Munch or Gauguin, Pagenkemper’s simplified and original manner of representation discloses a quest for expression and feeling that resists the deceptive illusionism of (media) reality, to ultimately put forth a different option, that of a changed subjectivity.
 
Similar trends can currently be found in the music, literature and theater scenes: Staging emotional transgressions or incidents where everyday feelings like love, hate and despair are hurt is a way to ensure that a situation will be dynamic, that it will provoke feelings of irritation for the recipient.
 
Through the simplified methods of painting she employs, Pagenkemper’s inner intention seems to be to want to leave the space of the painting, to offer a true art of the gesture. In the style of Georges Bataille, the artist stages the motifs of love and fear in terms of an aesthetic that transgresses notions of form and boundary and in place of the nothingness of the possibilities in the media age, she puts forth an aesthetic of an overextended self. It is precisely in the tense area of prohibitions and their transgression that the rebellious dissolution of the ego and the experience of being beside oneself is made possible, on “that path that leads to the transforming of a prohibition’s principle, of necessary and mandatory decencies, into uncomprehending hypocrisy, into a lack of understanding for what is at stake.”

 
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
Strausberger Platz 4
D- 10243 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 (0)-30- 613 03 887
 
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
 
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