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LUBOMIROV-EASTON, London

Perienne Christian
Siberia Irrational Representation III, 2011
Chine-collé etching
54 x 64 cm
Courtesy of the artist and LUBOMIROV-EASTON, London
 
 
PERIENNE CHRISTIAN
Running With Wolves
Work that speaks to our stories, dreams and desires
 
30 November to 22 December
Private View: Friday 30 November, 6-9.30pm
 
In her solo exhibition with Lubomirov-Easton, Perienne Christian layers images with archetypal myth, she maps eclectic territories and depicts natural landscapes bearing the marks of personal history and family heritage. Translating modes of representation -observational sketches, found photography, Victorian maps, press cuttings - into the levelling media of pencil, paint, or intaglio etching, she holds open spaces for contemplation. Christian’s psychogeography resonates with Blaise Pascal’s view of nature, as “an infinite space whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” This is, equally, an apt description of a draughtsman’s world, in which hand and eye coordinate through deft line, sensing and recording depths of meaning in the angle, proportion, and tone of each branch and crag, figure and creature. As the conventional configuration of space and form is turned inside-out in images such as Crescent Moon Bear (2012) and Siberia Irrational Representation (2012), we are given permission to pause at each element - rich with a quavering touch - that speaks to our own stories, dreams and desires.
 
These intimate images are also the subject of Phantasmagoria, an ambitious work-in-progress, so far comprising eighty new drawings on paper depicting other people’s dreams. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described the unconscious as a “theatre within,” a stage on which the characters of our inner world perform. In Christian’s universe, these characters, emblems, and motifs are certainly diverse, and rely upon multiple layers of interpretation, from the participant’s take on the question of “dreams” to the artist’s translation of their words into images. Arranged in a grid format, the 8x10cm drawings display pictorial slippage across a collective fantasy space: wolves and dogs surround submissive humans in several sketches; still water and waves fill others.
 
Though many of Christian’s dreamers reported nightmares to her, not joyful wishes, her work wraps even these terrors in a sincere beauty that promises more than mere comfort.
 
Curated by Bella Easton and Iavor Lubomirov.
 
Text by Becky Hunter. Becky Hunter writes for Artforum and is a contributing editor of Art Papers.
 
 
LUBOMIROV-EASTON
50 Resolution Way
London SE8 4AL
T: +44(0)7931747049
E: info @ lubomirov-easton.com
Open: Wednesday to Saturday, 12-6pm
 
LUBOMIROV-EASTON
 
PERIENNE CHRISTIAN
 
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GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH, Berlin

Paule Hammer
Nicole 2, 2012
123 x 180 cm
Acryl auf Karton
Courtesy of Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin
 
 
PAULE HAMMER
INTERVIEW MAGAZIN 2
 
30 November 2012 - 12 January 2013
 
"The Other is a relief, as I am, not absolutely vertical existence.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible [1]
 
The Jette Rudolph gallery is very pleased to present Paule Hammer’s second solo show at its gallery in Berlin. Part 1 of Paule Hammer’s “Interview Magazine” was shown at the Leipzig gallery, “Laden für Nichts,” and the Berlin exhibition picks up where it left off. Once again, the focus is on a series of interview pictures that the artist created by inviting old and new friends and acquaintances to his atelier to sit for a portrait and discussion session.
The artist’s own dreams as well as larger world-encyclopedia-like issues on the problems facing humanity had previously provided the starting material for Hammer’s motif-and-text-filled pictures, which combined personal experiences with stories from friends and media information. But now, in the intimate atmosphere of a portrait session held in his own atelier, the artist opens himself more than ever before to his subjects’ personal dreams, experiences, desires or theories about the world and humanity in general – yet always within the context of a straightforward social situation that forms the basis for this close exchange.
Landscape painting, the still life and the portrait are just some of the traditional art history genres that intentionally underlie the artist’s works. But Hammer takes these genres, surpasses their limits, and creates an expanded reference field. So they are not limited to representing familiar local situations or individual human characteristics, but transgress the limits of their own forms: ”Surpassing forms does not mean … breaking away from forms, alienating oneself from their location. To validate the formless does not call for non-forms; instead, it is about agreeing to work with forms.”[2] Two factors are behind the specific dynamics in Hammer’s works: the elimination of the rules governing traditional representation and the use of different contexts.
 
On the image’s projection surface or, more specifically, on canvas or cardboard, Hammer employs various strategies to integrate the image and information in a complementary way or to juxtapose them as utopic parallel worlds. Hammer’s system is always characterized by the following: he fuses dichotomous areas to offer a complex look inside human beings.
So, in “Juliane 1,” the concept that is still relatively vague on developing a fictive male artist figure called “Alain d’Arc,” which the artist portrayed here and Hammer are in the process of discussing, is positioned like a text slide behind the profiles of the interview partners that are superimposed over it. By contrast, in “MIG,” an aerial view of a former East German military housing complex dominates in the foreground. The protagonist, “Nicole,” spent her childhood there. Her sad memories are presented in text that is superimposed over the image like a window: “... And there were never people on the street who were simply out on a walk... An alarm signal sounded at six. After that, it was always quiet.” Unlike his (sound) sculptures, in his paintings Paule Hammer takes advantage of the medium’s special nature and uses his paintings as an “intermediary” level to offer viewers a view of things, people and information “... that puts us into a relationship with others and the world and allows us to represent the self, even one’s own body.”[3]
In his paintings, all the material the artist has collected is transformed into abstract shapes and text designs that represent the distance between the self and the outside world. Hammer thereby presents the (self)-perception of the remembering subject (or his protagonist) as images of the self, which are based on specific structures that are not rooted in entities, but rather in dynamic patterns, in relationships between the human being and the world that are in constant motion.
 
But interrelationships not only emerge and become visible within the image. They extend from the image to the actual gallery space and are inextricable from the exhibition’s layout. The artist is especially known for his almost sensational use of background colors. By contrast, in “Nicole,” Hammer uses fine brush strokes for the lineature that extends far beyond the picture’s field and the protagonist’s network of relations. Powerful contouring is also used for various motifs or text sections and works to keep them from canceling each other out. Lastly, the artist provokes the transgressions that occur when the boundaries of the projection surface or rather of the canvas or paper are overstepped and branching “relationship arms” are painted directly on the wall to connect various paintings. Paule Hammer’s objective is not to give the exhibition a theoretical superstructure, but rather to create a context that is open to debate, in other words, to create an image where issues related to existence, appearance and meaning are open to interpretation.
 
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and the Invisible.
[2] Georges Didi-Huberman: La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille, Paris, Editions Macula, 1995.
[3] Please see Reinhold Görling: “Die Schreckensseite der Sichtbarkeit: Traumabilder” in Kunst.Bild.Wahrnehmung.Blick. Merleau-Ponty zum Hundertsten, edited by Antje Kapust and Bernhard Waldenfels, Munich, published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010, p. 118.
 
 
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
Strausberger Platz 4
D- 10243 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 (0)-30- 613 03 887
 
GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH
 
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CHAMBERS FINE ART, Beijing

Ye Nan
Distant Water
Canvas, phosphorous, fire, metal, acrylic
2012
90 1/2 x 74 3/4 in
Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art, New York | Beijing
 
 
YE NAN
Like Moths to a Flame
 
November 17 - December 28, 2012
 
Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on November 17 of Like Moths to a Flame: Recent Works by Ye Nan. This exhibition is a development of procedures first glimpsed in Phosphorous Red - Ye Nan's first exhibition at Chambers in 2010. In the past two years, Ye Nan has developed a more in-depth understanding and application of red phosphorous as a particular artistic medium. His bold and highly innovative thinking and experimentation show no signs of stopping, but are ever more active, accentuating the playful and conceptual aspects of the work.
 
The title of the exhibition Like Moths to a Flame comes from Ye Nan's musings on the phenomenon of moths flying into flames. In scientific theory, the phenomenon is a result of the insect's built-in celestial navigation. Moths rely on their inherent compound eye structure to determine their direction in relation to moonlight. However, when an artificial light source appears, moths misidentify the artificial light as moonlight and fly towards it. A nearby artificial light is of course no celestial moon. Instinctively trying to maintain a constant angle with the light source, a moth flies around the light in a spiral trajectory, circle after circle, until it dies of exhaustion; or it flies into the flame. From a scientific perspective, the act of moths flying into flames is purely instinctual; on the other hand, in a literary sense, there is deep pathos. Though it appears to be a rather stupid suicidal act, the moths' immolation perpetuates the species' phototropism, which could be just the meaning of living for moths.
 
In this exhibition, Ye Nan combines his creative process with the principle of moths flying into flames, as if to signify some sort of inner connection between his work or this exhibition and the spirit of moths. He covers the canvas surface with red phosphorous, turning the canvas into a large matchbox striker. He then strikes matches on the canvas like magical paintbrushes, creating light and energy in the dark. The energy leaves its traces on the canvas, forming an image within the painting frame. The whole process is akin to producing an artificial light that attracts moths to the image, constructing a scenario between the real and unreal. It is worth mentioning that human intervention did not ever cause moths to forgo their nature, in relation to Darwin’s theory of evolution. For the artist, none of these interpretations is important, what really matters is to embody the spirit of moths in the pivotal moment when trying to achieve the sublime, as flame turns into ashes.
 
In recent years Chambers Fine Art has been committed to discovering and nurturing the careers of exceptional young artists, Ye Nan being one of them. Ye Nan was born in Hangzhou in 1984. Since graduating from the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou in 2006, he has produced an impressive body of work that is highly idiosyncratic both technically and thematically. The current exhibition features Ye Nan's most recent paintings on canvas as well as his latest video. Employing a strategy of substitution, the video captures fireworks explosion, which serves as a metaphor for Ye Nan’s painting process in slow motion. Such metaphorical device not only enhances the work’s playfulness, but also heightens a sense of being in the scene for the viewers. Meanwhile, elements from Ye Nan’s paintings- phosphorous and fire are also found in fireworks. This isn’t a mere coincidence. By transplanting the final moment of fireworks explosion from reality to canvas, Ye Nan also introduces to the viewers another evanescent beauty in moths flying into flames.
 
 
CHAMBERS FINE ART
Red No.1-D, Caochangdi
Chaoyang District
100015 Beijing
China
T: + 86 (10) 5127 3298
 
CHAMBERS FINE ART
 
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CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY, Chicago

Joyce Pensato
Pineapple Bob
2012
enamel on linen
90" x 80"
Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
 
 
JOYCE PENSATO
YOU GOTTA DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO
 
26 October - 24 November, 2012
 
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do, its first exhibition of new works by Joyce Pensato.
 
Working largely in black and white, and often with signature images drawn from comics and popular culture, Pensato is an exuberant expressionist painter. A native Brooklynite, she has lived and worked in the borough for her entire career. Over the last ten years Pensato has slowly but surely garnered an international reputation for her darkly provocative and often poignant paintings.
 
In this exhibition Corbett vs. Dempsey will present a group of brand new paintings, including images of Groucho Marx and South Park Kenny, as well as a startling new batch of painting collages, a new facet of her oeuvre. These bold and explosive works often begin as splatters from her canvases, migrating onto other surfaces in her studio, which are grafted together into photographic assemblages featuring the likes of Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino. Additionally, specially concocted for Corbett vs. Dempsey, Pensato will install selected elements and splattered sculpture from her studio.
 
This exhibition comes on the heels of Pensato’s wildly successful show Batman Returns that opened at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York earlier this year, and anticipates her upcoming 2013 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, curated by Jeffrey Uslip.
 
 
CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY
1120 N. Ashland Ave. 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60622
T: +1 773-278-1664
 
CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY
 
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CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY, San Francisco

Chester Arnold
60 Years in the Forest, 2012
Oil on linen
71 ½ x 56 inches
Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
 
 
CHESTER ARNOLD
A Pilgrim's Progress
 
November 3 – December 22, 2012
 
Catharine Clark Gallery announces A Pilgrim's Progress, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chester Arnold.
 
For Chester Arnold’s 2012 solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, the artist presents new paintings rooted in imagery of the west - grand landscapes scarred by the work of miners, stratified and marked by history: geological and human. Metaphorical narratives and occasions for contemplating the duality of the human journey unfold on the painting’s panoramic stages. The binary sides of our emotional experiences, dark and light, are present in each work. The title of the exhibition, A Pilgrim’s Progress, references a Christian allegory written by John Bunyan and published in 1678, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature. The paintings in the exhibit convey the artist’s personal journey through what he calls “the disorganized religion of art.” “As the secular madman that I am, there is a constant, inescapable commentary staring back at me from the Judeo-Christian pollution in my early life. I love the stories, but deplore the dogma.” Arnold’s painted imagery also grapples with transitions and the passage of time (perhaps his own aging) through depictions of elderly men, skeletons, and the heavily chiseled chasms in the earth. Arnold’s tenebrous mood in the paintings is tempered by passages that are also humorous and light, providing visual reprieve and a bit of optimism in the ponderous, larger narratives.
 
American by birth, but raised in post-war Germany during the formative years of his childhood, Chester Arnold is interested in the capacity of painting to convey the complexities of the human psyche. His compositions often present skewed linear perspectives that place the viewer at a remove, above and beyond an unfolding narrative. The romantic natural landscape in Arnold’s paintings, in part informed by the work of 19 th century German painter Caspar David Friedrich and classic literature, is littered and marred with the abject accumulation of modern cultural detritus. Arnold’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, On Earth as it is in Heaven (2010), and was accompanied by a monograph. Next year, Arnold’s paintings on the subject of accumulation and dispersal will be featured in a solo exhibition at American University’s Katzen Art Center, Washington DC. In 2008, Arnold’s work was included in the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibition which highlighted recipients of the 2005 Eureka Fellowship. Donald Kuspit selected Arnold’s work for New Old Masters at the National Museum in Gdañ sk, Poland in 2006, accompanied by a major catalogue. In 2001, an extensive solo exhibition of Arnold’s paintings was presented at the San Jose Museum of Art, also accompanied by a catalogue. Arnold’s work is further represented in the public collections of many institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the di Rosa, the Tacoma Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Works + Conversation, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives and works in Sonoma, California, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2003.
 
 
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
150 Minna Street
Ground Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
T: +1 415 399 1439
 
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
 
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ARCILESI | HOMBERG FINE ART, Brooklyn, New York

Margaret Withers
sun dogs in the sky, 2012
Watercolor, ink and enamel on paper
30"x42"
Courtesy of the artist
 
 
MARGARET WITHERS
PAINTING THE AMERICAN ANTI-STORY
 
November 4 - December 1, 2012
Opening Reception November 8 and 9 from 6-9pm at 111 Front St. Suite 222, DUMBO, NY 11201
 
Arcilesi | Homberg Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Margaret Withers. The exhibition, Painting the American Anti-Story, is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery and will include approximately fifteen paintings dating from 2011 to the present.
 
Painting the American Anti-Story is Withers' ongoing works on paper project that strives to open a space between the viewer and the art, and between the point of recognition of an identifiable form and the abstract.  By ignoring the structural conventions of traditional narrative paintings, Withers’ anti-story paintings interrupt the flow of abstract shapes and forms with familiar shapes causing a pause in the viewing pace,  as if a lightning strike across the setting of an implied narrative.  This pause causes a flash of possibilities for a story by suggesting a direction that the viewer can take in forming a narrative. Utilizing a static iconography of a quickly becoming American past of erect and sometimes teetering wooden telephone poles and shrunken houses, that are immersed between the cacophonous daubs and dots of color, the informative floating eyeballs, and the pockets of space - Withers propels the viewer into her imaginative landscape.
 
Margaret Withers was born in Austin, Texas in 1965. Her father worked in the oil industry and because of the nature of the work they moved frequently, Withers’ dealt with this constant change by casting herself as both playwright and lead actor in countless fictions.  She attended Texas A&M University where she received a BA in Literature.
She moved to Colorado in 1991 and worked primarily in hand-built porcelain objects.  In 1998 she started a series of mixed-media oil paintings with bronze cast porcelain heads pushed into the canvas.
In 2004 she attended CU Boulder’s MFA program but did not matriculate, instead deciding to move to New York City in 2006.  In 2011 she started working primarily on paper with watercolor, ink and enamel on an overlapping  series that explores migration, identity, belonging and the American anti-story.  She has won numerous fellowships and awards for best in show, best watercolor and artist of distinction.
Her art has shown extensively in the US, and internationally in Europe, China and Moscow.
 
 
ARCILESI | HOMBERG FINE ART
111 Front St. Suite 222
Brooklyn
New York, NY 11201
T: 1-347-743-4132
 
ARCILESI | HOMBERG FINE ART
 
ARCILESI | HOMBERG FINE ART, Brooklyn, New York
 

GALERIE NORDENHAKE, Berlin

Stanley Whitney
This Side of Blue, 2011
oil on linen
244 x 244 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm
 
 
STANLEY WHITNEY
YELLOW, NOON AND NIGHT
 
November 3, 2012 – January 12, 2013
 
Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present Yellow, Noon and Night - the first solo-exhibition of US -American painter Stanley Whitney in Germany. For almost thirty years Whitney has been exploring two central aspects of abstract painting: Colour and structure. The exhibition will show new works as well as paintings from the past eight years.
 
The title of the exhibition, which is also the title of one of Whitney’s paintings, is, like most of his paintings, inspired by music, poetry and his love of reading: In this case by a blues song called Morning, Noon and Night. For the title Stanley Whitney simply replaced the word “Morning” with “Yellow” to introduce the aspect of colour. And the title also emphasises rhythm as a parameter that is essential to Whitney’s work: Whereas rhythm is central to Jazz and Blues, it is the colour that makes the beat in Whitney’s paintings.
 
Colour is what structures the paintings. For a long time Whitney has been working with square canvasses of different sizes, which he structures with up to four unequal bands consisting of one or more lines the width of a paintbrush. Starting from the top left–almost like writing a text–he fills the bands with a series of non-uniform rectangles and squares of different colour. This process, which ends at the bottom right of the canvas, can be repeated two or three times. The choice of colour is intuitive and the result of the painting process which is unpredictable an unknown.
 
Whitney works with the system of “call-and-response”, which is a principle used across multiple disciplines, and in music is typical in spirituals, gospels, blues and jazz. He paints one colour and then decides which colour responds to the first one. This very simple principle results in the fact that the same colour is almost never used twice and the colours become more and more complex.
 
And yet, Whitney’s paintings seem easy, almost effortless. They are playful and strictly formal at the same time. This is similar to Jazz - which seems easy - as Whitney explains: “As if you could just get up and play the instruments, that there’s no struggle with how it’s done. It’s like Coltrane using a simple melody. I just use a simple square”.
 
Despite their complex colour scheme Whitney’s compositions are always harmonic and show his joy for colour and composition. They are rhythmic, melodic, and intense. "The idea is sound through colour, creating a polyrhythm and confronting something very beautiful with a lot of humanity to see something that you think you know but then realize you don’t" (Stanley Whitney).
 
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia and currently lives and works in New York and Solignano, Italy. His works have been featured in numerous international exhibitions since the early seventies. His work was part of the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) in the project Utopia Station, and was also shown in the Dakar Biennal (2004). Museum exhibitions include the National Academy Museum, New York (2012), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2008), the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio (1991), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1985), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1983), the Alternative Museum, New York (1981), the Studio Museum in Harlem (1981) and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (1976). He is the recipient of the John Guggenheim Fellowship (1996) and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2002) as well as winning the First Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011).
 
Parallel to Whitney’s show French artist JEAN-BAPTISTE BOUVET will present Everything that has a name in our space on the first floor.
 
 
GALERIE NORDENHAKE
Lindenstrasse 34
D - 10969 Berlin
T: +49 30 206 1483
 
GALERIE NORDENHAKE
 
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Galerie Karl Pfefferle, Munich

DAVID LYNCH
"It Happened at Night"
 
Recent Paintings and Drawings
 
26 October -  22 December 2012
 
Opening: Friday,  26 October 2012, 6 - 9 pm
 
Art Weekend Munich 2012:
Saturday, 27 October 11am - 6 pm
Sunday, 28 October 11 am - 6 pm
 
Sunday, 28 October, 4 pm:
Lecture: Prof. Werner Spies on David Lynch
 
For the first time on view in Munich are large-scale matter paintings and recent drawings by American artist and filmmaker David Lynch (b. 1946). His most recent exhibition at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl in 2010, the year in which Lynch also was awarded the "Kaiserring" in Goslar for his artistic work, revealed the astounding coherence of his entire oeuvre.
 

David Lynch
Box of Bees, 1988-1990
Watercolor on paper
25,4 x 17,8 cm
10 x 7 inches

 
Lynch arrived at film through painting and the latter has accompanied his work since he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1960s. As Lynch explains: "Painting can make true statements about any aspects of life… The same is true of film. There are things that can't be expressed in words. That's what painting and filmmaking are about... Painting is like a thread running through everything else."  Mounted in heavy gold frames referencing Francis Bacon, Lynch‘s scenographic matter paintings become environments or stages where the artist's passion for stories without endings and riddles without solutions unfolds. Fragments of words and sentences such as "I burn pinecone..." hint at disconcerting plots, yet never reveal their outcome.
 
Lynch plays with shifts of scale, ignores the laws of perspective and juxtaposes things close and remote, thus assigning a hierarchy of scale to them. Time and again the viewer's eye is attracted by a detail and the gaze locked in extreme close-up. In Lynch's work an ant is as big as a house, while a distant memory - say, of a woman's face - has the size of a matchbook. David Lynch's imagery always seems to obscure more than it exposes, which is the very reason for their overpowering appeal - an appeal often based on a mix of the sinister and the bizarre. As Werner Spies puts it: "We can never escape the incredibly sensitive, calculated preoccupation with the uncanny."

 
Galerie Karl Pfefferle
Reichenbachstr. 47 – 49
80469 Munich
Germany
 
Fon +49.89.297 969
Fax +49.89.291 3571
 
galerie@gkpf.de
www.galeriekarlpfefferle.de
 
gallery hours:
Tue – Fri: 11 am – 6pm
Sat: 11 am – 4pm
and by appointment

OCCUPY MY TIME GALLERY, London

Greg Rook
Morning with plough
Oil on linen
2012
183 x 183 cm
Courtesy of the artist
 
 
GREG ROOK
Survivors
 
9th October to 10th November 2012
 
"Is that what life's worth nowadays. Fifty gallons of petrol? God help us all"
- Greg, ‘Survivors’, Series 1, Episode 12 (1975)
 
In 1975, when Britain was seemingly grinding to a halt, with political upheaval and economic gloom threatening financial and social collapse, the BBC broadcast the incredibly successful series ‘Survivors’ (1975 -77). Based on the premise that a global pandemic could leave only a few thousand survivors in the UK, it explored the practical and political implications for a group of individuals attempting to survive and ultimately rebuild society. The concepts of self-sufficiency and commune living were extremely current both in the UK and in the US, where there are still survivalist groups and families who choose to disengage with contemporary aspiration and act ‘as if’, culture-crafting and story telling – anticipating an imminent collapse of society and constructing their lives according to this premonition.
 
New paintings by the artist Greg Rook explore the historical stasis brought on by the post-apocalyptic scenario depicted in the TV series 'Survivors', and the chasm left by potential futures once imagined. In his work, the English landscapes depicted are corrupted by the post-apocalyptic imagery rooted in us by twentieth century history, and the literature, television and cinema influenced by this two-way slipstream of history and fiction. His practice explores the politics of apocalypse: the right focuses on the battle and the final show down that will, in the final triumph of the conservative impulse, return the earth to the state it occupied at the beginning; the left focuses on a New Age, where there will be no final battle, only a glorious transition to a future of sheer bliss. In this system there is no evil, only the perception of evil and therefore perception is all that there is to change. The right wing imagines perfection only in the past, the left in what’s to come.
 
Much like the idealistic satire of self-sufficiency and sustainability presented in ‘The Good life’ (1975), broadcast in Britain at the same time as ‘Survivors’, Rook's work invites us to question our own position in relation to the fragmented realities of his paintings. Borrowing from historical aspects of landscape painting and shared fears of post-apocalyptic narratives, Rook, not only reminds us of the lives we dreamed of in the 60’s and 70’s, but also the undetermined future unfolding in the pastoral lands of his works.
 
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
 
Greg Rook was born in London in 1971. He studied at Chelsea School of Art 1997-2000 and Goldsmiths College, University of London 2000-2002. He is currently programme leader of Fine Art BA for the University of Kent. Rook has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia in both solo and group exhibitions. In 2009 he completed a two year commission for a solo project with The David Roberts Art Foundation. Recent exhibitions have included solo shows in London and Tokyo.
 
O.M.T was founded in 2006 by Sue Cohen, an artist, curator and educator. This is the first permanent gallery space for O.M.T gallery, which until now has been presenting challenging and innovative visual arts events in temporary locations. These spaces were often outside the traditional gallery space and interacted directly with the audience through their choice of intriguing environments.
 
 
OCCUPY MY TIME GALLERY
Enclave 9
Resolution Way
Deptford
London SE8 4NT
 
OCCUPY MY TIME GALLERY
 
GREG ROOK
 
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DAVID RISLEY GALLERY, Copenhagen

Ryan Gander
I just want you to know I can see through your mask, 1987 by Aston Ernest, 2011 (detail).
Courtesy of the artist and David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen
 
 
RYAN GANDER, An Exhibition of Recent Paintings
 
October 26 - December 1, 2012
Opening October 26. 17.00 - 20.00
 
David Risley Gallery is proud to present Ryan Gander, An Exhibition of Recent Paintings. Gander is among the most important practitioners of conceptual art in the world today. Gander’s expansive practice has been the subject of exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA 13, Palais de Tokyo.
 
Gander's work exhibited at dOCUMENTA 13 was highly prominent despite being either invisible, hidden or played by anonymous actors. I need some meaning I can memorise (The Invisible Pull), was a gentle breeze blowing through the whole ground floor of the Fridericianum, the main exhibition space of dOCUMENTA. In, I had a message from the curator, an actor took on the role of a scriptwriter sitting anonymously in the café of the Orangerie. A sculptural work Escape Hatch to , was hidden in the woods.
 
His exhibition at David Risley Gallery will be called 'Ryan Gander, An Exhibition of Recent Paintings'. Has he, in his words, ‘gone all hippy and painterly’?
 
Gander's art is concerned with context. At dOCUMENTA, a setting ripe for conceptual art, his work, though invisible, was highly present. A natural fit. Perhaps within the context of this gallery a painting exhibition performs similarly. His work, chameleon like, changes appearance to fit its surroundings. The façade may change but the conceptual underpinning remains the same.
 
This show uses the physical attributes of a painting exhibition to deal with concerns other than those of painting. Gander presents us with all the component parts of an exhibition of painting, a lightbox gallery sign, packing crate, palettes and paintings. He made a self portrait every day for year, showing only the palettes used to mix the paint. We will present Self Portrait XII, 31 circular glass palettes from August 2012 wall-mounted in a grid, the last work from this series. There will be 3 large paintings, which are realisations of paintings featured in Tintin and Alph-Art, the final and unfinished book from the comic strip series created by Hergé. Another work, Just, which looks like a neo-geo painting is actually an oil painting of a glitch from a quicktime video of the artist. The way things collide (picture crate, meet museau), is a partially exposed and seemimgly unfinished carving of a transport crate with a pig's snout on top, hewn from a single block of wood. The crate is the correct dimensions to be used to transport Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde. I just want you to know I can see through your mask, 1987 by Aston Ernest, 2012, consists of 2 oil paintings, which are reproductions of two paintings which appear in the film The Rebel. A lightbox sign renames the space. Marks on the floor show evidence of a struggle within the gallery.
 
Gander’s work wears the mask of art history, in this instance using painting as a Trojan Horse to smuggle his conceptual narratives into the gallery.
 
Ryan Gander is an artist living and working in London and Suffolk. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, NL. Recent projects include Esperluette, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, G; Boing, Boing, Squirt, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, MX; Locked Room Scenario, commissioned by Artangel, London, UK; Really Shiny Things That Don't Mean Anything, Trybuna Honorowa, Plac Defilad, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, Warsaw, PL; ILLUMInations at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Intervals at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC, US and The Happy Prince, Public Art Fund, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, NYC, US.
 
 
DAVID RISLEY GALLERY
Bredgade 65
1260 Copenhagen
Denmark
T: +45 32 20 38 10
 
DAVID RISLEY GALLERY
 
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