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CHARLIE SMITH london

 

John Stark
'In Times of Exactness and Uncertainty', 2011
Oil on wood panel
110 x 145cm
Courtesy of CHARLIE SMITH london
 
 
JOHN STARK
Apiculture
 
October 7th - November 12th 2011
Private View Thursday October 6th 6.30pm–8.30pm
 
CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present John Stark with his second one person exhibition at the gallery.
 
In this exhibition Stark has created a body of work that gravitates towards the centre of his preoccupations of the last three years. Rendered with masterly technique in oil on panel, Stark’s paintings transcend time by navigating the historical, the contemporary and the futuristic. At once his content recalls the Flemish landscape painting of Patinir; the figure work of Zurbarán and Sassoferrato; and the minimal Modernism of Judd. We are invited to assume that these depictions are posited at some point in an imagined future. Figures bustle amongst sporadic buildings in verdant foregrounds and backgrounds made of ever receding waterways and rocky out-crops. However, on further consideration it becomes unclear as to whether these vistas are a futuristic wondering or rather a rendition of some eternally recurring cycle.
 
Central to this creation of non (but all encompassing) time and place are the endeavours of the populace within. Colonies of beekeepers tend to their colonies of bees. Hooded and masked figures labour in the landscape in a collaborative enterprise to create liquid gold. Analogous to the intensive work of the artist, all are toiling here, all creating. Stark has also begun to provide more information. There is no doubt that we are exploring a utilitarian society consisting of communities inhabiting historic towers and fortifications; postmodern and prototype dwellings and units; and everyone and everything has its function.
 
We are not being directed however. These paintings are a virtuoso display of artist as vessel. They are depictions from an internal world but which also touch upon universal aspects of existence, traversing expansive leitmotifs that embrace philosophy, spirituality, and the histories of art and thought (and feeling). Operating as a collection of paintings that work together as a group, the whole refers to each individual part and in turn each part serves to provide an understanding of the whole. There is only one more component required to interpret the circle of endeavour of artist and subjects in these allegorical paintings and that is the psychology of the viewer.
 
John Stark
Born: 1979
Education: MA in Fine Art, Royal Academy Schools, 2001 – 2004; BA (Hons) in Fine Art (First Class), University of West England, 1998 - 2001
Selected Exhibitions: 2011: The Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s New Sensations and The Future Can Wait, Victoria House, London; Black & White, Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin; Polemically Small (curated by Edward Lucie-Smith), Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre, Klaipeda; The Future Can Wait presents: Polemically Small, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; 2010: Mercurius Duplex (One Person), Conner Contemporary Art, Washington; Dawnbreakers John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; 2009: Meliora Silentio, CHARLIE SMITH london, London; Secrets and Confessions, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York; Romance Derived (thecentre:MK Annual Painting Prize), thecentre:mk, Milton Keynes; Saxon, Schwartz Projects, London; Strange Days and Some Flowers, Storey Gallery, Lancaster; 2008: The Sovereign European Art Prize, Somerset House, London; The Past is History, Changing Role Gallery, Naples; New London School, Mark Moore Gallery, LA; Eau Savage II, Fieldgate Gallery, London, 2007; Kaminzimmer, Grieder Contemporary, Zurich
Selected Awards & Residencies: Arts Council Exhibition Award for ’Altered Beast’, London, 2006; Arts Council Exhibition Participation Award, 2005; Royal Academy Schools & Loughborough University School of Art and Design Artist’s Residency & Teaching Fellowship, 2004-2005; Royal Academy Schools Rome Travel Bursary, 2004; Premiums Award - The Victoria Levin Fund, 2003
Collections: P. Ognibene, MD, Washington DC; David Roberts, London; private collections in Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States

 
 

CHARLIE SMITH london
336 Old St
London, EC1V 9DR
T +44 (0)20 7739 4055
 
CHARLIE SMITH london
 
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MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS, New York

 

Steve DeFrank
Picnic Table, 2011
Casein on paper
35" x 60" x 48"
Courtesy of Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York
 
 
Steve DeFrank
This Ain't No Picnic
 
September 22 - October 22, 2011
 
A master of visual trickery and playful subversion, Steve DeFrank works with seemingly familiar materials and subjects to create a sense of accessibility and knowability in his work that enables him to tap into complex issues with a wry mischief rather than didacticism. In This Ain’t No Picnic, his second solo show at Margaret Thatcher Projects, what appear to be planks of wood chiseled with pithy, socially aware graffiti, upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be painstakingly crafted paper boxes painted with casein, an ancient milk based medium. The result is a delightful and willful suspension of reality, as the interplay between text and material comes to full effect.
 
For this exhibition, DeFrank has taken his subversive tromp l’oiel one step further - creating a life-sized picnic table constructed entirely of painted paper. Rife with pithy aphorisms, puns, and off-color jokes “carved” into its surface as though it were stationed at a rest stop somewhere along the New Jersey Turnpike, the piece is a dialogue within itself. And though you just may find “for a good time, call...” on the surface, DeFrank artfully applies his wry and cutting sense of humor to the fray, creating something that moves past mundane graffiti and becomes a conversation about contemporary life and values. Just below a carving that exhorts “luv your body the way it is” a wise-cracking response is carved: “You wouldn’t say that if you were a zombie,” and a third vandal adds “or if you had a viral infection.” Another tag proclaims “I <3 my 2 dads,” and yet another points out “your ego is showing.” As the viewer spends time considering the table, the ultimate pun is revealed: however bright and delightfully packaged, contemporary life, it seems, ain’t no picnic.
 
DeFrank’s art is first and foremost his own private playground, a vehicle for exploring issues central to his personal identity. He grants elements often considered kitsch by the artistic hierarchy, validity by inserting them into fine art conceptions. Transforming the playful into the significant while making the all too serious humorous, the artist reveals his own approach to life. Resigned to the inevitable hurdles that arise, DeFrank and his paintings triumph through a resilient optimism and a persistent sense of humor.
Steve DeFrank, who has also had solo exhibitions at Clementine Gallery and Clifford Smith Gallery in Boston, is represented in the permanent collections of the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the West Collection.

 
 

MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS
539 W. 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 212 675 0222
 
MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS
 
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GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF, Stuttgart

 

Anne-Lise Coste
"d5919bcc3aeeb621e64daf06b703c106"
 
16.09. -  29.10.2011
 
– painting and new york –
 
i moved to NY april 1, 2010, into a handsome apartment on the upper west side. it’s the lay of the land that made things happen, I’m happy, there’s a handsome tall tree outside my window where handsome birds (red cardinal, blue jay) land and sing. it’s very calm here, gentle and luminous, there’s the sky that opens above my bed. the sounds of the city that reach me are ambulance sirens and planes landing in the distance.
I get the exact opposite when going down into the subway nearby: the underground, the deafening, the withering, black, neon, metal, asphalt and concrete. and the rats and cockroaches race. humans are another story.
 
in may 2010 i was drawing on the table (in the living room of my apartment) on paper, horizontally, with an 8B soft pencil and a ruler. what came out were the series “cages,” “penetrations,” “pedestals (Mondrian)” and “architectures.”
 
at the end of the summer, paper felt insufficiently there: i discovered the wood panel.
 
so i continued the first oil paintings (see the oils from berlin, in the reinhard hauff archives) with the series “sort of letters” and the series “sort of cubes,” as the name indicates, you can see letters and cubes in thick spaces of titanium white.
 
I was very sick in october, the smell of oil made me worse, i therefore switched to tempera on paper and primed canvas, which i bought at the art supply store.
 
december 2010, a large painting with many colors, the last one, made from 15 canvases placed side by side, exhibited in detroit at susanne hilberry; two faces and two words, SEX, MAMA, appear again and became the title.
 
then it was over. there wouldn’t be any more. no more heads no more words.
 
some call it silence. i don’t disagree.
 
january 2011, a reduction of the palette to red white blue and black and especially the decision to only paint. painting with tempera on primed canvases of different sizes, “red,” “blue,” “white.”
 
end of february, black nothing but black; then came: “amerikka,” also exhibited in detroit. then “new york” and “a car in the night,” the last series made with the sole brush.
 
for even more presence, the choice was black oil, “ivory black,” a fine oxymoron.
 
i empty the tube of paint directly onto the handsome, unprimed wood panels that i’ve just discovered; from there i give up the brush for the silkscreen squeegee.
 
later come fingers upon the suggestion of a friend about the existence of latex gloves.
 
the gravity, the prominence of the work grows as a result of physical spaces graciously offered to me (financially unable to have recourse to any myself). i now work in places that look like what one would call studios: an empty room with white walls and a wall of windows in an LA-60s-style summer villa in east hampton and in a gallery on the 4th floor in chelsea, also a very handsome space with high walls on 26th near the hudson.
 
this has yielded paintings on large wood panels, plywood, bought at the lumber yard measuring 92 x 123 cm and on unprimed canvases, dropcloths to be precise, which are used to protect and which i bought at the hardware store, measuring 3.65 x 2.74 m.
 
all of it still flat on a table or the floor.
 
i continue down my painter's path: i paint
 
(Anne-Lise Coste, 2011)

Anne-Lise Coste was born 1973 in Marseille and lives and works in New York. Recently her works have been shown at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Santander / Spain, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Detroit, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York and in the group show "Hysteria, Laughter and a Sense of Seriousness" at Galerie Gregor Staiger and Karma International, Zurich (all 2011). This october she will show at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, in november at Noguerras Blanchard, Barcelona. "d5919bcc3aeeb621e64daf06b703c106" is the fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart.

 

 

GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF
Paulinenstrasse 47
D - 70178 Stuttgart
Germany
T: +49 (0) 711 609 770
 
GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF
 
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HPGRP Gallery, New York

 

Adela Leibowitz
Untitled (purple), 2011
acrylic on canvas
52" x 54"
Courtesy of the artist and HPGRP Gallery, New York
 
 
Adela Leibowitz
The Untitled
 
September 29 - October 29, 2011
 
hpgrp Gallery is please to announce the opening of The Untitled, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Adela Leibowitz. Defying easy categorization, the works - which utilize tropes of landscape and figurative painting while denying representation - are depictions of abstract notions of spirituality, mythology, and the elemental (and often invisible) fabric of life manifested in physical forms.
 
Inspired by a range of esoteric sources that include Egyptian objects of worship, the films of Alexander Jodorowsky, the color theories of Rudolf Steiner, music from the 1960s, and the practice of worldly Asceticism, Leibowitz’s compositions are lush, spectral, and otherworldly. Rather than being reflections of objects as seen by the eye, the works are conduits that allow viewers to open themselves to higher powers - earth, wind, fire, water, and depending on one’s own belief system, the deities that weave the web that connects everything, including our souls, to the natural world.
 
Adela Leibowitz is a New York-based artist whose work has been exhibited in shows at hpgrp Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Bo-Lee Gallery, Bath, United Kingdom; Holster Projects, London, United Kingdom; Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Canada; The Observatory in Brooklyn, New York; and Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama, to name a few. Past solo shows include Jack the Pelican Presents (2004) Brooklyn, NY and 33 Bond (2009) New York, NY.
 
Leibowitz, who holds an MFA from The New York Academy of Art, has currently been awarded a studio residency at Chashama. Previous residencies include the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York and P.S. 122 in New York, NY. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NY Arts Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, The Village Voice, New American Paintings, Time Out New York, Art of England, and American Art Collector.
 
Currently, an exhibition she curated, The Unseen, is running at The Torrance Museum of Art in Torrance, CA.

 
 

HPGRP Gallery
529 West 20th St. 2W
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212 727 2491
 
HPGRP Gallery
 
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HEZI COHEN GALLERY, Tel Aviv

 

Amit Cabessa
Burial, 2011
Oil on canvas
197x199cm
Courtesy of Hezi Cohen Gallery, Te Aviv
 
 
AMIT CABESSA
Bli Neder
 
06.10.2011 - 19.11.2011
Opening: 06.10.2011, Thursday at 20:00
 
The current exhibition presents Amit Cabessa's new works from the last two years the works are marked by exile. In previous years the artist worked on establishing the main characters together with a kibbutz ideal where man and nature unite. These paintings were characterized by descriptions of local characters, families, animals and sabras in this pastoral atmosphere brides and grooms were depicted as a symbol of mating between man and mother - earth.
 
The Paintings and sculptures in this exhibition uproot the kibbutz residents we met in earlier paintings, dropping the ground beneath their feet and converting the green land to blood red soil. In the Center of the exhibition is the painting titled "Golus " - This is a monumental triptych that phrases in it three wings the ethos of the Diaspora, it describes a family who leaves their home and accepts the Burden of exile. In another major painting, "Family in a Boat", the artist depicts his family roaming an endless sea. Thus between boat statues and paintings of long journeys the residents of Cabessa work leave the sunlight into the darkness of exile.
 
In light of physical exile metaphysical exile occurs. If geographic exile involves non-existence – not being in a certain place which is significant or "The place", then the mental exile separates man from himself, or me from myself (a component that comes up in the artist self-portraits). The current creative Episode reveals epic tells that come up through the existential human condition and places physical exile (local) and metaphysical (spiritual) as an inherent feature of the human character.
Text: Ron Bartos/ "Amit Cabessa: Kibbutz-Golus"
 
 

 
 
Jonathan Touitou
Genetic Assemblage
150 x 260 cm
Courtesy of Hezi Cohen Gallery, Te Aviv
 
 
JONATHAN TOUITOU
Pandora's Box
 
06.10.2011 - 19.11.2011
Opening: 06.10.2011, Thursday at 20:00
 
The installation work Pandora's Box is a comment on ideologies, on what a pre-established set of ideas can generate. It is a tale staging the dystopian mirror of spectacle. The work is dedicated to who, like Pandora, is left with hope after his/her naivety has "released all the evils of mankind into the world".
 

HEZI COHEN GALLERY
54 Wolfson Street
66042 Tel Aviv
Israel
T: +972 (0)36398788
 
HEZI COHEN GALLERY
 
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LEO KOENIG, INC, New York

 

Bill Saylor
Top Hat, 2010
Oil paint and oil stick on canvas
91 x 72 inches
Courtesy Leo Koenig Inc.
 
 
BILL SAYLOR
Audio Tuna Sunshine
 
September 15-October 15, 2011
 
For his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Bill Saylor will exhibit new sculptures, paintings and drawings. Working within a visual vernacular that is decisively American, Saylor fuses the organic and industrial in a manner that is at turns cheerfully ironic and piercingly sardonic. Saylor's sculptural practice combines scavenged objects and hand-fashioned elements that bring into play discourses around American consumerism and the preciousness of the object. His large-scale paintings imbue a physicality that borders on hypertension, punctuated and balanced by elegiac passages of the brush and the inclusion of ephemera derived from pop culture. And, as ever, Saylor's drawings reflect an unabashedly gritty quality that is alternatively expressed through poignant single-line drawings and a visceral oil stick works on paper.
 
Bill Saylor (b. 1960) is a New York-based artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally for over two decades. Recent exhibitions include Ghost Light Junkie, The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2010); De-Nature, Jolie Laide Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2010); In Dialogue, Four Generations of Painting, curated by Peter Makebish, Anonymous Gallery, New York, NY (2010); Jr. and Sons, curated by Joe Bradley, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY (2009), among others. Saylor recently curated Dirt Don't Hurt, Jolie Laide Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and completed an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Saylor lives and works in Brooklyn.
 
In classic Saylor fashion, the gallery is pleased to produce a zine in conjunction with the exhibition.
 
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and by appointment. For further information and images please contact Stephanie Schumann at 212.334.9255 or stephanie @ leokoenig.com.
 
 
LEO KOENIG, INC
545 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 212 334 9255
 
LEO KOENIG, INC
 
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POSTMASTERS, New York

 

Anthony Goicolea
Entangled, 2011
graphite and ink on mylar
24 x 29 inches 
 
 
ANTHONY GOICOLEA
Pathetic Fallacy
 
September 10 - October 15, 2011
 
Postmasters is pleased to present Pathetic Fallacy, an exhibition of new drawings and photographs by ANTHONY GOICOLEA. This will be the artist's fourth solo show at the gallery. Central to the exhibition is a forty-foot long wall of layered drawings, large and small, rendered in graphite and ink on mylar.
 
The term “pathetic fallacy,” coined by John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1856), describes the treatment of inanimate objects and places as if they had human feelings, thoughts, or sensations.
 
In this new group of photographs and drawings nature takes on anthropomorphic characteristics. A new, uneasy equilibrium is created as human and animal bodies merge, trees grow hair and pump blood, flies multiply into tornadoes and wild dogs settle in the ruins of a home. Anthony Goicolea’s version of pathetic fallacy becomes an atmospheric elegy of passing time, transition, loss and decay. In new hybridized world of man and nature nothing is permanent and nothing is safe. Humans, plants and animals have cross-pollinated; they have merged, evolved and adopted different features from each other. Objects acquire pathos and empathy while the decomposition of material things reflects the the world in flux.
 
Oftentimes we celebrate life with beautified images, but Goicolea portrays life as a riot of organic forms, each grasping for light and air with an almost violent greed. Nature is economical in the structures it uses: vascular forms repeat in bundles of nerves, blood vessels and rivers when seen from above. In his drawings Giocolea superimposes these forms, transitioning from one to the other in a seamless manner that casts an unflinching eye on anatomy.
 
Goicolea practices a nominal realism in his photography, but each scene gathers farflung elements that generate subtle cognitive dissonances. As signs, these images generate a primary emotion, often sadness, loneliness or a sense of a lost past, but underneath them is a geographic surrealism, a nagging impression that these places do not really exist. Or that they exist in many places, though perhaps only in the imagination.
 
Anthony Goicolea lives and works in New York City. Most recently a large scale survey exhibition “Alter Ego: a decade of work by Anthony Goicolea” was presented by North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC (April - June 2011). It is currently on view at Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA and will travel to 21C Museum in Louisville, KY (January 2012). Goicolea was included in “Hide and Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. This show will open at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in November 2011.

 

POSTMASTERS
459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue)
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 212 727 3323
 
POSTMASTERS
 
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JACOB'S ISLAND, London

 

Karen David
Apophyllite 7.8.11, 2011
acrylic on canvas with apophyllite crystal
51 x 50 cm 
 
 
KAREN DAVID
'Searching for the Viable Essence'
 
16 September – 11 November 2011
 
Jacob’s Island Gallery is pleased to present Searching for the Viable Essence, the debut solo show of London based artist Karen David.
 
Karen David’s practice explores the relationship between high and low culture by juxtaposing painting styles from Post Painterly Abstraction with found imagery and objects from ‘new age’ spirituality — in doing so, questioning our belief systems in these hierarchies and highlighting the slippage that exists between them.
 
David’s progressive approach to painting is premised on challenging our beliefs in the objectification of spirituality through artefacts. Her work creates modern day meditations that derive from placing dreamcatchers and crystals with appropriations of Abstraction. Through apparently simple painterly gestures and mark-making, David comments on mysticism and the meditative quality of how we might visualise the aura of these objects.
 
Within the exhibition David presents dreamcatchers which are suspended from circular canvases imbued with concentric circles, in order to reference Kenneth Nolan’s seminal target paintings. This marriage adds an alternative reading to the original reading of the artwork, as they now become associated with the filtering of negative and positive energies — as told in the myth of dreamcatchers.
The depiction of her crystal paintings also play with the idea of the radiating power we imagine the art object to hold. Displayed on top of inverted pyramids, David presents Apophyllite crystals associated with clarity and purifying properties, which seem to bleed into the dark density of the painting and activate its 'viable essence'. 1
 
Karen David is currently studying MA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art. In 2011 she was selected by Dexter Dalwood for Creekside Open at APT Gallery. Other groups show include: Futura Oblique, The Nunnery, Bow Arts Centre, Tag: From 3 to 45. New London Painting, Brown Gallery and I Want to Believe, Millais Off-Site Projects, Southampton Solent University.
 
1. The term 'viable essence' was first quoted by Greenberg in a Mark Rothko biography: '...a discarding of “expendable conventions'–e.g., figuration– in a quest to reduce painting 'to its viable essence'.'
Mark Rothko: A Biography. James E. B. Breslin.

 
JACOB'S ISLAND
56 Butlers and Colonial Wharf
10-11 Shad Thames
London SE1 2PY
T: +44 (0)20 7407 8850
 
JACOB'S ISLAND
 
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NORDENHAKE, Berlin

 

Sreshta Rit Premnath
Foreground: Kite, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein with William Eccles at the Kite-Flying Station in Glossop, 1910,
photographer: anonymous, 2011,
wood, thread, nylon, aluminium tube, 195,7 x 90 x 253 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
 
 
SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH
"Storeys End"
 
September 10th - October 15th, 2011
 
Storeys End seems a culmination of Sreshta Rit Premnath’s engagement with the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who undoubtedly acts as a kind of muse for the artist. Like Wittgenstein, Premnath relishes philosophical, linguistic, and cultural aporia. In Storeys End, named after the address where Wittgenstein composed his posthumous text, On Certainty, and died shortly thereafter, the viewer is presented with a detective plot redolent with post-modernist obsessions.
 
Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art offer Premnath an art historical language game, like so many of his generation who have returned to the “scene of the crime” of their parent and grandparent generations. But this game cum crime story also takes place between multiple media, which include photography, sculpture (the partial reconstruction of a kite designed by Wittgenstein in 1909), and painting.
 
Visual puns occur between objects, such as the five inkjet prints of detective fiction writer Norbert Davis firing a gun at a target out-of-frame (Toners, Dyes). The bullet hole seems to appear on an adjacent wall, as a hole cut-out of canvas (Eclipse). Similarly, the titles of many of the works play on the relationship between death and narrative (Storeys End; Toners, Dyes; Doyen’s Rest), a relationship defining of modern philosophy, art, and literature (think of Gertrude Stein’s comments about the structural importance of the corpse in her Everybody’s Autobiography; think also of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and L’Aventura, in which the plots revolve around a corpse or missing person). The corpse of Storeys End, as in the detective novel, provides a pivot or absent center around which individual works interact, becoming visually and linguistically slippery - polysemous and indeterminate.
 
Premnath’s works allegorize the indeterminacy of cognitive-perceptive processes wherein, following Wittgenstein well-know quip, the ethical becomes embodied by the aesthetic. The process of bleaching and scraping off photographic emulsion in EX / X represents a non-site (or non-sight?) where the viewer’s perception becomes negated (X-ed out). Likewise, the greenscreen to bluescreen gradient of Toners, Dyes indicates an absent presence, while the Ellsworth Kelly-like blue canvas of Eclipse evokes the nowhere of Bluescreen video technology (wherein one’s image can become superimposed upon any place whatsoever). As in many of his works, in Storeys End Premnath develops a language of displacement and difficulty in relation to existing cultural materials - detective novels, philosophical treatises, historically significant photo-documents, and art historical precedents.
 
Premnath’s installation pushes against the limits of a particular universe of meaning, the work of art measuring the limits of a world—the personal and collective capability to understand in situ through a set of linguistic and visual propositions. By entering into the work, the viewer encounters the artifacts of the artist’s research practice, which move seamlessly between philosophical speculation and humor. In the narrative tension of these objects, stories actually begin rather than end. Objects mark the mobile traces of our compulsion to make meaning faced with negation, absence, aporia, and gaps within signifying processes. (Text by Thom Donovan)
 
Sreshta Rit Premnath was born 1979 in Bangalore, India and lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Bard College, NY and was a 2008 studio fellow at The Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2009 he participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency program, Skowhegan, ME. (Premnath has been exhibiting internationally since 2004. In 2010 he presented the solo project Zero Knot at Art Statements, Art Basel. His work has been shown at Gallery SKE in Bangalore; Balice Hertling in Paris; as well as at Thomas Erben Gallery, Friedman Benda, Rotunda Gallery, Art in General, and Bose Pacia (all New York); and at 1A Space in Hong Kong. Later this year he will participate in exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and at Wave Hill, New York. In 2011 he was awarded an Art Matters Foundation Grant. Premnath is the founder and editor of the magazine Shifter.

 

GALERIE NORDENHAKE
Lindenstrasse 34
D - 10969 Berlin
T: +49 30 206 1483
 
NORDENHAKE
 
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GALLERI CHRISTOFFER EGELUND, Copenhagen

 

GHOST OF A DREAM
End of the Spectrum, 2011
Discarded lottery tickets on panels with UV coat
233x310 cm
Courtesy of Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen
Photo: Jeff Barnett-Winsby
 
 
WE SPEND OUR LIVES AS WE SPEND OUR DAYS
 
23. September – 23. October 2011
 
Galleri Christoffer Egelund proudly present "WE SPEND OUR LIVES AS WE SPEND OUR DAYS," the first solo exhibition in Denmark with the artist duo Ghost of a Dream from New York. The renowned duo, Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom create ambitious artworks. Where hopes and dreams of the big lottery prize burst, is where these artworks begins. The exhibition presents 16 new works of drawing, collage, sculpture and installation.
 
Ghost of a Dream is known for their work using discarded scratch cards, but they also use materials such as covers from romantic novels and invitations for exhibitions. They collect the materials from gas stations, bars and streets, or they receive the materials by post.
 
The shows title "WE SPEND OUR LIVES AS WE SPEND OUR DAYS" emphasizes the duo’s interest in what we hope and dream about, and how we, in the easiest way possible, try to attain those dreams on an everyday basis. According to the duo most people dream about wealth, recognition and love - dreams we regularly try to fulfil by buying lottery tickets and self-improvement books.
 
The exhibition consists of 16 artworks, which suggest how a bright future may look like, and makes us think about our current situation. The collage "End of the Spectrum" for example portrays how the end of the rainbow may look like. The work is made from thousands of discarded lottery tickets and illustrates how eye-catching and enticing these tickets may be on the viewer, but also how depressing it can be for most people, when the unlucky number makes the dream vanish. Another work is the sculpture "I Am What I Am," which offers a repeated read on the work's title through its cyclical shape. The work is made from used lottery tickets, covers from kitschy romantic novels and mirrors, whereby one is confronted directly with his or her current situation and the constant quest for a better life. Finally, it is impossible to overlook the work "Postcards", which is mounted from the ceiling of the gallery. The collage is made of hundreds of old exhibition flyers, which the gallery has posted to the artists. The collage mimics the stucco-decorated ceiling of Gallery Christoffer Egelund, and refers to the many aspiring artists, who also wish for recognition, success and exhibitions at prestigious galleries, museums etc.
 
Ghost of a Dream consists of Lauren Was (b. 1977, USA) and Adam Eckstrom (b. 1974, USA). They are married, lives in New York and they both graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, USA. In 2009 they received "The Young Masters Art Prize," and they have exhibited in Basel, Beijing, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Miami and New York. They have two major solo exhibitions "So Far, So Close" at the Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey and "Remember When Tomorrow Came" on the Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs in 2012.
 
Project Room
Ghost of a Dream are also the curators of a group show called “FUTURES PASSED” in the project room. An exhibition dealing with the theme “the passing of time”, and how our expectations of a supposed future are constantly changing. The exhibition consists of artworks by the following young artists: Basim Magdy, Eve Biddle, Breanne Trammell, Guadeloupe Gonzales and Bradley Fesmine.

 
GALLERI CHRISTOFFER EGELUND
Bredgade 75
DK-1260
Copenhagen
Denmark
T: +45 33939200
 
GALLERI CHRISTOFFER EGELUND
 
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