Group Show - Greater L.A.

I don't know if it was just the humidity that was getting to me or the very unpleasant moment of Time-Square crowdedness that had descended upon Soho on a holiday weekend, but by the time I reached the "Greater L.A." group exhibition, my expectations were sky-high.  I was hoping that it had been worth the battle to get to see a spectacular show.  I was disappointed.

I was really excited to see this show which had taken over the 2nd floor of 483 Broadway (at Broome).  This is the first survey I know of in the last ten years in New York that was supposed to represent Contemporary art in Los Angeles.  The survey had both a good mix of established and emerging artists.  The title, "Greater  L.A.", is probably based on the "Greater New York" show that is held at the P.S.1 on a five year basis which basically gives a snapshot or takes the pulse of contemporary art at that moment in and around NYC.

If this is the state of Contemporary art in L.A. - well, then it looks a bit lackluster to me.  However, I think I know enough that's really not the case.  There are very exciting things going on it L.A. and I love that there is completely different set of cultural perspectives, a whole different "American" experience there, and the ideas of individual, isolation, industry, growth, history, art practice and process and Conceptualism is completely separate than our East Coast mind-set.  And I think this was not really successfully presented in this exhibition and I think there was a lack of "craftsmanship" overall.

I read somewhere that the exhibition was planned and executed within a couple of months and it certainly has that feel to it.

But if you know me, you know that I don't like to focus too much on the negative, and there were certainly works that were worth seeing (or worth seeing again).  These were the real highlights for me in the show.....


Alex Prager

I have been drinking the Alex Prager Kool-Aid for a while now and I am not going to stop anytime soon.  She is hot, hot, hot right now - which in my book, is not always a good thing, but she is one of my favorite photographers at the moment and I will continually sing her praises.  These works are from the "Week-end" series of 2009 that I am very familiar with and I think it would have been a huge catastrophe had they not included her work in this show.

Prager is a self-taught photographer whose influences are obvious - you can see the stylings of Hitchcock, Crewdson and Sherman for sure - but the combination of their techniques with her own style, enigmatic narrative, tension of retro with the contemporary against the Los Angeles backdrop makes these works intriguing, sexy and magnetic.  Prager photographs young attractive women, primarily actresses, who are wearing wigs and vintage clothes against a contemporary backdrop. She then manipulates the images.  There is a wonderful cinematic quality to the work with added mystery in terms of what the women are wearing (clothes from the 60s and 70s) juxtaposed to contemporary objects (cars, signs, items).  She also has appropriated and set forth her own visual language that continues through her pictures.  These highly stylized scenarios with high-keyed colors (see other works in this series - link below) are melodramatic, sinister and striking.

In these particular photos, which are the nocturnal scenes of the series, the "bad girl" is played up next to the "forlorn ingenue" in a separate photograph - is this the land of broken dreams?   There is a sense of isolation in an urban environment - something I think that we New Yorkers can relate to.  I love the primordial fire in the last photograph against the manipulated layered parking lots.  What is going on here?  We can keep guessing and making up our own story about it - but we will never know for sure.

I believe her work keeps getting more interesting - especially with her new foray into film.  I can't wait to see what comes next.

Link to more Alex Prager photographs


Melanie Schiff

These are a few examples of photographs that I saw at this exhibition by this artist.  This is the second time that I see them because I also saw them in 2009 at Horton Gallery in Chelsea.   I am not entirely crazy about this photographer's entire body of work, but I absolutely love this series of "contemporary landscapes" that the artist has done.  I love this idea of the lost areas in our cities and the intense graffiti covering these tunnels, ramps and manmade ditches.

The photographs of these "found spaces" are not only photographed quite well, but are layered in meaning.  They can be thought about in terms of a graffiti culture - there is a sort of immortality of one illegally laying his mark or "tag" on the concrete - however this is quickly covered by someone else and there is a sort of tribute to the passage of time.  We can talk in terms of man vs. nature as these manmade areas that we have carved into the land seem to be defunct and abandoned and not even being used anymore.  You can also compare these to the important American landscape photographers and painters that have been capturing our country's beauty over the last two centuries.

I would love to see the photographer explore this series further and see them in a larger scale.

Link to more Melanie Schiff photographs

Karl Haendel

Here are a few examples from graphite drawings from the series "All the Clocks in My House" dated 2010 that were show in this exhibition.  How can you not love these?!  They are more stunning in person for sure.  I believe the artist literally took photographs of the clocks in his house and drew from the photographs.  There is an incredible precision to the drawings that only when you are up close to them can you distinguish them from actual black and white photographs.  I love his use of cropping and perspective here.  More importantly, I enjoy the concept of capturing time or the idea of the passage of time or how we spend time in our personal life.  Would love to see more work by this artist - I believe there is a show planned for his work in the fall of 2011 at Harris Lieberman.

Mark Grotjahn

There are three small, jewel-like colored pencil drawings by established artist, Mark Grotjahn.  As you know, I am not a huge fan of abstract art, but I have always loved all the works by Grotjahn.  Unfortunately, I cannot find the exact images that were in the show, but this is very, very similar to the works that are there.  He is a true colorist and although over the years he has built upon and developed the same visual model and system, its hard not to continue to be intrigued by his work.  I am crazy about the color and the cold, straight-forward formalism.

Currently, there is an exhibition at Anton Kern in Chelsea of new work by Grotjahn.
Link



Also there are also some works by Carter Mull, Jonas Wood and Sterling Ruby that you shouldn't miss if you go.

Its worth stopping by if you are in the neighborhood to see the works that I mentioned above.  I do hope that they continue this exhibition on a regular basis, because its great to break out of our East coast mentality and see a different perspective (just with better execution).

Link to exhibition - wish the site was a little bit better in terms of showing the actual works in the exhibition (be sure to check the days and hours they are open before you go  - not normal gallery hours)

Photographs by Rinko Kawauchi

I have issues with art exhibitions in stores, especially high-end ones on Madison Avenue.  I really do not like the blurring of lines between art and luxury item - it really bothers me and I think it does a disservice to the artist and his or her career.  Yeah, yeah - I know - I live in NYC - who am I kidding?  Hello - Warhols at Christie's - that's the ultimate in luxury items, right there.

But again - I am a bit of a purist when it comes to art venue and I probably need to get over it.

However, I saw this photographer, Rinko Kawauchi, for the first time at AIPAD in March (I am not sure why I hadn't discovered her work before - she is very popular in Japan and has published a multitude of books of her photography, but I think this is her first solo show in the US - so that may be why) and I had heard that her new body of work was going to be shown at the Hermes Gallery, which is on the 4th floor of the store on Madison and 62nd street in late spring.

First about the space - I hate to say it, but its really nice.  Natural light pours in like a waterfall through the enormous skylight just above the  4th floor.  There is nothing there except for the gallery and actually hardly anyone was there and it was practically silent - a perfect setting to see this work.

Kawauchi captures the sort of magic that happens at a moment in the everyday.  There is a focus on the chance beauty of things - whether it is a minute frog taking a short rest on a gargantuan hand, the over exposure of a rose, a dead bird or an eclipse.  I had only seen her work in the small scale, but here the works are a bit larger (40x40), but do not lose the kind of reserve and simplicity seen in her earlier photographs.  I love how light becomes ultimately as important as the subject in her pictures.  At first glance, the images seem to be sort of haphazard - a focusing in on the small and then with the next image, a larger landscape of light breaking through trees or an imposing rocky crag.  But after a while, you begin to see that they all relate to life, death and the eternal.

These works are uncomplicated and there is a silence that pervades her work - a welcome respite in our loud and crazy times and the antidote to the constant bombardment of images in our everyday life.  Here we can take a moment and see our own mortality - that there is a life cycle and that the natural world will continue without us, but there is joy in that because we learn a lesson here.  The small, precious moments in life that we miss - that Kawauchi has captured here for us to behold and in her past photographs (please look up her earlier work - its fantastic!!), we should slow down and take the time to see, understand and celebrate the beauty.  At least, that's how I feel when I look at these and her body of work.   As she exercises restraint in the way she approaches the image, I find my emotions in looking at them a bit overwhelming.

Please don't miss this show.  (Sorry - there is no link to the exhibition)

(I have also just heard that there is a dual exhibition with her and another Japanese photographer downtown at Mountain Fold gallery of recent photographs from the devastation of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan.  I haven't seen it yet but anxious to go.)

Paintings by Damian Loeb

There is an exhibition of photorealist paintings by self-taught Damian Loeb up until mid June at Acquavella.  I have been following his career for a while (from when he splashed on the scene with Mary Boone years back).   There was debate back then surrounding his staying power or whether he was a flash in the pan.  But clearly those that believed that he had a strong career ahead of him won.  This is his second show at blue chip Acquavella.

Loeb's early work was culled from images from media - advertisements in magazines, etc.  Loeb then appropriated images from movies, specifically science fiction and horror movies.  Although they were oil paintings, there was a quiet and unnerving quality to the works that reminded me of Gregory Crewdson's photographs, which he has carried onto his later work.  His last exhibition with Acquavella was both landscapes and painting from his own photographs of scenes that looked as if they were film stills.

In this show, Loeb's work is equally as beautiful as in the past, but I think shows more depth, especially psychologically.  In this series, he focuses on pictures that he took of his wife over the last seven years and painted from these images.  The moments that he has captured are truly intimate - there is an ease between her and the viewer - which makes us somewhat uncomfortable as we are confronted with her relaxed nature and her nudity.   I am not sure if its because of the way she stares directly at you in some works (a contemporary Olympia), the immediacy you feel from the modern furniture and surroundings or just his genuine talent for capturing a moment so real you feel like touching the work to make sure its actually a painting; I am jarred by the fact that I am walking in on a very private moment. 

His eye for color, composition, cropping and technique is as good as any Old Master.   There is a Vermeer quality to his treatment of light in his paintings that is exquisite and his use of black and restraint of hue reminds me of the Spanish masters.  The theme of the bather is repeated - in the tub, in the shower and even as you view her mannerist back as she bends over a child (I think compositionally from Degas' bathers).  I love his use of 3 x 3 ft and 4 x 4 ft square format for these paintings (rather than his very horizontal, long rectangular format he has used in the past).  You truly feel like your are looking through a window and completely feel like a voyeur.  

My favorite work, by far, in the show is the one above.  His wife is lying on the bed horizontally bathed in the blue glow of what we can imagine is a flat screen TV.  I love the dichotomy of the traditional technique and the idea of the nude - which has been painted for centuries - truly updated and made contemporary by the invasion of technology here.  And what makes the work even more dreamy, sexy, magical - is not his gorgeous wife in her bra, but the treatment of the wrinkled sheets and pillows captured in the yellow light behind her.  You can almost see the imprints of the couples head on the pillows that sit somewhat askew - the memory of an intimate moment between a couple - whether lying in bed reading together or otherwise.  I am glad to be a fly on this wall here.

A few things now on the Lower East Side that I like

I had a marathon day on the LES on Friday and here is a few things that I liked.

There is a show that you shouldn't miss at Rachel Uffner with her second show of works by Hilary Harnischfeger.  (She also had an amazing solo exhibition of her works in her booth at the Armory show a couple of years ago.)  I love these!!   They are smaller 3-D abstractions made from layers and layers of multi-colored paper (she colors them herself) that are tightly compressed and cut with plaster, rock and clay that are molded into organic forms.  These sculptures are hung on the wall, and remind me of either weather-beaten sea rocks or coral, solidified magma or a model of a mountain range turned on its side.  They are gorgeous and although there is a kind of unfinished quality to them, you can also see the effort and labor it took to get them balanced in terms of color combination, hue, form and materials.  There are also some new ceramic works that look like vases that are freestanding.  She uses the same materials as in her wall sculptures, but a significant part of them are glazed and fired clay.  They remind me of the kind of half-done paper weights that I made as presents for my parents as a child, but I mean that in a good way.  They also remind me of smaller, abstracted Betty Woodman ceramics, but I appreciate these much more - I like the combination of materials and the colors and they are less garish and more accessible than Woodman's.  There is also a very large work that is shaped like a rectangular canvas hung on the wall (I think her first in this scale) that really straddles the mediums of painting and sculpture.   And be sure to check out the sides of the work - they are as interesting as the front!!

Link to exhibition

There is another fabulous show at DCKT with paintings by Timothy Tompkins (maybe their 3 or 4th show with this artist?).  The artist has been working in the same method for a number of years - taking imagery, not his own, and manipulating it.  He then paints these altered images in glossy enamel paint on aluminum where there is an intense blurring effect when you stand back from the painting.  In this show, the images primarily focus on explosion - be it fireworks at the Olympics in Beijing or a rocket blasting off into the sky.  There is also a more subdued painting of a spider web (which makes me think of Vija Celmins - although totally different style) and a fiery clouds.  I love this work for a variety of reasons - I love its magnetic effect because of its blurred nature.  Your eye doesn't want to look away because your brain is constantly trying to decipher all the details of the image through the lozenges of intense color.  When you get very close to the painting, there is a wonderful second discovery of the layers and layers of complimentary and contrasting colors.  The surface of the painting itself, in all its slickness, its a thing of beauty.  When you are very close, the images becomes almost abstracted (not unlike an Impressionist painting - but here entirely controlled).  The artist is a brilliant colorist - I feel that some of the colors he uses I have never even seen before and probably don't even have a name.   I also love the kind of dichotomy of the images of explosion - with the blurring you can't really tell - is this a celebration of a global athletic event or superior technology or is something violent going on here?   The images are above, but these works really can only be truly appreciated in person.

Link to exhibition

I don't know much about this artist, but I really enjoyed looking at Ben Grasso's paintings at Thierry Goldberg.  The colors are rich and the brush stroke a bit loose in these fantastical images of houses being spun about and disintegrating before our very eyes.  They remind me of Adam Cvijanovic's paintings of a similar subject that I haven't seen for a while - but also really liked.  Here the scale is smaller than the latter artist's work and with the looser brushwork, there is a little more interesting play on the surfaces of the painting.  Also, the vegetation that surrounds the levitating houses - plants, trees and grass - also seem to  explode in a fury.  There is a deconstruction around the center of some of these images into vertical and horizontal planes which makes me think of one of my favorite German contemporary artists, abstracted landscape painter, David Schnell (who for some reason is not represented in the US and doesn't have such a huge following here - not sure why?).  

Is this what happens to homes during a tornado?  Its a mystery because the sky is so blue....

Link to exhibition

Lastly, I went to the 11 Rivington exhibition of Caetano de Almeida paintings.  The paintings are large, brightly-colored, geometric abstractions that are cool, but for me, they lack a little depth (I will attach a link below anyway).  However, if you peek around to the back for a wonderful suprise, there are some prints that are fantastic.  Maybe its just my love of German Expressionism and Modernism, but there is a handful of fabulous prints by the contemporary artist, Volker Hueller.  He had a show with the gallery and the associated, Salon 94, last year of paintings and paintings with collage (I saw an example of one in the back - fantastic).   These are etchings in which the artist manipulates with watercolor after the impression.  The imagery is figurative - but part Cubist, Surrealist and very expressionist.  There is an image that reminds me of Georg Grosz and the palette is also nostalgic of Klee and Schiele.   Right now I don't have images of these exact prints that I saw - I will try to find them this week and add them.  But here are some examples above and there is a link below to a show that he had in London with Timothy Taylor that has very good examples of similar prints that I saw.

Hueller's exhibition last year at Timothy Taylor in London

Link to Almeida exhibition

Paintings by Xiaoze Xie

Recently, Chambers Fine Art, a gallery that is based in New York and Beijing whose focus is Chinese artists, had an exhibition by painter, Xiaoze Xie, an artist whose career I have followed for a while and whose work I adore.  Although Xie hasn't strayed very far from his original project for several years - richly colored photorealist paintings of piles of books and newspapers found in archives and libraries - I continue to be intrigued by his talent and technical excellence coupled with the subtle changes in subject matter and palette with each of his exhibitions.  I first saw his paintings after the Gerhard Richter exhibition at MOMA which had a major effect on me and brought me back to a love of figurative, photorealist art.  I have been hooked for a while.

In many cases, Xie, who has been granted special access to the archives and stacks of libraries in the US and in China, first photographs his subject which is the piles of books and newspapers without altering their order or moving them.  He then paints directly from his own photographs.  His technique is highly traditional and could be categorized a contemporary still-life - oil on canvas starting with a undercoat of blue or red that drips down the side of the canvas - reminding one of spilled blood.  I do not think this is an accident when you relate these drips to the images before you.

In this particular exhibition, the depiction of Chinese newspapers from Chinese libraries, the photos from newspapers display moments of celebration, but also of suffering and violence.  The papers are in layers and the pictures on the front pages are piled up on top of each other.  You can see the front page images on the folds of the papers and although these images aren't supposed to be seen together in this context, its impossible not to draw correlations between them.  In most cases its difficult to see the text, or if you do not read the language, the characters mean nothing to you, so the viewer must rely on the photos only and draw his own conclusions.  There is a fireworks display from the Olympics that could be read as a moment of nationalistic pride or as a terrible explosion.  The men at the bottom of this painting - are they athletes or laborers?

In painting this subject matter here, imagery from newspapers, I think Xie is speaking volumes about politics and society.  Although the beauty of these paintings is transfixing, there seems there could be a very subversive message going on here. Xie grew up in China, under the Cultural Revolution, and studied art there and in Texas.  He is continues to work in the US on the West Coast, unlike many of his contemporaries that have returned to China after studying abroad.   The idea of what information that has been dispatched as news to the public in Chinese newspapers and the idea of censorship could be at play here.

Also, the idea that events in our lives - here a person suffering from injuries from a devastating earthquake and in another the damage captured juxtaposed to an image of a man in space - How do we as a people deal with the horrible events that happen around the globe while there continues to be a great push forward to the future and new technology?  Do we quickly forget the bad and throw it away like yesterday's news?  Does the bombardment of images in the newspaper and even more so on the internet make us jaded to those that are suffering?  I think his paintings make us ask these important questions, but clearly there is no answer here.

You can also look at his works in terms of the concept that newspapers are a dying medium.  As we have been hearing for years now, that magazines and newspapers are on their way out as we continue to embrace new technologies.  Here papers are filed away haphazardly in layers on shelves thrown on top of one another - not archived in a proper and organized manner to help them withstand the damage of time.  I think this is further evidenced in his painting of books that seem to be falling apart and rotting away on the shelves.  And unlike the newspapers, we cannot see the images or words as if the information is being hidden from us.  When books are treated like this, we ask how important is history to us?

The most overtly political works is a video by Xie (I had never seen him work in this medium before) that was projected on a stack of books like a screen in the front room as well as paintings that correspond to the imagery that is seen in the video.  The paintings, the most abstracted works of the bunch and a departure from his usual compositions, look as if the pages are in flames, particularly in his use of stark contrast of darks to fiery yellows, oranges and red.  The books look like they are being tossed about and this is even more evident in the video (see the double image 4th from the top).  Why are the books being treated this way?  This video is supposed to invoke images of book burnings by the Nazis by the 1930s.  As violent as this is, the books as they levitate and fly through the air look almost graceful as they fall to their death - as they do in the paintings.  The idea of book burnings speaks for itself.

Xie had been the only Chinese artist represented by Charles Cowles before he closed the gallery a few years ago, and this is the first show of Xie's in New York with Chambers.  I think its a different and welcome perspective to see him in the the company of other Chinese artists and I look forward to seeing  his work contextualized with them in group show here in the hopefully in the near future.


*****Oops!!  One thing I forgot to add is that often think about Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History series from the 1970's when I see Xie's works.  Her works were highly conceptual and a completely different style (you can look at the artist's website to see examples), but the point of her series was to show the front page of various newspapers around the globe on one specific day with only the images and the name of the newspaper intact, but devoid of the text.  The works question what these institutions that run the newspapers decide is important for the public to see - what will interest them, get them to buy them and what they deem "newsworthy".  I think you can look at Xie's works in a similar context as what does this newspaper, from this particular region, deem important for the public to see and read.


Link to exhibition

Paintings (on car hoods) by Jonathan Monk

I am sorry I haven't updated my blog in a while, but I really wanted to highlight this show that I went to a couple of weeks ago.

Jonathan Monk is a contemporary British artist that seemed to have lost himself in the 1960s in California.  In "Californian Conceptualism" that is.   To be brief, this past show that Casey Kaplan had with him was chock full of interesting stuff, however, his paintings on car hoods are what really appealed to me (see above), called the "Rew-Shay Hood Project".  At first glance, this is a fantastic series of black and white photo realist paintings on car hoods.  The works are pristine depictions of retro gas stations.  Some of them are single car hood paintings hung on the wall while others are placed in a more sculptural context on the floor (which I like better - it seems to break with the convention that painting must be hung on a wall - but then again, a figurative painting on a car hood is a little rebellious in itself) as well as diptychs made from two adjacent car hoods.

I thought these images of the old gas stations looked familiar, and then I realized they were based on photographs that Californian-based artist, Ed Ruscha, had taken in the late 1960s along Route 66.  These black and white documentary-like photographs had been a series that Ruscha had published in 1967 called "Twentysix Gasoline Stations".  These photographs, and gas stations in particular, were a source of inspiration for Ruscha's hard-edged series of paintings from the same era (see an example below) and as well as for Jonathan Monk here.

In true Conceptual fashion, Monk defies the idea of authorship here by appropriating from this series of images.  This imagery is not his own.  Furthermore, he is not painting these at all himself.  From these photographs, Monk commissioned a New York hot-rod car painter to apply these images to the hood using an airbrush.  The painting style here is a complete departure from Ruscha's painting style, but the idea of the expansive American highway and "car-culture" is taken one step further by painting these works directly on the car hoods from Plymouth Barracudas, Chevy Novas, Datsuns and Dodge Demons from the late 60s and early 70s (according to the gallery description and similar to those automobiles depicted in the paintings themselves).  I can't help but think of the artist, Richard Prince, the king of appropriation and masculine imagery, here among these muscle car hoods.   The concept here is stretched to the limit and the works are, at the same time, both intellectual and witty.  There also seems to be a tension between the cold and slick color and style of the images and the romanticizing and nostalgia for the old American highway and automobile.  Foremost, the work is defiant in terms of originality but it engages the conceptual art of the past and actively continues the conversation.  They're cool.

Link to exhibition