Friday, July 29, 2011

Group Show "The New Verisimilitude" at Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, California

“Art is the lie that tells the truth” – Pablo Picasso

François Ghebaly Gallery and M+B are pleased to announce The New Verisimilitude, a two-part group exhibition across both gallery spaces, curated by François Ghebaly. This exhibition explores new approaches to realism in the contemporary practices of ten artists working in different mediums (painting, sculpture, video, and performance), with each work manifesting a different approach to verisimilitude.

Italian historian Bartolommeo Fazio first formally described verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, in a discussion of a Jan Van Eyck painting in the fifteenth century. In a description of a triptych by Van Eyck, the Genoese humanist noted an Angel Gabriel with “hair surpassing reality” and a donor lacking “only a voice”. Since this first contextualization, verisimilitude has been closely associated with aesthetic representation, and the very idea of verisimilitude in art has evolved alongside technology: first defined through painting and live performance, then through photography and cinema, and now through recent developments in CGI and virtual reality.

For over thirty years, Daniel Douke has created meticulously crafted paintings that push the boundary between image and object. In his re-creation of boxes and packaging materials, Douke is pushing his masterful painting technique towards an illusion that takes the form of a three-dimensional object, which once the artifice revealed, cleverly comments on pop art and minimalism.

Dan Finsel’s videos, objects and installations exist as documents of a centrally performative practice. His work chronicles the narrative and psychological motives of a fictional but often unstable character—Dan Finsel—whose subjectivity is constructed from a displaced perversion of Finsel’s “authentic” self. Taking from Lee Strasberg’s method acting techniques, Finsel immerses himself in the psychological trauma of this performed identity and attempts to destabilize/disrupt the relationship between the construction of the subject and the subject as production/performance.

Inspired by the neon signs and billboards of Las Vegas where he was born and raised, Cayetano Ferrer investigates the continual change and growth of the city in his own art practice. InRoadside Monument (2011), Ferrer recreates various computer-generated commercial signage, those familiar blinking signs that the average American sees hundreds of times a day. These signs invite the viewer to enter his site-specific sculptural video installation, which in return questions the unknown and the improbable, challenging the verisimilitude that allowed entry to his work in the first place.

Argentinean artist Victoria Gitman’s small and highly detailed oils on wood depict vintage fashion artifacts that the artist collects from thrift stores. Using a technique reminiscent of the works of the Dutch masters and working directly with the actual object rather than a photograph, her subjects levitate from a minimal background, giving them a radiating presence.

Karl Haendel’s photorealistic graphite drawings reproduce images culled from the world of mass media and everyday objects, playing with notions of authenticity and truth. Haendel’s installations of overlapping and seemingly unrelated subjects create a new narrative and invite the viewer into a radical social commentary on American culture.

Using actors as a material, David Levine is interested in the idea of acting techniques as a means of knowledge and experience-acquisition, often putting actors in unorthodox situation. Combining elements of endurance art, performance art and theater, Levine’s performances and installations question our fascination with actors and the hopelessness of their efforts to fully become someone else.

Isaac Resnikoff’s hand-carved wood sculptures are the result of countless hours of a methodic and precise process. Using this ancient technique, the artist creates large and ambitious reproductions of real life objects that forces the viewer to modify his behavior and to rediscover the surrounding architecture and meanings presented under a new perspective.

In Peter Rostovsky’s practice, images are mined from a wide array of media—including film, video or photographs—from which still images can be captured. Rostovsky sees these single frames as the most concise and expressive increment of our mediated lives. His photo-realistic paintings and sculptures show an interest in the ephemeral quality of painting and make visible the constantly shifting balance between the power of transmitting and receiving information.

Robert Russell explores the existentialism of the painter through a rigorous daily painting practice. His work questions, like Richter or Tuymans, the relationship between painting as a primary hands-on means of producing images and all the medium’s technically assisted derivatives. The metaphysical concern of this major issue is subtly raised through his gentle painting touch, and his work functions as homage and criticism to the medium.

Yoshihiro Suda is a Japanese contemporary artist known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of plants and flowers created in the tradition of Japanese woodcarving. In his installations, he strategically places his small sculptures—which might be in the form of perfectly rendered clumps of weeds or a single rose—in unexpected places, such as a crack on a wall or a window frame.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@ghebaly.com, or visit our website www.ghebaly.com

François Ghebaly Gallery
2600 La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T 310-280-0777






Tuesday, July 26, 2011

"IT'S GREAT TO BE IN NEW JERSEY" CURATED BY GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON at Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, California


JULY 16, 2011 — AUGUST 27, 2011
















2622 S. LA CIENEGA BLVD.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90034

T: 310.837.0191
F: 310.838.0191

www.honorfraser.com

Sunday, July 24, 2011

MATT CONNORS, ROBERT CUMMING AND FLORIAN MORLAT at Cherry and Martin, Culver City, California

For this exhibition, Matt Connors and Florian Morlat invited Robert Cumming to exhibit the photographs he made in Los Angeles in the early and mid-1970s. Like many conceptual photographers, Cumming embraced the photograph as an objective tool to document his narrative conceptual impulses. However, his photographs are separated from those of his peers John Baldessari and William Wegman by his interest in the construction of the photograph itself, especially with regard to the picture plane. At his house and in his backyard, Cumming built elaborate set-ups that when photographed resolved themselves to present odd tableaux that were concise and open-ended, serious and funny, obvious and mysterious. The photographs he took resonate today with the same uncanny wit and authority they had when they were made. The exhibition, Matt Connors, Robert Cumming, Florian Morlat, presents an open-ended dialogue concerning the structure of art objects and how we look at them.

Matt Connors’ work is currently the subject of a two-person exhibition with Fergus Feehily at the Dallas Museum of Art. In the fall of 2011, Connors will have concurrent solo shows at Lüttgenmeijer and Veneklasen Verner (both Berlin). He has had solo exhibitions at Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles), Canada (New York) and The Breeder (Athens). His work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Artforum. Connors received his BFA from Bennington College in 1995 and his MFA from Yale University in 2006. He lives and works in New York.

Robert Cumming’s works are in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. Cumming lives and works in Massachusetts.

Florian Morlat will have a solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin in February 2012. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin), Rowley Kennerk Gallery (Chicago) and Daniel Hug Gallery (Los Angeles). Significant group exhibitions include YBA, curated by Ali Subotnick, Mauritzio Cattelan and Olaf Metzel, Berlin Biennale (Berlin); Florian Morlat and Thaddeus Strode, Michael Hall Gallery (Vienna); Abstract Art Now—Strictly Geometrical?, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, (Ludwigshafen, Germany); and Home Show, Revisited, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (Santa Barbara). Morlat studied at the Akademie der bildenden Kuenste, Munich, received his diploma from the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf in 1996 and his MFA at University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
90034
Phone 310 559 0100
Fax 310 559 0120
info@cherryandmartin.com
www.cherryandmartin.com











Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Alison Rash / Chris Trueman: The Suspended Literal at Autonomie Projects, Los Angeles, California

In their new show at Autonomie gallery in downtown Los Angeles, Alison Rash and Chris Trueman engage in a dialog between form and line, color and composition, and pattern and design. Rash's works on paper consists of line and form, interspersed in pattern and design. The works are well done. Rash visually engages in the viewer's belief of form and design in a playful manner that teases and challenges at the same time. 
Trueman's paintings are Rothko-esque in their composition and color. The paintings challenge the viewer into looking deep into the painting while taking the viewer to another dimension. They are airy and almost mystical in nature.  However, unlike Rothko, Trueman's paintings formulate shape and composition so that the viewer recognizes the strategy of what the artist wants to convey. The paintings communicate a structure that demands of the viewer its attention. Both Rash and Trueman take different approaches to abstraction and engage the viewer and each other of specific strategies on painting. A wonderful show and I highly recommend seeing it. 
Autonomie Gallery
333 South Spring Street, Unite E4., 
Los Angeles, CA 90808
Email for hours: autonomie333@gmail.com

Chris Truman

Allison Rash

Allison Rash

Allison Rash

Allison Rash

Chris Trueman

Chris Trueman

Chris Trueman

Allison Rash

“Through a Glass Darkly” Tim Braden, Daniel Pitin, Ciprian Muresan and Hugo Wilson: Group Show at Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Culver City, California

Curated by the British art critic and curator, Jane Neal, the exhibition brings together four of the most dynamic and intriguing young artists working in Europe today: Tim Braden, Daniel Pitin, Ciprian Muresan and Hugo Wilson. The title of the show is taken from a verse in the Bible (1 Corinthians 13). It references the blurry confusion of life in light of the future clarity of heavenly perspective. The phrase also served as the title for Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film involving four characters, each of whom offers an insight into the mind and actions of the others, thus serving as a kind of “mirror”.

Taking place on a bleak Swedish island over an intense, 24 hour period, the film charts the descent into madness of Karin, the main protagonist, and witnesses the often desperate actions of the remaining three characters: Karin's husband (and psychiatrist), her absentee father and her highly-strung brother. Karin's obsessive watching of the wallpaper in her room, and her “fate” at  the hands of the men in her life has prompted comparisons to be drawn with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's chilling short story: The Yellow Wallpaper (first published 1892).

The artists in this exhibition were all aware of both the Biblical verse and the film. The intention behind the show was not to call the artists to respond directly to either verse or film, but for them to have in mind something of the atmosphere or motivation of each. The four artists work in distinctly different ways: Braden in paint, Pitin in paint and film, Muresan in drawings, film and sculpture and Wilson in paint, drawing and sculpture; yet each is concerned with something of the sensibilities outlined above.

Mihai Nicodim Gallery
3143 South La Cienega Blvd, Unit B, 
Los Angeles, CA 90016
T: 310.838.8884 
info@nicodimgallery.com 
www.nicodimgallery.com
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday
11 – 6 pm













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