Sunday, March 17, 2013

Olga Koumoundouros and Monique Van Genderen at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, California

SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
6006 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
phone 310.837-2117
fax 310.837-2148

Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 6 pm and by appointment.


"Possessed by Glint and Dreams"

Olga Koumoundouros’ work addresses a fundamental tenet of the American Dream, home ownership, inviting viewers to consider the ties – emotional, financial, and psychological – that bind us to the place we call home. Recently she re-contextualized the focus of her work by taking possession of an abandoned house in her neighborhood, thus becoming both storyteller and protagonist in a narrative that equally chronicles the political and personal fallout of the recent housing market collapse. Entitled A Notorious Possession, she treated the home as a monumental readymade, covering it entirely in gold paint and, by moving in, weaving her own personal narrative and desires into the real and imagined story of the previous owners.

In this exhibition, Koumoundouros presents the gold canvases that covered the rooftop of the occupied home.  Here, it has been re-assembled as a full-scale roof which hangs upside down from the ceiling and spans the first two galleries. Koumoundouros invites viewers into a world of displacement and desire in which abandoned couches grow appendages, a refrigerator door holds a cipher of conflated lives, a crematory urn acts as a kind of celestial mailbox, and a Lazy-Boy recliner – like Sisyphus – is allowed no rest. A sprayed rainbow encircles the space, while dyed thrift-store sheets knotted into escape ropes co-mingle with objects both new and retrieved from an amalgam of histories. Extrapolating from the objects left behind, from interviews with neighbors and by drawing from her own imagination, Koumoundouros insinuates her own life into the abandoned home to create a haunting narrative that is emotional, confusing, and generous – defying both easy categorization and a simple solution.

Olga Koumoundouros received her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts in 2001. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; and Rogue Wave Projects, LA Louver Skyroom, Venice, CA. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including “Greater LA” New York, NY; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, Utah; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; 18th Street Projects, Santa Monica, CA; the Banff Centre Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB, Canada; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; the Glassell School of Art, Houston, TX; “Thing,” UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Schindler House, Los Angeles, CA. This summer, her work will be presented in a public engagement project at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. A site-specific project in collaboration with Andrea Bowers will be featured this year at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY and LAND will include her work in an upcoming project in Los Angeles as well. This is Olga Koumoundouros’ third solo exhibition at the gallery. Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is located at 6006 Washington Blvd in Culver City, 1 block west of La Cienega at Sentney Avenue. Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am - 6 pm and by appointment.























"MONIQUE VAN GENDEREN"

March 1 - April 10, 2013


Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to present new paintings by Monique van Genderen.
For van Genderen’s second solo exhibition, the galleries will be physically adjusted to equal size and shape in order to feature two identical installations. One large-scale painting, each comprised of two connected panels, will be installed in each gallery. While the paintings are firmly situated within the discourse of abstraction that Van Genderen has long pursued, these works are simultaneously self-reflective. They are in a dialogue with each other, reflecting both the interiority of the gallery’s architecture and an exterior landscape by way of their horizontal composition. Because it is impossible to see both works at the same time, the viewer must rely on memory to experience them together, thus provoking a déjà vu experience. Halfway through the duration of the exhibition, Van Genderen will re-install the paintings, changing the arrangement of the two large format paintings into four single works. By creating a fluctuating environment, the artist proposes a new set of possibilities for the viewer to discover, to compare differences and similarities, and to articulate our ever changing trains of thinking, seeing and looking.

Monique van Genderen received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. She has had solo exhibitions at Hammer Projects, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; D’Amelio Gallery, New York, NY; Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin; and Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; Art Unlimited at Art Basel 37; and in the 48th Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is located at 6006 Washington Blvd in Culver City, 1 block west of La Cienega at Sentney Avenue. Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am - 6 pm and by appointment.










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