REVIEW - Sarah Awad “The Women” at Diane Rosenstein Fine Arts, Hollywood, California

When looking at contemporary painting, many artists combine and use various styles and approaches that may seem contradictory, and at times, challenges notions of a pure style or a visual language. Sarah Awad, in her first solo show at Diane Rosenstein Fine Arts, approaches painting and the structure of the nude figure using various modes from the modern past.

Sarah Awad masterfully is able to combine elements of both modernism and post modernist style. The figures and the composition allude to the early 20th Century painters such as Matisse and Picasso. The composition and pastel colors are reminiscent of Neo-Expressionist painters such as David Salle and Eric Fischel. The women in her paintings are cast in various poses. They’re at times sitting and standing, and the color insinuates both passion and intensity. The figures show both a strength and vulnerability with their poses. The area around the women is not recognizable as to any location. However, the structure points to an architectural place where these women exist as beings in an abstracted - imagined place. As I walk through the gallery, I am struck by the serenity and the confidence of the figures. These women are beautiful. They are figures of both desire and courage as they stand before the viewer. Awad loves these women as both structures and as symbols of nature that is both free and bold. 

Awad's painting are beautiful, and a show that is definitely worth a visit. A must see.

Sarah Awad (USA, b. 1981) received her BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2007), and an MFA from UCLA (2011). This year, her paintings were included in three important group shows: Rogue Wave '13 (15 Artists From Los Angeles) at L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; First Anniversary Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture and Photographs at DRFA; and Paradox Maintenance Technicians at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2013). Sarah Awad lives and works in Los Angeles.

Sarah Awad

October 19, 2013 to November 30, 2013

Diane Rosenstein Fine Art

831 N. Highland Ave. 

Hollywood, CA 90038

(323) 397-9225

http://www.dianerosenstein.com

Lucy McKenzie in A Bigger Splash from The Tate, London, England

Are these paintings or a stage set? Artist Lucy McKenzie presents us with an elegant room, complete with fake marbling, trompe l'oeil radiators and the scuffs and stains of years of inhabitation.

This imaginary room was inspired by Muriel Spark's 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means, and was used as a back-drop for a recent film. McKenzie talks to TateShots about challenging expectations of what a painting can be. Lucy McKenzie's work is shown in A Bigger Splash, a new exhibiton at Tate Modern that explores the relationship between painting and performance art.


A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance 
Tate Modern: Exhibition 14 November 2012 -- 1 April 2013

Phil Kim "Inuendo" at Bolivar Cafe/Gallery, Santa Monica, California

PHIL KIM
innuendo

curated by Kio Griffith

ARTIST RECEPTION: OCTOBER 5, 2013 from 8 to 10pm
EXHIBIT RUNS: SEPTEMBER 23 to OCTOBER 25, 2013

FREE ADMISSION

BOLIVAR CAFE + GALLERY
1741 Ocean Park Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405

Cafe Bolivar offers great locally roasted Latin American coffees and Venezuelan Arepas.
Mon - Fri: 7:00 am - 8:30 pm Sat: 8:00 am - 7:00 pm

Bolivar Cafe / Gallery + Cafemode proudly present "Innuendo" solo show by PHIL KIM

My practice explores the fluctuating metafiction of paint – self-referencing itself as a material object in conflict with the nature of creating an image that invokes and recalls preconceived notions of palpable objects, brain stimuli or even images from our own mental database. I question the metaphysical aspect of what a painting is – the illusion that the painted object or subject is real, but if one starts to reason, it is just pigment on canvas, and just actors playing a scene.

The constant consumption of pixelated images, the vicarious living through a movie by creating a fiction that is in constant flux, a reality between the sensorial, corporeal and the intangible. The girl in the poster is just pigment on paper. The pair of legs spreading on the screen is just pixelated desire. Movies are not real. Nothing is but a fiction. My practice is to question the conflicting constant reminder of a self-awareness within the manifolds of a split mind living in an overwhelming image-making culture.

The paintings on canvas remind me of gem clusters containing traces left behind from a slithering paint. The thick protuberances of hues intertwine like sweaty manifestations trying to escape from one another while living in islands of perpetual diffuseness of trompe l'oeil fiction. The painted representation of the figures are as real as the pixelated pictures from the Internet. Touch me. Feel me. I am not just a face. I am materialized viscosity. I am a tangible pixelation of a reality screaming out to be preserved further than the confines of our memory, swimming in the overloading digital stream of disseminated images. My body is made of pixels and cells constantly trapped in its sticky web and never forgotten. I am just pigment. Then I become thick and blurred. You could hold me if you want and caress the slickness of my paint. Or you can digitally pickle me. Slide your fingers over the glass and voyeur my physical absence.


Philip Kim

Stephanie Pryor "New Work" at Marine Contemporary, Venice, California

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

— Robert Frost

Marine Contemporary is delighted to present Stephanie Pryor’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, which has been developed over the past two years, Pryor will be presenting a selection of large-scale landscape and figurative paintings. Pryor’s portraiture has long captured the emotional complexities of her subjects in shapes and in palettes at least as if not more evocative than descriptive. And now, alongside her acclaimed work with the figure, a reinvigorated interest in the narrative might travel in tandem. Pryor builds her images by diluting acrylic pigment and then layering it to generate discernible luminosity and depth between and among the myriad washes of embedded pigment. In her surfaces, she’s looking at the Nordic styles, and the Flemish Renaissance; but in her style of rendering,
she looks to a certain studied mannerist naivete, an elegant Outsider gesturalism in her interpretiverelationship to space and color. In both her portraits and her landscapes, she is representing both realand psychological spaces, invoking aspects of ordinary life infused with an unnatural naturalism.

The newest landscapes are based on her personal travels, including to places from her past, so that in addition to her art-historical and formal concerns, her own memories become factors as well. Even her more traditional landscapes strike a note of dream-state ambiguity, achieved, as in her portraiture, through an evocative use of color. In the new portraits, not only are the subjects’ surroundings more articulated than ever, those settings – a brick wall, a city sidewalk, a gathering crowd – get the same elaborated attention. For the first time, all the paintings are based on her own original photography rather than on found or sourced material – so that her versions of events are now increasingly tied to her own direct experience of time and emotion.

Pryor has arrived at a place in her newest work from which she might well go in any of several diverging directions -- a metaphor that’s both a little oblique and also quite direct. In sense, her persistent desireto take all available paths at one time has long defined the struggles that play out in her pictures, narrated as a contest of choreography between depiction and abstraction. “It’s not about being faithful to the pictures; they can change during the painting process.” Rather, it’s about being faithful to another kind of knowing.

Stephanie Pryor (b. 1971, Great Lake, Illinois, USA) graduated with an MFA from UCLA in 2000. Her layered, seductive paintings explore the line between abstraction and representation, both physically and psychologically. She has exhibited widely in the states and abroad. She has had solo shows at ACME, Los Angeles, CRG Gallery New York and Studio Guenzani, Milan, Italy. Stephanie has participated in numerous group shows. Some highlights include Studio International, Paintings for the Ophichus Collection, Hydra Workshop Greece, The Sensational Line, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Contemporary, Cool and Collected, The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Select public collections include MOCA Madison, WI, Creative Artist Agency Los Angeles and Deutchebank Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. Her 2011 solo exhibition at Marine Contemporary was listed in Modern Painters 100 Best Fall Shows. Pryor currently lives
and works in Los Angeles.



Opening Reception: Thursday, Sept 12, 6–8pmSept 13 — Oct 19, 2013

Telephone
+1 310 399 0294
Email: ca@marinecontemporary.com\

1733 – A Abbot Kinney Blvd
Venice, CA, 90291
marinecontemporary.com
11– 6 Tuesday – Friday
12 – 5 Saturday
or by appointment