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VOGES GALLERY, Frankfurt

 

 

ALEXANDRA RANNER
FLUR

Installation and new Photographic works

 

January 29 - March 27, 2010
Opening: January 29, 2010, 7 p.m.

 

VOGES GALLERY is pleased to announce its third solo show with Alexandra Ranner. Ranner surfaced on the international art scene in 2001 in Venice, at the final Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann. Her highly acclaimed, large-scale installation APRÉSLUDE (today in the collection of the Lenbach Haus in Munich) was the starting point for her numerous gallery and museum exhibitions in Europe, North America and Canada. In 2003, Ranner received the prestigious Schmidt-Rottluff Grant and her most recent significant piece, SCHLAFZIMMER II was commissioned in 2009 for the exhibition INTERIOR/EXTERIOR at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

 

The centrepiece of the exhibition at VOGES GALLERY will be, along with new photographic works and light-boxes, the large-scale installation FLUR, which was Ranner's first multimedia work. As in most of her large-scale work, plain wooden panels enclose the richly-detailed, stage-like interior, in which the artist creates a state of illusion using painting, video and sculpture. In FLUR, the spectator's view is directed into a perspectively reduced corridor, where a half-opened door allows us to witness a short, enigmatic sequence, embodied with a Hitchcockian suspense that evokes simultaneously disruption and irritation.

 

Alexandra Ranner (*1967, Munich) lives and works in Berlin. She teaches at the University of the Arts (UdK) at the architectural faculty.

 

Image:
Alexandra Ranner, Flur, 2003 [Exterior View]
mixed media
220 x 300 x 560 cm, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Courtesy of VOGES GALLERY, Frankfurt

 

VOGES GALLERY
nationale suisse hochhaus
Neue Mainzer Strasse 1
60311 Frankfurt
Germany
+49 69 557454

 

VOGES GALLERY 

 

ALEXANDRA RANNER 

 

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Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

 

 

RODNEY MCMILLIAN

"Succulent"

 

January 23 - March 6, 2010

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects has moved to a new building, located just a few blocks west from our previous location, at 6006 Washington Boulevard in Culver City.

 

We are pleased to inaugurate our new gallery space at 6006 Washington Boulevard in Culver City with a solo exhibition by Rodney McMillian. Encompassing a wide range of media, McMillian's work is at heart a highly poetic investigation of an American social history, as it manifests itself from political reality to the deeply personal spheres of the home and the body.

In his last solo exhibition at the ICA Boston McMillian offered a look at the social, political, and personal connotations that construct the place we call "home". In this exhibition, McMillian develops this conversation further to investigate how political realities reach beyond the home to the body. Entitled "Succulent", the exhibition centers on a large hand-sewn painting containing a sphincter, an orifice that mediates consumption and waste and that acts as a liminal space between inside and outside. Also on view will be a video showing the artist's hands in motion as if conducting an orchestra, an arrangement of painted columnar sculptures, and a group of succulents that were grown by the artist for the exhibition.

In the second gallery space, McMillian presents a hand-sewn room made from black vinyl fabric. The fabric covers the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the entire gallery space. Fusing spatial and bodily categories, the vinyl room is a poignant reminder of how cultural meaning and aesthetic form are inherently linked.

 

Born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969, McMillian lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in 2002 from the California Institute of the Arts and his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. McMillian has had solo exhibitions at Momentum 14, ICA Boston, Boston (2009), at the Kitchen, New York (2008); ArtNova, ArtBasel Miami Beach (2006); and at Triple Candie, New York (2005). His work has been featured prominently in important group exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial, New York, 30 Americans, the Rubell Collection, Miami, Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Painting in Tongues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; in Uncertain States of America at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo, and traveling to Serpentine Gallery, London, Bard Museum Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson. His work has also been featured in Thing - New Sculpture from Los Angeles, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; in Frequency, Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem; in White Noise, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles; and in USA Today at the Royal Academy of Art, London. This is Rodney McMillian's third solo exhibition at the gallery.

 

Also on view in the new gallery's viewing spaces will be an inaugural group exhibition with selected new works by gallery artists. Presented in sections, this exhibition will span over several months with the first section including works by Andrea Bowers, Edgar Arceneaux, Jedediah Caesar, Olga Koumoundouros, Patrick Wilson, Steve Roden, Ruben Ochoa and Amy Sillman.

 

Housed in a former industrial warehouse, the new roughly 8000 sqf gallery space features four large exhibition spaces, an open bow truss ceiling, and a massive work / storage area. Led by architect Peter Zellner, the renovation of the building was completed by HWI Construction, who have built, among others, for Frank Gehry, Phillip Lim, and CalArts. Architect Peter Zellner is the designer of contemporary art spaces in the Los Angeles area such as the Sweeney Art Gallery for UC Riverside, LAXART, and the REDCAT Lounge as well as New York galleries Wallspace, Maccarone Inc., and Harris Lieberman. His firm, ZELLNERPLUS, is now at work on the new Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood.

 

 

Image:
Rodney McMillian
"Untitled", 2010
Vinyl and thread
14' H x 27' 6" W
Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

 

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 West Washington Blvd
Culver City
Los Angeles, CA 90232
+1 310.837-2117

 

 

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

 

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Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart

 

 

Wolfgang Flad

"Coryllis erscheine"

 

January 29 to March 20, 2010

Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce the exhibition "Coryllis erscheine" by Berlin artist Wolfgang Flad (*1974). The artist's dynamic works - contrasting geometrically precise with amorphous, organically fluid forms - were last presented at the Galerie Reinhard Hauff in 2007. Since then, Flad's sculptures have entered the collections of institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Kunsthaus Zürich. In "Coryllis erscheine", Flad 's volumetric objects explore the theoretical potential of scientific models and reflect the artist's fascination with utopian science fiction inspired organisms.

Flad uses modest materials such as sandpapered plywood, painted planks and a malleable mixture of paper and glue. In a complex process of transformation, elimination and adaptation, the artist constructs skeleton-like frameworks where fine and heavy, light and dark, fragile and robust forms combine to contradict perceived weight and mass. The artist doesn't disguise the identity of his raw material but is intrigued by its capacity to take on characteristics of classical materials of sculpture such as bronze, iron and stone. In Flad's work, references to Brancusi's Endless Column, Giuseppe Penone's work with wood and John McCracken's minimalist reduction of immaculate high gloss surfaces are consciously combined and fused with influences from design, architecture and Bionics - the study of mechanical systems that function like living organisms. Within the current debate on Bionics, its significance for transposing various solutions used in technique and in nature to applications in architecture and design, such as various types of support media for example - the complex sculptures of Wolfgang Flad could also be viewed as a visual translation of (bio-) chemical models combined with a re-interpretation of the 1950's different experiments with sculptural form. For Flad, the notion of using recycled wood and shredded paper with recycled ideas, sketches, theories and plans for the scaffolding of his sculptures corresponds to his view that art as nature constantly renews itself.

 

Image:
Wolfgang Flad
(Detail)
Courtesy of Galerie Reinhard Hauff

 

GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF
Paulinenstrasse 47
D - 70178 Stuttgart
Germany
+49 (0) 711 609 770

 

GALERIE REINHARD HAUFF

 

WOLFGANG FLAD

 

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Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin | Galerie schleicher+lange, Paris

 

 

 

ELLIPSE / ECLIPSE

Part I. in Berlin, Galerija Gregor Podnar
15.01. - 13.03.2010
Attila Csörgő, Franziska Furter, Laurent Montaron, Goran Petercol, Evariste Richer

 

Part II. in Paris, galerie schleicher+lange
29.01. - 20.03.2010
Attila Csörgő, Vadim Fiskin, Alexander Gutke, Goran Petercol, Evariste Richer

The Gregor Podnar and schleicher+lange galleries are pleased to announce Ellipse/Eclipse. This double exhibition project, which is taking place as part of the gallery exchange programme Berlin-Paris 2010, will be on display through March 13 in Berlin and March 20 in Paris.

The two exhibitions, curated jointly by the two galleries, take their name from a work by Evariste Richer. In the project, each gallery is hosting artists from the other while at the same time showing artists from its own programme. In Berlin, the Galerija Gregor Podnar is presenting works by Attila Csörgő, Franziska Furter, Laurent Montaron, Goran Petercol and Evariste Richer. In Paris, galerie schleicher+lange presents Attila Csörgő, Vadim Fiskin, Alexander Gutke, Goran Petercol and Evariste Richer.

 

The Ellipse/Eclipse exhibitions bring artists together around the notion of space-time, from its most concrete, physical aspects to its most abstract interpretations - in science, fiction, geology, symbolism. Evariste Richer's work Ellipse/Eclipse represents the sun and the moon through the use of two light reflectors, such as are often found in movie theatres. Their respective gold- and silver-fabric faces reflect and intensify light, making them resemble heavenly bodies. This work acts as a link between the exhibited artists: the way they make use of devices suggests a certain pragmatism in the employed medium, which nevertheless stimulates the imagination and object-related thought.

 

Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

 

As shown in Berlin, Richer's Ellipse/ Eclipse will be set in dialogue with the work After by Laurent Montaron. Here the slide projection of an image of an explorer on a film set covered in artificial snow during a shoot is regularly interrupted by a spinning propeller in the front of the projector. The blinking image suggests the related experience of an actual film screening even as it lays bare and comments on the presented staging in the exhibition space. The adventure implied in the image of the explorer in fact belongs to the visitor, who is invited to "travel" between two realities.
The works of Attila Csörgő explore photographic space, its two-dimensionality and its potential as a geometric entity. Orange Space, for instance, attests to a double relationship to space through a panoramic photograph that is presented both as a flattened "orange peel" in a frame and as a sphere created from this approximate spiral.
Franziska Furter presents drawings from the series Draft, which can be understood as enlargements on the graphic representations of the most ecstatic and epiphanic moments from both Manga aesthetics and more traditional iconographies. Nevertheless, on closer inspection of the overlapping lines and black shapes of the graphite, the viewer is able to get a sense of the mental concentration that has occurred in the artist's meticulous and repetitive gesture within this now-definable space.
Goran Petercol investigates how an object acquires the character of an artwork through its presentation; thus, he analyses and defines the space and interspaces from which his works emerge. In the series After Reflections, a ceramic mass of 5 cm is added to the original dimensions of an object as materialized interspace. This establishes a reconnection between the original object and a creative process based on the chance occurrence of a broken form.

 

 

 

Galerie schleicher+lange, Paris

 

In Paris, the work CMYK, by Evariste Richer, is concerned with the durability of material. It consists of four semiprecious stones in the colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The reference to the colour code of offset printing is thwarted by the temporal nature of the stones, as well as by the unique character of the material.
The work Ping-Pong Electronic, by Vadim Fiskin, also plays with the relationship between the material and time. As in a homemade scientific experiment, a ball moves forwards and backwards, endlessly pushed by air from blow dryers, as a way to illustrate the laws of gravity and force. Its reference to the Sisyphus myth turns it into an allegory of the absurdity of the cycle of life.
Spherical Vortex, by Attila Csörgő, can be seen as echoing the other works. Like a planet, a lamp spins on its own axis so fast that the point of its light turns into bands and its trajectory describes a sphere. Three photographs make visible what the naked eye is unable to apprehend.
Also on display is a work from the series Sjene, by Goran Petercol. A metal tube placed between a light bulb and a pedestal functions as a channel for light. The work has the effect of amplifying the phenomenon by which a flowing, evanescent material is maintained. Petercol's works often stimulate us to perceive the world more intensively.
The leap from the "world" to the universe is only a wordplay away in Alexander Gutke's work Universe. Gutke's art is often characterized by the way it disrupts our usual relationship to emptiness, space and our own imagination, and this by means of obsolete projection devices that investigate themselves. The work Universe remains true to form, conveying the impression that the projected word "carousel" (which can refer also to the tray on a slide projector) is in fact travelling through the space it defines. In an almost tautological and, indeed, literal way, this work re-creates a total space through the unique medium of totality.

 

The exhibitions take place in the framework of "Berlin-Paris, un echange de galerie".

 

 

Images:

1. Installation view, Galerija Gregor Podnar, On left: Evariste Richer, Ellipse/Eclipse, 2007

Photograph: Marcus Schneider, 2010

2. Attila Csörgő: "Moebius Space", 2006

Courtesy of Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin | Galerie schleicher+lange, Paris

 

Galerija Gregor Podnar
Lindenstrasse 35
D-10969 Berlin
Germany
+49 30 259 346 51

 

Galerija Gregor Podnar

 

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galerie schleicher+lange
12 rue de picardie
F - 75003 Paris
France
+33 (0) 1 42 77 02 77

galerie schleicher+lange

 

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Loek Grootjans at S.M.A.K. Museum Gent, Belgium

 

 

 

Leaving Traces - Loek Grootjans

 

30.01.2010...16.05.2010

 

For the Leaving Traces exhibition, S.M.A.K. has selected three key works by the Dutch artist Loek Grootjans (b.1955). There is one thing we can say about Grootjans with absolute certainty: he thinks in terms of systems and takes his artistic practice very seriously, in the sense that everything is thought out down to the very last detail. When talking about Grootjans’ work, we have to refer to the specific framework he has created for it. This was in 1998 when he established the Foundation for the benefit of the aspiration and the understanding of context (formerly known as the institute for immediate knowledge, real perception and logic features according to the most contemporary monochrome paintings). This foundation has various departments, sub-departments and divisions that have increasingly subdivided over the years. The whole system functions like a gigantic construction around something that is actually physically absent from Grootjans’ oeuvre, and which precisely because of this defines and pervades even more forcefully everything he embarks on and creates.

 

In 2008, in collaboration with the museum, Grootjans launched a publication entitled Foundation, which systematically examines all the departments he had set up since 1998. Now, two years later, this collaboration has been extended in the form of the Leaving Traces exhibition. It focuses on three works of art from Foundation. These works each play a key role in Grootjans’ oeuvre. By bringing them together we are given an insight into his artistic practice which, since he started his career at the end of the 80s, has seen a great many developments.

 

He began his career at the end of the eighties producing purely monochrome paintings. These were inspired by an experiment he did in 1988. He shut himself up in a room without light for a month. He also wore a blindfold to make sure he could see absolutely nothing. Gradually brown patches began to appear in the completely empty darkness. When he finally left the room and removed the blindfold he was overwhelmed by a bright green colour. This colour experience was so powerful that from then on he used only browns and greens as the basis for his paintings. 

Aware of his position as a monochrome, abstract painter, especially with regard to his great predecessors Mondriaan, Malevitch, Newman, Reinhardt, Klein and so on, he approached his work very seriously and without compromise, starting with the amount of paint to be used, which is something he has always determined very precisely before starting to paint. Every stray drop or blob of paint was carefully recycled. This system implies a ‘delayed stop’ in the act of painting: once all the paint had been used up, the artist was forced to stop painting. In 1998 Loek Grootjans cleared out his studio and collected every remnant of paint, including every little drop that had fallen on the floor. He collected all these ‘last’ remnants of paint – the DNA of all the years of his artistic practice and system – in a Petri dish and called it The Final Remains of a contemporary monochrome Painter... which is also the first work of his to be exhibited at the S.M.A.K.

 

 

The Remembering Department is shown in conjunction with this work. We see a storage room with shelving against a wall. The shelves are empty and covered with a thick layer of dust, except for a space here and there which has been kept dust-free. Arranged on these spaces are the objects Grootjans has used in various Foundation projects since he set it up. The dust comes from the artist’s studio and he has carefully amassed it over the years.

 

 

The third key work is The Good Care Department. During a visit to the Opera Paese in Rome in 2001, Grootjans encountered election posters near the arts centre, featuring the surgically enhanced head of the television magnate Silvio Berlusconi and with the slogan: ‘Who takes good care of himself, takes good care of those who choose him.’ Inspired by this, Grootjans created a mural in which he juxtaposed the slogan diagrammatically with extracts from his book Visioen van de overkant (2002). The writing comprises many ‘observations’ and each one shows a subset of what concerns man in his happiness, fear, horror, desires, pleasures and obscenities. It shows an endless series of profundities, foolishness, delights and shamelessness linked together. In other words, Visioen van de overkant contains every possible definition of ‘the other’. Several versions of the Opera Paese mural have been shown in various contexts and in a number of different languages. At the S.M.A.K. Grootjans puts together another version of The Good Care Department.

 

 
Leaving Traces turns the spotlight on three major installations by Loek Grootjans. Each marks a new direction the artist has taken in his work and together they give us a picture of his artistic practice. After the exhibition the museum will select one of the works for its permanent collection.

 

 

 

Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris

 

 

ERIK SCHMIDT
Perusing The Scenery

9 January - 13 February, 2010

 

Perusing the Scenery is Erik Schmidt's second exhibition at Praz-Delavallade after 'Nach der Jagd ist vor der Jagd' in 2006. His new works reflect Schmidt's observations of the Holy Land, stemming from several journeys to the hills of Judaea, the Golan Heights and the Dead Sea. His conscious and deliberate decision to approach his material with the romantic idealism of a nineteenth century tourist armed with Baedeker and pith helmet might seem naive considering the paradox between the beauty of the scenery and the tension immanent in the images as a result of their context, yet Schmidt himself provokes by admitting this buildup of energy, with both creative and destructive aspects, into the works on show.

 

In the oil paintings, bucolic scenes, almost scientific in their dissection of the geography, are juxtaposed with the geometric forms of concrete, urban inclusions in the landscape, which, in turn, seem to melt into the heat-haze hanging over them. Schmidt's trademark application of paint, deep like bunches of grapes or discarded fruit peel, elevates the everyday into the spectacular, an olive tree glows in the sun, splendid like gold, alongside pastel tones that would be twee but for the muscular interference of that burning, aggressive orange.

 

As if to drive home the spontaneous aesthetic of the casual traveller, one corner of the show is devoted to a slide show of scenes from the Dead Sea's shores - disjointed pictures flick past, banal yet incisive, slicing up the unreal monotony of the receding waters and parched earth into segments: holidaymakers bathing in the brine, mounds of salt, and the artist himself, distanced in his mise-en-scene, showering nonchalantly, freeing himself of the dust, grime and sweat.

 

Schmidt's jaffa impressionism harks back to the innocent era of 'Visit Palestine' posters, coupled with an almost imperial drive to subvert the seen into the seeming by applying his own thick layer of artistry to the simple, archaic imagery; a troubling evocation of the earthly desire for the land and our belief in a unique ability to see beyond the surface, forcing us to re-examine our standpoint tirelessly and lock into the simplicity of the vista constructed by the mind's eye.

Geoffrey Whittaker

 

Erik Schmidt had solo exhibitions with Elisabeth Dee in New York, carlier | gebauer in Berlin and at the Museum MARTa Herford, Germany. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; ICA, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Artists Space, New York; and Barbara Gladstone, New York. In 2007, Hatje Cantz published the first monograph on the artist's work titled Hunting Grounds.

 

 

Image:
ERIK SCHMIDT
Bipolare Beschaffenheit, 2009
Oil on Canvas, 150 x 300 cm
Courtesy Praz-Delavallade Paris

 

Galerie Praz-Delavallade
28, rue Louise Weiss
10 rue du Chefdelaville
75013 Paris
France
+33 145862000

 

Galerie Praz-Delavallade 

 

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Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid

 

 

 

Marcel Dzama
Delila's Dance

 

January 14th - March 13th, 2010

 

Marcel Dzama (1974, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) presents his second solo exhibition in Spain, and first in Galería Helga de Alvear. His drawings, endowed with a unique and personal imagery, have become extremely popular in the past few years..

 

Marcel Dzama's world is rooted in the history of traditional illustration, with visual references which refer us to the classics from the decades of the 20's and 30's of the last century. Nevertheless, it is as if the artist were presenting us with a perverse version of these. He has created a personal, perfectly identifiable iconography, with recurring characters who perform rather difficult to discern actions, creating an atmosphere, an aura, full of humour, irony, anxiety and absurdity.

 

These are hybrid characters, personified animals, animate objects. Their actions are sustained on the limits of narrative, prompting the spectator to find a meaning, a linearity, which doesn't lead anywhere but which keeps the spectator guessing. It is as if we had access to a unique, not decisive moment, not knowing what happened before or what comes after.

 

The works are realised in pencil, ink and watercolours with a restricted palette: there is a dominance of red, brown, green, khaki, grey and black. The paper background is always left white, emphasising that reference to traditional illustration and, occasionally, the artist adds a text, either a line as a title or filling up the whole page.

 

He has produced a project specifically for this exhibition, in which he has given vent to Spanish motives. Almost as in a circus parade in which we see Don Quixote, bulls and bullfighters, flamenco dancers and a new character in his world; perverse, dressed in polka dots, and sexually ambiguous, these figures along with details borrowed from Goya's drawings and quotes from Federico García Lorca and from the Aragonese painter himself.

 

Regarding The Dance of Delilah, the artist says: "I had recently embarked on the task of collecting the images piled up around me, and Delilah wasn't something I was expecting to do. It emerged from the concern with the meaning of existence, and, above all, the death of the anonymous masses. Thus, Delilah dances with uncertainty and plays with language, as if she really cared about one language or another. Beyond that, the rules are random, and nothing is familiar or usual, although they do join the rhyme and richness of the harmonies and the suggestions of the imagery. So, please, enjoy the dance."

 

Along with the series of drawings, the artist also presents the video "The Infidels", in which two armies, a male and a female one, face each other in a battlefield, mixing choreography and details of great violence.

 

Image:
Marcel Dzama, "The possibilities of a rider's song", 2009
Ink and watercolor on paper. (Detail)
Courtesy of Galeria Helga de Alvear

 

Galería Helga de Alvear
Doctor Fourquet, 12
28012 Madrid
+34 91 468 05 06

 

Galería Helga de Alvear

 

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Domobaal, London

 

 

 

LARA VIANA

 

29 January - 20 March, 2010

 

Domo Baal is delighted to welcome Lara Viana to the gallery programme with her first solo show.

 

" ... When taking in these works one can't help but think about how the photographic object has been previously handled in paint, by the likes of Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans. They radiate a peculiar energy that sits somewhere between the fuzzy warmth of recollection and the alchemical mystery of the re-dimensionalised subject. Viana appears at home within the representational hall of mirrors that connects the world of painting with that of imaging, drawing one's attention to the innate human desire to render things realistically and the ways that new technologies fracture our understanding of reality. Where Richter's and Tuymans' blurry re-contextualisation of familiar and mass-media imagery are associated with particular political themes, Viana hovers between the time-based evidence of an unspecified event and its fictional (mis)reading as if stage-managing fragments of a baroque drama. Her paintings may be more about the workings of the mind than the media machine but, like her predecessors, she appears alive to the difficulties of extrapolating one from the other.

 

It is no surprise, then, that Viana cites Velazquez as an influence, particularly when it comes to her chromatically complex interiors out of which social situations, or the aftermath of them, seem to have grown like soft-tissue attachments. So, too, her reductive approach to technique - Viana applies, moves and erases oily umbers, ochres and blues around and from the ground as if hesitant to pin the image down. Ever since her Royal College days, Viana has been making works in which the potential elements of a story appear to emerge, low-relief, from matter. The lurid gaseous compositional quality of her earlier paintings has given way to a more sophisticated set of mid-tonal propositions, the slippery smears of organic hues reminiscent at points of bodily fluids on glass - biopsy slide evidence of the painter's uncanny ability to describe space and the passage of time.

 

The most recent series of table paintings, still lifes of table tops literally writhing with dinner party detritus and rudely cropped like outtakes from a film reprographic project, push the subject/context dissolution further still. Despite the chaotic melding of objects and interiors, one is never allowed to get lost in each frame on account of areas of sharp linearity - the crisp edging of laundered linen and the encroaching presence of brushstroke walls - but directed as if to experience the shift that occurs as the familiar yields something unexpected. As with other of Viana's series, one is left to situate oneself between the layers of the representational onion, the metaphorical distance from the table. As a group, they make visible the subjective discrepancies between different human accounts on a single event, the treacle slide of time between one perfunctory moment and one of significance.

 

Viana's delectable, yet disquieting studies for a mental picnic open up many byways between personal and public territories: the influence of cultural production on the content and stylistics of memory, at every level. But back in the studio, and drawn into a Viana Rorschach-image conundrum, one remembers that these works are as much about the nature of living as the removed technical recording of it. Her curious handling of the half-remembered comes as a result of serious real-time observation, an acute sensitivity to the manner in which light alters objects and situations. And as one watches an eggy ovaloid visage melt into a mirror holding a secret interior, it's hard to care about the chicken. ... "

- Rebecca Geldard, an extract from her essay for Lara Viana's exhibition at Phoenix Arts, Exeter, in June 2009.

 

Lara Viana was born in Salvador, Brazil, where she spent her childhood. She graduated from the Painting Department at the Royal College of Art in 2007, was selected for New Contemporaries in 2008 and the Whitechapel Gallery's East End Academy 2009 - The Painting Edition as well as a solo show at Phoenix Arts, Exeter. Lara Viana is also currently exhibiting in a group show at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. Rebecca Geldard's essay will be published with images as a pocket-book by domobaal editions, and will be available from the gallery.

 

Image:
Lara Viana, 'Untitled (Table 4)' 2009

 oil on board

35 x 40cm / 14" x 15.8"
Courtesy of Domobaal, London

 

 

DOMOBAAL
3 John Street
London WC1N 2ES
+44 2072429604

 

 

DOMOBAAL 

 

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Vilma Gold, London

 

 

 

NICHOLAS BYRNE
'A Catholic Episode'

 

17 January - 7 March 2010

 

VILMA GOLD is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Nicholas Byrne.

 

'Drawing on copper, linen and paper, Nicholas Byrne's recent paintings disperse emergent figures amongst a restless ground. Made on a scale relating directly to the body, these works are reminiscent of an era in British painting in which the figure is brutalised. Byrne�s paintings butt up clean, bright planes of colour against aged surfaces holding torn and delineated incarnations. The paintings hinge upon offering up a series of tensions, or flirtations perhaps;- the pure and the profane, lucidity and doubt, confession and secrecy, innocence and experience. Picked up, discarded and remembered elsewhere as the paintings take shape, Byrne's fidelity to these vibrations opens the possibility of entering into an ornate visual play with the works.'

 

Arriving from within a particular history of taste, Byrne sources and mills a cast of characters -imagery associated with having 'exotic' or 'liberal' tastes - to cast them in a febrile drama: A fragment of Chinoiserie for example, comes to resemble the Commedia dell'Art's famous Pierrot, elsewhere an ornamental dial kicks out like a leg. The notion arises that Byrne is foregrounding emergent sensibilities- the tasteful, the exotic, the catholic, or the figure as free as the bricoleur- and in doing so laying out his group of works to become a chorus making an ode. Here 'A Catholic Episode' could suggest the thrill of being 'over-come' by a sudden collapse in disposition, or point to the migrating elements- potentials and places perhaps- that form sensibility as a whole.

 

Embodied in the loops and coils of his painted winding forms, Byrne's mining of Modernity's underbelly, - its excesses, overflows and contradictions, has functioned to open a sinuous developmental tract in his work. In this regard his index of graphic motifs play a secondary role, forming a potent locus directing the event of growth and erasure by which each painting evolves. A black husk of a doll on a blue pastel ground for example, provides a charge for the movement of quick, scouring marks- it seems to function as a factory; a guttural tract almost- consuming, digesting and re-distributing shape and colour throughout the body of the painting. As form bubbles out and quickly dissolves again it becomes apparent that the figure/ground opposition works here as a permeable skin. Byrne's enigmatic paintings mark the gap between saying and not saying, between the want to confess all and something more private. They act as configurations tracking the forms that somehow survive, that just slip out, episodically- to quote Jasper Johns,

 

'The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.'

 

Born in Oldham, Nicholas Byrne lives and works in London. He studied at the Royal College of Art and has exhibited at Tate St Ives (2009), David Zwirner, New York (2009), Studio Voltaire (2008) and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2007).

 

Image:
Nicholas Byrne
Soft Stylus
2009
oil on copper
87 x 57 cms
Courtesy of Vilma Gold, London

 

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street
London E2 9EH
+44 (0) 20 7729 9888

 

 

VILMA GOLD 

 

Read On... VILMA GOLD, London 

 

 

Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin

 

 

SIMON ENGLISH
English Painting 2009 - 2010 ( below the belt )

 

November 21, 2009 - February 27, 2010

 

GALERIE VOLKER DIEHL is pleased to present English Painting 2009-2010 (below the belt). This will be the second solo exhibition at the gallery of the London based artist Simon English and will consist entirely of new works on canvas.

 

Simon English emerged onto the London Art scene in 1994 with his first ever solo show Young British Art 3 at the Saatchi Gallery. In more recent years, he has become known for his large and small-scale works on paper which have been described as painted drawings and fit somewhere between the two.

 

Lyrics and literature loom large in the work. Extracts from Jonathan Coe, John Betjeman, Annie Lennox and Barry McSweeney to name a few, combined with his story and history, twist and turn through the painted score. Seemingly random texts hijack the Image Bank and sets forth an emotional discourse to sad and comic effect. In Art in America, January 2007, Ana Finel Honigman states that "English resurrects lost images, connects loose references and makes beauty from pictorial chaos".

 

English Painting 2009 - 2010 goes a little below the belt.

 

This is no survey show or genre that Simon would necessarily identify with. The paintings quite often break the rules from top to bottom. Indeed the work takes a swipe when you least expect it and when looking at the Painting referencing Barry McSweeney's "The Book of Demons" you are left positively bruised and riddled with crabs. In the gate crashed Wedding of Laura Wingfield, the established use of oil on paper makes way for paper on oil. Each work has it's own internal logic in which supposedly "high" and "low" become flattened onto one scene. It is hard to know at times, whether you are awake or dreaming, or if fantasy has superseded reality.

 

Simon's large loft Studio Space is situated above his flat. In the painting Upstairs Downstairs it is difficult to know whether you are in his painting space or the bedroom below, in a 1970's Victorian Soap Drama, decoding a map of desire or addressing his proverbial "upstairs, downstairs", above and below the belt.

 

In Paul McCarthys 1974 "Penis dip painting", associations of Renoir and the patriarchal tradition of painting come straight to mind. English describes returning to canvas as "feeling a bit like going back to an all male boarding school." In the painting Lady Digby (The Rotters Club) (referring to Digby House, Sherborne School, Dorset ) English returns to puberty/ painting and describes growing breasts with the same bewilderment as when Mervin Peake's Mr Pye grew wings. The exquisite corps of Lady Digby fights to find an ungainly balance between her male and female persona. This two-spirited hermaphrodite tries to reach reconciliation with her body and find a poetic alignment between drawing and painting. Her protrusive semi covered form is ludicrously serenaded by a prayer for swimming trunks (taken from a section in Jonathan Coe's novel, "The Rotters Club", set in a 1970's school) from Benjamin, who not only finds a pair of swimming trunks in the locker room but God at the same time.

 

English Painting 2009 - 2010 is the start of a new love affair.

 

In Song for Painting, Galloway, where tableaux and still-life prop each other helplessly up, we are now led to believe that for Simon, Painting is "my first, my last, my everything".

 

In 2005, English's work was included in the Contemporary Erotic Drawing Show at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut and his monograph, "Simon English and the Army Pink Snowman" (Blackdog publishing) was released, with extensive essays by Bill Arning and Stella Santacatterina.

 

Simon English has had solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, Zurich, Norway, Paris and most recently in New York. His work is in the collections of Agnes b, Paris, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, The Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, The Essl Collection, Vienna, The Museum of Israel, The Burger collection, The Furstorffer collection, The Arts Council Collection of Great Britain, The British Museum, London, The Paisley Museum, Scotland, The Saatchi Collection, The Schacter Collection and The U.K Government Art Collection amongst many other important collections.

 

 

Image:

SIMON ENGLISH
English Painting 2009 - 2010 ( below the belt )
Installation view
Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin

 

Galerie Volker Diehl
Lindenstrasse 35
D - 10969 Berlin
+49 30-22 48 79 22

 

 

Galerie Volker Diehl 

 

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