Jurek Wybraniec, Surrogate (Pillow-like template
for despair, Blue + Pink combo 1), 2009
Enamel on vinyl, 40 x 40 x 9 cm

SNO 50 Fundraiser - Silent Auction
Over 50 Australian & Internationals

All bids finalized at 5pm, Sunday, July 26, 2009.
All bids enter at $100, with no reserve.

Viewing throughout July.
Opening reception: Saturday, July 4, 3-6pm

Bids can also be placed via an online form at www.sno.org.au
or in person at SNO centre at:

Level 1, 175 Marrickville Road
Marrickville
Sydney, NSA 2204
Australia
info@sno.org.au

Open 12-5 pm, Friday to Sunday or by appointment

Installation view

June 27 - July 12, 2009

PIT (Project Initiative Tilburg) presents its second international artist at the artspace Argument: Martin Pfeifle (1975). Pfeifle was born in Stuttgart and is currently living and working in Düsseldorf. After Tilman (US/BE) PIT invited Pfeifle to come to Tilburg. “HEMMA” is the name of his installation, one he’s specially making for the occasion. Pfeifle belongs to a group of international artists working in abstract manner that PIT closely follows and seeks collaborating with.

Martin Pfeifles works are cuts into space. Although they always relate to their location and are built in situ, his settings exist nevertheless as self referential sculptures. Pfeifles settings are sometimes difficult to take in as a whole and best glimpsed piece by piece and little by little, His work occurs with the aid of geometric fragmentation. He breaks down the things he sees as well as the things he constructs into smaller elements. The exhibition space itself becomes his topic and everyday possibilities are sequestered to resolve his artistic inquiries.

Last month Pfeifle released his new catalogue, a beautiful publication that gives a nice overview of his work. It´s not the first time Pfeifles work can be seen in the Netherlands. In 2007 Museum Valkhof in Nijmegen showed his work.

The abstract genre is alive as ever, rejuvenating you could say. PIT-curator Linda Arts states ” That alone deserves attention. All over the world PIT connects with comparable initiatives. In Sydney, Düsseldorf, New York, Paris, Tokyo…”

As a wandering art initiative, without a self owned space, PIT will frequent different places and spaces. Its primary goal is promoting the abstract genre by presenting artists who are mainly living outside the Netherlands and working in a reduced manner. Beside this PIT also wants to enhance the exchange with similar artinitiatives in the world. Later this year Kunstpodium T and artspace De Verschijning offer PIT their hospitality.

NYC’s Chelsea gallery district

From Artnet Magazine, June 20, 2009

New York galleries…seem to be closing at an alarming rate. At the beginning of the art-market recession, Jerry Saltz predicted that 50 galleries would go out of business. In a report last week, the New York Times said 25 galleries had closed. Coming up with an exact count is probably impossible, but herewith, a list of New York galleries that are not only closed, but missed.

A few date to the period before the economic collapse, but are included here all the same; other dealers are continuing to operate privately. Several galleries currently closed promise to return in the fall; these are not included in the listing here. The tentative total is 25: 31 Grand, Bellwether, Cohan and Leslie, Charles Cowles, Andreas Grimm, Gasser & Grunert, Buia Gallery, Cristinerose, Cynthia Broan, Clementine, Fruit & Flower Deli, Guild & Greyshkul, Kinz Tillou + Feigen, Lital Mehr, Moti Hasson, Andre Schlechtriem, Moeller Snow, Never Work, Oliver Kamm 5BE, Plane Space, The Proposition, Rare, Roebling Hall, Rivington Arms and Senior & Shopmaker.

Eileen Quinlan, Fracas #3 (for I.G.), 2009

March 18 - July 19, 2009

The photograph has often been described as a transparent window into a frozen moment. For Eileen Quinlan it is not a window but a mirror—reflecting our tendency to see even constructed images as truth when delivered by the camera. Fascinated by this, Quinlan explores her medium’s capacity to be both record of physical fact and deceptive illusion.

Employing analog techniques in an era of digital manipulation, Quinlan creates kaleidoscopic or atmospheric abstract images using the standard tricks of commercial film photography. With color gels and flash on close-up shots of backdrops like mirrors, Mylar and fabric, she achieves an infinite range of prismatic compositions. Almost like product photography without the product, her images invite a range of associations, from lipstick ads and album covers to screensaver patterns and modernist painting.

For her first solo museum exhibition, the artist presents a series of new prints that extend this exploration of how photography can “make strange” even ordinary furnishings meant to fade into the background.

The Momentum series presents a focused look at artists whose works mark emerging currents in contemporary artistic practice in the U.S. and around the world.

Pasha Rafat, Untitled, 2003
15mm argon, mercury gas tubing and steel framing
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Photo by Pablo Mason

Ongoing

Primary Forms: Illuminated and Opaque features Minimalist and Post-Minimalist works from the MCASD collection.

As squares and cubes are the basis of the modular sculpture by Sol LeWitt, so are circles and spheres the foundation for Keith Sonnier’s 1970s incandescent light reliefs that explore this medium’s reflection and diffusion. Primary forms also echo in Stephen Antonakos’ staked neon light sculpture, as well as in the hanging neon pieces of Las Vegas-based Pasha Rafat—an artist of a later generation whose work is indebted to both the rigor of LeWitt’s form and to Antonakos’ use of neon to inform and articulate space.

Two recent acquisitions of theatrical light and glass pane wall reliefs by Sonnier, exhibited for the first time, are presented with another work, their equivalent in neon. A light box by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar utilizes the same shapes—the square and circle—but now as part of a documentary piece that remains a beautiful exploration of luminosity through colored film. A two-channel video by the Mexico City-based British artist Melanie Smith completes the exhibition’s lighthearted meditation on formal variation, revealing the sheer labor and exertion behind such pure manifestations of light and matter.

Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1971
Synthetic fabric, wood, fluorescent lights, floodlights
96 x 564 inches
Collection Walker Art Center

August 6, 2009 - November 21, 2010

Throughout his long career, Robert Irwin has pondered whether we ever have an absolutely pure or direct moment in front of a work of art. This installation, last on view 20 years ago, represents his effort to foster such an experience. Part of a series of powerful—and temporary—works the artist created using oblique planes of translucent scrim fabric, it was commissioned by the Walker in 1971 as part of Works for New Spaces, the inaugural exhibition of its Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. The untitled piece, which Irwin’s preparatory drawings and notes refer to as Slant/Light/Volume, was last on view 20 years ago; now, its installation in the Friedman Gallery provides an opportunity for a new generation to see this pivotal work.

Irwin’s transformative pieces in the 60s and 70s helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement. Along with fellow artist James Turrell, he explored how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness, in effect orchestrating the act of perception. His seemingly simple architectural interventions are philosophically rich exercises in the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.

Sarah Morris, 1932 [Rings], 2006
Household gloss paint on canvas, 289 x 289 cm

May 26 - July 26, 2009

Curated by Gianfranco Maraniello and Andrea Viliani

MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna is showcasing the first solo exhibition of Sarah Morris in an Italian museum and has the pleasure of welcoming the international première of her new film: Beijing.

Starting from the mid 1990s, Morris became famous due to paintings and films characterised by an abstract and complex structural approach. The artist creates paintings and films in which she traces urban and social topologies. The urban environments, the architectural motifs, the symbols, the places and the representations of the power are the subject of a close investigation, according to an alternation of fiction and reality. She explores both the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics in order to survey how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades, urban structures, cities and nations might conceal. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in studies of power, of the structures of control, of global socio-political networks.

Beijing, an 86-minute 35mm film, focuses on one of the most intricate and ambiguous international broadcasted events of past years – the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. It observes the overwhelmingly perplexing and contradictory economy and authority of China, made all the more resonant in current climate of global crisis. The film continues Morris’s investigation into the psychological and political space of architecture and the changing city. It explores a spectacle unfolding during the days leading up to and surrounding the Olympics of 2008. Shot from multiple perspectives and given unprecedented access by the International Olympic Committee, Beijing captures the variances within the city, from the urban routine of its citizens to the President of China, Mr. Hu Jintao, moments before his speech at the opening ceremonies on August 8th, 2008. The unmediated and the scripted are all part of one continuum. Morris’s version of cinéma vérité uses not only architecture and its infrastructure as phantom characters, but political leaders (Henry Kissinger), Olympic athletes (Michael Phelps), actors (Fan Bingbing), performers (Lang Lang), film directors (Zhang Yimou), and architects (Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron) in a quasi-narrative about this developing city that opens up numerous fictional possibilities and questions the authorship of the spectacle itself. Beijing depicts a hitherto closed country at a moment of apparent and possible theatrical openness, a hidden culture at a moment of extreme visibility.

China 9, Liberty 37, a reference to the English title of 1978 Italian-Spanish western film (Amore, piombo e furore), contains eleven paintings, the film, and a site specific large scale wall painting by the artist. The exhibition itinerary includes works belonging to the series Origami and Rings. Origami paintings are based on schematic folding diagrams for the traditional Eastern paper compositions, which give rise to complex forms starting from a simple process. Also, in popular culture, origami is often used to signify impending events. The Rings paintings are titled by date of the various years of Olympic games and their corresponding cities. These works are based on the never ending “Ring Road” systems of Beijing, which ultimately lead to disorientation, and on their analogy with the official symbol of Olympic Games (the five rings of the Olympic flag). The large scale intervention, Taurus, will occupy a 30-metre-long exhibition hall of the museum.

Sarah Morris is also having a concurrent solo exhibition at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.

Installation view

June 3 - July 18, 2009

PSM announces an exhibition organized by the New York-based critic and curator, Bob Nickas.

“Cave Painting,” which brings together works by twenty-seven artists, evolved as a result of
Nickas’s research for his book, painting abstraction, to be published in September by Phaidon Press. He initiated the project with months of studio visits in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of the artists in the exhibition are also included in the book, which aims to open up a wider sense of how abstract painting can be understood. The title, “Cave Painting,” is a direct reference to the beginning of picture-making, painting, and representation; in the exhibition there are abstract and figurative works, as well as paintings that exist in a hybridized in-between state, and, despite what the title suggests, what might be identified as “primitive” imagery is neither privileged nor denied. Expressionistic works are seen alongside those that are formally reserved; hand-painted pictures are shown in counterpoint to those that have their basis in mechanical procedures; the range of works accounts for both predetermined result and pure chance.

Over the course of the show, a collaborative work by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, a small
child mannequin, will move each day to a different position in the gallery to look at and further animate the paintings.

Participating Artists:
Tomma Abts, Richard Aldrich, John M. Armleder, Monika Baer, Agnieszka Brzezanska, Jules de Balincourt, Verne Dawson, Philippe Decrauzat, Katharina Grosse, Wade Guyton, Daniel Hesidence, Charline Von Heyl, Richard Hoeck/John Miller, Nathan Hylden, Tony Just, Jacob Kassay, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, David Malek, Bernd Ribbeck, Thomas Scheibitz, Anja Schwörer, Amy Sillman, Josh Smith, Kelley Walker, Jens Wolf

Michael Scott, ATHTTSTW #3, 2008
Enamel on wood, 13 1/4 x 12 x 3/4 inches

June 18 - August 21, 2009

Gering & Lopez Gallery presents “and then he tried to swallow the world”, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Scott. Initially known for his signature black and white “line” paintings widely exhibited in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, this exhibition marks Scott’s return to the New York art scene after a ten-year hiatus.

After dabbling in the fashionable abstract expressionist style of the late 1980’s that celebrated individualism, Scott formulated a reactionary position designed to question the basic concept of originality. Inspired by the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt and the date paintings of On Kawara, Scott created a series of “target” paintings consisting of black and white concentric circles that appear identical with only slight variations, intending to remove the aspect of qualitative judgment from the viewing experience. After Scott felt he had reached an endpoint with this body of work, he moved on to a series of black and white line paintings driven by the concept of making works so intensely optical that in theory they would be impossible for the human eye to view, a complete inversion of the traditional function of painting. Scott differentiated these works from the Op Art movement of the 1960’s because their focus was on content rather than aesthetics. Once he felt he had exhausted this critique of opticality, Scott moved into a series of color line paintings that embrace their own viewing rather than deny it. These new works display a heightened emphasis on humanism, showcasing the presence of the artist’s hand as well as a more automatic painting method. The works rely less on mechanical perfection and more on the inherent imperfections that occur in the intuitive process of creation. These brightly colored works on aluminum and wood that compose the current exhibition constitute the most ambitious series of Scott’s work today. Accordingly, he has titled the exhibition “and then he tried to swallow the world.”

New York-based artist Michael Scott was born in Paoli, Pennsylvania in 1958. He received his BA from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and then received his MFA from Hunter College in New York City. His work has been exhibited at Le Consortium, Dijon, France; PS1, LIC, New York; Le FRAC, Nord-Pas de Calais, France; Musée des Beaux Arts, La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland; Centre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland; and MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland. This will be Scott’s third exhibition with the gallery.

Mira Schendel, Untitled- ‘Notebook’ series’, c. 1970
Letraset on paper, 22.5 x 22.5 x 7cm

June 2 - July 11, 2009

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of monotypes and other works from the Estate of the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (b. 1919, Zurich d. 1988, São Paulo). This two-part exhibition encompasses an in-depth survey of the artist’s works and includes seminal drawings from the 1960s and paintings, objects and collages from the 1950s to the 1980s. This group of oil transfer drawings on thin Japanese paper, known collectively as ‘monotypes,’ have never been shown before.

This exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery coincides with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (5 April - 15 July 2009), entitled ‘Tangled Alphabets,’ which focuses on the work of Mira Schendel and León Ferrari and cements their position as two of the leading exponents of Latin American Modernism.

Born in Europe in 1919, Mira Schendel is an artist whose life and art were shaped by the tumultuous events that broke apart communities on the Continent leading up to the War. Her Jewish parentage and Catholic education contributed to her profoundly spiritual and philosophical approach to her art making. Displaced by fascist persecution in Italy, Schendel eventually immigrated to Brazil leaving behind her family. Participating in the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951, Schendel soon found herself among the intellectual elite and began to show her work frequently. Her early paintings, in dense tones and textured surfaces, stood apart from the prevailing Concretist movement and suggested dissatisfaction with pictorial means. In life, Schendel was an avid reader and continued correspondence with poets, philosophers and theologians throughout Brazil and Europe. It was in the 1960s that her work began to incorporate language, albeit silently, and it eventually became a crucial part of her formal vocabulary.

The ‘monotypes,’ produced in 1960s and shown here, were extremely experimental at the time. They were made by applying talcum powder to one side of a piece of Japanese tissue paper and laying this paper onto a pre-oiled glass sheet. Schendel then ‘drew’ with various instruments including her fingers by applying pressure to the unoiled side. The process created an emotive line that almost felt like part of the paper and allowed Schendel to respond gesturally and calligraphically to the material. These graphic marks, letters and blotches resulted in extraordinarily beautiful and poetic two-sided drawings which Schendel insisted be shown suspended and encased between two sheets of glass.

Also included in this exhibition is a single rare example of the ‘Objetos Gráficos’ of the late 1960s. Similar in technique to the monotypes, though much larger in scale, this beautiful object is painted in deep red and is peppered with symbols and markings on top and inside the acrylic sheets. Installed in front of a window with natural daylight, the layering of texture and gesture within slowly unfolds. Critic Rodrigo Naves states: “superimposition, transparency, and space were all parts of these works, and the galaxies and constellations of their arrangements reinstated the tension… in a wider, perhaps even cosmic setting, transposing to a superhuman scale the interplay of chaos and meaning.”

Other important objects such as ‘notebooks’ and ‘discs’ from the 1960s and early 1970s are also shown here. In this period Schendel began to dispense with her own touch and turned to commercial materials, such as ‘Letraset’ and acrylic. Synthesising the formal experimentation with the ‘monotypes,’ this body of work continued to embrace spiritual ideas of ‘the other side’ of transparency, a place where other worlds and other forms of materiality existed. The notebooks consist of pages of different coloured sheets of paper, patterned with holes and Letraset printing and bound together at one corner so that the layers spin out and expand in one dimension. Similarly, the round ‘discs’ are also made from acrylic sheets sandwiched together. They encase flurries of Letraset letters and symbols, which are legible but untranslatable compositions. Here too, language is seen as a sort of cosmic dust, inchoate and infinite.

Representing Schendel’s late career is an important work from the ‘Sarrafos’ series. These paintings expressed the conclusion of her experiment in line and form. Unlike the exhaustive workings of the ‘monotypes,’ the ‘Sarrafos’ articulate a Zen-like distillation of her ideas and pursuit of the void. Here, the mute white monochromatic paintings with their protruding forms rupture the pictoral space and deny the plane and surface of the painting. Schendel’s experiment in language ultimately concludes in the impossibility of utterance but in the purity of gesture alone.

Installation by Anthony McCall

June 26 - July 31, 2009

Sean Kelly Gallery and i8 Gallery announce two exhibitions, featuring Anthony McCall and Finnbogi Pétursson, being held concurrently in New York and Reykjavík, Iceland.

In Reykjavík:
Anthony McCall will present Doubling Back, 2003, at the Kartöflugeymslur, an old war bunker, positioned on the outskirts of the city. This projected light piece stretches from the floor almost to the ceiling and, over a period of thirty minutes, two intersecting curved lines create planes in space that gradually move toward and away from each other. The installation examines drawing, volume, space and time, as well as how viewers engage with each other and the physical realms of an artwork. At i8 Gallery, McCall will present a group of early works from the 1970’s, including performance scores, films, installation drawings and photographs. McCall first presented a performance work in Iceland in 1972, along with members of the SUM collective (many of whom currently work with i8 Gallery), at the Gallery SUM during the Reykjavík Arts Festival; SUM was a group of Icelandic artists who ran their own gallery in Reykjavík from 1968 to 1976.

Finnbogi Pétursson will present new installations in the lower gallery at i8. Engraved into the gallery wall, an actual sound recording from an Icelandic glacier materializes as a ’sound-image’. Another site-specific work consists of a small-scale water installation where the conjunction of light, water and rhythm create an interplay of shadows and sound caused by the passing of time.

In New York:
Anthony McCall will present three vertical ’solid-light’ works - Breath, 2004, Breath III, 2005 and Meeting You Halfway, 2009 - each of which is being shown in the United States for the first time. The works will be exhibited quarter-scale, in maquette form, projected from the ceiling onto pedestals. As a group, the vertical projected works continue McCall’s exploration of sculptural form, durational structure, and the possibility of representing the corporeal, which began in 1973 with his seminal film, Line Describing a Cone.

Finnbogi Pétursson will present Earth, 1994-2009, a transfixing installation that utilizes sound, light and shadow. Pétursson will flood the main gallery, employing low frequency sound to continually move the water. The reflections radiating from the piece form an ever-changing environment in the gallery, creating a deeply compelling installation. In an additional work, Dream, 2004 – installed in Gallery One - Pétursson channels low frequency sound through a large, clear bowl of water, creating reverberations on the water’s surface. Light projected from beneath the bowl onto the ceiling, creates luminous undulating patterns. As the sound changes, the patterns of the projection fluctuate and evolve. Pétursson says: “I am always trying to capture phenomena, such as sound, water, fire, shadow and light, and channel them along new grooves, turn them into something other than what they are. These are phenomena that you feel and think about, but never see.”

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Yellow Butterfly I
Red P MARK GROTJAHN 07 781), 2007
Oil on linen, 63 x 53 inches

May 30 - July 31, 2009

“I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a “face painting”, but I don’t exactly know what color it will take, or how many eyes it’s going to have, whereas the “butterfly paintings” are fairly planned out. They’re still intuitive, but I generally know where they’re going. It’s a different kind of freedom…” –Mark Grotjahn

Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Grotjahn. This is his first exhibition with the London gallery.

In Grotjahn’s first “butterfly paintings,” clusters of vibrant, gradated triangular forms were anchored to vertical tangents, vehicles by which to treat problems in classical perspective such as dual and multiple vanishing points. As he continues to mine this hieratic motif — which over the last decade has yielded extensive permutations that invoke narratives central to modernist painting, from the utopian vision of Russian Constructivism to the hallucinatory images of Op Art – the allusions to the natural world have ceded to more specific aesthetic issues such as the monochrome, the serial image, and the sublime. Increasingly, he has restricted his use of color, moving through phases of blue and black, and now to red and yellow. In the new paintings he has closely subdivided the “rays”, making the chromatic distinctions ever more nuanced. With Untitled (Red Butterfly I Yellow P MARK GROTJAHN 07-08 751) Grotjahn revels in a highly controlled mastery of shade while continuing to embrace contingency. From the upper right hand side of the painting, moving clockwise, the palette shifts from a darker red to an intense vermillion, contrasting with the acid yellow undercoat, which he deliberately reveals in the block-lettered signature.

As Grotjahn continues to refine the butterfly paintings so does he, conversely, appear to find release in the raw energy of the “face paintings.” Roughly painted on cardboard, with sections often cut away to reveal painted canvas beneath, they compel with their strident tones, scratchy textures, and cartoonish faces that loom from the surface. Inspired by Picasso’s primitivist explorations, they resemble tribal masks and other ritualistic totems. In Untitled (Red Face 773), an abstract face in yellow, grey, white, and pale green is traced in linear dashes and concentric whorls, its glowering eyes incised from the vivid red background.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art.

Mark Grotjahn was born in 1968 in Pasadena, CA, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Recent solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006); and Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2007). Selected public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

New York City pigeon

Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.  Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.

The team–which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso–was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other. For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.

The researchers then displayed the pictures on a screen to the birds and gave food rewards to those that picked at the “good” paintings while denying rewards to those pigeons that displayed poor artistic taste. The researchers used a variety of images, including pastels and watercolours, still lives and landscapes, which were judged on their artistic merit, including how clear and discernible the images were.

Through the month-long experiment, the pigeons learnt to peck only at “good” paintings said Professor Shigeru Watanabe of Keio’s Faculty of Letters and Graduate School of Human Resources. Crucially, they responded appropriately even to paintings they had not seen before, said Watanabe.

Keio University in a report clarified that the research “did not deal with advanced artistic judgements.” ”But it did indicate that pigeons are able to learn to distinguish ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ paintings the way an ordinary human being can,” it said. The findings of the government-funded study by the university’s Centre of Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility are due to be published in the journal Animal Cognition.

May 21 - June 9, 2009
(exhibition’s closed already, but the video is great)

Participating Artists:
Darren Kraft, Steve Lambert, Julia Schwadron, Michael Mandiberg, Marisa Olson, Lee Walton

Drawing Contemporaries, curated by Eyebeam senior fellow Michael Mandiberg, is an exhibition of works on paper made by a peer group of new media artists who all make drawings, either as a primary object, or as an experimental step in their process. The artists often use computers or algorithms as a logic structure or drawing aid in a way that is foregrounded in these works. Many of these artists are Eyebeam affiliated, but all are contemporaries whose influences upon each other can be traced in this exhibition.

Darren Kraft uses powdered graphite to photorealistically reproduce icons and logos associated with consumer and political culture; Eyebeam senior fellow Steve Lambert and Julia Schwadron write personal and poetic messages of hope which they leave taped up in public places; Michael Mandiberg uses the laser cutter to etch and carve works on paper that incorporate text, history and design; Marisa Olson performs Google image searches for obsolete technologies, and traces their contours directly off her laptop screen with a mechanical pencil; and Lee Walton creates elaborate indexes of possible graphic marks which are algorithmically used to document events as they occur. His subjects range from from pedestrian traffic to sports games.

Jo Baer, Untitled (Black Star), 1960-1961
Collection Kroller Muller Museum, Otterlo

June 20 - October 4, 2009

Jo Baer (Seattle, 1929) is a painter and lives and works in Amsterdam. This exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum traces the journey through Jo Baer’s stylistic and ideological developments throughout her painting practice. Baer’s oeuvre spans a journey and critical dialogue from abstract expressionism to minimalism to her current style rooted in metaphorical imagery - what she terms radical figuration.

“All of the so-called abstract artists always have a tissue of meaning. I always did certainly. . . . I meant layers. I meant boundaries. I meant very specific things always” – Jo Baer, 1987

A journey through painting
The début of Jo Baer in the fifties was with abstract-expressionist work. Between 1960 and 1975, Baer made paintings which referred to Minimal Art. In these she aimed for a perfect balance between space and representation. She created series of rectangular or square paintings, often triptychs with a central white or grey plane and narrow black or coloured stripes on the edges. At the height of her fame Baer also turned away from abstract art and started to examine figurative representation as a possible way to connect social reality and illusion in painting.

In this exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum the ways Baer’s art travels through movements, divisions and arguments in the art of the past century are clearly visible. Put simply at one point she changed her mind and was bold enough to change the directions of a successful career in consequence. She has always written and published polemical statements for example her now famous article in Art In America called “I am no longer an Abstract Artist”. Here she forecast the purely formal and selfreferential dead end into which modernist painting was to direct itself. Baer condemned the growing preoccupation with the purely formal properties of painting over broader intellectual concerns of the artists and their need to communicate in the world. As she herself explained “to enhance discourse is to paint and draw in fragment, which is an open adventure: it is having painting talk (as opposed to having painting talk about parts of others’ paintings).”

This solo exhibition spans a period of fifty years and places well known abstract works from Baer’s oeuvre such as Untitled (Black Star) (1960-1961) or Vertical Flanking Diptych (Yellow Ochre) (1966 -1974) alongside work based on what she calls radical figuration. It spans the period from the 1970’s right up to her most recent completed Memorial to the Art World Body (Nevermore) (2009). This is the first showing of this most recent painting, which incorporates elements of what she calls an alternative self-portrait. In this new painting she incorporates images of herself by other artists (including John Wesley and Bruce Robbins), which she suggests in the act of repainting them she may be “stealing back”.

Max Gimblett, Orpheus, 2004
Gesso, polyurethane, pencil, epoxy, pigment,
moon gold leaf on wood panel
70 x 70 inches

June 19 - August 1, 2009

Hamish Morrison Gallery presents, for the first time in Germany, New Zealand artist Max Gimblett (* 1935). His work enjoys special recognition in his home country with which he has retained many links, but especially in the United States where he has lived since the 1970s. This year his works have been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum New York as part of the exhibition The Third Mind.

The work of Max Gimblett is characterized by paintings and drawings of great virtuosity and finesse as a bridge between different cultures. The contact with artists like Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock has had significant influence on his painting in the context of abstract expressionism. However, since the 1980s his cultural curiosity which had first been aroused by Maori art has been reflected by the influence of Asian culture on his work and his life.

By using the Greek word Téménos which refers to the space dedicated to a sacred shrine or sanctuary, to describe the exhibition, Gimblett does not evoke the religious aspect of art, but its spiritual dimension. The technological and aesthetic delicacy of his paintings consisting of rare and precious materials such as sheets of silver, gold and palladium imported from all over the world and combined with traditional materials and contemporary polymers results in masterful and fascinating works. The unique forms of his paintings break the convention, which automatically identifies a rectangle suspended from a wall as a work of art or at least as a decorative image. The viewer becomes aware of this quasi-votive character of the work, allowing him access to a dimension beyond time and space, opening a space of meditation.

In the act of painting, his gestures reflect an energy, a rhythm and a dance in which the viewer can participate. This participation is made possible by the perception of time by observation; time, which according Gimblett is concentric. The spectator, by following the traces of the paint brush, witnesses the beginning, accelerations, decelerations and the culmination of the gesture. For Gimblett the process of painting is not a cold cerebral act expressing the Cartesian “I” of the proud and egocentric modern man, but the Buddhist principle of non-self eclipsing one’s judgment. His painting expresses intuitive, pure energy.

The titles of his works and their shapes reflect the wealth of inspiration and syncretism of the artist as well as his interest in different cultures and his reflections on the Jungian collective unconscious. He appears to look beyond the Jungian self which is the unknown centre of personality where antinomies and the collective unconscious expressed by myths of different cultures and embodied by certain signs, such as quatrefoil (Apricot Garden, Celestial) are reconciled. By using the quatrefoil with its association to the four elements, windows, flowers in general or lotus in particular, Gimblett convokes the vital forces and archetypal transcendence of the human psyche.

This motif explains the most recurring references such as the influence of Japanese painter Senga Gibon (1750-1837), for whom the circle, triangle and square – bases for many of Gimblett’s works - alone represent the universe. (The Gaze - For Jackson Pollock 2008, Guggenheim Enso Series, 2008). According to the philosopher of Buddhism Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the circle corresponds with the infinite without beginning and without end, while the triangle is the beginning of all forms, and the square, a double triangle, stands for the process of duplication. The approximation of the series Guggenheim Enso with “Ten Ox Herding Pictures”, which reflect the path to enlightenment in Zen, is particularly interesting, especially the 8th picture above entitled: “Self and Ox Forgotten”

Gimblett’s work is a synthesis not only of the many questions and answers posed by the history of art, but also between cultures by bringing together opposing values and principles, such as calligraphy and geometry, abstraction and figuratism, as well as aesthetic and philosophical propositions of east and west. In bringing together these spiritual considerations and coming to terms with the seductive power of images, and the intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment, Gimblett achieves in his work the reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian.

June 19 - July 12, 2009

CCNOA presents a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Greet Billet, which will take place in all 3 exhibition rooms of CCNOA. Billet’s exhibition is based on her on-going research project The development of the monochrome in its digital and analogue/graphical form of apparition and will present a large site-specific installation, a new video work as well as a printed edition. The fact that Terence Haggerty’s large site-specific wall paintings in the main space will remain on view during Greet Billet’s exhibition, will provide the public with an excellent opportunity to reflect on the state of digital-based research and its application in the field of non-objective art today.

Dan Graham photographing Two Adjacent Pavilions, 1978-82
2-way mirror, glass, and steel
2 structures: 8 1/4 x 6 1/8 x 6 1/8 feet each
Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
Installed in Documenta VII, Germany, 1982

June 24 - October 11, 2009

My Turn expands the definition of a museum program by inviting a guest artist to interpret another artist’s work. This new and unique public program series, held in conjunction with the exhibition Dan Graham: Beyond, is organized by guest curator and artist Howie Chen. Dan Graham: Beyond, Graham’s first U.S. retrospective, traces the evolution of his art from his early conceptual projects and performances, to his films and videos, architectural projects and pavilions, and sculptures as well as his collaborations with musicians and rock bands.

Taking the exhibition as a point of departure, Chen approaches Graham’s work through musicians, filmmakers, and performers to provide a new and insightful look at an artist who has been influential since the 1960s. Chen is cofounder of the curatorial partnership Dispatch and is a member of the collaborative New Humans.

Jamisen Ogg, Associate (bench), 2008
Wood, canvas, acrylic paint, 35 x 72 x 17.5 inches

June 18 - July 24, 2009

Hudson Franklin presents Embedded, a group exhibition featuring the work of Alice Könitz, Fawn Krieger, and Jamisen Ogg. These three artists embed forms associated with modernist architecture and design as well as Minimalism into their sculptures and works on paper. Each artist has subsumed the modernist vocabulary, and in varying degrees of transparency, each artwork in the exhibition investigates the ubiquity and precedents of that language. Jamisen Ogg’s Associate (bench) is a handmade replica of a George Nelson bench altered to include an appendage: a custom-shaped canvas painted with his signature drippy CMYK palette. Similarly, in Fawn Krieger’s Case Study 63, the foundational shapes of a Case Study house design are surmounted by a concrete rock formation. In other works, the modernist embed is more suggested, as in Alice Könitz’s Untitled (3 pieces), which subtly relies on a modernist grid as its skeleton. The artists in Embedded create objects with a lingering sense of utopia that supply perceptual shifts while building within an assimilated vocabulary.

Alice Könitz (Los Angeles, CA) was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. She received her M.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts after graduating from the Academy Düsseldorf, Germany, as a Master Student. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Suzanne Vielmetter Projects Los Angeles and Berlin; University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach; and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. This fall, she will take part in a two-person exhibition with Arthur Ou at LAXART in Los Angeles.

Fawn Krieger (New York, NY) received an M.F.A. in 2004 from Bard College. Her most recent solo project, COMPANY, began at Art In General, New York, in 2007 and continues in the recently published catalogue Fawn Krieger: COMPANY. This fall, she will be working on a commissioned project at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR, and her work will be included in a group exhibition at the Lambretto Art Project, Milan, Italy.

Jamisen Ogg (New York, NY) studied printmaking at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving his M.F.A. in 2004. His recent exhibitions include I Don’t Believe You at Roots & Culture, Chicago, IL, and One Loses One’s Classics at White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO. His first solo exhibition with Hudson Franklin was reviewed in Artforum last October.

Kate Beck, Untitled
Graphite on Rives BFK, 17.5 x 26 inches

June 27 – July 25, 2009

Works by Brent Hallard, Richard Roth, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog

Opens June 27, 2009

During July, ParisCONCRET presents work by three contemporary artists who push, gently, against the notion that painting is a strictly 2 dimensional proposition: Brent Hallard (au/jp), Richard Roth (us), Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog (nl).

Eric Dever, Zinc White on Burlap No 13, 2009
36 x 36 inches

June 20 – July 9, 2009

Painting itself is the subject of Dever’s ongoing project, spanning two years and 94 paintings. In his investigation of titanium and zinc white oil paint on canvas, linen, and burlap, the exclusive use of white has more to do with a focus on paint properties and supports and is less about color. This is a progression from Dever’s earlier color based work previously exhibited by Sara Nightingale Gallery in 2005.

Each piece is constructed with one or two brushes or knives. Supports are revealed as the negative space between multiple strokes or through the paint itself. Dever was introduced to Robert Ryman’s monochrome painting as an NYU graduate student of Marcia Hafif; both were influential artists of the Radical Painting Group formed in the late 70’s.

Whether applied in stacked or alternating strokes, concentric circles, or randomly placed marks with second tries and adjustments, qualities associated with current ‘Provisional Painting’ (Raphael Rubenstein, Art in America May’09), these paintings are part of a continuum. They are energetic and nonchalant.

June 27 - September 26, 2009

Christian Tuempling, Night

May 1 - August 2, 2009

New York City’s distinctive architecture and urbanism, and the opportunities the cityscape provides for photographers to explore visual experimentation and abstraction, will be the subject of an exhibition on view at the Museum of the City of New York. Urban Abstractions: Photographs from the Collection will feature some 35 images (3 in color)— by 20th-century masters, and an unknown shutterbug—each expressing artistic vision and personal aesthetic sensibility through photography. The exhibition features images from the Museum’s renowned collection of photographs of New York City; works by Edward Steichen, Aaron Rose, Berenice Abbott, Samuel H. Gottscho, Andreas Feininger, Aaron Siskind, Sigurd Fischer, Scherril Schell, and others will be on view.

The duality between photography as a means of documentation and as a medium of artistic expression came to the foreground in Europe and the United States in the early 1900s. Photographers such as New Yorker Alfred Stieglitz elevated the medium into an art form by capturing the world in much the same way that Impressionist painters rendered the fleeting and transitory with paint and canvas. In Germany in the 1920s, photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others presented their surroundings as asymmetrical patterns similar to those being created by architects and painters of the Bauhaus school. Over the next decades, photography intersected with other art movements from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism. In New York City, visual icons such as the street grids, skyscrapers, reflections in nighttime store windows, and the city’s almost hallucinogenic network of lighted signs propelled individual artists to capture the metropolis as pure visual form.

A recent card from Smack Mellon

Gallery Card as Relic?, by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, June 23, 2009

“Of all the things going the way of the Internet these days, one is the gallery exhibition announcement card. For decades this useful bit of art-world indicator has been an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums. But lately the death knell has been sounding, each a linguistic (and attitudinal) variation on the same theme…”

PS - MINUS SPACE has been paperless since 2003.

Work by Connie Goldman

July 5 – September 27, 2009

Edge of Abstraction is a permanent collection exhibition that explores the 20th century’s fascination with abstraction. It is an attempt to question what abstract art is and why it is important to art history. Many recent EPMA acquisitions are included in this exhibition.

Featured Artists:
David Bates, Kim Bauer, Peter Bialick, Lydia Bodnar–Balahutrak, Paul Henry Brach, Nicholas Conbere, Nancy Conrad, Susan Davidoff, John Davis, Steven A. Davis, John Allen Dawson, James Drake, Chuck Dugan, Spencer Fidler, Gene Flores, David Ford, Sam Francis, Francoise Gilot, Connie Goldman, Fermin Gutierrez, Bill Haveron, Wolf Kahn, Karl Knaths, Bill Komodore, Tom Lea, Michael Ledet, Ken Luce, Judy Mehaffey– Chavez, Beth Merrick, Jeffrey Mitchell, Jesus Moroles, Takashi Murakami, Haynes Ownby, Sylvia Paulus, Mercedes Pena, Pablo Picasso, Burton Pritzker, Sam Reveles, Louis Ribak, Beatrice Riese, Andrea Rosenberg, Fritz Scholder, Al Souza, Rachel Stevens, David Taylor, Francine Tint, Karl Umlauf, Casey Williams, Dee Wolff, Micheline Wyler, Joy Young

Liubov Popova, Part of the design for the stage set for
Earth in Turmoil (directed by V.Meyerhold), 1923
Photomontage, gouache, newspaper and photographic
paper collage on plywood, 49 x 82.7 cm
State Museum of Contemporary Art-Costakis Collection

June 24 - September 20, 2009

Curators: Margarita Tupitsyn & Vicente Todoli / On the Greek side, the curators of the exhibition at the SMCA will be the SMCA’s director, Maria Tsantsanoglou and the SMCA curator Angeliki Charistou.

After the success of the exhibition “Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism”, at the Tate Modern in London – attendance far exceeded the organizers’ expectations, with more than 102,155 visitors, while the British press (Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Evening Standard) wrote exceptional reviews – the exhibition is to be presented by the State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki-Greece) from June 24 to September 20, in the exhibition halls of Moni Lazariston.

The exhibition presents the work of two of the most important artists of the Russian avant-garde, Aleskandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) and Liubov Popova (1889-1924). This is a major project, with around 350 paintings, designs, structures, reconstructions, photographs and archives, intended to focus on and present the progress of Constructivism through the movement’s two greatest representatives. Observing the birth, the formation of the principles and the extensions of Constructivism, the exhibition also includes designs for stage sets, magazine covers, patterns for textiles and clothing, indications of the inclusion of art in production and daily life, as well as of the contribution the two artists made to the promotion of their era’s artistic creation to the avant-garde.

The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a notable period of artistic experimentation known as Constructivism, which raised questions about the main fields of art, and brought to the forefront the issue of art’s position in the new society. The representatives of the movement accepted the challenge of the concept of works of art as unique commodities; they investigated more collective working methods and examined how they could contribute to daily life through design, architecture, industrial production, theatre and cinema.

Rodchenko, whose wife, Varvara Stepanova, was also a great artist, actively embraced practically all of the movement’s expressions, from advertising to photography and cinema. Popova’s achievements in painting, theatre, the graphic arts and textile design occurred despite her poor health and her personal tragedy – her husband died of typhus in 1919, and she spent a whole year trying to recover. Both she and her son died just five years later of scarlet fever.

The representatives of Constructivism compared the artist to an engineer, who arranges materials in a scientific and objective manner and produces works of art with the same logic as any other manufactured object. In theory, it was an art that overcame the differences between the two genders. Gender equality was a basic communist principle, and this was one of the periods in history when female artists were evaluated as equally important as their male counterparts.

More specifically, however, visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to enjoy 350 works, including canvases from Popova’s “Painterly Architectonics” series (1917-1919), film posters, costumes and stage sets by Rodchenko. Among the most notable posters are the ones for the classic film “Battleship Potemkin”, directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925.

A prominent position in the exhibition is held by the works of the two artists that were presented in the historic 1921 exhibition entitled “5 x 5 = 25″, for which the two artists cooperated with their colleagues Aleksandra Ekster, Aleksandr Vesnin and Varvara Stepanova. These works include the famous monochromatic paintings by Rodchenko “Pure Red Colour”, “Pure Yellow Colour” and “Pure Blue Colour”. The exhibition consists of unique works from the period of the Russian avant-garde, contributed by 15 institutions from around the world. The SMCA has contributed 60 works, designs and archival material from the Costakis collection, thus making the greatest contribution to the exhibition.

Kevin Finklea
A List Of Things We Said We’d Do Tomorrow #18, 2009
Acrylic on Baltic plywood
28cm x 10cm x 12cm

June 20 - August 5, 2009

Participating Artists:
Christoph Dahlhausen, Kevin Finklea, Daniel Gottin, Rosa M. Hessling, Sherna Teperson, Mark Titmarsh, Heiner Thiel, Bill Thompson, Peter Weber

Brent: Color scales, gray scales, drums, unwrapped columns, the feel of folds, all different measures of light that sometimes manifest as light ‘actually’, though all together register as interest in how things unfold, expose, and fold back – that draw attention to form while somewhat masquerading with it – Linda, what is the common thread that runs through your work?

Linda: Interesting that you refer to my work as folds, literal, or as a manner of speech—each way is interesting. For me everything I do leads back to light and space. What I am after is capturing a sense of space and how light naturally opens, informs, and suggests. When you concentrate on the one aspect [light] the other [space] becomes an irrevocable subject that needs attention. Each aspect involves the other, not altogether different from how we experience ‘real things’, or how nature informs. Actually the canvas itself stands in for a sort of space also. It’s a complex relation where you try to tie the two by engaging a process, sometimes ignoring one for the other. Looking for a reconciliation, accepting what is done, and further working through the given…in a manner. Eventually there exists a tension. The work, also, is as much about darkness as it is light.

At this point it’s probably quite important to mention that though my work may appear distant and concrete, or minimal, more or less the result of a mechanical process (especially when it’s photographed or digitally reproduced) -, this is not the case in reality! When it is reproduced the little irregularities in my work caused by hand and the under ground aren’t noticeable. And that’s a pity because it is a deliberate choice that they are seen. Human touch is allowed in my work, if not necessary. As I said: my work is about finding and combining opposites. This means that the tension between mechanical and handmade must also have its place, must be shown, to be felt and to have its indescribable effect…

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam
All American Finish, 2009
Silverpoint, gesso, hardware, wood, aluminum
99 inches long x 24 inches wide
x variable height (approx. 65 inches)

June 26 - August 2, 2009

Participating Artists:
Jonah Bokaer, Jesse Bransford, Peter Clough, Ariel Dill, Jacob Dyrenforth, Jack Early, Michelle Grabner & Brad Killam, Rashawn Griffin, Fabienne Lasserre, Elwyn Palmerton, Jeffrey Perkins, Jeremy Sigler, Joao Simoes, Michael Taussig & Juan Bosco Diaz, Leslie Thornton

TRANCE, CHANCE, DREAMS & THE UNCONSCIOUS explores a variety of classic strategies to render composition non-mimetic and non-linear. The exhibition, includes new and historical works of video, painting, choreography, drawing, poetry, photography, and sculpture.