Leroy Lamis, 84, died Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010, in Austin, Texas. Mr. Lamis was a sculptor and long-time professor of art at Indiana State University. His Plexiglas sculptures, known for their geometric elegance, were exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and are in the collections of leading museums and private collectors.

Mr. Lamis was born in Eddyville, Iowa, and moved to Los Angeles during the depression. As a teenager, he worked at MGM studios in Culver City. He attended New Mexico Highlands University and received a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. He married Esther Sackler in 1954, taught at Cornell College in Iowa, then moved to Terre Haute, Ind., in 1961, where he taught studio art and art history at Indiana State University until his retirement in 1988. In 1970, he was Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College. He was a fixture in the Wabash Valley art community and had exhibits at the Swope Art Museum, Indiana State University, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Lamis journeyed to New York City with his modern cubist sculptures in tow. He found immediate success with art collectors in New York, being invited to join the Contemporaries Gallery. In 1964, his sculptures were featured in the Whitney Museum Annual exhibit, and in 1965, Lamis’ pieces were selected to participate in one of the most important modern art exhibits of the era, The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art.

From 1965 to 1971 his sculptures were shown and sold by Staempfli Gallery in New York City, where he had three one-man shows. From 1968 to 1969, his one-man show toured throughout the country including exhibits at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, John Herron Museum, Indianapolis, Des Moines Art Center, La Jolla Museum of Art, and Tacoma Museum of Art. In total, his artworks were featured in over 100 individual and group exhibits around the world.

His works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection, Washington, the Albright-Knox Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum, and in the private collections of Seymour Knox, Howard Lipman, SI Newhouse Jr., Roy R. Newberger, Denise Rene, and Robert Sarnoff among other collectors.

(Source: TribStar.com, August 22, 2010)

Douglas Witmer, Fruitville
Mixed media on found wood
Less than 8 inches in any direction

June 20 – July 25, 2010

Some Walls is pleased to present Philadelphia-based artist Douglas Witmer’s exhibition Fruitville.

Douglas Witmer is well known for his paintings which intuitively combine simple geometric imagery, emphatic color, and subtle manipulation of surface physicality. In addition to this widely-shown and growing body of work, for the past several years Witmer has worked on a series small three dimensional pieces using found wood as a support called Fruitville. This exhbition is the first time the Fruitville works have been shown publicly. Witmer has said about this series:

“The Fruitville Pike is a road where I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It’s a major thoroughfare, but it doesn’t go to, from, or through anywhere called Fruitville. My efforts to find Fruitville, if there ever was such a place at all, have been inconclusive.”

So Fruitville exists in my imagination as a kind of Eden; a place of purity, clarity, and quiet delight. It manifests itself in an ongoing visual process of experimentation with wood, paint, glue, paper, ink, light, and shadows. The things that make up my Fruitville exist to be in relationship to the places where they can be seen, and also in relationship with each other.

The sensitive, direct, and quirky color, spatial, and textural qualities that appear in Witmer’s paintings and works on paper are also found in the Fruitville series, continuing his approach to making art that is lush, playful, and deceptively simple, yet rigorous, iconic, and commanding.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. To view the exhibition online please visit somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Michael Dopp, Untitled (Kite 2), 2010
Acrylic on canvas, 64 x 48 inches

May 8 – June 5, 2010

Michael Dopp’s paintings are both dense and bare, open and closed, expanding and contracting. The work arrives out of successive stages that simultaneously complete and frustrate each other. Such stages are evident in the array of marks – networks of lines creating patterns, which suggest both spatial qualities and underscore the flatness of the canvas’ surface. The forms found in Dopp’s work maintain a common subject, that of perspectival lines, of vanishing points and the cube. The repetition of forms and lines establishes a seriality while also locating the viewer in a deeply personal space. Out of these tensions he creates a mapping of process and psychic space.

The works in this exhibition explore a rich and stark monochromatic pallete and utilize the raw canvas as a drawing material. Dopp applies paint with large palette knives and delicate automotive pin-striping brushes. The paintings vacillate between soft and hard, organic and geometric, warm and cool. While they reference and suggest minimalist and structuralist works, their psychological and metaphysical resonance attaches them to tantra and mandala paintings. Their mood is alchemical, a transmuting of process and image, one mark is present and impenetrable, the next is absent and exposed.

This is Michael Dopp’s first solo exhibition after finishing his MFA from UCLA in 2009. He has an upcoming solo exhibition in at Galleria Studio Legale (Caserta, Italy). Previously, Dopp’s paintings have been exhibited in group shows at Five Thirty Three (Los Angeles), Steve Turner (Los Angeles), HJKB (Brooklyn) and Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles) among others. Dopp received his BFA in 2005 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Amy Granat, Chemical Scratch (Return of the Creature), 2003
16mm film transfered to DVD, sound

May 24 – June 28, 2010

Arranged by Front Desk Apparatus

Participating Artists: John Cage, Jesse Cohen, Quentin Curry, Philippe Decrauzat, Matias Faldbakken, Amy Granat, Gareth James, Jacob Kassay, Jutta Koether, Amir Mogharabi, Steven Parrino, Seth Price, Josef Strau, Andy Warhol

Every image is offered our gaze is only presented, in its very obviousness, by means of the disconcerting economy of paradoxes that are always tied up with other paradoxes. Every image is offered only as a maddening, often sublime, intensity of simultaneous contradictions, a meeting of heterogeneous orders that move unhindered between thing-representations and word-representations. But in this “freedom” of imaginary associations, we have to recognize a true fact of structure, where every image becomes clear only in passing within view of all the others, however disparate or dissemblant they are among themselves. –Georges Didi-Huberman

Installation view

March 19 – May 1, 2010

Waltercio Caldas, Installation view of Dinamo (detail) and Shade

March 6 – April 24, 2010

The Christopher Grimes Gallery presents new work by Brazilian artist, Waltercio Caldas. Since his last solo exhibition at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in 2005, Caldas has had solo exhibitions at premier international institutions, including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain, and the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2007, he was included in Robert Storr’s exhibition, ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense’ during the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today. Inspired by geometric abstraction and working in a diverse array of materials – each situation determining the media – Caldas’ work articulates the tenuous relationship between the architectural space and those who occupy it. From a distance, one sees an abstract pattern of lines intersecting areas of color. However, upon closer inspection, one discovers that the lines are not as rigid as they first appeared – swaying slightly with the air current in the room. These materials allow him to sculpt the surrounding negative space. In the words of one critic: “The work insists persistently upon being a border. It further insists upon reducing the border it is. It wants to erase its outlines, its very constitution.”

In a similar fashion, the artists’ drawings and stainless steel wall constructions explore ideas of experience and perception within a formal dialogue by using thread to lead the eye from one point to another. They allude to perspective space that is not wholly present creating, what Caldas says is “a maximum presence from the least amount of material.”

Waltercio Caldas lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has shown extensively internationally since the 1960’s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art, São Paulo, and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others, and also represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include the Blanton Art Museum, Texas and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

His work is included in numerous permanent collections; some of which include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen, Kassel, the Chase Manhattan Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo.

Installation view

February – June 2010

The works of Josef Albers and Ken Price reveal a similarity of sensibilities and a kind of parallel thinking that stems from a shared interest in Mexico and the American Southwest. Drawing from polar extremes of the cultural spectrum, unexpectedly the two artists arrive at complimentary forms of visual expression.

After immigrating to America in 1933, Josef Albers visited Mexico and became interested in Pre-Columbian ceramics and Mayan and Aztec structures; he focused on their underlying geometric forms and repetitive architectural
motifs. These influences can be seen in his photographs of Mexico and the Graphic Tectonic series (1941). In the late 40’s, pueblo architecture
and Mayan temple facades merged with Albers’ overlapping colors in a series of paintings alternatively known as Adobes or Variants.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Ken Price was surrounded by popular Mexican culture, particularly curio shop ceramics and clichéd tourist graphics. In
the spirit of folk pottery, Price embarked upon the ambitious project of Happy’s Curios (1972-1977), along with numerous drawings and works on paper. Over time this spirit evolved into works such as Hefty (2005) that, while amorphous in shape, retain a sense of the arid and colorful landscape characteristic of the Southwest.

The work of Albers and Price connect in different and shifting ways, at times
through color, other times through composition, or both. The exhibition is about the visual links through a variety of media including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs.

George Rickey, Diptych – The Seasons, 1956
Stainless steel and polychrome

February 18 – March 20, 2010

Marlborough Gallery announces that a major exhibition of works by George Rickey will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on February 18 and continue through March 20, 2010. Twenty-four important indoor and outdoor works from Rickey’s personal collection and now held by the George Rickey Estate will be exhibited in the first floor gallery.

George Rickey is internationally regarded as among the most inventive and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. His iconic kinetic works were the outgrowth of experiments with wire and metal that began during his service in World War II. By the late 1950s and 1960s he reduced sculptural forms to simple, geometric shapes such as rectangles, trapezoids, cubes, and lines and largely limited his materials to stainless steel, creating a body of work that is a mesmerizing combination of minimalism and movement.

Important Works from the Estate will focus on Rickey’s sculptural exploration of light, line and shadow as effected by the changing air currents, wind and other natural phenomena; and will feature rare, unique works including the stainless steel and polychrome Diptych – The Seasons (14 x 55 x 22 • in.), 1956, Personage (98 x 20 x 39 in.), 1958 and Harlequin (78 x 25 x 25 in.), 1958, all of which were foundational in the development of Ricky’s kinetic oeuvre. Additionally Two Lines Vertical (20 • x 3 • x 2 in.), 1965, will be shown on the outdoor sculpture terrace at Marlborough on 57th Street. Two Lines Vertical was created by Rickey for his personal collection following the exhibition of the earlier but similar work Two Lines Temporal, 1964, at Documenta III in 1964 which established Rickey’s international reputation. Two Lines Temporal has been in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection since 1964.

Whether in columns, clusters, lines, or suspended shimmering planes, Rickey’s sculptures capture the expressive moment of the intersection of material form, light and movement in space. As art critic Alexandra Anderson-Spivy comments in the catalog essay: “His works mesmerize viewers even when they are still. But these fluid geometric constructions are born to move and they partner best with natural forces. Rickey often declared that he aimed ‘to make things [that are] as contemporary as the weather report,’ And gentle winds and changing weather usually are his sculptures’ greatest friends. The artist never ceased to explore the possibilities offered by the symbiotic relationship between his sculpture and the physical laws of natural motion, chance and light. ”

George Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 the family moved to Scotland, where his father, an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. While studying modern history at Oxford, Mr. Rickey also took courses in painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie L’hôte and at the Académie Moderne, where he worked under the Modernist painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.

Rickey served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry, an experience that reawakened earlier interests in science and technology. After the war, he resumed his peripatetic teaching career. A year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of Design in the late 1940s was decisive; for it was there that he seriously began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement. In 1949, while working as an associate professor at Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture using window glass.

In 1960 Rickey moved to East Chatham, N.Y., which remained his home base until the end of his life. He retired from teaching in 1966 after five years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., but continued to make sculpture and to travel incessantly. To keep up with his many public commissions and exhibitions, he maintained studios in Berlin and in Santa Barbara, California. Rickey’s last sculpture — his tallest, at 57 feet 1 inch – was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Japan in 2002.

Rickey received Honorary Doctorate degrees from nine institutions and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974 and received the Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995.

Keira Kotler, September 26 to October 28, 2008
[I Look for Light], 2008
Urethane and varnish on acrylic
18 x 18 inches

March 18 – April 23

Bay Area-artist Lisa Curet’s work channels and incorporates qualities found in pattern painting. Layer upon layer of shapes and color are applied, creating a tension between the varied surfaces. The combined results are flooded with resin, sealing and fusing the multiple applications. Inspired by travel and human interaction, she views her works as metaphors for one’s conscious perception of the world outside.

Keira Kotler is interested in the pure experience of color without the context of a given subject matter. Recently included in two notable exhibitions addressing spirituality and the sublime, her work focuses on light, shadow, and what she describes as the “subtle nuances found in common experiences.” This exhibition debuts a new series of paintings that further her interest with psychological introspection.

Indira Martina Morre applies multiple layers of white gesso on canvas and renders them to a rich satin finish. Here, she creates floating fields of her personalized markings made from graphite, charcoal, and pastel. In suspended masses, they imply an inner space suggesting psychological galaxies. Concerned with the influence of technology upon human cognitive experience, the paintings, while delicately beautiful, whisper an ambivalent tone.

Douglas Witmer, Things Mean a Lot at the Time, 2010
Acrylic on unprimed canvas, 20 x 24 inches

March 4-27, 2010

Blank Space Gallery presents Ring The Bells Anew, an exhibition of recent paintings by Douglas Witmer. This is the artist’s third solo show in New York, and his first with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Witmer has gained increasing attention for his uniquely distilled sensibility related to his paintings’ surface and color. His recent canvases feature one or two rectangles of solid color on top of and interacting with varied gray washes that cascade down the painting’s surface. Though reductive in their attitude and appearance, the resulting works are anything but “minimal.”

Contrary to first impressions, Witmer’s compositions are not planned or diagrammed. For the artist, painting is a process of inquiry; each piece is an individual result of decisions made intuitively and directly.

The critic and art historian Vittorio Colaizzi has written, “Witmer paints the inheritance of modernist abstraction, and perhaps, metaphorically, the more ecumenical spirituality of today, in the openness of his compositions, their perpetual almost-ness, and their refusal of closure or perfection.”

About the title for this exhibition the artist states, “I am trying to underscore the idea that my paintings embody new acts of declaration using long-existing means. Taken further, it communicates a hope in the continued relevance of abstract painting.”

Douglas Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In New York his work has recently appeared at P.S.1/MoMA in the group exhibition “Minus Space,” as well as The Painting Center and M55 Art in Long Island City. Other recent venues include: Pharmaka in Los Angeles, Gallery Siano in Philadelphia, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton in Ohio, Sydney Non-Objective in Australia, and Bus-Dori Project Space in Tokyo, Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Don Voisine, Chemical Moment, 2009
Oil on wood, 16×17 inches

“Brent: Upon entering the gallery, your first show on the West Coast, San Francisco, Gregory Lind, immediately you become aware of all that is color. Oddly it is not the black that pushes its presence first. But like a good friend, faithful, the blacks unfold at a different speed, which require the intimate. If dark be the turbine then color is the outwardly expressive, and is the meter. In the exhibition space this is what travels across to us in calibrated splendor.

Don: Your response sounds similar to the reaction people have when coming to my studio for the first time. Having seen a painting or two in various group shows they would expect the studio to be a dark and perhaps foreboding place. Often the first words uttered are, “Wow, look at all this color!” I think this explains why salon style installations of my work have been done in a few exhibitions. It replicates the experience of seeing the work in the studio…”

Installation view

January 6 – February 20, 2010

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present the first New York show of shaped, monochromatic paintings from 1965-66 by Ronald Davis – including four iconic examples that have not been on public view since the 1960’s.

In the fall on 1965 Ronald Davis introduced a series of eight geometrically shaped, richly painted monochromatic canvases at the newly opened Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. Consisting of rectilinear forms (e.g. a rhomboid, a parallelogram etc.) this body of work presented an illusionistic spatial order while also projecting an even greater sense of depth than their 4″ deep stretchers provided.

At play in Davis’s applications of two- point perspective were the lessons of spatial fictions learned from methods artists had employed in the past – from early Renaissance painters to Duchamp and, more contemporaneously, to the shaped canvases of Frank Stella. With this new and relatively radical body of work, however, Davis introduced the notion of depicting a three-dimensional abstract shape emanating from the wall as a monochromatic form. The idea of painting as object, hotly considered at that time, took on even greater depth with this work as it seemingly beamed out images of colors and shapes. Davis’s concerns with articulating space and perspective amounted to an investigation of form as it encompassed matter. “The nature of form in space…” as curator Susan Larsen has noted “… is the subject of Davis’s continuous probe.”

The work of Ronald Davis resides in over forty museum collections in North America and Europe. It has been the focus of over eighty solo exhibitions including six at Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles, five at Leo Castelli, New York and five at Blum Helman, New York.

Davis was born in Santa Monica, CA and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 – 64, and then moved to Los Angeles where he lived and worked until 1993. Davis currently resides with his wife Barbara in New Mexico.

Installation view

January 8 – February 6, 2010

Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 will present to the New York public a long-overdue survey of the particular kind of minimal work that was made in and around Los Angeles, work which differentiated itself in its emphasis on surface, synthetic materials, industrial processes, and perception. Often referred to under the umbrella term “Light and Space,” the artists and artwork included in this exhibition will present a more inclusive overview of the ground-breaking and diverse art practices that flourished in California in the 1960s. The exhibition includes rarely seen works by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine, and Doug Wheeler.

While most of the artworks included in the exhibition can be referred to as minimal in form, their seductive surfaces, often made out of nontraditional materials, and their luminescent use of color and light characterize them as uniquely Southern Californian. Distinguishing themselves from their East Coast Minimalist counterparts, the California artists in the exhibition were reacting to local concerns with light and atmosphere, often evoking the qualities of the bright Los Angeles sunlight and the shiny, finished surfaces of the city’s ubiquitous signs and automobiles. Noted for translucent, reflective, or ethereal surfaces, the work made by these artists explored the often ephemeral boundaries between painting and sculpture and the broader experiential possibilities of art.

The works on view capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles area during the 1960s, where certain cutting-edge industrial materials and technologies were being developed at that time. Many of the artists employed unconventional materials to create complex, highly-finished and meticulous objects that have become associated with the so-called “Finish Fetish” aesthetic. These artists were also influenced by the industrial paints applied to the surfaces of surfboards and cars, as well as the plastics of the aerospace industry.

Artists such as De Wain Valentine, Helen Pashgian, and Peter Alexander experimented with casting polyester resin in different formats, creating works which explore the material’s ability to both contain and reflect light. Alexander’s Untitled (Window), 1968, which consists of a transparent blue wedge, explores the synthetic material’s qualities in relationship to color and luminosity, whereas Pashgian’s clear, geometric orbs (such as Untitled, 1968-69) deal with shifts in perspective and issues of translucency and perception. Valentine’s Triple Disk Red Metal Flake – Black Edge, 1966, uses fiberglass reinforced polyester to achieve beautiful tensions between exterior and interior spaces.

In a similar manner, the early “cubes” of Larry Bell explore the relationship between the sculptural object and its surrounding environment. Creating perfect cubes made out of glass and metal (among them Untitled, 1966-67, and Untitled, 1969), Bell developed a delicate, vacuum-coating technique to achieve semi-reflective exteriors. The flawless surfaces of these works induce a mesmerizing range of perceptual experiences, simultaneously drawing the viewer inside the object and reflecting the surrounding environment.

Laddie John Dill’s Untitled, 1971, employs glass in a distinct manner: supported by sand and illuminated from below by argon light, its twelve glass panels create a reflective installation of fractured space that exponentially extends the sequence of glass panels in a mirrored progression. This work explores Illustration on first page: DOUG WHEELER. Untitled, 1969. Acrylic, neon tubing, and wood. 91 1/2 x 91 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches. the interplay of site, structure, light, and, in effect, immateriality, while also addressing the viewer. Originally conceived in 1971, the artist has subsequently installed distinct versions of this work in a site-specific manner: always using local materials, Dill configures the panes of glass according to the space in which it is installed.

The relationship between color and surface was a primary concern for many of the artists in this exhibition. Among them, Craig Kauffman and John McCracken utilize color as a physical presence or “material.”

Kauffman implemented plastic as his primary medium, creating his best known work: a series of vacuumformed, Plexiglas wall reliefs that investigate the material aspects of color. These glossy and symmetrical works utilized a vacuum-formed molding technique developed for commercial signage. His transparent, plastic “bubbles” were then painted from behind, achieving a luminous effect through the integration of color and ambient light, to create works which cannot be classified as either painting or sculpture.

The highly-saturated, monochromatic surfaces of McCracken’s works are sanded and polished to produce such a high degree of reflectiveness that they simultaneously activate their surroundings and appear translucent. Thus, the objects gain a singular and almost otherworldly quality, appearing at once physical and immaterial through his application of color. His signature form, referred to as a “plank” (the exhibition includes Red Plank, 1967, and Think Pink, 1967), leans at an angle against the wall (the site of painting) while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm and physical space of the viewer. McCracken’s work further challenged the notions of Minimalism through the artist’s interest in spiritual phenomena.

Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler, all of whom began as abstract painters, developed practices which employ light and indeterminate space to extend and disorient the visual experience. These artists created environmental installations which explore the physical, sensory, and temporal aspects of the architectural space.

Irwin began his practice by dismantling the act of painting in order to expose the perceivable qualities of color and space. The “dot painting” Untitled, 1963-65 (on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), made up of small dots of color that interact with the viewer’s eyes, is an example of Irwin’s early interests in perception and its mechanisms. The exhibition will also include an example of Irwin’s freestanding, transparent acrylic columns (Untitled, 1970-71), in addition to an untitled work from 1969 (on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego) that is comprised of a white, convex disc mounted on the wall and lit from four points, casting numerous shadows to effectually dematerialize the object.

Turrell’s work employs light as a medium. He creates what appear to be luminous three-dimensional forms which, upon closer inspection, resolve themselves into empty planes of light. Using colored light to cast geometric forms onto the corner of a room, these emanating projections explore the boundaries of the material and immaterial qualities of light to achieve perceivable visual forms that are distinct from the physical architectural space. The exhibition presents two such “corner projections” from the late 1960s.

Wheeler’s Untitled, 1969 (illustrated on first page), belongs to a body of innovative light paintings known as his “Light Encasement” series (begun in 1965). These works consist of large squares of plastic, with neon lights embedded along their inside edges that blur the distinction between the work of art and its surrounding context. Generally hung on a wall in a pristine white room of precise proportions, these works create an immersive environment, absorbing the viewer in the subtle construction of pure space. Like Irwin and Turrell, Wheeler’s enveloping environments explore the materiality of light while also emphasizing the viewer’s physical experience of space.

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by noted critic Dave Hickey will be published on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with Steidl, Germany.

Peter Forakis, Atlanta Gateway, 1967

From The New York Times, December 17, 2009

Peter Forakis, a sculptor who helped found Park Place, a prominent New York artists’ cooperative gallery of the 1960s, died on Nov. 26 in Petaluma, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Petaluma.

His death was announced by the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, which has represented him since 2007.

Mr. Forakis was one of many young artists in the late ’50s and early ’60s who took up geometry and moved into three-dimensional space as a way to avoid the omnipresence of Abstract Expressionism.

Born in Hanna, Wyoming, to Greek immigrants, he grew up in California, in Oakland and Modesto, and served in the merchant marine from 1949 to 1950 and in the military in Korea from 1951 to 1953. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1957 and moved to New York in 1958. Over the next few years he went from concentrating on painting to making sculptures, just as geometry was becoming a force in both mediums, but especially in sculpture, Minimalist and not.

In 1963, a group that included Mr. Forakis, Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor and Forrest Myers started exhibiting their work, playing free jazz and discussing the future of public sculpture in a floor at the top of a loft building in Lower Manhattan near Park Place, where several of them lived. The first director was John Gibson, who would later have a gallery of his own.

However geometrically inclined, these artists avoided the simple, stable shapes of Minimalism. Their best-known member, Mr. di Suvero, favored dynamic, open structures of tilted and balanced beams, objects and forms. His Park Place colleagues worked with and against his influence, usually with more streamlined forms or brighter colors.

Often consisting of repeating, flattened volumes tilted on a corner, Mr. Forakis’s work had a mathematical demeanor; sometimes it evoked the black, chunky forms of the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith.

In 1965 Park Place relocated to 542 West Broadway (now La Guardia Place) and became known for ecumenical invitationals that included artists as varied as Ronald Bladen, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Sylvia Stone, Ronnie Landfield, Carl Andre and Joan Jonas. Park Place closed in 1967. A year later its second director, Paula Cooper, opened her own gallery on Prince Street in SoHo, and for a time represented a few Park Place artists.

In addition to Park Place, Mr. Forakis had New York solo shows in the 1960s at the Brata Gallery, the David Anderson Gallery and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1966 his work appeared in “Primary Structures,” an important exhibition of geometric sculpture at the Jewish Museum.

Mr. Forakis returned to Northern California in 1979. His last New York show was at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in 1982.

He is represented in several public collections and numerous commissions in Atlanta, Denver, Oakland, Nyack, N.Y., and elsewhere. In 2008 his work was included in “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.

Mr. Forakis’s marriage to the artist Phyllis Yampolsky ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Christina Forakis of Sacramento, who is the child of an earlier relationship; and by two children from his marriage to Ms. Yampolsky, Gia Forakis of New York City and Jozeph Forakis of Milan.

Work by Brent Hallard

November 12 – December 19, 2009

An international, visual conversation between abstract painters; a traveling, transformable series of shows.

Exhibiting artists – Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier

Meridian Gallery is pleased to present TRANS: form | color the San Francisco manifestation of a series of international traveling shows by nine artists from Japan, Germany and the United States who are engaged in a dialogue about Painting and Abstraction.

Begun as an in-person and online conversation between Richard Schur in Munich, Mel Prest in San Francisco and Brent Hallard in Tokyo, TRANS has grown into an exhibition with nine artists. Three of the artists hail from Germany, four artists live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, one in upstate New York and one lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a visual dialogue between themselves and as a means to join today’s contemporary painting dialogue.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference, as well as, the ways that the works align both formally and conceptually, with a range of abstraction spanning hard-edge, optical, minimal, expressive and conceptual. An aspect of the artists’ continuing dialogue is the installation of TRANS: form | color, which is done onsite by the artists together. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic and timely exhibition.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century, with its awareness of history as well as conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

“…These painters, calling themselves TRANS, meeting in person or on the Internet, found that they share a common interest in the painting process, pure, and often not so simple. Unlike previous groups, they share no common ideology and they certainly are not likely to publish a manifesto. And they all agree that it is the viewer’s response, which completes the work…”
—Peter Selz

TRANS:Abstraktion opened in November 2007 at Weltraum, a non-profit gallery space in Munich, Germany. In March 2009 TRANS:formal traveled to Pharmaka, a non-profit space in Los Angeles. Each show includes new work by each artist –thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. TRANS: form | color at Meridian Gallery will be the first time all artists will be present at the exhibition.

Catalogue available, with notes on TRANS: form | color by Peter Selz.

November 28, 2009 – January 2, 2010

Alex Couwenberg, who was honored with the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2007, continues to expand his visual lexicon in a solo exhibition of new work at Royale Projects. The Los Angeles Times recently described his paintings as “sleek, multilayered, spatially sophisticated compositions”, but these words barely scratch the meticulously finished surface.

Comparisons to the renown Abstract Classicists of the midcentury are inevitable. This is in part due to the influence of his long time mentor Karl Benjamin and in part due to his dedication to the perfection and progression of the techniques innovated by post war painters such as Karl Benjamin and Lorser Feitelson. Alex Couwenberg has as much in common, in his sensitivity to pure aesthetic, with revered contemporary California artist Chuck Arnoldi. Alex Couwenberg, like Arnoldi, boldly and deliberately crafts “beautiful” paintings and in doing so has created a visual language that is undeniably his own singular voice.

The new body of work in Waimea introduces large canvases covered in wide expanses of meditative, monochrome, suddenly broken by dense, chaotic layers of hard edge design. As if his work is a series of abstract semiotic studies, these intrusions of amorphic shapes, luxuriant textures, and slick pin-striping allude to deep rooted icons of West Coast culture.

This year Alex Couwenberg’s paintings have been added to the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum and the Claremont Museum of Art. Waimea is the first solo exhibition for Alex Couwenberg at Royale Projects.

David Mackenzie, #6-2009-9, 2009
Acrylic on engineered jute, 18 x 18 inches

October 27 – November 21, 2009

This is Mackenzie’s first solo exhibition in New York City. He has exhibited in numerous group shows including the Whitney Biennial, the American Academy of Arts & Letters invitational and is a member of American Abstract Artist. He has been painting for thirty-five years, working quietly on the problems surrounding contemporary abstraction.

David Mackenzie writes:
“The works in this exhibition are the result of a five-year reexamination of the issues that began with my career as a painter. Initially I started with an analysis of what a painting was or could become. I wanted to reinvent painting from the ground up. My first works were quite literally paint cast into various molds, peeled out and nailed to the wall. This form of reductive abstraction lent itself naturally to my investigations. From then on my work gradually became more and more complicated, going from cast paintings to stretched canvases and from minimal to chaotic. Now I am back to where it all began, throwing out the excess and opening new paths of exploration ”

“What interests me in a painting is tension, working with color, structure and space. I find I can never resolve a particular painting without having some form of tension among those elements. Tension is what I hope to achieve. Otherwise, the work becomes an inert object and is less dynamic.”

“There are three bodies of work that played an important part in the development of my work: Ken Price’s ceramic dome sculptures – for bringing together historical references to a new form, John McLaughlin’s minimal paintings – for their activation of space and Dorothea Rockburne’s drawings which make themselves – for a self-referential mode of expression.”

The Painting Process:
Mackenzie begins his paintings by embedding string onto canvas, using acrylic and also applying a low-tech screening process to “engineer” a physical substrate on which to work. He formulates his own paint, applying up to a dozen coats to achieve subtle color changes and surface variation. His interest in paint formulation and the physical qualities of paint comes from having studied ceramics while in art school.

Born in Los Angeles, California, he attended The San Francisco Art Institute where he became part of a group of painters working with new materials, processes and unstretched canvases. Today he lives in upstate New York along with his wife and two cats.

Don Voisine, Seven-Zip, 2009
Oil on wood, 30 x 22 inches

November 4 – December 23, 2009

Gregory Lind Gallery presents a series of oil paintings on wood by New York artist Don Voisine, whose work is defined by its exceptional nuance, sophistication, and reductive visual aesthetic. Distinctively architectural in style, Voisine’s pieces consist of central expanses of overlapping rectangles or squares painted in black and set against white fields. These hard-edged forms are bordered top and bottom or left and right by vibrant bands of contrasting colors of varying width. While the surfaces of his pieces are smooth, they are also not entirely uniform, as the interplay between transparency and opacity manufactured by the variance of paint density is always at work with his visual planes.

Voisine’s pictorial planes connote a meditative self-containment that renders Voisine’s images almost sculptural and object-like. His aesthetic lexicon is one that is both formal and rigorous with its adherence to strict geometries, but it is also deeply refined and meditative in its evocation of empty or deep space, as well as movement. Voisine’s works are unvarnished and rectangular or square in shape, while the shapes within the paintings are also rectangular, square or rhombi. The works are composed on flat surfaces that offer no traditional perspective, thereby creating the illusion of endless depth. Despite Voisine’s restricted palette and compositional consistency, his work evinces an enormous amount of freedom within constraints, in facets such as weight, tone (in working with varying grades of color, such as matte charcoal black, deeper carbon black, and shinier black surfaces), direction, and spatial illusion.

Don Voisine attended the Portland School of Art and Concept Center for Visual Studies in Portland, ME. He received an honorary BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2000. His recent exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art, New York; Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, ME; and Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY. His recent group exhibitions include “New From Hamburg, New York, Berlin,” pp projects, Hamburg, Germany; “Planes of Abstraction,” Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; “Escape from New York,” Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; and “Minus Space,” P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY. His work has been written about in The New York Times, Village Voice, and Chicago Tribune. Collections include Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museum, VA. He lives and works in New York.

James Turrell, Ganzfeld Piece (model), 2008
Installation
Photo: Zooey Braun, Stuttgart, 2009

October 24, 2009 – April 5, 2010

The primary medium of Californian artist James Turrell is light. Probably the best-known artist in his field, Turrell’s entire oeuvre since the 1960s has been devoted to exploring the diverse manifestations of this immaterial medium and working towards a new, space-defining form of light art. While light here refers to nothing beyond itself, it causes surface, colour and space to interact and allows viewers to immerse themselves in a mysterious, painterly world.

Occupying a central place in James Turrell’s oeuvre is the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert which the artist has been transforming into an observatory since 1974. Building upon the cosmic aspects of this quiet, meditative place, Turrell is creating the worldwide largest museum installation he has made to date at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, producing a light-filled space of experience in the tradition of his Ganzfeld Pieces. Making full use of the adaptable architecture system of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg – unique within the German museum landscape – his installation will be an exploration of space and light: immaterial and material at once. The timelessness and fascination of James Turrell’s works derives from his incredible skill at capturing fleeting light and giving it the visual presence and tactile density of a physical body.

Nathan Hylden, Untitled, 2009
Acrylic on aluminum, 34 x 28 inches

October 1-31, 2009

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents “Affinities,” a show that juxtaposes new paintings by Nathan Hylden with works by Josef Albers, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Curated by Meredith Darrow, the show connects Hylden’s geometric forms and repeated gestures with those of his art historical predecessors.

Like Albers, Stella and Warhol, Hylden uses a regulated process to create variations within a systematic sequence and to continue Modern Art’s redefinition of pictoral space. Starting with a stack of identically sized aluminum panels, Hylden adds layers of paint and ink to these reflective surfaces, changing the order of operations for each panel. As the series progresses, older panels are used in the creation of newer ones— for example, vertical bands of white paint bridge the borders of separate panels, forming an indexical link between these individual works within the larger series. Another unifying motif presents itself in the screen-printed image of a one-to-one photograph of a blank canvas hanging on a wall. Hylden deliberately chose the loaded notion of a “blank canvas” to evoke long-standing concerns about the relationships between the illusory depth of an image and its physical support. Grounding itself in Albers’s pure geometry, Stella’s insistence on the potential of formal abstraction, and Warhol’s interest in serialized imagery, Hylden extends the conversation to the next generation of artists and viewers.

Nathan Hylden was born in 1978 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. His works have been shown in several international group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo, Art: Concept in Paris and Johann König in Berlin.

Meredith Darrow is an independent curator living and working in New York City.

Zak Prekop, Untitled, 2008
Pen and paper on canvas
25 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches

September 9 – October 18, 2009

Lisa Cooley Gallery presents a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings by two artists, Jon Pestoni, from Los Angeles, and Zak Prekop, from Chicago.

The paintings of Jon Pestoni and Zak Prekop have clear affinities – their separate practices arise from a conceptual foundation, but are executed with intellectual playfulness, subtlety, lightness and lyricism. Both artists are highly aware of art historical precedent and yet aim for the discovery of unique forms. Both bodies of work deliver formal investigations with a critical edge.

Neither figurative, nor purely abstract, Jon Pestoni’s paintings are imbued with an experiential quality. They highlight paint application, materiality, rich color schemes, and occasionally, blunt, aggressive brushwork. His work is explicit and avoids visual pretense in a direct, immediate way. Scale and color shift subtly from work to work, revealing the internal logic of Pestoni’s practice and contextualizing each individual painting.

In certain works, wide, dragged brushstrokes create thick horizontal bands across prepared grounds. Pestoni sometimes contrasts these severe strokes with small, lyrical surface marks and lines, adding yet another layer to the work. Such contrasting moves address the heavy ground beneath and imbue the painting with a decorative but opposing tension.

Pestoni’s work plays with ideas of negation. The artist might seem to deny the viewer access to the “interior” of the work, but in fact he is playing with the trope of deriving pleasure from inaccessibility, thereby amplifying awareness of the work’s materiality and nuance. Pestoni pushes the act of building up and breaking down, painting something in and painting something out, unifying this practice into a single picture. In short, much of the activity in these paintings is the work of erasing the work. By investigating disappearances, the paintings become evidence of a process and saturated with visual and indexical meaning.

Collage and pencil drawing spark the composition of Zak Prekop’s oil paintings. The artist uses these two non-painting mediums to create the nuanced structures, the destabilized geometry, the rambling, gestural creases and the shallow, color-filled ridges that characterize the surface of his paintings.

This approach yields a range of pictures, some of which are more about drawing, others more about painting. Some pictures combine both ideas, emulating collage to create an illusion of torn paper within the underpainting. Other incongruities are evident – torn paper and quick marks suggest immediacy, but Prekop’s creamy paint application and subdued palette evoke a contemplative, slow reading. His layers of color range from translucent to opaque, but always retain a striking luminosity.

Prekop’s paintings are notable for their levels of refinement, interiority and sincerity. Even in his larger canvases, the artist conjures an intimate experience for the viewer. Diagetic, almost invisible marks reveal themselves only when viewed at certain angles while the quality of the artist’s lines feel introspective and meandering. Reinvesting seriousness and the personal into tropes of abstraction, Prekop creates a new form of subdued and cerebral non-representational painting.

Jon Pestoni lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA in Art from UC Berkeley in 1992 and his MFA from UCLA in 1996. His paintings were included in The White Columns New York Annual 2008, curated by Jay Sanders. His work has also been exhibited in New York at Leo Koenig Inc and Marianne Boesky Gallery as well as at Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2005 he has lectured in Studio Art at UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Riverside. Upcoming exhibitions include a two-person show with Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago.

Zak Prekop lives and works in Chicago, where he also received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He is currently studying at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. He has recently exhibited at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago and Roger Björkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, Sweden.

Installation view

May 22 – September 26, 2009

Installation view

September 10 – October 31, 2009

Some Walls is a new curatorial and writing art project located in a private home in Oakland, California. For the inaugural exhibition, Some Walls presents “Jeffrey Cortland Jones: Recent Paintings,” from September 10 – October 31, 2009. Images and an essay about the exhibition are at Some Walls.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones is Associate Professor at University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. A painter as well as a curator, he is much admired by peers for his lush and serious work, disciplined and productive practice, broad and active exhibition schedule, and friendly and generous spirit.

Some Walls will show four small recent paintings made with enamel on acrylic panels. Known for his use of industrial materials, institutional colors, complex layering, and vigorous mark-making, Jones had in the recent past used a more wild and vibrant palette. The four paintings in this exhibition head in a slightly different direction, however. Returning to his previous use of green and white, Jones has quickened, reduced, and softened his paint application, resulting in images that, though abstractions with a strong physical presence and object quality, with their vertical format and horizontal spatial divisions hint at the wintery-like atmospheric image of haze just as the sun is about to burst through.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: Recent Paintings at Some Walls, 2009
Long known for his use of industrial materials, various kinds of paint, institutional colors, and a complex layering of transparent and opaque paint akin to glazing, Jeffrey Cortland Jones had gradually shifted towards a brilliant, vibrant palette, and a vigorous, painterly, graffiti-like approach to mark-making. Recently, however, he returned to his former more subdued color set, and radically reduced and refined the materials used in order to make a large and continuing series of new small paintings, each enamel on 10 x 8 inch acrylic panels. The resulting flat fields, smeared strokes, close contrast, and horizontal divisions, while appearing initially and deceptively simpler than previous work, are confidently abstract, visually evocative and associative, and, despite their size, surprisingly monumental.

In this new work Jones’ painting is quick, soft, flat, and deft. The speed at which Jones makes and completes each painting is rapid and decisive, without hesitation and worry. The four paintings exhibited at Some Walls, all basically green and white, evidence play with paint and ground. Surprisingly, for such small work, the paint is often rapidly applied with large brushes, spread, smoothed, or scrubbed, and sometimes wiped and buffed to expose the clear acrylic ground. In areas where no paint appears on the front, the backside of the acrylic is often painted, adding depth to the frontal plane and changing the color of the side of the panel. The edges and corners of each panel’s front are handled differently: fully covered with paint; or exposed by strokes that pull away from the edge; or built up where a dragged brush spills paint over the edge to form a small lip. When hung, small spacers on the back of each panel push them off the wall one eighth inch or so, adding depth and heft. These small differences, immense to a painter, become significant to the carefully observant viewer. The resulting paintings, intentionally created objects, have a sensitive, physical presence, and are containers of human activity, seeing, and thinking; their presence is a sign of recognition and resolution.

Jones’ approach—the large strokes, the broad effects, working with and incorporating the surface—make the paintings feel larger than they are. Because the objects are painted and physical, and despite a photographic quality, in terms of size and surface, it’s possible to feel that not only one is looking at an image, but that one is also a part of or inside the image. Size is one thing, and scale quite another. Looking at a painting, feeling our body in relation to the object, is one sense of scale, but being inside the image is something else, a more psychological and emotional experience. A shift from seeing size to experiencing scale is why these paintings feel monumental; this is difficult to achieve, especially in a kind of abstract painting where no other form, line, or spatial devices tells the viewer the scale of the image being viewed.

Associative aspects of paintings are useful ways of describing visual and emotional experience. In these paintings the vertical format, horizontal divisions, and cool color hint at the wintery-like atmospherics of haze over a landscape just as the sun is about to burst through. This feeling of faintly seeing into a distance, of wanting to see what is beyond the haze, and the effect of light and atmosphere, is a kind of abstraction, a covering over, of preventing our looking for and latching onto something “real.” It is time-based, keeping us present, watching, and wondering. Although each painting can stand absolutely and successfully alone, as installed here a few inches apart in a single row these paintings interact, like four views of the same place within minutes of each other, almost a time lapse sequence. This is one example of the narrative possibility of a abstract painting, however nonlinear and pre-lingual that narrative may be. But there is little outside of these paintings that can help us understand them more. Our understanding remains in the experience of looking.

In a recent essay, Matthew Collings commented about an exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s “Open,” series of paintings, “I like the way the ‘Opens’ simply refuse any possibility of looking up things in books,[1]” meaning, I take it, that the paintings are intensely visual and abstract, with no other agenda than painting, and are only accessible through observation and interaction. One has nowhere else to turn to figure them out. What Collings admires in Motherwell applies to Jones—the painting is itself.
Jones says, “This work is honestly only about the painting: how its applied; how is sits on the surface; how most of it is matte but then a few moments of gloss hang around the edges; the shift from a cool white to a warm white; its relationship to the wall; what happens with the space between the painting and the wall; etc.[2]” In an excerpt from a recent statement, he tells us, “Painting is simply obsessive, correcting, locating, apprehending, pigment, fog, field, continuous, resistance, painting.[3]” Jones confirms that his making paintings becomes for the viewer a process of participating, observing, and paying attention.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, California
September, 2009

[1] Collings, Matthew.”The Known Unknowns” Modern Painters. London. September 2009. Pages 24-26
[2] Email from the artist to the author, August 25, 2009.
[3] Email from the artist to the author, August 20, 2009.

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.

Michael Zahn, Police and Thieves, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

May 14 – June 6, 2009

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention. . .and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and. . .oh, there are loads of rules.” — High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

Crossing genres, blending generations and connecting the emotional dots, My Certain Fate, a group show curated by Timothy Buckwalter at Pharmaka.

Bay area artist Timothy Buckwalter made his first mix tape in 1979 while staying up late trying to record Pink Floyd’s runaway hit song “Another Brick In The Wall, Part One.” The 45RPM had been sold out at his local record store for weeks. Lying on the floor with his RadioShack portable cassette player – its microphone jammed against his clock radio’s speaker – waiting for Pink Floyd to come on, Buckwalter realized that he could go beyond recording that one contemporary song of rebellion. He was soon jotting onto tape anything that evening that seemed connected to that song: Blondie’s Heart of Glass, Billy Joel’s My Life, M’s Popmuzik, The Knack’s My Sharona, Herb Alpert’s Rise and Don’t Bring Me Down from ELO.

Combining photography, painting, sculpture and text-based works in My Certain Fate, Buckwalter has crafted an exhibition that mimics the dynamic behind the mix tape – a genre he believed that evening he had invented but which is in fact a popular element within youth culture. Since the mid-70s the creation of a mix tape has been seen as an expression of the individual compiler’s taste in music. And, of course, as a gift, it has often been put forward as a tentative move toward creating some kind of emotional relationship with the tape’s recipient.

Featuring more than 65 works from 28 U.S. and international artists, My Certain Fate explores and connects the feelings emoting from each piece to create an overarching narrative. Bubbling to the surface of a photo is a mysterious tale of yearning and denial. A drawing begins to crack under the weight of its own smugness. A crisp Miminalist painting offers a space to breathe, a break in the mix. Lurking beneath a sculpture is a less than obvious tale of redemption. The title for the exhibition is excerpted from one of Buckwalter’s favorite songs, “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate” on Mission of Burma’s 1982 album “Vs. “ – a track that exudes a boatload of melancholia mixed with the possibility for love through self-sacrifice.

Included in the mix are works from John Altoon, Angela Baker, Val Britton, Martin Bromirksi, Manuel Dominguez Jr., Bill Dunlap, Sacha Eckes, Sylvia Fragoso, Tammy Harper, Kevin Parks Hauser, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Michelle Lewis-King, Joe Macca, Michael Macfeat, Rob Matthews, Mike Monteiro, Marlon Mullen, Christopher Saunders, Jen Siska, Dean Smith, Brian Stechschulte, Katy Stone, Rebecca Whipple, Billy White, Jim Winters, Douglas Witmer, Michael Zahn, and Nina Zurier.

A catalog — with an essay by DJ and blogger Heidi De Vries, poetry by Suzanne Stein, and a Q&A between the curator and painter Michael Zahn – will accompany the show. Included will be a mix CD (playing during the show).

Matthew Rich, Nine, 2009
28 x 23 inches (wall)
Andrea Myers, Fold/Unfold, 2008
Dimensions variable (floor)
Andrea Myers, Soft Shadow, 2008
Dimensions variable (leaning)

May 22 – June 22, 2009

Hallway Projects at Park Life presents a group exhibition featuring artists Chris Corales, Andrea Myers, Matthew Rich, Brion Nuda Rosch & Liz Walsh.

April 25 – June 6, 2009

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to announce LA’s first solo show of internationally renowned artist-activist Steve Lambert. You may have encountered Steve’s work already, though you may not be aware of it. Maybe you saw him interviewed on CNN, or listened to him on NPR. Lambert’s work operates in popular culture, using everyday language and humor to convey ideas that both subvert and expand the worlds of art, free technology, and media. In the course of his work, Lambert has worked with volunteers to close every McDonald’s in Manhattan; he has renamed a street in San Francisco, and replaced advertising on the internet with curated art images. Perhaps most famously, Lambert and the Yes Men orchestrated the New York Times Special Edition, wherein he and his collaborators wrote, printed and distributed a near-perfect imitation of the New York Times, its differences detectable only in its content, which included a cavalcade of ‘if only it were true’ headlines like “Iraq War Over” and “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds.”

In Everything You Want, Right Now!, Lambert takes on the vernacular of commercial signage with a regional emphasis unique to Los Angeles. Visually, he is interested in what makes certain styles of signage feel so innately familiar, and in the methods that signage employs to grab our attention. Lambert will investigate the numerous emotional promises that inhere in commercial advertising, promises that may excite or reassure us, while remaining ultimately undelivered. The business of fine art and the relevance of the white cube gallery will also come under the scrutiny of Mr. Lambert. Under his direction, the Charlie James Gallery will be transformed into something reminiscent of an over-eager appliance store during the 6 week run of his show. The gallery will be festooned with pennants inside and out, the windows painted over with garish promises of “Slashed Prices!” while the interior pulses away with lighted signage, all promising wild levels of deliverance to the viewer.

Steve Lambert is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency and the lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with curated art images). He has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, Packard Jennings, and the Yes Men. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Lower East Side Print Shop, Rhizome/The New Museum, Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at various galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recently collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, with reportage of his exploits captured in multiple outlets including the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. Steve studied sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006.

Dan Graham performing Performer/Audience/Mirror
at P.S.1, NYC, 1977
Photo courtesy of the artist

February 15 – May 25, 2009

Dan Graham: Beyond is the first North American retrospective of the art of Dan Graham (b.1942, Urbana, Illinois), examining his entire body of work in a focused selection of photographs, film and video, architectural models, indoor and outdoor pavilions, conceptual projects for magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings. Graham has been a central figure in the development of contemporary art since the 1960s—from the rise of minimalism, conceptual art, and video and performance art, to explorations of architecture and the public sphere and collaborations with musicians and the culture of rock and roll. This exhibition traces the evolution of his practice across each of its major stages, while asserting ongoing themes, most notably, the changing relationship of the individual to society as filtered through American mass media and architecture at the end of the 20th century. Dan Graham: Beyond is co-curated by Bennett Simpson, MOCA associate curator, and Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Following its presentation in Los Angeles, the exhibition will tour nationally to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dan Graham: Beyond will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue.

Mel Prest, Uyo, 2008
Gouache on Fabriano paper, 18 x 18 inches

March 25 – May 2, 2009

Gregory Lind Gallery presents “Sky Black Ray,” a collection of new works by San Francisco-based artist, Mel Prest. The exhibit reestablishes Prest’s interest in the creation of structure-spaces, manufactured by the charting and projection of language, light, and sound.

“Sky Black Ray” refers to a series of concepts that Prest explores in her new body of work: a space of openness that is both empty and full (sky); the darkness and mystery that constitute the center or focal point of the work (black); and the fluctuating fields of lines beginning at one point but radiating out into infinity (ray). The colors themselves, as responses to the cadences and topographies of the sensory world, are experienced as deep, interior fields that undergo subtle changes as they are observed. Prest’s works present perceptual puzzles that insist our eyes focus and refocus continuously. Her structures are understated and subtle, offering a range of possible shapes and unique interpretations.

Mel Prest received her MFA from Mills College, and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her recent exhibitions include; “The Space Between” at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; “Touch” at Bus-Dori, Tokyo, Japan; and “TRANSformal” at Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA. Her stop-motion animation, Immigrant Song, will travel with “Stop & Go,” a curated show of artist-made stop-motion films, to San Francisco’s Exploratorium and other venues. Prest has been featured in Artweek, Art Papers, San Francisco Chronicle, and New American Painting. This is her third solo exhibition with Gregory Lind Gallery. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Works by Leo Hurzlmeir, Richard Schur & Brent Hallard (l to r)

March 12 – May 2, 2009

Exhibiting artists: Kasarian Dane, Stephan Fritsch, Brent Hallard, Leo Hurzlmeir, Robin McDonnell, Mel Prest, Richard Schur, Nancy White, John Zurier 


Pharmaka is pleased to present “TRANS:formal” the Los Angeles manifestation in a series of traveling shows by nine artists from Germany, Japan and the United States who are all engaged in a dialogue about Abstraction in painting.

Working both internationally and in a variety of approaches to Abstraction, the artists have created this show as a dialogue between themselves and as a means to engage the viewer in this conversation.

The show poses questions of cultural/aesthetic difference as well as the ways that the works align formally and conceptually. This convergence of approach and locale creates a dynamic, timely exhibition.

Begun as a conversation between an artist living in Munich and another in San Francisco, this dialogue has evolved into a show of nine artists. Three of the artists live in Munich, Germany, one lives in Tokyo, Japan, four live in the San Francisco bay area, one in upstate New York.

The show first opened in Munich, Germany as TRANS: Abstraktion at Weltraum gallery in November 2007, and in November 2009 it will travel to San Francisco to the Meridian Gallery. Each show will have new work by each of the artists thus keeping a fresh and ongoing dialogue. The show provides a location for the artists to come together and converse. Many of the artists will be engaging in the artists talk at Pharmaka on March 14.

Each of the artists work with optically engaging abstraction whose roots lie in different twentieth century trajectories, yet the work is very much of the twenty first century with its awareness of history as well as the conceptual concerns and aesthetics of contemporary painting.

Kasarian Dane uses highly colorful hard-edge painting to push a perception of the reductive. His vertical strips of color jerk and cajole the edges of the eye. In an elegantly calibrated and vibrant space, it appears nothing else is there: nothing else is needed. Born 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota; lives in upstate New York.

Stephan Fritsch is equally at home on and off the canvas. Referencing aspects of gestural painting, graffiti and architecture, he builds complex canvases and installations. His color instances, discovered in daily encounters, mingle with brushstrokes and create images that evoke unexpected and fresh associations. Born 1962 in Stuttgart, Germany; lives in Munich.

Brent Hallard’s work is full of contradictions: quirky and conventional, jarring and elegant, humorous and refined. Using plastics, vinyl, aluminum, painted tape and templates, he often imbues a singular minimalist shape with multi-possibilities, pushing a perceptual vision into a realm of irreconcilable illusion. Born in 1962 in Sydney, Australia; lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Leo Hurzlmeir’s paintings move between motifs of abstraction to figuration and narrative and are engaged in the materiality of paint itself. Within this realm of play, his work undergoes a highly personal process of abstraction that is always left open to associative readings. Born 1983 in Starnberg, Germany; lives in Munich

Robin McDonnell uses an abstract ‘process’ driven language to create a complex field of activity in her paintings. The intention is to create an opticality that is both engaging and immersive to the viewer without providing resolutions or answers, thus creating an open ended visual experience. Born 1955 in New York, NY; lives in Berkeley, California.

Mel Prest’s conceptual color drawings transform language into color and shape. With a systematic but open process, words derived from pop culture, the urban, and the everyday produce a precarious architectural space. In her paintings a dissonant palette of hand-painted lines evoke the optical effect of collapsing space creating perceptual puzzles. Born in 1969 in Saint Paul, Minnesota; lives in San Francisco, California.

Richard Schur combines rigorous visual enquiry with a knowing playfulness where amalgamations of marks break the dominance of the geometric. With a systematic and sensuous use of color, space in Schur’s paintings is both elusive and palpable.. Born 1971 in Munich, Germany; lives in Munich 
 


Nancy White orders geometric shapes with precision to intensify the instabilities of visual acuity. On hand pigmented grounds after-images emerge; forms can appear simultaneously flat and three-dimensional. Her frame paintings create an amplification of light and color. Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1947; lives in Redwood City, California.

John Zurier is highly attuned to and carefully considers the intrinsic characteristics of all his materials. His brushwork can be simultaneously expansive and restricted, formal and informal, lush and austere and always compels a closer, slower and longer look. In all his work an ethereal quality is evoked revealing the experience of seeing as something difficult and real. Born in Santa Monica, California in 1956; lives in Berkeley, California.