17 Oct 2009 to 21 Nov 2009
Gallery Hours:
Tues.- Fri., 10am -5:30pm; Sat., 11am -5:30pm
Craig Krull Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3
CA90404
Los Angeles, CA
Santa Monica
California
North America
p: 310.828.6410
m:
f: 310.828.7320
w: www.craigkrullgallery.com
Robin Mitchell RM 08 10, 2008, Gouache on Paper, 24 x 18 in
October 17th - November 21st, 2009 Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 4-6 pm
Robin Mitchell's second solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will open on Saturday, October 17th. Obsessive, detailed and intimate, the richly colorful marks of Mitchell's intricately layered paintings suggest plant forms or other microscopic shapes laid out in symmetrical patterns. As Constance Mallinson observed in Art in America, "...the shapes are archetypal and recall forms from Egyptian hieroglyphics and stylized decorative borders, Eastern mandalas, early modernist abstraction or popular 50s design motifs." Her paintings, while highly introspective, demonstrate her spiritual associations between the natural world and human nature. Mitchell states that she is concerned with "how the mark in its abstract nature is able to communicate an image and transcend beyond to suggest themes both tangible and intangible." The works in this exhibition are a conceptual extension of Mitchell's previous body of work, entitled, Code Paintings. As she would have us remember, a code is a rule for converting information into another form of expression, and codes are particularly useful where ordinary language is difficult. As Mallinson concludes, "Mitchell's heightened sense of the spirit and rhythms in nature is heir to Arthur Dove's and Charles Burchfield's investigations of a life force beyond mere appearances and their extension of Romantic nature philosophy into the 20th century."
Concurrently, the gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of the work of Dan McCleary. A native of Southern California, McCleary notes that L.A. "feels weightless and devoid of formal rituals. It has no center. Its inhabitants find their own center through daily rituals like driving, shopping, eating out and seeing movies." McCleary's paintings begin with simple, seemingly banal moments like ordering coffee and sitting alone at a Formica table with a foam cup, and a red plastic stir-stick. The structure of his scenes however, is as carefully composed as a Vermeer, with what Christopher Knight identifies as, "a clear-eyed sense of gravity that recalls the likes of Piero della Francesca." McCleary's paintings deal with restraint. As he says, "I don't like to show too much. I can't stand for things to be explicit. It's so much better when they are reserved." McCleary's flower paintings, the subject of this exhibition, are equally reductive in style and possess the directness of a Manet. The simple, clear vases sit on backgrounds void of everything but a small shadow. This exhibition also includes black and white etchings of flowers made at a studio in Oaxaca.
REVIEW
LA WEEKLY Robin Mitchell at Craig Krull Gallery By Christopher Miles Published on November 04, 2009
Robin Mitchell's latest exhibition offers a rare case study in how humble and subtle works (in this case a collection of modestly sized works in gouache on paper) can deliver an experience that is compelling, rich, intelligent and engaged with the array of traditions from which it descends and advances. Assembled of what one might call controlled gestures - casual yet deliberate marks - Mitchell's paintings deal in the play of movement against stasis and symmetry. They get you going with horizontal eye movement, as if reading music or scanning a page (or scanning stacked horizons), as well as vertical movement, as if you're watching lines roll by on a Teleprompter or data stream on a monitor. At times they seem almost to chirp and hum. But as much as they get you in the mode of watching a hustle-bustle, romantic, quasi-abstract world go by - imagine Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie crossed with the luminescent daubing of Monet and the relentlessness of a news wire - they also jump off the wall and drop away via a handling of color and light, which can make elements read as foregrounded object, middle space and void. Radiant shapes, often centered in the compositions, and usually among the largest of elements employed, read simultaneously as starbursts, sunspots, dahlialike flowers, pompoms or the sorts of noses one finds on Muppets. The latter association isn't at all off, given that as much as Mitchell's project at times seems like an inversion of Chuck Close's devotion to constructing portraits from the sum total of many tiny abstractions, with Mitchell seeming to build abstractions out of what seem like tiny vignettes of landscape, water and atmosphere, there is a striking facial quality to many of her paintings. It's no accident. Mitchell's as smart a painter as there is when it comes to the odd overlaps of the abstract, the nonobjective, the representational, the referential and the evocative. The repeated presence of elements that stand out in combination - via manipulation of color, scale and emphasis - as anthropomorphic, and that trigger the tendency in all of us to see things from hubcaps to houses as made in our image, is clearly a knowing aspect of her oeuvre. The paintings stand simultaneously as catalogued landscapes, "field" paintings, iconic abstractions and surrogates for a more traditional presence of the figure. They awe in a way that connects them to Mitchell's quite different but related contemporary Sharon Ellis, and to predecessors like Agnes Pelton and Charles Burchfield, whose current exhibition at the Hammer Museum, combined with Mitchell's show, makes for a Westside art excursion of the sort of loveliness one might hope to find in the pairings by a good sommelier. They also push and pull you in and out like a Hans Hofmann painting one moment, get your eyes scanning the next, and then center you like a mandala. And they confront you and engage you with a near-human presence; they make you stare, and make you feel as if you're looking into their eyes, though they really have none. In the end, you don't really know how to look at them. In essence, they are shape-shifters, chameleons, grifters, and also mirrors, and they jerk you around in ways that can be pleasant, and even profound.
