September 16th - October 23rd, 2010 Opening reception September 16th, 6-8 pm
"What is so amazing about her works, when you first see them, is that they look like a teenage girl kind of thing...You know, there is something astounding in the work's simplicity that is almost terrifying to me. What it really makes me think of is going to the dentist and getting laughing gas, they always have very banal pictures on the ceiling that you are supposed to look at while you're getting your teeth filled. Well I think it's like that with her work."
-John Waters in an interview with Charles Esche for van der Stokker's catalogue "Friends and Family"
Leo Koenig Inc. is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Lily van der Stokker entitled Terrible and Ugly. Utilizing bright colors and graphic punctuation, van der Stokker creates a sort of "romper room" for adults. For more than twenty years, van der Stokker has been making work which unashamedly addresses the everyday and the ordinary in a language she has made entirely her own. Phrases written on walls are sometimes general, in a buoyant greeting card way, sometimes personal, revealing tidbits from her life and friendships. Throughout her career, text combined with curlicues, puffy clouds and flowers, have always been impossibly exuberant, optimistic, pretty and decorative making her work the antithesis of "bad boy art."
Recreating the gallery to suit her vision, van der Stokker has painted three enormous wall murals in the front room, and will display a number of works on paper as well as murals in the back room. The two rooms have effectively been cut off from one another, and the back room can only be accessed through a small door whose purpose, it would seem, is to alter the viewer's perspective towards an "Alice in Wonderland" state of mind. When commenting on her work, van der Stokker has said "I like to make things that have as little meaning as possible...To give useless information, and see it as a relaxation."
For this exhibition Lily van der Stokker continues her series of "Ugly" works that have been shown at venues such as the Aspen Museum and the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam. Starting with a simple drawing on paper, van der Stokker has decided to concentrate on the parts she deems as "failures." And within those failures, she has blown up the most "offending" details of the failed drawings. Inspired by critics who have maligned her work, she sees this series as an extension of earlier series of works with titles like "Extremely Experimental art by Older People."
Lily van der Stokker has an upcoming catalogue entitled "It Doesn't Mean Anything, But It Looks Good," detailing her exhibition "No Big Deal Thing" at the Tate St. Ives, in Cornwall. She has exhibited extensively in both Europe and the U.S. Some of her most recent exhibitions have been "Terrible" at the Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam, Netherlands, "To The Wall," with David Shrigley at the Aspen Art Museum, and" Plug In#52" with Jim Iserman at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindoven, NL. She lives and works in NYC and Amsterdam.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10-6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact Elizabeth Balogh or Nicole Russo at the gallery.
Leo Koenig Inc. 545 West 23rd Street New York, New York 10011
DEBORA WARNER The Full Story
Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte is delighted to present The Full Story, a selection of paintings and works on paper by Debora Warner. Expanding upon her previous practice of incorporating text in some form, the artist has utilized a more direct approach with her most recent series The Declarations and The Swadesh Paintings.
The new work takes it's content from a list of basic vocabulary words that was created by linguist Morris Swadesh in the 30's and 40's. This list consists of 207 words that exist in all languages. These most commonly used words provide insight into our preoccupations with survival, the body, and social systems. The list currently has ambiguous relevance in academia, so Warner provides a new context for this piece of anthropological research.
Warner has continuously incorporated forms of text into her work such as; exploring text as audio in the experimental audio group, SONTEXT-sound/text (1999-2001); then as sculpture, in the rose bouquets largely inspired by poetry (specifically Rilke's idea of "thing-poems"), as three dimensional representations of longing, lust, cruelty, and obsession. With The Swadesh Paintings, the artist focuses her vision on concrete language, words relating to our physical existence, and rooted to our perception and our senses.
However rooted in physicality the words may be, Warner's fluid and spontaneous application of paint onto the canvases creates a divergent template for the weight of the words laid upon them. The words convey a fairly confrontational stance, while the materials underpin them with a sophisticated, gestural monochrome. By isolating the words while animating them, Warner allows us to see ourselves as a highly complex species, however very much connected. At the same time, the artist's hand is ever the reminder that our motivations may be much more complex than basic sensory reflex.
Debora Warner created the surround-sound audio piece "Flutter" (2000) which was exhibited at the Frankfurt Kunsthalle Schirn in 2002. She has been included in exhibitions at the Frac Bourgogne (Dijon) and the Musee de Elysee (Lausanne). Ms. Warner has had solo exhibitions at Akira Ikeda Gallery in both Germany and Japan as well as at I-20 in New York City. More recently she has participated in numerous group shows at venues such as The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Gallery 400 in Chicago, the LTHM Gallery in New York, and Cherest Weinberg in Miami.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10-6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact Elizabeth Balogh or Nicole Russo at the gallery.
Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte 541 West 23rd Street New York, New York, 10011
