11 Sept 2009 to 10 Oct 2009
Gallery Hours :Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: 1 212-680-9889
m:
f: 1 212-680-9897
w: www.marianneboeskygallery.com
Anthony Pearson Untitled (Solarizations, Suite of Four), 2009, detail Framed solarized silver gelatin prints, 17 x 68 inches
September 11 – October 10, 2009 Opening reception Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6 – 8 pm
Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition by Anthony Pearson.
Anthony Pearson works with photography and sculpture to create a formal and conceptual matrix. His varied works interlock on both a procedural and physical level. Individual pictures and objects exist in accord with one another. This is perhaps most evident in the artist's Arrangements, in which he creates pairings of bronze sculpture and photography that resonate simultaneously on a material, pictorial, and phenomenological level.
The artist's Flares, which in the case of this exhibition, act not only as singular pictures, but also as components of larger Arrangements, employ digital transmission to create an abstraction. Sourced from a light leak in the artist's camera, the concentric forms of the Flares shift with the compression of the image. In this exhibition, many of the Flares are presented as vertical planks throughout the gallery.
Three suites of the artist's Solarizations act as small-scale analog counterpoints to the Flares. The artist constructs the subjects of these silver gelatin prints, by creating drawings on foil, and subsequently photographing these drawings. The solarization of the final photographic print creates an additional layer of procedural transmission, abstracting the image even further from its initial source.
In this exhibition the artist will debut a new set of works entitled Opaques. These photographs consist of images of the backsides of the renderings that were the source for his solarizations. The Opaques are essentially images of the trace of the artist's brushwork pushing through the foil on which he works.
By presenting an enlargement of the literal posterior of his drawings, the artist continues to employ his consistent exchange between the positive and negative. This interplay is found throughout the work on the level of the photographic negative, sculptural casting, and mold making. By imaging the Opaques as either inverted, or as blown-out, the artist presents the extreme poles of photographic tonal range.
Pearson uses a strict process-based methodology to derive all of his works, though his output presents itself as highly visceral. An overarching sense of intuition remains throughout the work, even though the creation of each work is procedural. The artist's strict systems allow for an unfolding of personal expression. Seemingly primordial works are derived from the most cognitive actions. This mercurial range, from the procedural, to the material manifestation of the work, is broad and transformative. This aforementioned vast trajectory, from conceptual genesis to concrete formalism, is the principle act of his work.
Melissa Gordon A Lonely Crowd
Project Space September 11 – October 3, 2009 Opening reception Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6 – 8 pm
Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Melissa Gordon's first solo exhibition in New York, which will be on view in the gallery's project space.
In a series of new paintings and sculptures, Gordon parses the dramatic role of tragic modern man in mid-century America. The exhibition takes its title from a popular sociological book The Lonely Crowd (David Riesman, 1950), which described a shift in the fabric of American post-war society, as it moved from being driven by production to consumption. Gordon is interested in the effects of what Riesman termed the 'other-driven' personality, an emerging American male social character bounded by concepts of community, self-projection and alienation.
Gordon's paintings are constructed of abstract systems of colors that are layered, transparent or woven in their patterning, referencing traditional and modern printing techniques. Images of male characters mid-performance are then embedded into the logic of these patterned matrices. Culled from post-war media images, archival photos and theater and dance stills, Gordon selects images that are gestural, in their subject matter as well as in their cropping. In doing so she makes abstractions with the figurative elements, paralleling the play between grand abstractions and reality in theater. In some instances, Gordon uses imagery from actual theater performances including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Edward Albee, 1962) and All My Sons (Arthur Miller, 1947). In others, the figures literally battle with the modern world, becoming stuck between cars or tangled amid coat hangers. With titles of the individual works such as "Character Development" and "Performing Frustration," alluding to theatrical sources and terminology, the artist also imbues the works with an element of slapstick and a residue of old Vaudeville.
In front of the paintings is a series of screen-like constructions of metal and painted panels, which together create a mis-en-scene of references. The structures are faced with traditional heraldic patterns and tartan, denoting clan or group identification. Other sides reveal fractured images of crowds, deteriorated through scale into an abstracted collective. In both the paintings and the sculptures, a clash of motifs and quotations create a complex set of decisive images and symbolic forms interrupting and overlapping one another. As in much of her work, Gordon's installation re-contextualizes socio-historical documents, and in doing so, assembles new angles on cultural material.
Melissa Gordon lives and works in Brussels, where she recently completed the Artist in Residence program at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union, New York and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. She has had solo exhibitions at Cosar HMT, Dusseldorf and Galerie Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam and will have a show with Ancient & Modern, London in September 2009. She will be included in the group show "Paying a Visit to Mary" at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT in January 2010.
Marianne Boesky Gallery is located at 509 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Our hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For further information or images, please contact Annie Rana at 212.680.9889 or annie@marianneboeskygallery.com.
