October 16 - November 26, 2008

Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present So Much Sound, Nathan Redwood's debut solo exhibition in New York City. For this exhibition Redwood stretches and contorts his acrobatic brushwork and expands his expressive vocabulary. His water-thin acrylic strokes over glass-like, gessoed surfaces contradict the illusion of volume and depth articulated in his work. Velvety swathes and seductive folds of flowing paint trace his kinetic strokes, as figure and ground arise in their wake. The frozen energy captured in his marks evokes the fluidity in the abstract paintings of James Nares and David Reed; however, Redwood's paintings thrive in the margins between concrete imagery and abstract space, offering an additional dimension in which his whimsical cast of objects and characters performs. Historically, Redwood's work looks back to the epic visions of Romantic landscapes painters like Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable, but brings to it a mark-making sensibility inspired by Surrealists such as Wolfgang Paalens and Max Ernst. These unorthodox touchstones invest his work with an unusual combination of eccentricity and drama. The canvases in So Much Sound are created through an artful combination of brushing, pouring, jabbing and finger-painting - a gambit with the infinite and indefinite space of the blank canvas, aiming to carve it up, piece by piece, until an unlikely narrative emerges. The edges of his canvases become a proscenium, the canvas a stage and paint a magical cast of rope, cinder block and plywood players.

A graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Nathan Redwood's work has been shown at the San Jose Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art and numerous solo and group gallery exhibitions in the US and Europe. His work has been featured in, among others, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and ArtUS, His recent solo show at the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles will be the subject of an upcoming review by Michael Duncan in Art in America.

 

Caren Golden Fine Art
539 West 23rd Street
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 727 8304

 

 

8 October - 7 November 2008

Blyth Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mindy Lee.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2004, painter Mindy Lee has developed her visceral, commanding abstract works into this arresting series called 'Slipping Out'.  In each painting, there's a rectangular core from which a swarm of energy and colour explodes across the canvas, riding the edge between seduction and disgust.  Just as we watch horror movies to relish our sofa safety from the slash and gore, Lee's exquisite layers, rings and ridges of what look like snot, smoke and gunk, emit such an infectious force that we can only admire the adrenalin that spills out over the borders of the frames themselves.  The spoors of colour maintain an ugly coherence, as if the party balloons have long burst but the fun goes on.

Here is pattern breaking down, cells rioting, communication coagulating in an overload glut of signs and codes.  Like Teresita Dennis's work, Lees' paintings evolve from a process that traces the artists' physical interaction with the canvas. Lee uses this process as a tool to explore events, which unravel within the paintings. These events are regurgitated or invented moments that resemble a range of imagery from eco-disaster or bio warfare to computer meltdown or a brain haemorrhaging.  In 'Sumpter', 2007, a trail of knotty lumps of paint frosted in a thick glaze resemble a fractured spinal cord, while the mass that detonates above it seems to suggest a cloud of disorientated, pesticide-poisoned bees unable to navigate their way back to the hive.

While the works appear anarchic, frenzied, it's taken months to accrue such complex surfaces, with the artist applying triple pours, surfaces rubbed away and threads manipulated over the canvas as the paint dries to create colour bleeds in 'Doll's House', 2007 and in 'Birdsweb', 2008.

'With their compositional constancy, these strong paintings could belong to the emerging body of work dubbed Landscape Trauma, which uses a vibrant and violated abstraction to underscore anxiety about a corrupted environment in which we inhabit.  There's no didacticism in this slow apocalypse.  Rather it's electrical, infectious work that if connected to the national grid could provide a massive surge of alternative energy.  As alienating, alienated topographies, these paintings are wonderfully impolite at a time when much painting chooses graphic cleanliness or inexpressive, muted tones.'

Critic, Cherry Smyth

 

Blyth Gallery
Level 5, Sherfield Building,
Imperial College, Exhibition Road,
London, SW7 2AZ

 

 

 

October 17 - November 16, 2008

Thierry Goldberg Projects is proud to present Logan Grider in his first solo exhibition. His latest paintings offer a mix of Constructivism and classic abstraction. In clamoring arrangements, shape, color, and form commingle with Grider's desire to, "construct representations of sounds, emotional states, conversations, and actions." The ensuing mélange of techniques, history, and memory always stand one step beyond recognition, on the tip of one's tongue. Illusive, comic, and warm, the paintings invite the viewers to question the depicted space as well as their own realities.

In sometimes-playful sometimes-tumultuous cumulation, Grider's spaces assemble elements of 20th century abstraction as touchstones for composing contemporary emotional contexts. The vernacular is consistent with Precisionism and Cubism pulsing with the formal inventiveness of Thomas Nozkowski, and the humor of Milton Avery. Rubbing, washing, scrapping, and blending Grider breathes a lightness and curiosity into the heavy vintage modernist hand.

With abrupt one-word titles, the paintings boldly announce themselves as Clamor, Ambition, Homily, Slip. The viewer is then lead into subtle riffs and resonances of ambiguously familiar spaces. Dangling from the edge of certainty, the paintings hang as bold question marks for the viewers' interaction.

Logan Grider was born in Salem, Oregon and currently lives and works in Connecticut. He holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having completed programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The International School of Art, Italy. He has exhibited in group shows at Yvon Lambert Gallery, NY; Jack Tilton Gallery, NY; Baumgartner Gallery, NY; and Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA.

 

 

THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS
5 RIVINGTON STREET
New York, NY 10002
+1 212 967 2260