May 28 - July 24, 2009

Mireille Mosler, Ltd is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the Los Angeles artist Wayne White. In this series of surrealist landscapes, twisting letters trample through idealistic, bucolic scenery to bring messages of biting sarcasm, emotional sincerity, and tender insight into American art and ethos.

Rather than a canvas, White paints on 1960s and 1970s thrift-store lithographic reproductions of 19th century Romantic landscape paintings, incorporating their kitsch iconography into the composition with both irony and national pride. Over the dusty, muted pallet of open vistas, torrent oceans, unpaved roads and domestic hearths, White employs traditional oil painting techniques to render three-dimensional phrases as if they were monolithic sculptures jutting from the terrain. His industrial bronze sculptures conjoin letters to form vertiginous totems that are playful and yet vaguely threatening. Inspired by his childhood in Tennessee, the phrases often strike an aggressive, irreverent, or vulgar tone on first reading, but can be interpreted to hold multiple meanings.  Expressions such as Cheap Bastard painted in opalescent hues over a twilight seascape become cheeky and self-referential whereas Denim Whale on a Shag Carpet Sea bares wistful and nostalgic notes despite its festive, multi-colored balloon letters parading across the canvas. 

Like Ed Ruscha before him, the language is given objecthood and achieves personification through a vernacular syntax.  Sometimes the words are presented like scene-appropriate signage.  Other times they correspond with the rest of the composition in color only, creating a visual onomatopoeia through psychedelic distortion.  His treatment of words and material and the alteration of his ready-made backgrounds recall graffiti art, Dada assemblage, Rauschenberg's Combines, and concrete poetry of the 1960s.

The kitsch element of the cliché imagery is elevated by White's skillful craftsmanship and the complex ways in which the text interacts with the landscape.  Spatial illusions abound with words receiving more formal attention than the appropriated backgrounds that they alternately contradict or articulate. In this manner, the American ideal meets the American neurosis, uniting language with imagery, scenery with the subconscious, and sincerity with the absurd.

Wayne White was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1957 and lives and works now in Los Angeles. He recently participated in the group show LA Now at the Las Vegas Art Museum.  White is represented by Western Projects, Culver City, California. This exhibition is in conjunction with the release of Wayne White: Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, edited and designed by Todd Oldham and published by Ammo Books, LLC.

 

Mireille Mosler, Ltd.
35 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10065
+1 212.249.4195

 

 

 

 

 

 

From May 22nd to July 17th

"Sticks & Stones"  is the first individual show of Morten Slettemeås (1975 Gvarv, Telemark, Norway) in Spain. After his participation in the X International Call for young Artists in the summer of 2008, and his incorporation to the Gallery, his work has been presented with great success at the fairs in Madrid, Bologna, Rome, Puerto Rico and Mexico.

After his graduation in 2003 from the Academy of Fine Arts of Oslo, where he resides, he has participated actively in diverse collective and individual expositions chiefly in Norway and Germany. At present he enjoys a three year scholarship for young emerging artists from the government of Norway. In 2006 he received the Diesel prize. His work is already to be found in public collections such as: Stavanger International Collection, Malmø Konstmuseum in Sweden, StatoilHydro and Norwegian Cultural Council and in private Collections of Norway, Spain, Germany and Portugal.

Slettemeås' paintings are large in format; they are colorful, expressive and organic. The artist knows that painting of today with necessity will have to relate to the long and rich history of painting, and he relates actively to these traditions. In the paintings one can see anonymous human beings partly set in heroic postures that remind one of pre-modernistic history-paintings. At the same time he relates to the Nordic expressionistic painting of the post-war period, like the painting of the COBRA-group and of Per Kirkeby.

You could say that his main characteristic, is the mixture, completely irreverent and audacious, of his diverse sources; The most dignified art history with its old heroic paintings, along with images of the daily press, advertisements and comics of old heroes. An interesting combination of low and high culture.

One of these points of departure is a 17th century painting which in a superior, dignified way depicts Spanish conquistadors. Slettemeås keeps some of the baroque structure. The diagonals. The pictorial space. But the figures are no longer superior to the observer. On the contrary, they have attained a touch of comedy or ridicule.

On one hand, the action is halfway destructive (the starting point is always very close to an existing image that is going to be "destroyed") and, on the other hand, the effect is always a new painting, partly reconstructed, recycled, spun and presented as an orgasmic explosion of colors, very seductive to the eye.

Slettemeås reveals himself under an anti authoritarian attitude towards painting and society. He cuts and pastes his motives in a kind of conspiracy that forces us to continue the evanescent narrative thread that takes place in his images. He steals like a magpie and plays around in the history of art as it was his own backyard.

LUIS ADELANTADO VALENCIA
C./ BONAIRE 6
E - 46003
Valencia
Spain
+34 963 51 01 79

 

 

 

 

 

6 June - 11 July 2009

There are no great gestures, no posing, no breaching of taboos, no reference to current topics. His images of alienation from reality exist outside of time. They portray mortality and losing one's grip on reality in pictures which are unspectacular. Pictures in which what the beam of a pocket torch makes fleetingly visible reveals only that what you are looking for is not there in what has been shown. Marcel Gähler, born in 1969, has found his own way as a painter. Gähler only ever suggests. He allows flashes of light to break through the darkness and an even deeper darkness to emerge from the impenetrable blackness of the night. Here too, the uncanny derives not from hints of past crimes or lurking monsters.. His painting drives us towards the limits of our perception. It makes it disconcertingly clear that seeing nothing does not imply that nothing is there. Gähler understands how to create a vacuum and then punctuate it with shafts of seeing.

When Marcel Gähler's camera flashes in the darkness of night, his photograph captures a world asleep. His are views of familiar but forgotten places, often in rain or snow. It might be an allotment with shrivelled, overgrown vegetable foliage, a trace of last summer amid remains of an improvised greenhouse, the front wall of a house behind a garden shrub, or a tree-top pointing skywards. Gähler bases oil paintings, watercolours and spectacularly detailed pencil drawings on these photographs. The real content of the photograph is highlighted by this transposition. What a superficial glance might previously have missed now emerges, subtly reinforced, in his pictures.

These are images which lie at the interface between casual snapshot and meaningful allusion. Thus they create a motif-like state of suspense, open to free interpretation. They recall lost memories, summon up dream sequences. The ongoing daily loss of universe comes into view, captured on paper.

Sylvia Rüttimann

Galerie Römerapotheke
Langstrasse 136
CH - 8004 Zurich
Switzerland
+41 43 317 17 80

 

 

 

 

 

5 June - 28 June 2009

Acme Project Space is delighted to present an extensive exhibition of new paintings by Howard Dyke.

 

Stephanie Moran describes Howard's work:

'Dance of the Techno Polar Bear' combines process painting and Expressionism via a Pop sensibility, re-evaluating 80s Neo-Expressionism. How does it do all that, you may ask? Well...

Dyke begins with the image of the Burka or hijab-clad figure and expands the symbology; relating to the Madonna of Western art, dressed in a veil of our times, she presents a conflicted image, ubiquitous in the press and cosmopolitan cities. She is a celebrity and also, paradoxically, anonymous.

Dyke sees the paintings' real subject as constructions hidden by or revealed beneath drapery. In luscious colour, the physicality of the paint drips over an image-structure which acts as a 'scaffold' or rationale for the paint. The paint, like the veil, conceals and reveals; it becomes the fetishistic veil. Dyke moves towards transcending the subject, allowing spontaneity and chance to work through the process and the framework.

How to negotiate expression in an era of mediated emotion and alienation? "Never be afraid to cough up a bit of diseased lung for the spectators... How are people ever going to help themselves if they can't grab onto a fragment of your own horror?..."¹

Gesture takes the place of a literal narrative. Dyke meditates on the Burka - an idea of repression, of subjection - the figure, the facial expression; perhaps expression enabled through restriction. Gestural marks are contained by a rigorous framework and disciplined approach, however there is a move away from the restraint of the clothing, a desire to escape.

The imagery transforms. Veiled women become mountains or airplanes or even 50s sci-fi figures in spacesuits. Textures change from soft fabric to hard reflective surfaces, then become dripping paint again. There is a discernible cartoonishness. The titles knowingly blend cultural references: Guston's Klansmen, religious painting, as well as celebrity stardom are present in 'Ikkkon'; Nigella Lawson meets Rauschenberg, de Kooning and 70s feminism in 'Domestic Goddess Combine Painting'.

The most recent work, which emerges out of the veiled women paintings, achieves disruption of the support having reached a point of collapse, dissolving or transcending of the image/structure. The actual support, the fabric ground, takes the place of the image and diversifies as Dyke uses various patterned fabrics. The marks become more diffuse, responding to the ground. It seems as though the point of view has become so close up the figure cannot be seen. The figure is the paint, the gesture; the veil is absorbed and internalised. Panels are montaged together to create new relationships and junctures, thresholds and joinings, opening up the paintings and forming dialectics between them.

This overview of the past year hangs across two rooms which mark a transition, diversifying or zooming in, as the focus of Dyke's painting moves from clothing to fabric, image-structure to a fascination with the seams.

Stephanie Moran 2009

 

¹ Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, 1991

Acme Project Space
44 Bonner Road
London E2 9JS
+44 020 8981 6811

 

 

 

 

 

June 6 - 7, 2009

My practice is the push and pull of the rapidograph barrel against the paper grain, with the paper grain. The delight in the ink's power to overcome, obliterate, saturate the white as the barrel passes calculatingly along the paper. The smell of the ink, the sound of the barrel scratching a pathway as the ink is pulled out of the pen. The almost giddy anticipation of the act of drawing, the chase. Oh, what animalistic pleasure is derived.

These drawings are also a record of a journey. A journey of thought and contemplation Sometimes brief, other times long and involved. My drawings record the time spent.

Sam Still
Storefront Studio
1207 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101 USA
Cell +1 212-874-2610
 
Saturday, June 6th, 1:00 - 6:00 PM
Sunday, June 7th, 1:00 - 6:00 PM

 

 

 

 

Coming Next