11 January 2008

re-title.com newsletter - Painting & Drawing January 2008

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Caren Golden Fine Art New York Josée Bienvenu Gallery New York Packer Schopf Gallery Chicago THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS New York Cherry and Martin Los Angeles Standpoint Gallery London Haunch of Venison Berlin Next Newsletters         sign up!

Caren Golden Fine Art New York Travis Somerville Authentic Facsimiles of a Nation 3 Jan - 9 Feb 2008 The tumultuous history of race relations in the South has been, in large part, buried and left to fester in the years since the Civil War. While culture is intangible and abstract, its artifacts are available as evidence of its existence. Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised throughout the South, Travis Somerville unapologetically picks at these old wounds by exposing the popular objects and iconography of Southern culture. Somerville's use of imagery is complex and shaped significantly by his personal relationship to it. His critical eye works in the shadow of his own nostalgia and consequently attempts to reconcile the idealism of his religious upbringing with the racial and political turmoil of his past. Somerville's irreverent installations, paintings and embellished photographs incorporate suggestive symbols of the South's troubled history such as Ku Klux Klan hoods and Confederate flags as well as doo-rags, whiskey bottles and images of popular advertising from the more recent past. His graphite-on- paper portraits take their subjects from vintage photographs and offer a more reflective side of his historical excavation. The suggestive content, although sensitive, attempts to unearth the complexities and contradictions in post-antebellum society rather than condemn it. Somerville has recently expanded on these ideas by exploring how the contemporary concerns of the South - most salient in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - stand as a metaphor for exported racism and colonialism. Travis Somerville has shown extensively with numerous solo and group exhibitions in both galleries and museums. His work has been presented at, amongst others, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C, the Laguna Art Museum and the university art museums of Virginia and Arizona State. He is currently participating in "Beyond the Mountaintop" at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, CT. He has garnered critical attention in numerous publications including The Washington Post, Art in America, FlashArt and The Los Angeles Times. Authentic Facsimiles of a Nation, Somerville's first solo exhibition with Caren Golden Fine Art, will be on view from January 3 through February 9, 2008. image: Travis Somerville The Stories of Childhood, 2008 oil and collage on unstretched canvas 82 x 64 inches Courtesy of Caren Golden Fine Art New York Caren Golden Fine Art 539 West 23rd Street Ground Floor New York NY 10011 Caren Golden Fine Art New York Read on... Caren Golden Fine Art New York

Josée Bienvenu Gallery New York Robert Jack Before and Aftermath 10 Jan - 23 Feb 2008 Josée Bienvenu gallery is pleased to present Before and Aftermath, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Robert Jack. Robert Jack lives and works in Brooklyn. It is his fourth solo exhibition in New York. A work by Robert Jack is a silent process, an osmotic and homeopathic development. Every surface hides a symbiotic network wherein each element is linked to the next forming a tenuous chain. For the past few years, his work has been based on the circulatory systems of plants, making visible a vital and basic aspect of life that is overlooked due to its scale. From photosynthesis in plants to the occult intentions of any information system, the world is governed by the imperceptible. Bits, genes, and viruses are the decisive structures of our future, the invisible forces of good and evil we blindly dialogue with everyday. This new group-comprised of twelve paintings and five drawings-is also based on microbiological structures and forms but they all relate to viruses and bacteria that can affect humans. The title of the show refers to before and after contamination. In the end, there is little difference between the two states in terms of structure, and the before and after become merely two separate elements in one continuous flow of the process of evolution and change. Every aspect of reality becomes quietly interconnected. Robert Jack makes these invisible mutations the main protagonists of his paintings and drawings. He amplifies, illuminates, and captures them on small square panels or on paper. His work documents crucial variations of structures, possible abysses and invisible gaps. He accumulates signals, vibrations and variations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. The paintings evolve continuously by the pull and manipulation of the same building blocks into new configurations. Everyone's fate depends on these invisible processes. Robert Jack portrays them slowly as imaginary landscapes of color and form. He invents epic, sometimes psychedelic under-the- microscope scenarios, encapsulating intimate rhythms and hazardous colors, in between the healthy and the toxic. Image: Robert Jack For the Next Three Years, 2007 (detail) casein on wood 19.75 x 19.75 inches Courtesy of Josée Bienvenu Gallery New York Josée Bienvenu Gallery 529 West 20th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) New York NY 10011 Josee Bienvenu Gallery New York Read on... Josée Bienvenu Gallery New York

Packer Schopf Gallery Chicago Clive Barker Apocalypses: Paintings and Works on Paper 11 Jan - 16 Feb 2008 Since the mid-eighties, Clive Barker has concocted intricate, dark fantasy worlds in film and fiction. One of his first novels became the cult horror classic, Hellraiser, adapted and directed by Barker himself. His most recent publication, the hauntingly, self-reflexive Mister B. Gone (2007), suggests to the reader that the book he holds in his hands is possessed. In the early nineties, Barker began expressing his vicious visions in the medium of painting, a selection of which are on view at Packer- Schopf gallery. Like his movies and books, Barker's paintings investigate reality, sexuality, and morality. Dancing across paper and canvas, one will find monsters and martyrs in all degrees of pain and pleasure, some of them howling like Edward Munch's The Scream. The largest canvases describe ominous, anthropomorphic landscapes with solitary mountains, cathedrals in flames, and black moons. This painted world of physical deformities and Boschian earthly delights is appropriately rendered in a hyper-tactile impasto technique, with juicy gobs of paint and urgent scratch marks, demanding these works be seen in the flesh. One can sense violence in Barker's act of creation, which he describes as a physically strenuous and sweaty affair. We can imagine Barker frantically trying to give form to his demons and fetishes. For Barker, painting is a visceral, non-intellectual process: "Writing - particularly the large books that I write - is a ritual, filled with elaborate, intellectual processes, and structuring a book is a big puzzle. Painting is not a puzzle. Painting is red and yellow. Painting is filling the brush with something that looks so tasty you feel like you could feed off it for a thousand years, then slapping it on the canvas and feeling an immediate emotional rush from it...Painting is about unleashing. Painting to me is: paint and a lot of cheap cigars and a lot of loud music." Where his epic novels require sustained mental effort, and his films require the collaboration with numerous other people, painting allows Barker to indulge in the immediacy of personal expression. It is this directness and intensity of emotion that connects Barker to those artistic traditions that favored the personal, the irrational, and the fantastical. In his paintings, we can find traces of the mystical, solitary moments portrayed in works of Romanticism. We can sense a return to the exploration of dreams and neuroses that was the project of Symbolism and Surrealism. And we can feel the deep emotional angst that characterizes Expressionism. Indeed, Barker cites Goya's monsters, William Blake's visions of heaven and hell, and all "fantastical painters, painters who used paint to express extremes of emotion" as key inspirations. Blake figured the devil as having both creative and destructive potential, a paradox that pervades Barker's personal universe, where lines are not drawn between heaven and hell, pleasure and pain. Barker reflects that he seeks "a more complex vision of religion than the simple 'good and bad.'" The exhibition at Packer-Schopf juxtaposes the most stark and minimal of Barker's sketches with his most lush and epic expressions on canvas, thereby encompassing the whole spectrum of the artist's process. One way to experience this display, then, is as a record of the birth of a visual idea as it develops from a rudimentary collection of marks to a fully orchestrated scene. Even in their most developed state, each picture seems to offer only part of a story. Various characters are isolated in their respective canvases, while other canvases focus on an as yet unpopulated setting. If each painting in itself seems to be a fragment of a larger narrative, then the paintings together animate each other to form a more complete drama, a total view of an artist's imagination. Antonia Pocock 2008 Image: Clive Barker The Comets, 2007 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 in Courtesy of Packer Schopf Gallery Chicago Packer Schopf Gallery 942 W. Lake St. Chicago Illinois Packer Schopf Gallery Chicago Read on... Packer Schopf Gallery Chicago

THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS New York KHALIF KELLY Recess 11 Jan - 10 Feb 2008 THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS is pleased to present Recess, the first solo exhibition of Khalif Kelly. With a fresh and vivid palette, Kelly's paintings capture children at play in moments of sharing, solitude, and vying for power. The paintings often refer to Kelly's own childhood experience and in turn, to the African- American experience at large. Within these seemingly nostalgic paintings, the mechanisms of race, history, and theater compose the children in telling group dynamics. In picturing playtime, Kelly reveals the contrast between theater and voyeurism, which strikingly occur ever so naturally and innocently at an early age. The figures he depicts are a mixture of personal archetypes and classic racial stereotypes. His aesthetic includes references to the figurative work of Jacob Lawrence and to the controversial stop motion animations of George Pal, especially 'John Henry and the Inky-Poo' and 'the Jasper series' from the 1940's. Like George Pal, Kelly utilizes perception of race, not for entertainment, but as a narrative device, a role in the theater of personality. Here, race is a tool, something to work with and work against in the children's subsequent formation of identity through play. Kelly locates his paintings within the dichotomy of spectacle (that which presents) and voyeurism (that which discovers). He likens the spectacle to a moment that may create its own reality separate from the conventions actually governing it - suggesting the possibility of lifting the veil of history and race, however fleeting. Khalif Kelly was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1980 and grew up in Arlington, Texas. He currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. He holds a BFA in paintings from The School of Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University. Recess is the first gallery exhibition of Kelly's work. Image: Khalif Kelly Boy on Swing, 2007 Oil on Canvas 63 x 47 in Courtesy of THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS New York THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS 5 Rivington Street New York NY 10002 THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS New York Read on... THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS New York

Cherry and Martin Los Angeles Ruby Osorio Looking Through the Blind 12 Jan - 16 Feb 2008 Cherry and Martin presents new works on paper by Ruby Osorio. The gallery also announces the release of Osorio's first suite of hand- colored, hand-stitched lithographs. Ruby Osorio's latest works delve into the interplay between mischief, myth, and art. Following upon her recent solo show in Athens, Greece, Osorio focuses on the long-standing archetype of the trickster in Greek mythology and other cultures. As Lewis Hyde states in his book, Trickster Makes This World, "Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox." It is in this ability to hold contradictory positions that artistic renewal occurs. New possibilities also emerge for Osorio's idiosyncratic language of thought and unreasoning. Employing a preparatory process of collage and improvisation, Osorio reorders the meaning of signs and signifiers taken out of their original context to raise more questions than can be answered at first glance of one of her paintings. Encoding meaning becomes the focus of the creative process and with it, Osorio consciously investigates artifice and its ability to both mask and reveal personal, social, and cultural assumptions. In a work like The Troublesome Bouquet (2007), Osorio depicts a delicately painted circular swag of flowers and feathers interwoven with skeleton bones and the legs of a woman. Simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, The Troublesome Bouquet demonstrates that the act of revealing absurd and impossible scenarios conceals an imperative impulse to make sense of what unfolds in daily life. In Osorio's own words, "Psychological tensions depicted through the use of positive and negative space betray the need for order and stability in the picture plane. Aesthetic beauty obscures the shadow self. A puzzling image subverts an easy answer to philosophical quandaries. These are the realizations I derive from the process of creating and imagining unusual scenarios." Arcanum Editions, New York has published a suite of four six-color lithographs hand drawn by Ruby Osorio. Such Wayward Whimsies, Osorio's first suite of prints, were inspired by four specific prints from Goya's Los Caprichos and examine women on the brink of betrothal or seduction. The prints are infused with an unflinching feminine perspective and fashioned with hand stitching, intricate color palates, precise rendering and fantastical imagery. Printed in Los Angeles at El Nopal Press, the suite is an edition of 25 with six artist proofs. Ruby Osorio's work is currently on view in Domestic Departures, a group show that includes Kiki Smith, Kara Walker and Amy Cutler at the Cal State University, Fullerton museum. In September she had a solo exhibition at Vamiali in Athens, Greece. Her first museum show, Ruby Osorio: Story of a Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far Away), was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2005 and the Laguna Art Museum in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and London and reviewed in numerous publications. Image: Ruby Osorio The Troublesome Bouquet, 2007 Gouache and ink on paper 42 x 42 inches Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles Photo credit: Josh White Cherry and Martin 12611 Venice Boulevard Los Angeles CA 90066 Cherry and Martin Los Angeles Read on... Cherry and Martin Los Angeles

Standpoint Gallery London Shadowy Nadine Feinson Hilde Grandalen Andrew Hladky 18 Jan - 16 Feb 2008 From the darkest months of the year emerge shadowy things, rendered into paint with all the obsessive excitation or melancholic lingering sensuousness that the artists' Northern European temperaments can afford. What these three quite different painters share is a distinct and sophisticated quality of surface, and a mysterious, troubling and dusky imagination. Nadine Feinson's paintings act on the edges of vision, where the semi-formed emerges as monstrous. Teasing and delicate, the oil paint reveals uncertain things. There is in Feinson's paintings the echo of the surrealist spirit, of Ernst's restless experimentation, here driven more by a need for invention than mastery. The image comes through an act of articulation of the medium and idea simultaneously so that the shape shifting nature of the paint embodies the monstrous nature of the chimera. Nadine Feinson graduated MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2004. Recent shows include Salon 07: New British Painting, 319 Portobello Road, The Future Can Wait, Old Truman Brewery,Avatar of Sacred Discontent, 9 Hillgate Street, London 2007, and New London Kicks II, New York 2006. Hilde Grandalen's paintings have the all-over rhythm and structural intensity of Jackson Pollock. Her mark making evinces both sureness of touch and great sensitivity. Working always to completion in one sitting - be it a marathon - Grandalen takes her inspiration from music, lyrics, and the beautiful desolate landscapes of her native Norway. Fleeting images - of forests, starry skies, graffiti - dissolve into the abstract rhythms of her subtle colour relationships. Hilde Grandalen trained at Chelsea College of Art and has exhibited in solo and group shows in the UK, Norway and internationally (including Heartland, Scandinavian House, Prague 2006, Fuck Art Lets Paint Transition Gallery, London 2005). She now lives and works in Oslo. Andrew Hladky makes three dimensional paintings that are built up from successive, obsessive additions of pure oil paint. These deep reliefs provide from the front view an almost pointillist technique, tiny flecks of pure colour blended by the eye to create tonal shifts. Great worms of oil paint straight from the tube interrupt this organisation - a violent punctum grabbing at us from the surface. The landscapes that emerge from this technique are equally strange. Hladky allows us glimpses of very alien scenes - reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch - across myriad horizons lit by several suns, their foregrounds sometimes populated by religious figures engaged in uncertain rituals. Andrew Hladky graduated MA Painting from Wimbledon School of Art in 2003. Recent shows include Wintry, Lounge Gallery 2007; On the Various Means of Reanimating Dead Tissue, APT, 2007; and Hypertopia, Gone Tomorrow Gallery, 2006. Image: Nadine Feinson Raven, 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Standpoint Gallery, London Standpoint Gallery 45 Coronet Street N1 6HD London Standpoint Gallery Read on... Standpoint Gallery London

Haunch of Venison Berlin Brian Alfred Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!! 12 Jan - 22 Mar 2008 The American artist Brian Alfred (born 1974) is best known for paintings, collages and animations which examine the ways in which perception of our surroundings and culture is mediated by technology. His works present a flattened, depopulated and predominantly urban world derived from found images. His thematic concerns - including the signifiers of Modernist idealism and technological progress, conspiracy theories and the growing prevalence of surveillance in the post-9/11 world - have led him to focus on images featuring architecture, machinery, interiors and urban landscapes. However, he has also explored ways in which to recalibrate the clichéd tropes of romanticism - a sunset, cherry blossom or a shooting star - for the twenty-first century. The world as depicted by Alfred is distanced, banal - as in visually unremarkable - yet highly charged with possible meanings. As Aaron Betsky has suggested: 'In a world dominated by images that promise a great deal, delight the senses and scare the hell out of us... All art can do is to show the flatness of that promise, of those compositions, and of the world around us. And this is what Brian Alfred does. His world is flat. His surfaces are impenetrable.' The mass media enacts the first flattening of both our perceived world and lived experience. Working from photographs, Alfred defines the essential forms present in an image with the aid of a computer - a process of reduction and abstraction as well as, perversely, focussing - before rendering the forms as carefully calibrated colour fields in animation or acrylic (it is worth noting that despite their formally precise sources Alfred's collages and paintings have a very handmade and crafted tactility to them). Thus in the finished works the artist's hand is at more than one remove. Presenting non- judgemental renderings of surface, of flatness, and of shape, Alfred leaves conclusions concerning paranoia or politics, the manifold meanings of his images, to the beholder. 'His task,' suggests Betsky, 'as somebody who has dedicated himself to making and not just consuming images, is to use the logic by which our visual culture works, which is seduction mixed with blandness that allows the information to reach as wide an audience as possible, against the flatness itself.' Haunch of Venison Berlin are to present an exhibition of over 300 animated, painted and collaged portraits of the people who have informed and influenced Alfred's creative practice, from musicians and architects to politicians and writers. Alfred's ambitious new project represents a significant departure from his previous practice by placing the creative individual within society as the focus. 'Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!!' maps the many and diverse creative influences that act upon the artist in the form of 333 portraits of musicians, artists, actors, writers and politicians, a series of animated portraits and a 'mash up' soundtrack. The project proposes that personal creativity can be understood as a potentially open and affective process, as the chain of influence extends from artist to artist, from generation to generation. Many of the subjects of Alfred's portraits are famous figures who have profoundly affected contemporary culture - as well as Alfred's own practice - including Pop artists Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, and musicians Miles Davis and Bob Marley. Equally, a number of the portraits represent members of the experimental art and music scenes, such as Squarepusher or Kid 606, figures known only to a select audience. Alfred's friends and family are also featured. Some of these people have provided rich and enduring inspiration for the artist; others represent fleeting moments which are nonetheless important. The project thus provides a map or index of Alfred's creative development, and can even be understood as a form of expanded self-portraiture. Brian Alfred lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited widely internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo (2007); Haunch of Venison, Zurich (2006); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2005, 2006); Haunch of Venison, London (2005); Phoenix Art Museum (2004); Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles (2003) and Max Protetch Gallery, New York (2000, 2002, and 2004). He was recently included in 'System Error: War is a Force that gives us Meaning' at the Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2007); 'Shapes of Space' at the Guggenheim, New York (2007); 'Radar - Selections from the Kent and Vicki Logan Collection', Denver Art Museum (2006) and 'Metropolis' at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2004). Alfred's work is included in many important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Image: Brian Alfred Aloe Blacc 2006-7 Acrylic on canvas 22.9 x 30.5 cm © Brian Alfred. Courtesy Haunch of Vension Haunch of Venison Berlin Heiderstrasse 46 10557 Berlin Haunch of Venison Berlin Read on... Haunch of Venison Berlin

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