July 28, 2006

Painting

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Cristina Guerra, Lisbon HPGRP Gallery, New York Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago Sixspace, Los Angeles Kantor / Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles Union, London The Apartment, Athens Next from re-title.com         sign up!

Cristina Guerra, Lisbon JOHN BALDESSARI - NOSES & EARS,ETC Like the title itself denotes, this new series focuses ears and noses by excising the rest of the face. These over-paintings are a continuation of the artist’s wry game of omission, which has marked his work in an overall sense. Baldessari blocks out the lips, eyes, wrinkles and spots, any telltale features of a person, by over-painting. In doing so, he obscures the face, shattering instant identification or interpretation of these images. “What I leave out is more important. I want that absence, which creates a kind of anxiety” [Artforum, March 2004] Read on...Cristina Guerra, Lisbon

HPGRP Gallery, New York Adela Leibowitz - The Cassandra Prophesies Adela Leibowitz shows us her world of fable like paintings of little girls lost in eerie blue landscapes. Time travel to the days when monsters walked the earth with us, legends abounded of cursed exchanges between animals and people, and deer trapped on a floating iceberg in the wide open sea are just a few of the sinister warning tales. The little girls are embodiments of everyday people, participating as both the watchers and instigators in the unfolding scenes. Questions of existential angst, power and mortality are explored in Leibowitz’s finely rendered paintings where outcomes and final verdicts are always left to be seen in a dual light. Adela Leibowitz draws on the influence of choose your own ending children’s story books, current political power struggles, mass annihilation and the threat of environmental changes in her almost stage set like recreations of reality in a seemingly unreal world. The title “The Cassandra Prophesies” alludes to the tragic Greek figure of Cassandra, and what she would have foreseen were she here today... Her name, Cassandra, has two distinct meanings. Robert Graves translates it from Greek to mean "she who entangles men", which is ironic since, although she was stunningly beautiful, her 'madness' repelled most men and her prophesies foretold their ignorant deaths. Today, we call a "Cassandra" someone whose true words are ignored, since Cassandra's doom was to predict what others refused to believe. (Graves p747, Powell p325) Read on...HPGRP Gallery, New York

Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago Jo Jackson : Victory Over the Sun Jo Jackson is well known for her paintings, animations and sculptures dominated by recurring provocative images which have included bleeding skulls, silhouettes of the United States, nuclear explosions, animals, and couples copulating. Her distinct use of over saturated hues of pink, turquoise and purple heighten her loaded repetitive symbology. Jackson’s often serious and dark subject matter, which traverses the political, personal and social plain, becomes easily digested with a saccharine palette. Jo Jackson’s latest body of work titled Victory Over the Sun, includes a new collection of imagery infiltrating her paintings as well as a 16mm film. Representations of Yves Klein’s “living brushes” and the tragedy linked to this work concerning Klein’s early death mingle with repetitive imagery of old skeleton keys, pocket watches, and scattered playing cards addressing the unknown factors of chance and mystery. Dying glaciers also appear as a dark metaphor of a powerful yet fragile mass that is slowly melting away. All of Jackson’s personal mythic imagery is still portrayed in her signature hyper- saturated pastels though now the works are on a black ground leading one to think that perhaps Jackson’s story is a bit more urgent this time around. Read on...Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago

Sixspace, Los Angeles Donovan Crosby - Kindertotenlieder In her new acrylic paintings Crosby portrays Victorian- era children with flowers. Using the saccharine iconography of the 19th century, Crosby plays on the irony and perhaps oversimplification of our idealized expectations regarding the imagery of children or flowers. Often perceived merely as "pretty little things," each can carry within a fundamental "darkness" and complexity that, while disturbing in some regards, is also a natural component. The depiction of certain flowers in Kindertotenlieder reference a "language of flowers" that was a common tradition in Napoleonic France through Victorian-era England. Citing two authoritative historical sources, Crosby utilized floral meanings that have meanings such as "absence," "reverie," and "hatred" that counter-act the quaint notion that flowers, and subsequently children, are wholesome and simplistic – for instance, the symbolic use of flowers was as much present in superstition and proverbs as it was communications and ceremonies. These dark undertones also signify the horrible living conditions many children suffered during the 19th century. Read on...Sixspace, Los Angeles

Kantor / Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles Benjamin Degen : A Tree Is Falling In these new paintings Degen isolates the basic elements of visual representation: people, places, things and thoughts. The individual components are stripped of specific identities and reconstituted in compositions that can simultaneously function as portraiture, landscape, still life and diagram. In doing so Degen creates a meta-space in the picture, which is not fixed in place but rather can shift from human space to land space to thought space. Referencing Greek amphorae, Minoan paintings, Navajo rugs and Chinese landscape painting Degen composes objects that can be read in various ways. A body can be seen as a landscape or as typography. Text stripped of all meaning can begin to read like the patterns of nature. A geometric pattern becomes visual mathematics. The grain of wood can begin to read like text. In these meta-spaces all of the elements become reflections of each other. The composition becomes a floating space as the specific definitions of individual elements are replaced by a relative balance. Read on...Kantor / Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles

Union, London Tobias Lehner : Undeviating The majority of this exhibition sees Lehner continuing his use of vivid colour schemes to dynamic effect in his abstract paintings. There is a distinct sense of the musical about his work, the brush strokes articulating a pulsating rhythm emerging from the diffusion between organic and synthetic forms. The compositions invoke ruptured landscapes overlaid with and displaced by geometric patterns. They are suffused with a vital energy that seems to stretch the limits of the canvas. A sense of tension between internal and external space is underpinned by a tangible yet fragile harmony bringing an elusive order to the work. We may glimpse a spectral desert or a swirling cosmos beyond rigid fractals unfolding across the canvas. Blurred forms call to mind cloud formations and aerial photography, their fluidity counter balanced by repetitive and automated geometry. There is an uncanny, otherworldly quality to these paintings, yet the viewer is aware of an inherent melodic mood. A transcendent atmosphere is evoked through the use of diverse stylistic techniques ranging from comic book playfulness to graphical clarity. Lehner’s use of uncompromising and effusive colour is put to exhilarating effect. Read on...Union, London

The Apartment, Athens Daniel Sturgis & Nina Bovasso Daniel Sturgis and Nina Bovasso belong to the same generation and share similar painterly concerns. They both make bold, playful and cerebral works that fuse a modernist pictorial language with the world of popular culture, and revitalize the abstract model by acknowledging a number of influences from high art to counter-culture. Nina Bovasso's large-scale post-paisley abstractions abound in psychedelic references. The infinite repetition of organically expansive shapes, loopy rounds, bold dots and fiery swirls culminates into visually captivating arabesques that cunningly capture the eye. The sheer nerve and the underlying obsession that characterizes these intuitive works is a spontaneous and genuine homage to the oeuvre of Philip Guston. Writing in ARTFORUM about Bovasso's work, James Yood discerns a fastidious construction, ‘a focused pedal-to the-metal loopiness that fully energizes the decorative and chums it into a charged vehicle for a kind of acrylic adrenaline'. Read on...The Apartment, Athens

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