20 March 2008

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

Home About Contact us Artist Opportunities Thinking of Joining Advertise with re-title.com

MAMA Rotterdam David Risley Gallery London Jeff Bailey Gallery New York 798 Avant Gallery New York Sprüth Magers Projekte Munich Lehmann Maupin New York Nohra Haime Gallery New York Studio 1.1 London Next Newsletters         sign up!

MAMA Rotterdam Andrew Schoultz Chaotic Balance On Well Built Structures 14 Mar - 20 Apr 2008 For Andrew Schoultz, art is an uncontrollable passion and obsession. This is apparent, among other things, in the abundance of paintings, drawings, murals, installations, photos, graffiti and sculptures he produces. Since 1997 he has been working out of San Francisco on big murals, which have become his trademark. They resemble a fusion of political comic strips of Doctor Seuss, the social awareness of the Chicano Muralism, and the erratic reality of protest and beauty. The symbolic images in his paintings refer to Christian iconography, miniatures from the Middle- East, medieval maps and his reinterpretation of folk art. In that way arise an output of an apocalyptic world full of chaos, chimeras and fantasies; bizarre political landscapes filtered through the matrix of graffiti and comic strips. The artist comments with his work on the themes from world history that he believes continually repeat themselves, such as war, colonialism and the relationship between mankind and nature that must be constantly reinvented due to changing technologies. Especially for this exhibition Schoultz will create murals and objects in the Showroom of MAMA. Moreover, this first solo presentation of Schoultz in the Netherlands concludes a few new drawings from 2008. MAMA thanks: Lindsay Charlwood/ Gallery Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles. Image: Andrew Schoultz Slave Ship Para Trooping into Chaos 2007 Acrylic and collage on canvas 72 x 60 inches  (182.9 x 152.4 cm) Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles MAMA Witte de Withstraat 29-31 3012 BL Rotterdam Netherlands MAMA, Rotterdam Read on... MAMA, Rotterdam

David Risley Gallery London Roderick Harris Fugue 7 Mar - 6 Apr 2008 David Risley Gallery is proud to present a new body of work by Roderick Harris. David Risley's first independently organised exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery, London 'Showdown' was a solo show of work made by Harris following his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 2000. Fugue will be Harris' first solo show for 4 years. Over the past year Harris has been photographing and re-working footage of Michael Jackson performing "Smooth Criminal" from his "Dangerous" World Tour of 1993. Shooting directly from the screens surface, anomalous digital effects are created and a foggy, electronic texture resembling vintage or "psychic" photography emerges as a digital ghost of a ghost - further liquefied through painterly interpretation. The collective title for this body of work "Fugue" derives from the Latin fuga - related to fugere (to flee). In music it denotes a type of contrapuntal composition most highly developed during the Baroque. In psychology it denotes a dreamlike altered state of consciousness that is dissociative - characterised by flight from personal identity as a response to trauma or stress. Harris identified this performance as an effective lens through which an ongoing fascination with a network of psychological, esoteric, existential, pictorial and painterly connections converging around the notion of fugue could be explored. The stage performance is read as a highly orchestrated ritualisation of a surrogate persona analogous to the logic of personal fugue - as the notion of fugue itself is read as analogous to a wider, collective situation. Experience of fugue state typically expressed as that of the "puppet zombie" holds an uncanny relevance in light of the logic of Jackson's earlier "Thriller". Pyrotechnics, spotlights, dry-ice and shadows, feature as centrally as performers but distanced from their original identity and context invite readings less than theatrical or banal. A hallucinatory transmutation bordering on the hyper-religious emerges, its participants caught up in a performance of uncertain currency. The star of this spectacle fails to appear as icon to be worshipped or object of lampoon, but as an obscured and elusive fragment, a microcosmic creature (and audience) in dissociative flight playing out a game of losing itself on stage as within the materiality of a dissolved miniature painterly adventure. Image: Roderick Harris Fugue. Audience (Smoke), 2008 Courtesy of David Risley Gallery, London David Risley Gallery 45 Vyner Street London E2 9DQ David Risley Gallery, London Read on... David Risley Gallery, London

Jeff Bailey Gallery New York Martin McMurray: The Unreliable Narrator 19 Mar - 19 Apr 2008 Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Martin McMurray: The Unreliable Narrator. McMurray presents us with a cast of characters, both real and imagined. Paintings and drawings of movie projectors, typewriters and tape recorders are mixed with images of various individuals and snapshots. A life is recalled: not one, but several. Ruminations become stories with different points of view. In Scriptwriter, a fresh sheet of paper has been inserted into a large typewriter that sits unattended. The Yawning Abyss, No. 1, features a man sitting in his bathrobe, surrounded by sheets of paper tacked to the wall. He holds a sheet in each hand. Are they blank, or filled with text? Either way, he appears in the throes of an editorial dilemma. In Lansing, a hand holds a sepia toned snapshot of a young woman. She stands with her hand on her hip, gazing at both the viewer and the man who holds her picture. The photograph freezes her in time, but she is being considered anew. A camper sits parked in The Departure. A small and temporary home on wheels, it is ready for the next adventure. Included in the exhibition is a volume of books titled The Undoing. With titles such as What Came Between Us and Razing the Burden of Self, the author seems to ask as many questions as he attempts to answer. It is hard to pin down McMurray's narrator. He may be a scriptwriter, a ghostwriter, a playwright, or someone else. His stories are still unfolding. This is Martin McMurray's second solo exhibition with the gallery. His most recent solo exhibition was with Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and he will have a solo exhibition with Galerie Nouvelle Images, The Hague, Netherlands, opening in April. His work was featured in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport and in Palette at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. He is a recipient of a 2007 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. McMurray lives and works in Berkeley, California. Image: Martin McMurray The Dramatist, 2008 acrylic on panel 24 x 18 inches Courtesy Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York and Susanne Vielmetter Projects, Los Angeles JEFF BAILEY GALLERY 511 West 25th Street, #207 New York NY10001 Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York Read on... Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York

798 Avant Gallery New York Cang Xin The Shaman's Face 20 Mar - 19 Apr 2008 798 Avant Gallery is proud to present The Shaman's Face, a solo exhibition by the renowned conceptual artist Cang Xin. Having exhibited work across Europe and the Far East, this will be the artist's debut solo exhibition in the United States. The Shaman's Face is a continuation of Cang Xin's recent approach to visually conceiving images of Shamanic interaction between the realms of Man and Nature, the material and the spiritual, and the individual in the collective. Though born in Baotou, Mongolia, in 1967 Cang Xin was raised in Handan in Haibai Province. A student of music, literature, and philosophy it was after the 1989 student movement in Tiananmen Square that Cang Xin became committed to participating in the cultural reformation of Chinese society. In 1993 Cang Xin moved to Beijing's "East Village" where, alongside fellow artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, he began to create and collaborate on some of the earliest art actions of contemporary Chinese art, such as To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain. In his most recent series, The Shaman's Face, he has continued his departure from performance based art to reach into a visual world that the physical body is incapable of inhabiting, a world where the realms of nature, man, and spirit are bound up like threads in the rope of experience. And he has done so continuing to use his face as the primary visual symbol and conduit of expression. In these new works saplings sprout out of eyeballs and tongues, insects rest peacefully on the artist's forehead, Cang Xin's face is transplanted on to the shell of a snail, and in multiple instances the head is totally isolated from any body becoming a metaphorical representation of ritual and the human experience. These paintings reach into the supernatural, almost mythical, world of Shamanism, where a human face becomes the medium for the interconnecting energies of spiritual realms. --Charles M. Schultz Image: Cang Xin No Body. No.2. Oil on canvas 180 x 140 cm 2007 Courtesy of 798 Avant Gallery, New York 798 Avant Gallery 511 W 25th St Suite 502 New York, NY 10001 798 Avant Gallery, New York Read on... 798 Avant Gallery, New York

Sprüth Magers Projekte Munich WHAT KIND OF PAINTING? Rafal Bujnowski Stuart Cumberland Hansjoerg Dobliar Slavomir Elsner Christian Hellmich Hendrik Krawen Christoph Lohmann Zbigniew Rogalski Thomas Scheibitz Veron Urdarianu 13 Mar - 3 May 2008 WHAT KIND OF PAINTING? considers the state of contemporary painting amongst a younger generation of artists. Eschewing a theoretical superstructure the intention is to juxtapose allegedly similar responses and heterogeneous approaches towards painting. "What kind of painting do you do?", the legitimate and inescapable question that no painter ever wants to hear and which actually cannot be answered provides the title for this exhibition. Image: Christian Hellmich Pavillon, 2008 Oil on canvas 204 x 150 cm Courtesy of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Munich Sprüth Magers Projekte Ludwigstrasse 7 Munich D-80539 Sprüth Magers Projekte Read on... Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich

Lehmann Maupin New York Ashley Bickerton New Work 20 Mar - 19 Apr 2008 Ashley Bickerton pushes further into his dystopic, end-times vision for his second solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. The gallery will present a new group of Bickerton's large-scale paintings called "The Eight Paintings" along with bronze sculptures. These new works are a fusion of painting, photography and sculpture and exude sexuality, exoticism and color. The eerie quality of the green men from Bickerton's earlier work has now given way to the raucous and psychedelic-hued adventures of his blue "20th Century-Man" as he navigates a world populated with shamelessly inflated women and littered with the wreckage of "existentialism" and "escapism." Bickerton represents this world of abundance and sensual opulence while addressing his concerns as a painter. He employs models and actors whom he paints on directly, then photographs numerous times. Bickerton then manipulates the images with a computer almost to the point of implausibility. These are printed onto canvas and altered further with paint. As a means to question the art object as commodity, these new paintings are displayed in elaborate hand-carved frames. While Paul Gauguin was searching for something intangible in the human spirit, with Bickerton we see a fin-de-sičcle malady, and an almost artistic certainty that we are approaching the end of the road. Ashley Bickerton was born in the West Indies in 1959. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1982, and continued his education in the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in New York. Over the last twenty-five years Bickerton has exhibited extensively around the world and his artwork can be found in many museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, all New York; The Tate Gallery, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Currently his work may be seen in Fractured Figure: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection at the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece and recently, he was included in The Incomplete at the Chelsea Art Museum and the East Village USA retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Bickerton was a seminal figure in the East Village scene in New York and one of the original members of the group of artists that came to be known as "Neo-Geo. " He remains an influential figure with younger generations today and since 1993 Bickerton has taken up full-time residence on the island of Bali where he continues to work. Image: ASHLEY BICKERTON The Preparation with Green Sky, 2007 acrylic and digital print on canvas in carved wood, coconut, mother of pearl and coin inlaid artist frame 72 x 86 x 7 inches 182.9 x 218.4 x 17.8 cm Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York Lehmann Maupin 540 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 Lehmann Maupin, New York Read on... Lehmann Maupin, New York

Nohra Haime Gallery New York CAROL K. BROWN: PASSERSBY and HOME DECOR 26 Mar - 26 Apr 2008 Based on photographs she takes of people on the streets, Carol K. Brown's Passersby are paintings of isolated homeless people that create a tension between the rawness of the subject matter and the beauty of the painting. Are the Passersby the transient subjects depicted in the paintings, or are they us, the viewers? Brown had been working on the Passersby series when a collector, after buying one of the paintings, commented that he enjoyed living in a neighborhood where everyone "looks the way I do." There is a fascinating irony that someone would spend money on a painting depicting a person he would go to extremes to avoid in real life. The realization of this attitude, perhaps not an uncommon tendency, was the impetus for the related series of prints entitled Home Décor. Brown sees them as an expression of the tension she felt as a child growing up in an elegant New Orleans home, a city where the lines between beauty and poverty were often blurred. While these images could be read as a scathing social critique, the "not in my neighborhood" impulse is rampant in all economic strata. The edginess of the images is heightened by the obvious tenderness she feels for her subjects. Perhaps the ultimate irony lies in Brown's series of refined looking dinner plates depicting images of hungry people. These are provocative images, flouting conventions. Image: Carol K Brown Passersby (75016) acrylic on canvas 2007 Courtesy of Nohra Haime Gallery, New York Nohra Haime Gallery 41 East 57th Street New York, NY10022 Read on... Nohra Haime Gallery, New York

Studio 1.1 London JOHN TINEY Travelling Our Way studio1.1 is very pleased to present a new series of large paintings by John Tiney. Since completing his MA at Goldsmiths in 2005, where his forensic mind explored film-making, he has made a triumphant return to painting in this his first solo show. In these skewed post-pop mythologies found and re- worked images contradict themselves while their meticulous execution suggests we may be missing something. A forgotten legend, an archetype new to us. A synthesis of images bubbling from the peripheral universes of advertising and archive. Far from any fashionable dystopia, however, a new hope is to be found clinging to the wreckage in these fragments from a mutated childhood. Post-apocalyptic they may be, but after the Twilight of the Gods is the Dawn of Man, and '2001' offers some back-dated hope of survival. Image: John Tiney Valley of the Stars Acrylic and cellulose on blockboard 183 x 122 cms 2008 Courtesy of the artist and Studio 1,1, London Studio 1.1 57a Redchurch Street London E2 7DJ Studio 1.1 Read on... Studio 1.1, London

Next Newsletters re-title.com - Independent directories of emerging & professional contemporary art re-title.com now lists more than 500 galleries and 1400 artists re-title.com is searched and researched by more than 250,000 art professionals & enthusiasts every month. re-title.com newsletters now reach out to over 25,000 recipients. The next re-title.com newsletters are scheduled for: New York Armory week - March 25-26 Sculpture & Installation - April 3-4 Photography - April 8-9 Painting / Drawing - April 16-17 Mixed Media - April 23-24 Please contact us to discuss and schedule your requirements for 2008 These newsletter features are an exclusive service for re-title.com members. Please contact us for membership information and to discuss your publicity requirements in more detail. To view this newsletter and previous newsletters online... Click here