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Galerie Emmanuel Post,
Leipzig |
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Sebastian Gögel
come rain or come
shine
Opening reception: 8 pm, Thursday, June 5, 2008
June 6-28, 2008
What expresses itself in
Sebastian Gögel's many drawings, paintings and tattoos as
drastic images of penetration and gestures of perforation
attains a new metaphysical level in the artist's new
sculptures. Here, Gögel affords insight into the mental tools,
subsidiary forms and primal creatures constituting his visual
world. Far beyond apologetic attempts at celebrating beauty
within ugliness, the grotesque within the purportedly normal
(and vice versa) by means of zealous technical mannerism on
the verge of kitsch, Gögel demonstrates in ruthless precision
what he is dealing in and what he wants us to look
at:
A stalagmitic, upward-growing liquid creature
attempts - sopping - to free itself from the shackles of
gravity: A great struggle indeed that strains and ultimately
succeeds in forcing the nape of this gelatinously supple
humanoid into a horizontal position. Yet tautologically, it
depends on the Earth's attractive force to get into shape, to
further continue its tragicomic growth flow and to excrete its
pore deep by-products. In psychogrammatic terms, we are not
only shown the liberation of the suppressed, but experience
the metallic ossification of a dark force defying
instrumenttalism, yet fuelling the convulsions of expression.
It is something else which urges us to establish contact, yet
what?
The cubature of a simple, insulated wooden box
condenses into a psychological riddle as to the meaning of
open-mindedness and denseness. The box - variously reminiscent
of a refrigerator, coffin, laboratory cabinet, toolbox or
architectural model - lies as if marooned, on the floor, its
six door flaps wide open. Emanating a positive albeit
mysterious presence, the cube has landed underfoot like a
visitation from another planet, bringing new air and a
different light. In this state of hyperventilation, the
capsule forfeits its function as a once-useful box, yet
paradoxically attains the status of a receptacle for aesthetic
subject matters.
The mirror as the very instrument of self-reflection
and, if one is fortunate enough, of self-realization, appears
in Gögel's work as an ecstatically crafted vase job. In its
shape visibly utilitarian as a mock neoclassicist vessel
(perhaps useful as a flowerpot, a champagne bucket, a font, a
tennis ball receptacle or a paint brush holder), the object
generates optical pandemonium however, as if causing disco and
junk recuperated from the Romans by military commander
Hannibal to short circuit. In any case, this self-devouring,
glass-eating Vorticist vase-flower would garnish perfectly the
terrazzo terrace of any German who has been to Italy ('Noodles
Make Him Happy') and who fancies the good life, perhaps even
likes to paint. It seems to embody the psycho-ornamental
symbiosis of two cultures competing between North and South.
Yet naturally, it can offer no more than fragmentary
particulars of this mystic union - and of the way we look when
we think we've got it.
Oliver Kossack, 2008 (artist, lives and works in
Leipzig)
Sebastian Gögel, born in
Sonneberg/Thuringia, Germany, 1978, lives and works in
Leipzig. Studied Painting/Graphic Arts, Academy of Visual Arts
Leipzig, 1997-2002. Master student with Prof. Sighard Gille,
2002-2005. Since 2005: HAGEL - artistic collaboration with
Paule Hammer. Detail Sebastian Gögel.
Figur 2008
aluminium
height 49 cm
Edition: 5+1
Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Post,
Leipzig
Galerie Emmanuel
Post
Windmühlenstraße 31b
04107 Leipzig
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Nohra Haime Gallery, New
York |
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LEOPOLDO MALER
SILENCE
28 May
2008 to 25 July 2008
"Maler is one of the very few artists of the 70s who
have tried to make truly imaginative
use of the available
technology, and the effects he has conjured up have been some
of
the most genuinely magical of the
decade"
Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the
Seventies
Silence, an installation by Leopoldo
Maler first exhibited at the Camden Art Center in
London in 1971, will be shown at Nohra Haime
Gallery. A seminal piece in Maler's development as he
moved from theater staging to art, utilizing forms that would
become part of the new art vocabulary: installation, video,
performance.
In a darkened room, the viewer encounters a
single bed constructed of blue neon. On the bed lies an
elderly woman which is projected onto the bed. A live nurse
sits knitting in a bedside chair.
Silence: a moment of reflection. It is a
psychological process where Maler uses these images
to
unchain these processes. It evoques presences and
absences. Maler is moved by the human body, horizontal and in
repose. All anxiety of everyday life disappears and everything
in our reality looses its value. The nurse's appearance gives
a physical dimension next to the filmed image which now become
The reality.
Silence is as fresh and haunting in the 21st
Century as it was in 1971.
Born in Buenos Aires, Maler studied Social Sciences
and Law. He moved to London in 1961 where he started to
experiment with his new ideas about mixed media, integrating
films into sculptures and installations. In 1977 Maler was
granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Arts and moved to New
York until 1983 when he became the first Dean of the Parson's
School of Design in Santo Domingo. Maler's work has been
exhibited at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Whitechapel,
and Hayward Galleries in London among others. He represented
Argentina in the 14th Sao Paulo Biennial and in the 1986
Venice Biennale. His works are in important collections
worldwide.
Also on view in the side gallery will be
selections of Maler's more recent paintings/ assemblages.
These works are personal dialogues with extreme depth and
social consciousness.
Image:
Leopoldo
Maler
Silence
1971
Courtesy of the artist and
Nohra Haime Gallery, New York
Nohra Haime Gallery
41 East 57th
Street
New York, NY10022
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Pippy Houldsworth,
London |
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Matt Franks
It's so hard to tell who's going
to love you the best
23 May 2008 to 28 June
2008
Pippy Houldsworth is delighted to
present a show of new works by Matt Franks,
whose first solo exhibition Transcendent Plastic Infinite at
Tate Britain's Art Now space in 2002 brought him to prominence
in the UK. At Houldsworth, Franks will display his latest body
of work comprising a series of hybrid sculptures developed
from his typically mock baroque aesthetic.
The exhibition title is borrowed from a folk song by
Karen Dalton, reflecting the artist's ongoing tumultuous love
affair with his work. The anxiety which underlies the process
of making is founded on the desire for success. Yet, no matter
the planning, there is always an element of improvisation,
putting the artist's association with the work beyond his
control. As with any relationship there can be no certainty of
the outcome.
References to modernism are prevalent in the works in
their theatrical posturing. Despite this, Franks opts for
materials that deny the works the monumentality of their
modernist predecessors, instead preferring styrofoam, mdf,
plastic and yak hair. Similarly the development of the surface
contradicts archetypal sculpture. The materials themselves,
which are soft and rich, belong to luxury goods and interior
design. The surface texture therefore disputes the autonomy of
the art object whilst raising questions of taste.
Matt Franks graduated from
Goldsmiths College with an MA in Fine Art in 2000 and is
currently Head of Sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts.
Since his show at Tate Britain Franks has been part of
numerous important international exhibitions including
Tailsliding, a British Council international touring
exhibition 2001-03; Into My World: New British Sculpture at
the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut in 2004; Metropolis Rise: New
Art from London, ICA London, Diaf06 Beijing and Shanghai in
2006; and 8x8x8, LON/MSP/NYC, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis
2006.
Franks' first public installation for an exterior
site, Fooooom!!! 2007, a three metre high white exploding
cloud, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society was on
show at the Economist Plaza in 2007 and toured to Blickachsen
6 at Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg, Germany, courtesy of the
Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Franks is currently working on a major outdoor commission
for Biedermann, Germany to be installed in June
2008.
Image:
Matt Franks
Installation View at Pippy
Houldsworth, 2008
Courtesy of Pippy
Houldsworth
Pippy
Houldsworth
50 Pall Mall Deposit
124-128 Barlby
Road
London W10 6BL
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Exitart, New
York |
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Charles Juhasz-Alvarado: Complicated
Stories
Sculptures and Written Testimonies,
1998-2008
May 17 - July 12, 2008
Charles Juhasz-Alvarado: Complicated
Stories will present the artist's past and present
bodies of works as an ongoing dialogue on social consciousness
and cultural identity. Charles Juhasz-Alvarado's elaborate
site-specific installations engage the viewer through
narrative, performance, audio, and sculpture to introduce a
fantasy world that serves as an acute and humorous allegory of
today's multicultural society and the artist's own
background.
The artist was born in 1965 on Clark Air Force Base
in the Philippines to a Hungarian father and a Puerto Rican
mother. He grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Dominican
Republic, attended Yale University in Connecticut, and now
resides in Puerto Rico. These socio-cultural influences are
addressed in his works, which often allude to his varied
background and the historical and political conditions of
those places.
Juhasz-Alvarado's works are playful monoliths,
combining monumental size with biting satire and political
humor. In I-Scream (resist!), 2004, the artist complicates the
history of Puerto Rican-American relations through the
depiction of the 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo van by the
Macheteros (a pro-independence Puerto Rican organization) with
an ice cream truck complete with a Mount Rushmore-shaped
Popsicle. The Garden of Forbidden Fruit / Zona Franca is a
complex installation exploring how the merging of divergent
cultures creates desires and consequent limitations through a
hilarious depiction of a Puerto Rican airport. The airport
becomes the ultimate allegory for the opposition of the Puerto
Rican and American experiences. The centerpiece of the
exhibition is a new, commissioned work titled Winged Termite.
This massive installation, made rather ironically from wood,
references Leonardo daVinci's idea to build a flying mac hine
modeled on the shape, proportions and mechanics of flying
animals such as birds, bats or, in this case, a winged
termite. Hanging from the ceiling of Exit Art, the work
invites the viewer to climb inside the machine and act as the
'conductor'.
In this age, where many artists work with assistants
or even hire out their work for other people to produce,
Charles Juhasz-Alvarado has mastered the literal crafting
involved in constructing his visions. He works hands-on,
asserting his complete control over all aspects of his
imagination. The artist himself is not only seen in the
concept, but manifests himself in the shaping of steel, in the
shaving of wood, so that when the viewer enters the
installation, the works involve the viewer in one coherent
thought.
This major project, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado:
Complicated Stories, will be a vital opportunity to survey the
work of this important contemporary artist and to introduce
him to American audiences, where he has had limited exposure.
Curated by Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo.
Image:
Charles Juhasz-Alvarado
Drawing for
Winged Termite: Flying Machine, 2008
Courtesy of the artist
EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue
New
York, NY
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ROEBLING HALL, New York
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David Ellis - Dozens
22 May 2008
to 28 June 2008
Roebling Hall is pleased to present its
first solo exhibition of new work by New York-based artist
David Ellis, entitled Dozens. The title of
this exhibition, taken from the slang "playing the dozens" to
describe good-natured verbal sparing, is more than just a
piece of poetic musing. David Ellis does, in fact, make trash
talk, or at least makes it sound funky and he uses language
and cadence as integral parts of his art making. Weaving
rhythm, cultural landscape, conceptual art, a variety of
collaborators and a myriad assortment of materials, Ellis's
art evokes both the participatory spirit of Allan Kaprow-
watch and see what happens- and the mechanical wonderment of
Jean Tinguely.
For this exhibition in the gallery's main room Ellis
installs a large pile of garbage and discarded objects
scavenged from the gallery's Chelsea neighborhood. Ellis
places player piano actuators inside the debris. Using his ear
to determine each object's inherent resonance, Ellis provides
cues for collaborator and composer Roberto Lange to create
musical compositions that transform the otherwise dormant pile
into a kinetic instrument of percussive funk. A pile of
garbage one minute, an extraordinary beat-box sculpture the
next. This is the largest example to date of Ellis's
Trash Talk installations, an ongoing series of work with
Lange.
In the gallery's foyer Ellis debuts a new sculpture
entitled Oh, Superman. Paying homage to Laurie Anderson's
iconic 1981 song and performance, Ellis repurposes an IBM
Selectric typewriter into a new fangled player piano. Here,
Anderson's lyrics are magically typed onto a scroll of paper
to the repetitious beat of the song. Ellis uses the
mechanical device to call attention to the prophetic verbally
sparse lyrics: "Here come the planes, they're American planes,
made in America, smoking or non-smoking?..."
Ellis fuses his mechanical wizardry with his long
established technique of time-lapse photography, works that he
calls motion paintings, in a new installation in the gallery's
project space. A new motion painting is projected onto the
tops of ten art storage crates arranged on the wall according
to the Fibonacci mathematical golden rule principal. Next to
the projection, inside the actual crates, piston actuators
bang and vibrate a collection of discarded studio debris that
creates the soundtrack for the adjacent projection.
Also included in the show are twelve new paintings.
"Ellis paints onto collaged pages comprised of his to-do lists
and hardware store needs, papers from the daily grind, as well
as things he finds on the street. Ellis then responds to the
pages by painting in and on them, rhythmically providing a
pulse. The painted layer is graphic, loose and flowing. Ellis
calls his signature painting form-a graphic wave in silver and
black- "flow," representing motion in air and water. There is
an unconscious, visual catalog below the surface of the final
work-an archaeological, archival underpinning inside the
painting, submerged below grade."
(Dara Meyers-Kingsley)
This is Ellis's third solo exhibition in NYC and his
first solo exhibition at Roebling Hall. Ellis has participated
in numerous prestigious group shows, including P.S.1's Greater
New York (2006), Ensemble, curated by Christian Marclay at the
ICA (2007) in Philadelphia. His Motion Paintings have been
screened at the MoMA.
Image:
David Ellis
Dozens
Courtesy of the artist and Roebling Hall
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Sam Still, Long Island City,
NY |
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Sam Still, Open Studio
12-07 Jackson Ave
Long Island City
NY 11101
USA
Saturday, May 31 and Sunday, June 1, 1:00 - 6:00
PM
Drawings available from 20.00 -12,000.00 USD
Free Signed Open Edition Print; see artist's website
for more information:
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Coming Next
June 4-5 Painting & Drawing
June 11-12 Mixed Media
June 19-20 Photography, Film & Video
June 26-27 Painting and Drawing
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