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EVAN HOLLOWAY

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Evan Holloway. This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. It will open on January 30, 2016 and remain on view through March 26. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 30 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.
 
Evan Holloway is one of Los Angeles's most iconic and quintessential artists. Identified with this city since the beginning of his career, he exemplifies a distinct West Coast art historical tradition. This exhibition is his first hometown solo show in over a decade, and features a diverse group of singular sculptures that speak to the do-it-yourself innovation, mysticism, and idiosyncratic engagement with contemporary culture that are hallmarks of his work.
 
A graduate of UCLA's MFA program in the late 1990s, Holloway lead a generation that ushered in a new era of California-based art, proving that innovation was not limited to cultural centers like New York or London. His decidedly hands-on approach to sculpture evolved at a moment when modes of institutional critique, identity politics, and high-end fabrication were dominating artistic discourse. What the artist describes as an “analog counterrevolution” is also a one-man paean to the belief that standalone sculpture can, in and of itself, be both conceptually complex and intuitively accessible to a general audience.
 
This is immediately apparent, for instance, in the tree sculptures that have been an ongoing part of his practice for fifteen years: dead branches are found by the artist, carefully dismantled, and reorganized into freestanding structures of vertical and horizontal lines joined by right angles, which are then often cast in bronze. Human intervention, and the presence of the geometric grid, are thereby applied to an otherwise naturally occurring form. The similarities and differences between these two ways of seeing the world become bracingly clear, especially since Holloway frequently paints the resulting object following a chromatic sequence or progression, providing another visual system by which to read the work. A monumental new sculpture from this typology, the largest Holloway has executed, and the first outdoor version to feature color, will be on view here.
 
While he absorbed the lessons of modernist forbears, Holloway has also maintained an unabashed affinity for artists and modalities that typically fall outside the Western sculptural canon. For example, his stacks of painted bronze heads, their noses replaced with light bulbs that flash according to various patterns, function as totems possessed by a spirit of carnivalesque familiarity. Another ongoing series making use of spent batteries evokes the studded forms that lend Nkongi sculpture a charged energy, which is ironic given that the batteries themselves are no longer able to supply the energy they once contained. With gestures like these, Holloway creates objects suffused with a prickly, menacing beauty that is at once personal and universal, channeling an intensity of vision also seen in the work of artists like Louise Bourgeois. In the case of the battery works, he also reveals a picture of the damaged ecological circumstances that define our time, even as he refuses to lapse into lament or facile critique. The batteries have been rescued from their untoward oblivion, their status as units of pollution redeemed by the mysterious power of art.
 
Holloway delights in objects that have equally strong esoteric and exoteric manifestations. This is particularly true of a large sculpture in the shape of a Mobius strip that evokes the sensuous forms of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Impossible to grasp as an overall shape except by walking around it, the work, like the idea of the infinity loop itself, yokes perception and projection together. The sculpture's multiplicity is a virtue of its oneness, and vice versa. And yet, in a move characteristic of Holloway's practice, the sculpture also features a pronounced olfactory component: It does double duty as a holder for a stick of incense. As the viewer circumnavigates the sculpture, the sweet, heady aroma permeates his or her experience, forging associations with spiritual mysticism and the myriad forms of consciousness expansion, chemical and otherwise, that are abiding facets of the postwar cultural narrative in California.
 
For Holloway, each work arises as a result of its own conceptual system and engineering requirements. This makes his project antithetical to the unified aesthetic of minimalism or the environmental cues of institutional critique, in which contextual frameworks determine how an object will look and feel. Influenced by formative exposure to punk and grunge culture, it also means that he avails himself of ordinary materials that he can source and manipulate on his own. For all of its sophistication and art historical resonance, Holloway's process, like that of H.C. Westermann, Bruce Conner, Mike Kelley, or Bruce Nauman, has a touch of the shop rat's democratic insistence on makeshift experimentation. The significance of individual human labor is evident in this approach, but perhaps more important is the idea that sculpture is first and foremost dependent on its material read, on the way it describes how physical things are put together. However, Holloway's interest in occult ideas and mathematical patterns suggests that the material read is not necessarily about the material world; in his work, what is seen is just as often prized for its ability to reveal an unseen, hidden structure of reality.
 
Evan Holloway (b. 1967, Whittier, California) has been featured in numerous institutional exhibitions, including You've Got to Know the Rules … to Break Them, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2015); Lightness of Being, Public Art Fund, City Hall Park, New York (2013); All of this and nothing, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); The Artist's Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2010); Projects Series #35, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California (2008); 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2008); Ensemble, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2007); The Uncertainty of Objects & Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006); the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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CALVIN MARCUS
Malvin Carcus 

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Malvin Carcus, an exhibition of new work by Calvin Marcus. This will be the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. It will open on January 30, 2016 and remain on view through March 26. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 30 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.
 
Calvin Marcus constructs his practice starting with the most basic of materials: himself. Nonetheless, his work is not concerned in any overt way with his own biography or the specifics of his life. He is interested, rather, in the artist's persona as it takes shape through carefully directed formal decisions and conceptual structures. The mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and drawings that result are as notable for their meticulous attention to craft as their surreal humor, evincing a playfulness borne from multivalent gestures and variance among serial forms.
 
Malvin Carcus centers around two new bodies of work installed according to a specific architecture, designed by the artist, that heightens their narrative overlaps. The viewer enters a space reminiscent of a hall of portraits, except that in this case the “portraits” are replaced by a series of shirts that have been fabricated by the artist, and that bring together strategies related to drawing, printmaking, performance, and readymade sculpture. Made from linen fabric onto which he has printed sketch-like images of a martini glass and olive, these idealized “leisure shirts” are worn by Marcus as he goes about his life. After a given period, each is then brought to a different Los Angeles dry cleaner. The finished pieces, as displayed here, retain all of the plastic covers, tags, and other interventions the cleaners apply to them; any remaining stains, meanwhile, reflect the impossibility of completely removing the presence of the artist himself from whatever he makes. In addition to providing a wry commentary on the nature of an artist's labor (itself considered by many to be a rarefied form of leisure) the shirts pose a potential trajectory through the cityscape Marcus appears to inhabit.
 
The series of paintings that make up the second half of Malvin Carcus also perform a kind of mapping, albeit of a more interior, cerebral sort. If the shirts communicate a sense of the world outside the studio, the paintings reflect an imagined world generated completely inside it. Each is prepared according to an identical format: four-by-eight foot supports of portrait linen have been exactingly gessoed, sanded, and tinted to produce a surface that the artist describes as “ergonomic”, one that is intended to mimic the look and texture of paper as closely as possible. Accordingly, the action performed on these grounds is in many ways closer to drawing than it is to painting. The canvases are laid out on tables or the floor so Marcus can move freely among them, using black oil stick crayons to create imagery in an automatic, unedited fashion. Disregarding their status as individual artworks for as long as possible, he produces images that flow from his mind, through his hand, and across the surfaces of the paintings without mediation, generating discernible tension between the care taken to prepare them and the methodology (or apparent lack thereof) by which they are inscribed.
 
The images that come about through this process are as heterogeneous in their mood, style, and complexity as they are straightforward in their execution. Passages full of repetitive doodles give way to intricately rendered scenes imbued with semblances of narrative; flatly sketched groupings of lines alternate with modeled, representational forms. In keeping with this fluidity, the orientation of each painting is not fixed until it is installed, and is determined largely by the way imagery carries over from one canvas to the next. Seen together, these works depict the unfolding of the artist's imagination in real time, granting exponential new breadth to Marcus's already broad definition of self-portraiture. Like the “Tischmatten” (table mats) of Dieter Roth or the allegorical expanses of Cy Twombly, they transform the simplest of impulses, to scribble a line and see where it goes, into a metaphor for the ever-shifting contours of the human mind.
 
Calvin Marcus (b. 1988, San Francisco) was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at Peephole, Milan (2015); Chin's Push, Los Angeles, (2014); and Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2014). His work has been featured in group exhibitions internationally including Repainting the Image After Abstraction, White Cube, London (2015); Le Musée Imaginaire, Lefebvre & Fils, Paris (2015); and Works on Paper, Greene Naftali, New York (2015). Marcus lives and works in Los Angeles. 

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DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY 
5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019 | Tel. 323.935.3030 | Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am–6pm | General Information: info@davidkordanskygallery