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MARIUS BERCEA
(On) Relatively Calm Disputes

Opening reception April 9th, 7–10pm
April 9 – May 14

Ghebaly Gallery is pleased to present (On) Relatively Calm Disputes, an exhibition of new paintings by Marius Bercea, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery.

For this new body of work, the artist expands his subject matter well beyond the depictions of Romanian landscapes and nostalgic scenes that he is best known for, broadening the scope of investigation recorded onto the canvases to include commentary on the global state of affairs, internal dialogues about authentic identity, and ruminations on the overbearing excess of utopian rationality as expressed through constructed environments. While elements of previous bodies of work still remain integral to this new series, most evidently his use of figures amid architectural features, Bercea allows these paintings to transcend locality.

Informed by the dramatic shift from a longstanding communist rule to a capitalist consumerist system he experienced while growing up in Cluj (located in the Transylvania region of Romania), the paintings on view point to an internalization of the signs and tendencies of two opposing aesthetic regimes. As the disparate dichotomies converge on the canvas, they produce a wholly hybrid territory that moves beyond identification with geographic space. Instead, the paintings act as dialogical platforms where Bercea speaks to the cacophony of contemporary life, where vaguely reminiscent architectural motifs are draped in the tattered vestiges of mid-century modernist ideals, and scenes are overrun with the exuberant entropy of vegetation. Here, Bercea presents a postmodernist Arcadia where a sparse population of nondescript pastoralists commiserate among morose landscapes and overzealous flora. These convoluted signs obfuscate any association with any real locale. It could be anywhere and nowhere.

Although the paintings speak to the transnationality of cultural modes, Bercea’s imagery is still grounded by the paradigmatic ruptures he witnessed in his native Romania. As such, the paintings are a result of an agglomeration of memories, personal documentation, and fantastic landscapes inspired by lived experiences that are woven together to portray a placeless reality that exists only in the picture plane. The flashes of luminescent colors that abound in Bercea’s work serve to reinforce this mystique. The brilliant strokes of neons jut up against austere purples and fiery reds. At the same time, the presence of dark earth tones tempers this vitality as the ominous greens of the shrubbery pull away from the magical and plant the scenes in an abstracted realism. These contrasting color profiles alongside the concrete greys lends to the artist’s unique ability to forge lived-in worlds. Bercea places the viewer square within this distopic landscape, often as a voyeur behind robust foliage. This visual layering is compounded by the physicality of the vacillation between thick impasto application of oil paints and the fluidity of washes of pigment streaking across the compositions. As the colors and textures crash into one another, the materiality of the works draw away from an internal logic and reveal Bercea’s investment in the tradition of painting.

Marius Bercea (b.1979) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where he is a professor at the renowned art and design university. Recent solo exhibitions include Hypernova, Blain|Southern, London (2014); Concrete Gardens, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Remains of Tomorrow, Blain|Southern, London (2011); and Time will Tell, Chungking Project, Los Angeles (2009). His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Young Collectors 2, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2015); Love: The First of the 7 Virtues, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA), Peekskill, US (2015); Defaced, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, US (2014); Hotspot Cluj – New Romanian Art, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2013); Nightfall, Modem Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrechen (2012); No New Thing Under the Sun, Royal Academy, London (2010); and the Prague Biennale 4, Prague (2009). His work is a part of several public and private collections, including the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill and the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Skowej.

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JOEL KYACK
On the Floor in the Cave of Skulls

April 9 – May 14, 2016
Opening reception April 9, 7-10pm

Ghebaly Gallery is pleased to present On the Floor in the Cave of Skulls, an exhibition by Joel Kyack featuring new sculptural fountain works and recent paintings. This show marks the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery.

Beginning with one of his earliest performative works, The Dam (2006), Kyack’s practice has been the result of an aggressive refusal to resist the natural resolution of materials, forms, and ideas. With this piece, a photograph of a performance that casts Kyack waist-deep in the middle of a swollen river while holding a broad plank of wood perpendicular to the rushing current, he reveals the futility of working against the charging force of nature. At the same time, the image is an allegory for the artist’s position within social constructs. With this piece, Kyack succinctly establishes a paradigm for his overall practice and introduces his use of running water as subject matter and material.

In subsequent bodies of work, Kyack introduces a cast of characters that urinate, spit, and swallow who commingle with dismembered prosthetic limbs, gravestones, kiddie pools, and assorted knives. Liquids move into, around, and over many of his sculptural works, with water finding its way through any available orifice. This is especially evident in works like The Waterfall, a video and photo piece from 2008 and 2013 respectively, in which Kyack himself becomes a vessel, simultaneously ingesting and excreting fluids through his own biological processes in front of a camera. The visceral nature of this gesture points to the artist’s tendency towards the grotesque. The dormant violence that is intrinsic to many of his objects is made palpable in performances like Growing Pains Leave Stains (2011) and Your Optimism Fills Graves (2015). In these works, Kyack is a singular performer amid an arsenal of props, sculptures, and materials that he splatters, stabs, squirts, and sprays in gesticulating throes.

For On the Floor in the Cave of Skulls, Kyack has constructed new sculptural works from his fountain series. These fountains are an amalgamation of disparate materials sourced from thrift shops, hardware stores, and bargain bins that are pieced together to create a closed loop that allows water to cycle throughout each discrete piece. Every object employed has its own unique surface tension, bending and conforming to the artist’s will only insofar as its material qualities will permit. When combined, the staunch pragmatism of the surreal assemblages allows them to maintain their materiality while also surrendering some of their signification in favor of a more subversive cause. This duality frees the sculptures to move beyond discussions of traditional aesthetics and into a complex discourse surrounding the body in relation to a ludicrously anxious social reality.

In addition to the fountain works, the exhibition includes a selection of Kyack’s recent paintings, which echo the logic of the fountains but with an economy of signs. The visual similes and puns that result from the connection of incongruent – or sometimes all too apparent – associations highlight the dark humor that permeates across his practice, where aesthetics are often subservient to practicality, where primitivism campaigns for art’s potential as an unsophisticated wilderness.

Joel Kyack (b. 1972, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Kyack received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2008 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. Recent solo projects include The Very First Day, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK (2015); Old Sailors Never Die, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Point at the Thing That’s Furthest Away, Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2013); Terms / Proposals / Demands, SSZ Sued, Köln, Germany (2013); Escape to Shit Mountain at Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Superclogger, a public project produced in collaboration with LA><ART and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); and The Knife Shop, Kunsthalle – LA, Los Angeles (2009). Recent performances include Your Optimism Fills Graves, Workplace, London (2015); Buy What I Say, FIAC, Paris (2014); Growing Pains Leave Stains, Kaleidoscope ARENA, Macro Testaccio, Rome, Italy (2011); and Wattis Up with this Guy?, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2011).


For more information, please contact [email protected].