Lia Chaia, Claire Fontaine, Bethan Huws, Alfredo Jaar, Cristóbal Lehyt, Michelle Lopez, Cecilia Szalkowicz, and Jorinde Voigt
Curated by Samuel Draxler
Cleaning Up brings together works by artists who critically intervene in or annotate their source material to produce clarity, sterility, or order. Ranging from sculpture and painting to photography and installation, the works on display engage with categorization and classification as functions of power that construct distinctions between the ordered and the errant. The exhibition offers an analytic perspective on today’s artistic practices that draw from the legacies of Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique.
Through an engagement with architecture of the gallery space, several of the artists shown continue an interrogation of the art institution’s conventions. Cristóbal Lehyt’s wall drawing is executed by a third-party, who also determines the size and location. Lehyt’s original figure drawing becomes a form of graffiti in which the white wall of the gallery, now the literal support, is marred by the artwork. In the photographs by Cecilia Szalkowicz, the functions of framing and display become central. For example, Szalkowicz references an architectural hole, a framed space, and the viewer’s relationship with the image. In another piece, a flat black plane obscures part of the image, embodying the ways in which pictorialization and representation can function as forms of repression. Michelle Lopez’s sculpture, by replacing rigid artifice with organic surrender, undermines the normalized conventions and connotations of Minimalist sculpture. Lopez employs the materials of a skateboard at the scale of a human body.
Lia Chaia’s installation comprises flag-like sheets that hang from the ceiling and display sections of the human skeleton. In segmenting and separating the components of the body, the work is among those that deal with the ordering within and of persons. Known for her unique synthesis of disparate networks, Jorinde Voigt collapses both objective and subjective elements into quantifiable forces whose interplay can be calculated. In the collage on display, Voigt excerpts images from erotic Chinese paintings. Through the transposition of bodies, Voigt turns the fluidity of sexuality into an ordered spread. Claire Fontaine, as a collective artist who operates under the pronoun "she," adopts the harmless female persona embraced by corporate bureaucracy. Fontaine reproduces a PowerPoint-style pie chart that identifies emotional intelligence, the ability to deal appropriately with human irrationality, as the main determinant of success.
A third body of work addresses intellectual management – the way in which social systems and language are manipulated and mobilized. In the drawings by Alfredo Jaar, the artist produces an image of Antonio Gramsci over and over, systematically attempting to represent all of the nuances of his vision. The work is thus an act of devotion to Jaar’s intellectual idol, but also a manifestation of the power enforced through cultural uniformity described by Gramsci. In another work, Jaar conceals an image of Karl Marx’s grave in an envelope that the purchaser agrees to view only once a year, on the anniversary of the day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The signboard by Bethan Huws – a similar type to those used by schools, offices, and churches – concerns the power of language. In its declaration that “words are equally ready-mades,” the piece evokes Duchamp’s famous declaration that “Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.” Huws positions speech as an act of inventive play, a system whose limits are constantly expanding.
ZACH STORM: “SOLITAIRE” March 28 – April 27, 2013
Johannes Vogt Gallery is proud to present Zach Storm’s first solo show at the gallery. Using an innovative combination of chemicals, spray paint, and pigments, Storm’s compositions on aluminum or paper draw heavily from the logic of color field painting as well as the materiality of process-based art. The show brings together three recent bodies of work entitled “Solitaire,” “Inferno,” and “Horizons.”
Storm’s aluminum works are executed in a process that involves consecutive applications of layers of pigments. As a consequence of using pigmented urethane in this process, each layer that is added to the work must cure in a time intensive process. As such, each layer added by Storm not only increases the spatial depth of the work, but also the amount of time encoded in its production. In addition to the references to process art and post-minimalism, and despite the industrial origins of his metal backings and automotive paints, the work opens a dialogue with the atmospheric paintings of the sixties by artists such as Jules Olitski and the like.
In the series Solitaire, Storm presents five paintings in which the compiled history of the work’s creation is presented sequentially over the panels. With each painting having one additional layer of pigment, the presentation increases both in chromaticism, tension, and opacity. The reference to the card game of Solitaire evokes the repeated rhythms of a game played by one, and a challenge being worked through over a series of stacks.
Horizons, a group of three paintings, depicts what Storm refers to as “layer collapse.” If in the process of producing these works a layer of urethane does not have sufficient time to harden, it will be destroyed by the weight of the subsequent layer. When this happens, Storm excises these areas with a razor, exposing the aluminum support and beginning anew. The border between these two zones forms a horizon line, thus transforming the material’s unpredictability and instability into a set of determining conditions through which ruin turns to representation.
The third series, Inferno, comprises thirteen paintings on paper. While channeling visions of catastrophe and doom, Storm sprays pigment into fiery compositions of ambiguous haze. The works, in their representation of mood but not image, recall blurred photographs, static-filled television screens, and corrupted digital files.
Zach Storm was born in Los Angeles, California in 1983. He received his M.F.A in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where he currently lives and works. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; The Cell Project Space, London; and Deutscher Kuenstlerbund, Berlin, Germany.
Since its inception only two years ago, the gallery has taken on a challenging program leading to a change of location in November 2012. Johannes Vogt Gallery is committed to bringing attention to the complex artistic and cultural ties that bind New York to both Europe and Latin America.
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
For further details please contact Samuel Draxler at [email protected] or at 212.255.2671
