JUXTAPOZ
Lola Gil is Doing More Than Just "Filling Up Rooms"
New initiative in contemporary art in Brussels: RendezVous brings together around fifty galleries, both emerging and established, and just as many exhibitions to discover. Founded by Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, the inaugural edition of this tour highlights the creative dynamics of the city, through a refreshing perspective.
Over 50 participating galleries with events throughout the city.
Raised in Houston’s Second Ward, Hunter College alumna Ana Villagomez opens her first solo show in New York with a showcase of all the detours her well-defined method allows the artist to make. There are personal memories of her community’s dexterity and inventiveness, renovation, and repair around the family home and the street. But hers are not the paintings that evoke (domestic) labor; if anything, they transcend it.
Fiercely independent, the artist belongs to no art group, movement, or style.
These most recent paintings of Liliane Tomasko present abstraction as a conduit for self-reflexivity. Upon color-drenched surfaces, raw traces of paint and concealed brushwork give rise to visual spaces wherein maelstroms of undulating bands and illuminated forms incite yet halt recognizable imagery. Painted wet-into-wet, free-floating marks give way to veiled and unstructured masses poised in space. Translucence and opacity meld into one another. Gesturally executed contours intertwine within unfathomable pictorial spaces, where form and formlessness restrain the gestalt. This suspension of the legibility of forms redirects the abstraction of the paintings from their self-containment to the ontology of visual perception, where figuration and abstraction coexist within sight, reveries, and dreams. Titled Shifting Shapes as a group, these hauntingly lyrical works of Tomasko caress the interstices of vision, echoing the thoughts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “‘Nature is on the inside,’ says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.” These paintings of Tomasko reveal themselves as windows to a primordial world that is in an interminable process of entering our awareness.
“The Art We’re Obsessed With” is a monthly series paying homage to the artworks Artsy staff members can’t stop thinking about, and why. From little-known artists our editors stumble across at local shows to artworks going viral on our platform, these are the artworks we’re obsessed with this month.
Schröder's solo exhibition is currently on view at Alfonso Artiaco in Naples.
Paintings that playfully push against comfortable legibility.
It might be in its 11th edition, but EXPO Chicago is embarking on a new chapter. This year’s fair—the largest in the U.S. Midwest—is the first since Frieze announced last summer that it’d be acquiring EXPO, along with The Armory Show in New York. How the new ownership would influence EXPO was a hot topic among art world whisperers heading into the fair, and on its VIP day Thursday, Tony Karman, the fair’s president, was in an enthusiastic mood. EXPO’s legacy of community involvement will continue, if not get stronger, he said, as Frieze helps elevate Chicago’s presence on the international stage.
THR commissioned 11 leading painters, sculptors and performance artists to create their own renditions of Hollywood’s favorite golden boy in an exclusive portfolio, which will be unveiled at Hollywood’s Jeffrey Deitch Gallery on March 9.
In her latest solo show, Who Are ( You ) Are Who, on view at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles this past fall, stereotypical, almost frozen faces form the backdrop for her paintings, each featuring delicate, translucent glass animals in the foreground as glowing giants of light shine through, refracting myriad colors and angles, asking us to see the nuance, beseeching us to do the same with a stranger, or even someone familiar we haven't taken the time to understand.
From sculptures and neo-impressionism to photography and romance-era, we've packed in the best openings coming up
Robert Storr, the former dean of the Yale School of Art, calls Asher Liftin’s upcoming show—his first with Nino Mier Gallery and his first solo exhibition in New York—“startlingly sophisticated.”
An Italian artist who is living and working in Los Angeles, Alessandro Pessoli’s work is coveted worldwide for the lively mix of photorealism and expressionism in his satirical paintings and drawings and clever combination of ceramics, bronzes and found materials in his playful sculptures. Employing a variety of media, including spray paints, oils, pastels, pencils and collage on his canvases and experimenting with ceramic techniques in his sculptures, Pessoli creates comical scenarios that comment on the human condition.
“Beach,” at both of Nino Mier’s galleries, in Soho and Tribeca, curated by Danny Moynihan, may have been the largest and most wide ranging of the summer group shows. An effort to “explore all aspects of the shoreline,” from place of utility and danger, to desirable, albeit fragile zone for leisure, the show assembled works by about ninety artists, beginning with Eugène Delacroix and continuing to such current practitioners as Katherine Bradford, Janice Nowinski, and Kyle Staver, plus a gang of younger people, by way of such modern masters as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and George Grosz, with detours to include Janice Biala, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Joe Brainard, and Tom Wesselmann, among many others.
In the realization of his artwork, it seems that James Chronister (Montana, 1978) wanted to play with the fundamental technical notions of photography, albeit with the ultimate intention of creating a painting. In fact, But you left it all for me (2023) is not a photographic print as it might seem at first glance, but an image made in oil on a large linen canvas.
Frieze installed itself in its usual spot in London’s Regent’s Park for a rather muted 20th-anniversary celebration. There were no fireworks—the birthday was announced rather quietly under the sign at the entrance and then not seen or mentioned again. The billowing wind and October rain tapping on the translucent tents were the extent of the foot-stamping for what felt like just another year. And I suppose it was just another year, but as always, there were—in the end—enough zippy wow-factor items to make all the trudging worth it.
Who Are ( You ) Are Who...? This is where Lola Gil begins her new body of work, with a question and a play on words. Where in the early years of the century, Lola was playing with the extensions of reality through pop surrealism, her newest bodies of work and this show on view at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, have subtle hints of surrrealism and obscured visuals. The glass animal figurines pose in the foreground while figurative elements are blurred in the back, and yet reflect with a mysterious clarity through the glass. That she uses stock imagery as the basis of each work seems to play with the idea of strangers, people that are used to tell a story who are almost employed to have no individual story at all. As the gallery notes, "These figures act as the protagonists of her paintings, highlighting the stranger as a sort of anyone and everyone character. " Anyone and everyone. Who Are (You) Are Who.
These dreamy paintings made with oil paint, colored pencils, and marble dust on linen are bursting with magical qualities. A strong sense of light dominates each work, and you’re left wondering what is happening in this visual version of magical realism. My only complaint is that the details and moody qualities of the paintings are lost in this well-lit gallery. Each work feels like an ephemeral universe flickering before our eyes. —HV
Lola Gil’s artwork in “WHO ARE (YOU) ARE WHO” features blurred figures engaged in various actions, deliberately obscured by glass animal figurines. The exhibition prompts contemplation of ethical questions related to human interaction.
The pink chopped-in-two meat bed displayed in Mia Enell’s Split Bed painting seems to have the most emblematic qualia in her Split exhibition, now on view in Brussels until October 28th at one of the two Nino Mier Galleries there. In philosophy of mind, qualia is how an experience feels from the inside: how things seem to us.
James Chronister doesn’t paint landscapes. Well, not traditionally speaking. His richly detailed greyscale paintings sidestep expectations: absent are the sentimental vistas of yore, the Romantic visions of untouched land. Instead, this Montana-based artist depicts closeup fragments of densely forested scenery to investigate the boundaries between the organic and the artificial. Heavily altered photographs of local environments serve as the source material for Chronister’s photorealist paintings, which feature overwhelming arrays of plant life cast in ghostly, unnatural hues. Chronister negotiates earthly abundance within the limits of its representation: his use of analogue and digital techniques further warps these compressed, fractured views, disrupting a genre marked by soothing illustrations of wilderness.
The Finnish photographer and video artist Iiu Susiraja’s first US solo museum exhibition, Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish, is up at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. When you enter, you’re both greeted by and confronted with a single work, facing you on the wall, entitled Woman(2010). An early, iconic work by the artist, it seems at first a straightforward photo of a fat woman dressed in a black dress with a wool cap on her head and big blue work gloves. There is almost no dead space outside of her body, which fills the width of the frame. Her eyes are looking off, perhaps dolefully, perhaps in boredom. Tucked into her cap, perfectly covering each ear like a warming flap, is a fish. Tucked into each glove is also a fish. The woman in the photo is Iiu Susiraja.
A series of new portraits and still lives line the gallery walls, each work seeking to reveal the recognition of individuality within the simplest contours of Subidé’s figures or scenes. With this body of work, the artist focuses on the emotive possibilities of painting, creating contemplative and placid scenes that reveal complex emotional truths. From her muted color palettes to her unfinished lines and quasi-cubist approach to shading, Subidé paints in a style that recalls the work of Lucien Freud, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso, whose portraits of his lover Marie-Thérèse provides inspiration for Subidé’s From Marie Thérèse (all works 2023).
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Portrait of the Self, the inaugural solo exhibition of Liliane Tomasko at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, comprises an absorbing suite of large-scale paintings and works on paper that embody webs of virtuosic gestural brushwork rendered in an expansive range of crepuscular and vibrant hues. An assured compositional dynamic prevails these airy, painterly and lyrical abstractions executed by means of the graceful spontaneity of the artist’s hand. Through the medium of acrylic and acrylic spray, Tomasko has transformed planar surfaces into illusive spaces replete with chromatic translucence, chance and volatility.
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A new exhibition at Duarte Sequire Gallery HQ in Portugal brings together five monumental artworks by Butzer. In this current exhibition, his work focuses on the recurring appearance of “the woman” – a motif that figures throughout his artworks. As Malycha explains, her presence within these works maps the journey of Butzer’s work, functioning as a symbol of hope and life.
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Cameron Welch remembers the first time he saw a painting by a person of color. Born in Indianapolis, Welch made many trips to the city's Museum of Art (now Newfields) as a child, but it wasn’t until his teenage years that he saw a newly acquired work there titled Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together by the Black self-taught assemblage artist Thornton Dial. It was only then, Welch says, that “I had seen myself in an artwork, in any sense of the phrase.”
Matthew Hansel packed more than a picnic for his trip to the seashore. The knot of exquisitely contorted bodies piled up under the shade of a yellow-and-white umbrella in his painting Balance Fails to Seduce Those Who Find Pleasure in the Fall, 2023, perfectly articulates the various emotional and conceptual facets of “Beach,” a two-venue exhibition featuring the work of eighty-seven artists—executed over the course of two centuries—curated by Danny Moynihan.
Curated by Danny Moynihan, Beach presents sprawling displays in Nino Mier’s two New York spaces of 107 works by an astounding 88 different artists, young and old, alive and dead. Like the tide, it spreads everywhere: into windowfronts, viewing rooms, offices, behind staff desks, and up the tall walls of Crosby Street in Soho. But once the overall, nearly overwhelming, impression recedes, the loose logic behind the display emerges, and one feels swept up engagingly in both its sandy and salty aesthetic breezes and deeper meanings.
It is impossible to encounter Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja’s photographs neutrally. Despite their air of mundanity, the strange, often humorous collection of props, the artist’s own plus size body and pose, and the glimpses inside a typical residence together elicit immediate response—both conscious and subconscious. In a culture and society rife with both discourses and hot takes on beauty standards, social norms, fatphobia, acceptance, sex, and a litany of other themes pertaining to existence, the images compulsively call forth the viewers’ own social conditioning and subsequent cacophony of opinions and feelings.
L.A.’s Nino Mier Gallery, which opened two spaces in New York earlier this year, is presenting a two-part exhibition that celebrates the shoreline, and the inspiration and recreation it has provided for centuries. Curated by Danny Moynihan, the show brings together a remarkable mix of established, midcareer, and emerging artists, all of whom have contributed fantastic works. Spanning mediums and scales, the works in this double-header show come together seamlessly and provide exactly what you want from a summer group show. There is conceptual depth for those curious to delve into the show’s origins, as well as aesthetically pleasing works for all to enjoy.
DKO Architecture founder and principal Koos de Keijzer, and Harvey Taylor publicity director Clemence Harvey de Keijzer, ‘knew nothing’ about country living before inspecting an off-grid house for sale near Kyneton, Victoria. This 100-acre property with valley views captured their hearts immediately, so they put in an offer while heading down the driveway. The couple moved in shortly after, and have since renovated the home to exude ‘glamorous, Italian, 70s-inspired country sustainability!’ A key element in achieving this goal was the various artworks Koos and Clemence selected for the home, including a reticular by Polly Borland.
Vanuit een verhaal naar het materiaal, zo laat de Belgische schilder Pieter Jennes zich leiden wanneer hij nieuwe werken maakt. De levendige en wrange taferelen zinderen van het maakplezier. ‘Al mijn vergissingen zitten nog in de schilderijen. Anders ben je gewoon aan het uitvoeren.’ Wanneer ik aankom in het atelier van Pieter Jennes (1990) in Antwerpen staat hij me met een stagiair op te wachten. Hij heeft speciaal opgeruimd, zegt hij. Al staan er nog honderden verfpotten op een grote tafel en leunt een hele pak doeken tegen de muur. Die zijn bestemd voor de kunstbeurs Frieze in Seoul in september, waar hij bij Vacancy Gallery een solostand krijgt.
Iiu Susiraja balances an umbrella above her head, tilting it slightly to reveal a set of suspended sausage links. She’s barefoot, wearing a blue bathing suit, and stands against a plaid background, beside a few fish stretched out on a candelabra. As is typical of her intriguing images, the Finnish photographer locks eyes intensely with the viewer, inviting us inside a visual universe that, though seemingly bizarre, continues to suck us in.
Canadian-born multimedia artist, Jon Pylypchuk shares his interpretations of otherworldly entities. From bronze ghost bags to found object rugs and a mixed media installation, “I’ve Got Love For You” acts as a tribute to the important figures in his life and his relationship with the other side. Dedicated to his wife and late best friend, it will be the first ever exhibit to feature his music as a soundtrack for the showing. As a songwriter, he continues to explore the themes of selfhood, community, and estrangement in parallel with his artwork. The exhibit will be on show at the ArtCenter in Pasadena until August 19.
British photographer Polly Borland has always specialised in the offbeat, surreal and fringe. So when she heard about a secret club in which adult men spent weeks looking and living like babies, she first could hardly believe it – but then set out to document it.
Iiu Susiraja comes from a long tradition of photographers who stay at home, dress up, and take pictures of themselves. Claude Cahun, Catherine Opie, Patty Chang, Cindy Sherman — they are there and not there in their images, playing cat and mouse with that elusive animal called identity, enacting dreams and surfacing subconscious anxieties. Susiraja is different: nearly six feet tall, heavy, inescapable.
The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.
Whoever said summer is an art world deadzone needs to see what’s on view in New York right now. Maybe we’re still striding through springtime in this hemisphere, but after weeks away from the gallery circuit, Brooklyn-based art writer Vittoria Benzine was gleefully surprised by lineups on view across the city. Some standouts just closed, like Fred Eversely’s Jolly Rancher monoliths at David Kordansky and Liu Xiaodong’s debut at Lisson, but even more remain on view. Read on to catch the season in full swing — each comes with a review to tell if it’s for you.
With a long-standing interest in art, Ayesha Selden took a deep dive into collecting after building a new home in LA during the pandemic. Since buying her first artwork in 2021, she has acquired close to 90 works -- including work by Kareem-Anthony Ferreira -- amassing a robust collection of contemporary, historic, and international artists while weaving herself into a growing community of dedicated Black art collectors. Selden has no plans to stop; here, she shares the intentions behind her collection, the work she's doing with other locals, and what she's looking to add next.
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Jon Pylypchuk is haunted by ghosts. I’ve Got Love for You, the artist’s current show at the ArtCenter College of Design’s Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, is anchored by a dime-store campfire set-up framed by furry trees and a chorus of pillowcase ghosts suspended from above. Tapestries made from carpet scraps hang on the walls, each depicting a wide-eyed, alien-like figure surrounded by apparitions fashioned from gym socks. Bronze casts of paper bags with eye holes cut-outs offer a simple, refined take on his scrappy DIY style, an attempt to immortalize the ephemeral and fleeting.
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“It’s the flotsam and jetsam of daily life,” said Stephanie Temma Hier, describing the decadent visual contrasts that characterize her artwork. Her works combine three-dimensional ceramic sculptures made in a veritable heap of forms—lobsters, teeth, horses—that frame her glossy, meticulous oil paintings, offering up an uncanny visual tension.
The strange, discomfiting photographs and videos of the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja push so many buttons that her provocative exhibition at MoMA PS1 should have been staged in an elevator — to paraphrase the theater critic Peter Marks. These powerful works take aim at a dizzying array of contemporary body image issues, obsessions and taboos, and from different angles, including fat shaming, fitness, obesity, standards of beauty, dysmorphia, self-loathing, self-love and of course sex.
Jan-Ole Schiemann utilizes a segmented compositional structure to annotate different modes of mark marking. The artist makes extensive use of pastiche within the gaps of the picture plane, in a process that disconnects signs from the literalness of representation. Each canvas relies on a Cartesian x-y axis, often employing a striping motif that invites parallels with artists as various as Matisse and Robert Motherwell, while also contextualizing each painting as a series of positions.
Andrea Joyce Heimer is garnering a wealth of attention in the wake of “Heartbreak on the high plains,” her new show of paintings and drawings at Nino Mier Gallery in Marfa, Texas, on view until June 17. These deeply personal, diaristic works build upon the artist’s distinctive, narrative style, this time tapping into the heartbreaks she’s experienced, from the romantic kind to family tragedies that she endured while growing up in Montana.
The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge takes the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Australia / New Zealand Magazine‘s June July 2023 edition lensed by photographer Polly Borland. In charge of styling was Jillian Davison, with set design from Patty Huntington. Beauty is work of hair stylist Clayton Hawkins, makeup artist Melissa Hernandez, and manicurist Vanessa Mccullough. For the cover Coolidge is wearing Dolce&Gabbana dress and Cartier jewellery.
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Jon Pylypchuk: I’ve Got Love for You at ArtCenter. With a site-specific installation and new bronzes and paintings by musician and multimedia artist Jon Pylypchuk, the exhibition is the first to feature the artist’s songwriting. Talking ghosts and other friendly, surreal creatures guide gallery visitors through an otherworldly landscape as Pylypchuk’s original songs play throughout the exhibition, as testaments to the emotional complexity of his career-long exploration of selfhood, community, and estrangement. 1111 S. Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena; Opening reception: Saturday, May 20, 5-7pm; On view through August 19; free.
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Seyni Awa Camara creates totemic works evoking subjects ranging from bestiaries to motor vehicles and maternity scenes. Camara’s sculptures are influenced by her dreams, where she first divines her forms. After preparing her clay, sometimes adding ore or other natural media to the mixture, the artist begins to sculpt her works. Over the course of many days, sometimes weeks, Camara carves the complex forms appearing in each work. She then fires the clay on a wooden pyre before immersing it in a liquid obtained from putrefied tree pods. This final stage lends the sculptures their color and robust, textured quality.
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Now in her 80s, Seyni Awa Camara was initiated to the potential of ceramics at a young age through utilitarian pottery that was made to be sold at the market in the village of Bignona, Senegal, where she continues to live and work today. Camara's rugged totems appear to be retrieved from premonitions and dreams. Attached to a central body, animals and humans are stacked upon one another in sculptures such as Couple torse séparé base ronde (2009), which illustrates a traditional family scene.
By mid-afternoon on Saturday (May 13), crowds milled about noisily in front of a dozen local and international galleries near the entrance of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas. Paintings and other works on paper took center stage at Taipei Dangdai, almost to the exclusion of other contemporary mediums like photography, installation art, and sculpture.
After a scaled down fair with just 60 galleries in 2022 when Covid restrictions kept many international galleries and visitors away, this year Taipei Dangdei hosted 90 galleries, 30 of which are showing for the first time, including Tehran’s Sarai gallery (now operating out of Mahshahir, Iran), Eric Firestone Gallery (New York, East Hampton), and Nino Mier Gallery, (Los Angeles, London, and New York).
When an artist uses his or her own face and body as the subject for single photographs or larger bodies of work, we inevitably get caught up in the definitional (and linguistic) question of whether such pictures are actually “self-portraits”. In many cases, these photographs are indeed knowing studies of the self, or the roles, stereotypes, and permutations of identity that surround the personas that we actively construct for ourselves.
She may be alone in this, but Sydney Sweeney sure seems to like Anish Kapoor‘s new bean sculpture in Tribeca *** Carl Kostyál, Jerry Saltz, and Cameron Silver down in Marfa for the unveiling of Polly Borland’s new land art sculpture *** Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, Dasha Zhukhova, Sofia Coppola, and Nan Goldin at Gagosian’s afterparty for their Richard Avedon show at The Standard High Line
The fourth edition of the art fair opens this week with 90 galleries, 70% of which have premises in Asia. First-time exhibitors include König Galerie, Nino Mier Gallery, and ShanghART, which will be exhibiting in the Galleries sector alongside returnees such as Gagosian and Lehmann Maupin.
Taipei Dangdai returns to a full edition this week for the first time since the pandemic and amid Taiwan’s emergence from prolonged, stringent Covid restrictions, with thirty first-time exhibitors hoping to build relationships with Taiwanese collectors.
Installed amongst the high Chihuahuan Desert plains, Polly Borland's BOD will be amongst the ethereal light and expansive space of far West Texas and the historied backdrop of Marfa.
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André Butzer has developed a style he calls ‘Science Fiction Expressionism’ – a fusion of American pop culture with expressionist painting, with figures that veer from cartoon-like creations to semi-abstract forms, rendered against chaotic, psychedelic backgrounds of block colour. This exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (9 May–10 September) is the first survey of the German painter to be held outside his native country. The show includes 22 works, ranging from the early series Science Fiction Expressionism (1999) to more recent works, including two that have just been acquired by the Thyssen-Bornemisza: Aladdin and the Magic Oil Lamp (2010) and Untitled (2022).
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The Fourth Annual Marfa Invitational, a contemporary art fair that brings artists and gallerists from across the globe to showcase their work in the remote arts destination, will kick off on Thursday — as founder Michael Phelan’s pledge to bring a permanent outpost for his foundation to the outskirts of town comes closer to fruition.
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Nino Mier Gallery presents sculptures by Senegal-based artist Seyni Awa Camara on view from May 5 – June 10, 2023, marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and first major show in the U.S.. The presentation will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by curator and writer Eva Barois de Caevel that will further situate the work within its original historical and cultural context.
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Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja has always sought out the extraordinary, whether photographing nature as part of her curriculum at school or later in her career – which has recently led to her first solo museum exhibition in the US, at MoMA PS1. In this show, which is titled A style called a dead fish, over 50 trace the artist’s self-portraits in which she poses alone at her apartment in Turku, surrounded or covered by mundane objects in different rooms.
The three new sculptures on display in the Project Room demonstrate once again the artful way in which the artist conceals scathing criticism behind apparently playful or outlandish imagery. Using the grotesque as a springboard in the purest medieval tradition, his buffoonish characters knock figures of authority off their perches with a healthy kick in the pants.
For Liliane Tomasko, the subjects of memory, dream, and reverie, which have deep roots in her slow, intimately made vignettes of domestic spaces eventually transpired to the synthesis of light and space of the mind, and of nature illuminated from within. Although there were evidences tracing from such slow movements of objects depicted in the once given and familiar domestic settings, to swift deviations of wind, air, and color of the outdoor, what Liliane has been undertaking in her new pictorial pursuit is evidenced in her recent exhibit Name Me Not at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos (CAB) in Spain.
MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of photographer Iiu Susiraja (b. 1975, Turku, Finland). The presentation will bring together over fifty photographs and videos that highlight the trajectory of Susiraja’s practice since 2008, when she was beginning to photograph and film herself in interior spaces. Most often, her images are shot in her apartment in Turku, Finland—the city where she has lived nearly her entire life.
As the Finnish artist’s show opens at New York's MoMA PS1, we sit down with her to talk inclusion, using her body as a prop, and heading stateside. Finnish contemporary artist Iiu Susiraja is a master of balancing hyperrealism with absurdity, and melancholy with humor. As her art stardom has skyrocketed, so has the array of adjectives used to describe her work. Mesmerizing. Confounding. Brave. Vulnerable.
Phenix’s works are rhizomatic; there’s no one entry point, nor is there a singular narrative to follow—instead, there are a host of different “micro-scenes’’ within Phenix’s pieces, together constructing a narrative that can be read in many ways. Different people will relate to different parts of the piece; different people will notice different elements of the story entirely. “It’s a constellation, visually,” the artist reflects.
Jennes’s intriguing figurative paintings are at once playful and ambiguous, filled with oversize, almost cartoonish figures and symbols that suggest a deeper open-ended narrative. (The artist counts African masks and folklore, as well as the cinema of David Lynch and Werner Herzog, as sources of inspiration.) The artist will have a solo spotlight at Nino Mier’s Expo booth.
In her third solo show with the gallery—mysteriously titled “Cracked; loosely thru the night visions”—Mindy Shapero explores the material relationship between her enigmatic paintings and goth-like sculptures. Creating what she calls “scribbles in space,” the Los Angeles–based artist’s bricolage sculptures are constructed by bending long rods adorned with broken mirrors and scores of painted found objects into snaking, twisted forms that she either hangs from the ceiling with chains or plops on a plinth.
Best known as a painter, in 2011 she compiled a series of satirical letters to famous male artists, including Picasso, as a limited edition book called “Dead Letter Men.” W.H. In “Dear Picasso” I wrote, “A journalist recently asked me if, as a female figurative painter, I’d been influenced by you, which I thought was a bit like asking if my diet had been influenced by Monsanto. Unavoidable.” He kind of personified how it was impossible to be a great woman artist in the 20th century. He defined the whole thing; it was a man’s game.
MIT CORNELIA BALTES, SHILA KHATAMI, INGO MELLER UND ROLF ROSE. Die Ausstellung KEINE ILLUSIONEN lotet Eigenschaften und Grenzen des Mediums Malerei anhand von unterschiedlichen zeitgenössischen Positionen aus. Gezeigt werden Arbeiten von vier eingeladenen Künstler*innen, die (teils) neue Werke für die Ausstellung schaffen: Die »radikale Malerei« Ingo Mellers (*1955) trifft auf die zum Teil überlebensgroßen Malflächen von Rolf Rose (*1933), welche die Handschrift des Pinsels negieren und Farbe selbst zu materialisieren scheinen.
Nino Mier Gallery is intrigued to announce a solo exhibition by German-born André Butzer through April 29, 2023, at Nino Mier’s new location at 62 Crosby St in SoHo. With the full artistic experience of 30 years, André Butzer has created six new paintings of one of his most distinctive characters—the figure of the Woman. Post-N, succeeding the truth and revelations of his N- Paintings (2010–2017), she is a being on the brink of this world and the beyond.
German painter André Butzer has created six new paintings of one of his most distinctive characters—the figure of the Woman, for his solo show (just the second exhibition for Nino Mier New York). Blending European Expressionism with American popular culture, Butzer has for three decades painted his way through the artistic and political extremes of the 20th century—life, death, consumption, and mass entertainment—into the 21st century.
‘Without Words’ - I have spent days thinking about the question and postponing my answer looking for a feeling in me in relation to the green kujakumidori-iro, and the truth is that I am unable to answer: I cannot put words and concretely define the color, which for me is more of an abstract emotion than a defined one.
Twenty-five years ago, four friends opened the Black Dragon Society in LA’s Chinatown, a gallery, performance space, and gathering spot for artists. It operated from 1998 to 2008, a period that saw the emergence of Chinatown as a vibrant contemporary art community. Nino Mier Gallery honors the legacy of the Black Dragon Society with solo shows of new work by two of the venue’s founders: Hubert Schmalix and Roger Herman.
The city’s younger galleries—including Anat Ebgi, François Ghebaly, Make Room, Nino Mier Gallery, and Night Gallery—have multiple locations, while blue-chip gallerists such as Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Kordansky Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, Regen Projects, Sprüth Magers and Vielmetter Los Angeles have either big buildings, multiple spaces, or both.
Collapsing the categorical divide between action and object, PERLASYNTHICS follows a lineage of artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Sonia Gechtoff to prioritize the gestural power of painting. For Schröder, painting is the medium best suited to register the motions and emotions of the artist and unmoor those of the beholder. PERLASYNTHICS is a meditation on painting’s physicality, both in terms of the creative process, and of a painting’s power to move through and affect a viewer.
“New Horizons” comprises paintings that tap into the horizon line as a limiting form. So often used to symbolize boundlessness, for Sonne, the horizon is a space of rupture where the sky meets its limit at the sea, a field, or some more recent structure. Within his vibrantly colored paintings, anonymous figures stand amid natural and built environments, displaced from both their own world and from that of the viewer.
Compiled under an enchanted or bewitched title, the exhibition 'Bewitched' presents a set of paintings and drawings by the American artist Ginny Casey which break with the physical and psychic integrity of domestic spaces to bring them towards a surrealism which mixes on the pictorial surface, animated and inanimate forms centered in square compositions designed like portraits.
"You have to paint your way through everything," André Butzer once said. It is impossible for the artist, who was born in Stuttgart in 1973, to begin a picture without preconditions and without any worries. What weighs on him is the entire 20th century - its art, its bloody history, its mass culture. Just the whole mess. And by putting these references together, he creates paintings for our present that has gotten out of joint.
Mier, who launched his first gallery in Los Angeles in 2015, has four primary spaces that vary in size in West Hollywood, a project space in nearby Glassell Park, another project space that occupies a former Texas gas station in Marfa, and two gallery spaces in the historic Sablon district of Brussels. Other than the Brussels’s townhouse, Mier has designed his various galleries in-house; but when he decided to open a flagship space in New York, he turned to the top gallery designer currently in practice, architect Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA.
Liliane Tomasko employs a very different way of reflecting the inside of ourselves in what she calls the “record of a visceral subjectivity.” “The subconscious is an unstable beast, and does not want to be reasoned or conquered.” The night emerges as a pictorial territory crossed by a misshapen magma. Beneath the surface of the tangible world “we know that there is something else, a dark matter that shapes our lives and our actions, our interactions with the world we live in,” the author tells us.
Pieter Jennes liet zich voor zijn nieuwe expo 'An Apple Can't Be Tired' inspireren door een kunstincident in Moskou in 1974. Zijn schilderijen zitten vol dubbele bodems, met veel knipogen naar de Belgische schilderkunst.
Polly Borland has made a career out of photographing others. Over the last several decades, the Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based artist has photographed the likes of Susan Sontag, Nick Cave, Cate Blanchett and Queen Elizabeth II. And now, for the first time in her professional life, Borland is turning the camera on herself.
La galerie Nino Mier, située à deux pas de la place du Sablon, présente deux femmes artistes : Ginny Casey et Nel Aerts. Toutes deux signent des expositions associant peintures et dessins et qui dévoilent leur imaginaire fantastique. Ginny Casey explore l’inquiétante étrangeté de la sphère domestique, tandis que Nel Aerts nous immerge dans sa psyché intérieure à travers l’émanation de la figure monstrueuse du cyclope.
Jana Schröder’s roaring, frenetic compositions have been lodged in my psyche since Nino Mier’s spectacular group exhibition last summer, “Painters Paint Paintings: LA Version,” curated by art advisor Alexander Warhus. Luckily, us New Yorkers will now have a Schröder all our own. I’m so looking forward to “PERLASYNTHICS,” which showcases her large masterpieces in the artist’s signature, saturated lexicon of scribbles and curling brushwork. The body of work will be rendered in fast-drying acrylic for the first time, and with a broader color range than ever before.
Acclaimed Australian photographer Polly Borland has taken shots of many people in the nude and now, for the first time, she has turned the camera on herself. For her latest series, the 64-year-old uses her body as sculpture, literally squishing bits of it together to create slightly abstract, occasionally surreal and often playful works.
Wat krijg je als je de woorden ‘oculus’, ‘cycloop’ en ‘copepod’ (eenoogkreeftje in het Engels) door de blender haalt? Dan krijg je het neologisme coclopie. Of toch in de fluïde fantasiewereld van Nel Aerts (°1987). Bij Nino Mier presenteert de Antwerpse kunstenares, bekend om haar kleurrijke, directe en grafi- sche beeldtaal, nieuwe olieverf- schilderijen en grafiettekeningen waarin eenogige wezens uit een patroon van strepen komen gekropen.
Reading Seyni Awa Camara’s practice feels very much like relating to a global tale made of many tales. Some are endemic to the place where the Senegalese artist was born; some are more globally African; some are emblematic of the countless stories Western art history needs to feed its narrative of non-Western artworks. Among these paths, maybe somewhere at the crossroads, stand Camara’s clay statuettes—the artist’s meditations on the maternal, mothering body.
Een tijger die in 1868 in de zoo van Antwerpen uit een kist ontsnapte en daarna in de stationsbuurt een paard aanrandde. De roes van de Amerikaanse dansmarathons, zoals de film They shoot horses, don’t they? die opriep. En nu weer een openluchttentoonstelling van dissi-dente Russische kunstenaars in een park in Moskou, in 1974, die ont-manteld werd door een als groendienst verklede knokploeg en sinds- dien bekendstaat als de Bulldozer exhibition.
“Being singled out and oppressed for being Black, I tried to toe the line,” Roger, 61, said. With just a few savings, Roger and his wife, Cathy, came to Canada from Trinidad and Tobago in 1988. Roger Ferreira is local painter focused on education as he explores Hamilton's heritage, bringing his Caribbean and Trinidad heritage to his work. Ferreira is part of a joint exhibit at AGH with his son Kareem-Anthony Ferreira.
When I first saw Blair Saxon-Hill’s assemblage installation at the 2021 New Museum Triennial Soft Water, Hard Stone, I instantly knew that I wanted to be in dialogue with this Portland-based artist. Her use of discarded materials and found objects spoke to my ongoing interest in queer artists’ engagement with the supposedly disposable fabrics of everyday life.
Dans cette nouvelle série, Wachholz explore les notions d’évasion et de loisirs dans ses compositions abstraites. Chaque œuvre condense un paysage entier en un nombre restreint de couleurs et de formes. En expérimentant avec les paysages que l’on trouve sur les cartes postales de vacances – avec des chaînes de montagnes, des plages et des couchers de soleil transformés en abstractions géométriques simplifiées -, la série développe le répertoire formel de Wachholz, caractérisé par des champs de couleurs opaques.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer is not the most gregarious of artists. Back in February, the brilliant, contemporary LA-based painter likened her typical level of human interaction to a “cloaked submarine.” Nevertheless, others have been crowding around Dupuy-Spencer’s work over the past twelve months.
It takes a minute to get your head around Lola Gil's somewhat surrealist composition, featuring a glass dog foregrounding a portrait of a woman. While it's hard to catch a glimpse of the woman behind, her portrait is reproduced, warped, and duplicated in various forms, on the smooth, reflective surface of the glass dog.
From Jocelyn Hobbie’s paintings of hyper-realistic models at Fredericks & Freiser in New York to Tony Matelli’s gravity defying sculptures at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, these exhibitions are not to be missed.
Two art shows in LA might look like your dining area after Thanksgiving. LA native Ryan Flores’ “The Fruit Vendor” features ceramic fruits and vegetables in varying states of freshness. Tony Matelli’s “Arrangements” has topsy-turvy flower arrangements, plus two lifelike sculptures of the artist himself with his head positioned off his neck.
Kyle Staver is an American painter who also works in relief sculpture, drawing, and etching. Engaging with canonical Western mythological and folkloric traditions, Staver finds her inspiration in sources ranging from the Bible to ancient Greek oral-poetic traditions. Staver captures critical moments within these narratives in her fastidiously refined color palettes, identifiable for their stark highlights and rich use of darker tones which blanket figures and their environments in shadow.
We all know how sought-after Scandinavian style has become, but this doesn't just stop at fashion; Scandi interior design is proving just as popular, with many wanting to emulate it in their own homes. Copenhagen-based fashion designer Stine Goya is known for her fun approach to fashion, with her collections featuring bold colour palettes, statement prints and sequinned head-to-toe looks – so, it comes as no surprise that her home echoes her joyous designs.
Mònica Subidé’s paintings are portraits and still lives set against shallow, color-blocked backdrops. The surfaces of each work are highly textural, either revealing the artist’s hand at work or incorporating collaged motifs beneath the paint. Subidé works with a formal language that refines scenes into their elemental parts, melding the figural with the geometric and the abstract in a quasi-cubist approach to figuration.
Over the past few years, changes have been afoot for artist Ethan Cook. While he still has a studio in Greenpoint and commutes there everyday, Ethan traded his Clinton Hill perch for a Soho loft. “I really wanted something different when I moved [back] into Manhattan, and this was the first place I saw when I started looking,” says Ethan, who had previously lived in Chinatown for over a decade. “I was happy to move and get a change of pace".
Repetition is the method to the miracle of artist Andrew Dadson. In 1970, National Geographic published its first Map of the Heavens, a celestial diagram of the night sky constellated with names of the ancient gods. Both the map and the map’s title were part of a cartography tradition spanning millennia. Stone carvings that chart the stars date as far back as the second century BC.
Birthed from equal parts make-believe and daily ritual, Seyni Awa Camara’s majestic humanoid clay sculptures evoke mythological deities, and are derived from her encounters with the folk gods of Senegal’s Wolof people. Born around 1945 in Bignona, Senegal, the Diola artist has been making work for the past five decades and receiving increased institutional recognition throughout Europe and Africa in the last twenty years.
Karen Robinovitz has a spidey sense for what’s about to be cool. For decades she’s collected contemporary art, snagging works by stars like Emily Mae Smith, Julie Curtiss, and Genesis Belanger just before they hit the big time. In 2010 she cofounded Digital Brand Architects, a talent management agency for influencers that cemented their role in the media landscape. By 2018, she was lurking on Etsy, buying, of all things, bespoke slime from savvy young makers who were not yet old enough to drink.
Kareem-Anthony Ferreira’s painting now hangs in the Los Angeles Lakers’ basketball star dining room. The former McMaster football player hit the pages of the latest Vanity Fair with his large scale “Dinner At Auntie Nicole’s House” shown in the background with LeBron James’ family seated at the table. Representing his Trinidadian roots, Ferreira’s paintings are relatable, with representations of family, like gatherings in the kitchen, Sunday lunches and the feeling of community.
LeBron James and Savannah Brinson met in 2002, when they were students at nearby high schools in Ohio and just as LeBron became a national phenomenon. The promise of his early expectations was staggering, but he went on to outstrip it. At 37, he’s not so much an elder statesman of the NBA as he is the engine of its contemporary business, politics, and presentation. He’s also vocal about being a family man. He and Savannah married in 2013, and they have three children, Bronny, Bryce, and Zhuri.
Among the standouts and discoveries in new art at the Javits Center fair are a Lakota artist, an emerging Cambodian American painter and a sculptor from Zimbabwe.
A bold and strong palette marks the surfaces of Cornelia Baltes’ large paintings: The German artist and London Slade School alumni perfectionated the play between abstract and figurative motifs on intense colour fields. Gradients, spray colours and fine brushstrokes are applied in thin layers. A shape that we may recognise on the canvases could be a peach or a bottom, or perhaps a set of eyes – these forever undefined “characters”, as Baltes refers to her paintings, convey joyfulness and humour. While preparing her solo exhibition “Waggle Dance” at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, we met in her Berlin studio to talk about how she defines titles for her works, about paintings as theatrical objects and about archives of ideas.
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Titled “Los Angeles Pines,” this group of screen prints, oil paintings and oils on paper by the Angeleno artist Jake Longstreth at this West Hollywood gallery brings a welcome sense of sunlight and air. Each work features a tree trunk, not necessarily pine, in front of a tennis court, parking lot or scrubby vista of low hills. Because foreground and background are rendered with the same mute colors in the same flat style — think of the comic artist Chris Ware— what could be mundane nature scenes become windows into the timeless uncanny.
Jansson Stegner paints people - just, not real people. He clarifies that his paintings are not portraits, but rather the culmination of composites of studio based studies, internet searches and his imagination. Lately, however, Stegner is shifting his approach toward portraiture and occasionally using a single sitter for his nevertheless highly stylized figures. Stegner credits his youthful infatuation with comic books for his interest in art and particularly exaggerated depictions of the human form.
“I’ve been extremely impressed by the energy of the Brussels art scene, ever since I participated in Art Brussels in 2016”, Nino Mier shared with Galerie. “When I was thinking about expanding into Europe, Brussels was really the first city I considered, because I remembered the great interest of the collectors and the seriousness of that interest. An artist recently told me that the conversations he had during the gallery dinner for his show were the most challenging, both intellectually and art historically, he has ever had. It rings to the core of the community—they care and they want to understand the work, deeply—which is less and less the case in today’s art world”.
Four works feature young Black swimmers, referencing a lack of access for Black people to beaches and pools. In Derek Fordjour’s magnificent Pool Boys (2019), the central figure, diving into the water, is collaged from material that includes newspaper stock market listings. It stands next to Lilo (2018) by Jonathan Wateridge, a white artist who is from Zambia.
Imagine if characters seen across modern sports and gambling arenas morphed into Pre-Colombian artifacts. That’s essentially a good starting point to describe Stefan Rinck’s new solo exhibition at Skarstedt. Housed at the gallery’s East Hampton location in New York, Semigods of the Jockey Club presents a series of totemic sculptures made of various materials, such as diabase, sandstone and cairo grey marble.
With two years on Newtown Lane under its belt, Skarstedt continues to mount museum-level shows that would be just as at home in its Upper East Side location. The most recently opened exhibition, ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’, is from Stefan Rinck, whose satirical surrealist-leaning sculptures of stone festoon symbols from sports, gambling, and popular culture into a cast of motley characters.
The New York-born artist Lola Montes moved to Sicily three years ago and soon realized there was something missing in her paintings on canvas. Perhaps they weren’t Sicilian enough, or just didn’t reflect her new environment. So she set up a kiln and a laboratory in her home, and began to make ceramics. Collaborating with local artisans, studying ancient techniques, Montes combined clay and volcanic ash from Mount Etna to create exquisite hand-painted tiles, reliefs, sculptural vessels, and candelabra. The results are ethereal.
Opening in August and remaining up through the close of summer 2022, Skarstedt’s East Hampton gallery will host a solo exhibition of work by German sculptor Stefan Rinck. This will be the first New York solo show for Rinck, who works primarily in stone and whose zoomorphic sculptures feel both humorous and archaeological, as if worthy of altar-like worship at times and
a good laugh at others.
Nino Mier Gallery, which was founded in Los Angeles in 2015 and has quickly been growing over the past seven years, will soon add a location in New York. Opening next January, the space will be inaugurated with a solo show of German artist Jana Schröder, who has been with the gallery since its earliest days. The New York location, located in SoHo, on Crosby Street between Spring and Broome streets, will be designed by Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA and led by Margaret Zuckerman, who has been a director at the gallery since 2018.
Ethan Cook is a Texas-born, New York-based artist known for his minimalist works and woven art. The abstract woven pieces feature color block compositions in bold colorways on self-made canvases. The geometric “paintings” are made from sewn pieces of canvas that Cook has woven on a four-harness floor loom. Once the various pieces are sewn together, they make up the canvas that’s then stretched on bars for hanging. Shaking things up, Cook has recently translated his signature aesthetic to woven Flat Works rugs designed for HAY.
The Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja makes photographs using herself as a model, but her images are less self-portraits than still-lifes. A deadpan protagonist—or a jarring centerpiece—she appears amid carefully staged arrangements of household objects, gazing into the camera with rich dispassion. Take the image “Fountain,” from 2021. The shot’s vantage foreshortens Susiraja’s reclining figure, exaggerating its proportions, rendering her bare legs and midsection mountainous while shrinking her head, which almost aligns with the composition’s vanishing point.
Four themes trend in the works included in Women Painting Women: The Body, Nature Personified, Color as Portrait, and Selfhood. Through these themes, the artists conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness, and joy, the portraits in this exhibition make way for female artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved.
Art21: Your paintings often start with a digital collage, what’s the process behind one of these paintings?
Cindy Phenix: I start by doing research and thinking about the general concept that I want to talk about in the painting, something happening in society. Then I have different scenes that I want to depict based on that idea. Once I’ve figured out the different scenes that I want to depict in a painting, I find pictures and images that fit these narratives. The majority of images I search for online, I also use images from reference books, and I walk around outside with my phone and take pictures....
Now in its third edition, the Marfa Invitational art fair brings together galleries, artists, and collectors to the remote desert town of Marfa, Texas. Part of the Big Bend, Marfa was established in 1880 as a water railway stop, then as a border trading outpost, and eventually becoming a military base. In 1971, Donald Judd relocated his artistic practice from New York to Marfa, setting up his home and studio in the former military base. Subsequently, Marfa became a hub for minimalist art. Marfa Invitational presents a wide range of art from outsider and folk art to sculpture, public installations, performances and contemporary art.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s only been just over a year since Beeple’s explosive sale at Sotheby’s changed the genetic makeup of the art market as knew it. Over the course of that year, a split has emerged between those in the art world that embrace web3 with aplomb, and those that have been forced to make peace with its presence. That tension was on full display at this year’s New Art Dealers Alliance fair in New York, its first in the city since 2018. Inside, digital art blended seamlessly with traditional art—which is quite a feat.
Andrea Joyce Heimer presents 24 paintings representing each hour of the day she lost her virginity in a new show '24 Hours' in Great Falls, Montana at Nino Mier Gallery. Opening March 26th, the show follows that day in Heimer’s life through the lead up, through noon when the fateful event occurred, and finishing out the remainder of the disappointed hours. “I look back at that day and think that’s where the trouble began. Of course it’s not that simple, but those twenty-four hours were formative,” writes Heimer in her statement. “I still find myself downstairs when I should be up”.
Working across painting and sculpture, Shapero layers found and broken objects, spray paint, mirrors and gold leaf, to create portals into other worlds and images of positive and negative space. In this video, she speaks to us about making and breaking her own rules to represent the cycle of life and dualities of experience in her work.
Nino Mier Gallery presents Women’s Work, an exhibition of photographs and videos by Finnish artist IIU SUSIRAJA. Susiraja is known for her still and moving image portraits, which capture the artist in her own home or her parents’ home, interacting with items such as housekeeping tools and pantry staples with prurient, deadpan humor. In Women’s Work, which will be on view from February 18 – March 19, 2022 in Los Angeles, Susiraja brings a sense of irreverent, macabre irony to the type of labor which extracts value from the display of women’s bodies.
Since 2007, the Finnish photographer and video artist Iiu Susiraja has made her own massive physique the centerpiece of her work. I vividly remember the first time I saw one of her early self-portraits, Broom, 2010, from her series “Good Behavior,” 2008–10. In this picture, the artist stands in the middle of what might be a kitchen or dining room, wearing a plain navy skirt and a drab, peasant-style blouse. Wedged beneath her breasts, unencumbered by a brassiere, is the long wooden handle of the namesake object. Her short, choppy haircut—“soft prison butch” seems an appropriate way of characterizing it—exacerbates an unsettling gaze, which is equal parts bemusement, frustration, and quiet fury. It is Susiraja’s trademark expression.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer is one of LA’s most sought after artists, and the art world can’t get enough of her work. ON THE MORNING of January 6, 2021, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, like most Americans, was going about her business as usual. She’d recently completed an ambitious suite of 15 allegorical paintings for her solo debut at Galerie Max Hetzler, her Berlin dealer, who also represents art stars like Ai Weiwei and Julian Schnabel. One depicted oil rigs burning in the sea; another, a medieval army killing everything in its path; still another, a parade of elephants representing the 3.5 billion-year march of evolution.
In a new monograph and exhibition at Santa Monica’s Nino Mier Gallery, the Los Angeles–based painter mines for beauty and meaning in retail chains. Jake Longstreth’s paintings document the suburban landscapes most Americans are all too familiar with, but few artists are interested in capturing—the monotonous commercial strips that house clusters of nearly identical retail and restaurant chains that stretch from coast to coast. With a new show titled Seasonal Concepts at Nino Mier Gallery in West Hollywood, the Los Angeles–based painter documents the decline of a brick-and-mortar retail culture that few are likely to mourn.
“There was a really odd wokey line in an explanatory side-bar to one painting of a black woman who helped Neel around the house. The portrait was of this woman with her infant son…– One of dozens Neel did of moms…and neighborhood people – Anyway – the curators hinted that the picture evoked a certain exploitative relation…- Maybe… but that surely wasn’t obvious…– And I thought to myself – this painter had NO money for decades – no studio EVER… – and lived in hoods the Met curators would never have set foot in…So their tut tuts seems FUCT to me!”
For many, The Armory Show’s 2020 VIP preview marked the last moment of normal before the world paused: in a heartbeat, museums and galleries shuttered, art fairs postponed, then cancelled, and dealers rushed to sophisticated virtual platforms. But Thursday morning saw the official emergence from this long hibernation, as the first major American fair returned with VIP hours and fresh September dates at the sprawling Javits Center.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer moves between styles, gestures and a history of painting to interrogate the American experience. Hailed by curators and critics as a leading artist of her generation, she's known for her energetic brushwork and incorporating a montage of visual language. Celeste’s paintings grapple with existential questions through figures and scenes that are at once confrontational and tender. Community and more broadly, society - in all its contradictions - is often the protagonist in a body of work that aims to capture the ever-evolving nature of America.
Jon Pylypchuk - I Know I'll Never Love this Way Again
'I was really trying to paint what it feels like to be living in the fall of human civilization' - Celeste Dupuy-Spencer on her powerful new Artspace edition. The highly acclaimed young American artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer artist paints visceral, visionary, figurative works, which draw on her own personal fears, wider political and social pressures, as well as the existential conflicts within the human condition.
Polly Borland is an Australian photographer who currently resides in Los Angeles. She is best known as a commercial photographer who specialized in editorial and portrait work. Her extensive resume and online portfolio reflects the scope of this impressive career. At Nino Mier, for the first time, she turns the camera on herself to create a highly personal body of work titled Nudie. Borland’s Nudies may be thought of as “selfies” — digital photographs made with an iPhone camera to share with an audience— as she even often creates them using a selfie stick, but unlike traditional selfies, these images are not about showing off where one has been or who one has been with.
Louise Bonnet’s third solo exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery draws inspiration from Agnes Varda's enigmatic film Vagabond (1985) about a drifter, Mona, traversing the French countryside. These seven large paintings made during the pandemic lockdown evoke the feeling of being adrift - the new existential dilemma we all had to face alone with the loss of our usual structures for living. These paintings of discontinuous scenes recall still cinematic images from a pan shot, since we know they are part of a longer narrative but we can only imagine what happened before and after what we see.
Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero creates extraordinary, layered paintings that come together as kaleidoscopic vortexes of colour. Shapero's exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery marks the artist's first in Belgium, presenting 12 paintings that are referred to as 'scars', their surfaces the result of accumulations of stencils created using studio scraps, delicately overlaid with gold leaf. Describing her work as 'a run on sentence', Shapero's paintings and sculptures often incorporate materials such as wire, dowls, paper, and beeds, which feed into their surfaces of infinite detail.
Los Angeles-based, Switzerland-born painter Louise Bonnet is hosting her third solo exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery, where seven new oil paintings have convened for their debut. Each completed one year into pandemic-induced quarantine, Bonnet’s new works are inspired by a film about an enigmatic wanderer in Agnès Varda’s French drama Vagabond (1985). Bonnet’s work teeters on the line between beauty and grotesque, enlisting exaggerated proportions and distorted features for her signature figures among vivd-yet-sparse backdrops, and this latest range is no different.
Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting “Vagabond,” an exhibition of new works by Louise Bonnet. Exploring themes of melancholy, displacement, and nostalgia in her practice, here Bonnet’s signature exaggerated characters follow ideas from Varda’s film—which follows the protagonist Mona through a portrayal of her travels that uphold a sense of personal privacy—yielding a sequence of connected scenes expressing frustrations about societal expectations for women to always remain accommodating and available.
For the solo exhibition “Nudie” Australian photographer Polly Borland has, after a long career, turned the lens on herself for the very first time. Using an iPhone camera, she challenges ‘selfie’ tropes and social media culture of self-worship and self-image through contorted, grotesque oversized nudes. These confrontational photographic prints amplify her aging body with tightly cropped frames that seem sculptural and surreal in their abstraction. The artist twists, kneads, flips and folds her body, handling her flesh like a malleable material while also steering her iPhone camera with a selfie stick.
"It's true that sometimes I've had to explain what my paintings were not about," Los Angeles-based, Swiss-born painter Louise Bonnet told me a few years back in her interview in Juxtapoz. That's a great insight into the part of an artist's practice that often we as writer's take for granted. The talking about what the work isn't. Bonnet is a rare painter where when the pandemic began, you got the sense that her characters in the works would be telling you about their experiences, that they would illicit even more a conversation about who they were. What these paintings weren't wouldn't be an option, it was about what they (and we) were becoming.
Most photographers love having the ability to hide behind the camera, relishing the agency it affords them. Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based Polly Borland isn’t immune to these pleasures. “I like photography because it’s about control,” Borland says on a Zoom call from her native Australia, where she’s spent the entirety of the pandemic. Though Borland devoted the first three decades of her career to crafting decadent, erotic, and uncannily hypnotic images of others, she’s rarely trained her lens on herself. For her breakout series, The Babies, she documented a group of infantilist fetishists.
The first time I saw these works I was reminded of Italian artist Enrico Baj, who like Blair, loved to combine scraps of fabrics, trimmings and found objects to compose seemingly grotesque portraits. In this presentation at Frieze, Saxon-Hill brings a cohort of formidable portraits, alternating large canvases with modest collages. Take a close look to appreciate all the details of the surface!
"Most paintings have an autobiographical core," Majic told Juxtapoz about the connecting theme between the works in his debut with the gallery. "There is no predetermined arch for this group of works but prior work inspires new work as an ongoing conversation." Such continuing effect of the works' narrative comes to light with a harmonious display in which the small-scale snapshots are creating a linear storyline that skips from lush rainforest-like scenes over domestic settings, to the portrayal of inconspicuous subjects.
The title of the 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” is taken from a Brazilian proverb: Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole). The proverb can be said to have two meanings: if one persists long enough, the desired effect can eventually be achieved; and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. The title speaks to ideas of resilience and perseverance, and the impact that an insistent yet discrete gesture can have in time.
The New Museum Triennial, one of the few biennials set to take place this year, has revealed an artist list for its next edition, which is due to open in October. Organized by New Museum curator Margot Norton and Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles senior curator Jamillah James, the exhibition will focus loosely on forms of perseverance and the ways that the past informs the present.
Inland Water presents a series of Wateridge’s recent paintings through which the Zambian-born artist provides a glimpse into private and intimate scenes of poolside affluence visually echoing Wateridge’s memories of his suburban upbringing during an era of immense racial and economic inequality in his birth country. While tied to the artist’s own history, the imagery escapes the limits of personal narrative and geographic location as Wateridge’s cinematic compositions establish a familiar and uncanny atmosphere permeating the façade of comfortable leisure.
Two years ago, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer walked into an evangelical mega-church, and had a profound experience. A self-professed atheist with progressive politics who doesn’t believe in what she refers to as the “sky daddy,” Dupuy-Spencer was nevertheless moved by a sense of unconditional love. “Out of a room full of holy people, Jesus loves the sinner the most,” she says. She continued attending the church until COVID-19 shut it down; to this day, she continues not to believe in God.
If you’re hoping to move on quickly from the memory of the deadly January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building, Nino Mier’s Los Angeles gallery is not the place for you. If you want to bask in the rightness of your opposition to the right wing, also not so much. At the gallery, you’ll be confronted with Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2020), a seven-foot-square painting by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer depicting the deadly insurrection, when thousands stormed Washington in an attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden.
For her entire career as an artist, Nikki Maloof has been afraid that she only has a finite number of paintings within her. Whenever she puts one on canvas, she’s worried that she’s tapped from the decreasing number of paintings still left — like eggs from an ovary, perhaps. “This could be the end,” she always tells herself. From the perspective of a critic who has watched her work for many years, Maloof is not running out of paintings; rather, her talent is swelling, growing, conquering all other painters, like the way the alien proto-molecule conquers human life in the television series 'The Expanse', if you’ll forgive the reference.
The best thing about Ezra Koenig, host of the cult-favorite internet radio show Time Crisis, is that he treats every cultural artifact that comes across his desk with the same care. The best thing about the show’s other host, Jake Longstreth, is that he absolutely does not. Founded in 2015 by Koenig, who is also the frontman of the popular indie rock band Vampire Weekend, Time Crisis currently airs every two weeks on Apple Music.
While barreling toward the end of this bleak year, we offer a bright spot in the wonderful variety of art books released this winter. (Excellent alternatives to doomscrolling, all.) Whether you’re longing for the familiarity of opening your mailbox to find a postcard from a far-off locale, looking to turn back time on your favorite city, or wanting to fall completely into a whimsical world with only soft edges, we have just the thing for you—or a loved one who needs their own pick-me-up!
Nino Mier Gallery will present four group exhibitions featuring artists on their gallery roster, each on view for only one day at the gallery. While it’s common to replace artworks daily at art fairs as works are sold, Nino Mier’s pre-planned exhibitions allow for conversations to emerge between their artists, whose work becomes recontextualized with each curated display.
Bonnet’s exhibition, titled “The Hours”, wasn’t originally intended to be viewable only through glass. “From the street, it’s really hard to see,” she admits, noting that the glare of the sun can be especially punishing. “I think at night, it probably looks its best,” she says. But even then, Bonnet feels the paintings need to be seen up close to be understood.
Who is MAMON? Mamon is the new leader of our Danish farm Østerfælden - a cow-cat as a: weapon, a performer, a chief of forest, a melancholiac, a powerplant, a defender, a wanderer, a peacemaker, a connoisseur, a beauty, an h-bomb, an ignorant, a tactician, a killer, a yes-sayer, a charmer, a 48-name-cat, a no-sayer, a multi-radar-tracker - a huge conterpart - big enough to host the whole world inside her black and white body and impressing enough to be thrown back into the evolution: being Mamon.
Though they may sit dusty on the shelf in Mom and Dad’s rec room or live boxed in a corner of the basement, our family photo albums make sacred texts. Those four-by-sixes remembering summer vacations and holiday get-togethers long ago, the Polaroids of picnics and birthday parties: they tell important stories about who we are and where we’ve come from. Recorded in ancient photo chemicals, these moments and memories are the stuff identity is made of.
From Saturday, October 24, 2020, the "André Butzer" exhibition will be held at the Kiyoharu Art Village Tadao Ando's Museum of Light. Andre Butzerbach is a German painter who has been highly acclaimed around the world, with items released in collaboration with CELINE in May of this year. In this exhibition, one of his representative series, <N-Paintings>, will be exhibited.
Mamon is the new leader of our Danish farm Østerfælden - a cow-cat as a: weapon, a performer, a chief of forest, a melancholiac, a powerplant, a defender, a wanderer, a peacemaker, a connoisseur, a beauty, an h-bomb, an ignorant, a tactician, a killer, a yes-sayer, a charmer, a 48-name-cat, a no-sayer, a multi-radar-tracker - a huge conterpart - big enough to host the whole world inside her black and white body and impressing enough to be thrown back into the evolution: being Mamon.
Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, a first-generation Canadian, completed his BFA at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 2012 and his MFA at the University of Arizona in 2020. Using a combination of painting and collage, Ferreira builds richly textured surfaces upon large-scale unstretched canvases, depicting intimate scenes that negotiate his Canadian and Trinidadian heritage.
These paintings were inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the “books of hours” that functioned as time planners through the depiction of daily prayers and seasonal activities. However, rather than honest labors, Bonnet’s Hours foregrounds a series of impossibly distorted, ambiguously gendered figures engaged in nightmarish variations on mundane routines, such as eating and sleeping.
A selection of paintings by artist Kareem-Anthony Ferreira. First generation Canadian with strong Trinidadian roots, Ferreira’s work incorporates black portraiture, non-indigenous patterning and mixed media collage to explore themes of cultural divergence and the sense of being rooted in multiple places at the same time. In tracing patterns of identity — be it personal, familial or social — Ferreira aims to challenge overly simplistic perceptions by offering compositions that allow disparate communities, traits, and identities to coexist.
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ICH MALE AUSSCHLIESSLICH ABSTRAKT – IMMER. AUCH WENN FIGUREN ZU ERKENNEN SIND. A couple of months ago, the opening bid at Sotheby’s for a picture was 40,000 dollars, but it ended up fetching 175,000 dollars. Philips advertised another for 25,000 dollars and sold it for 143,000 dollars. Today, André Butzer is one of the most influential and successful contemporary artists of his generation, and his pieces achieve record prices every year.
The Swiss artist Louise Bonnet creates offbeat paintings featuring figures with exaggerated, mind-bending bodily proportions. Her characters usually lack a face; but then again, there's no need for one when you can express yourself with every muscle to its extremes. Stretching and contorting, often in the nude, they seem to shout both their shame and their total lack of it. But what is it she and her critters are hiding under all that hair?
West Hollywood’s Nino Mier Gallery is the next art space to launch an online viewing room to support its entire roster of artists. Aptly titled “PAPER (and one on wood),” the digital presentation largely features works on paper with the exception of one piece on wood by both local and international artists.
Andrea Joyce Heimer, an artist and former horse trainer, paints folksy figures who live side by side, yet are isolated. Ms. Heimer’s suburban subjects cook, sew, exercise and sleep in rooms that evoke cramped dollhouses, but their blank expressions convey an unsettling strain. The coronavirus pandemic now has the artist living out that very scenario at her home and studio in Ferndale, Wash., a small city almost 100 miles north of Seattle.
Georg Karl Pfahler will have his debut exhibition in Texas at at the Dallas Art Fair, October 1–4. Though he passed away in 2002 at the age of 76, his work is as crisp and vibrant today as when it was created decades ago. This one-person exhibition will be the focus of Nino Mier Gallery’s program at this year’s fair.
What can I say? I’m totally in awe of Jansson Stegner’s genuinely weird approach to figuration. The people that populate his world come from the uncanny valley of just-distorted-enough to tickle my brain, full of muscular huntresses captured in gloriously active poses.
The art of Jansson Stegner interests me - I've been a fan of his mannerist figurative works for many years. His work appeals to my own way of making paintings - mostly for his interest in old paintings from history. I could list artists (other than myself), who also share this interest - Christian Rex Van Minnen comes to mind, John Currin, Trevor Guthrie, Robin F. Williams and others... But Jansson Stegner is an artist who has developed a shockingly original style all his own.
With elongated bodies and distorted proportions, Jansson Stegner's paintings of strong female characters seem to invert gender roles and get us thinking about identity and power today.
Don't miss shows by Mamma Andersson, Neha Vedpathak, and Jessica Jackson Hutchins in the city during Armory week.
Behind a red curtain at Nino Mier Gallery, a wallpaper of squiggled brush strokes on a mottled yellow background sets a particular scene. Within this, eight mirror-cum-drawings are hanging about, each one a delicate line drawing, depicting a female nude at a piano, or a man dancing with a bowler hat. Yet the faint figurative outlines meld with reflections of both the wallpaper and the viewer’s own reflection, making the drawings difficult to see clearly.
Muscular men, poised for action and blushing, acquiescent women have historically populated the world of portraiture, each mirroring a prevailing male perception of the human form. This premise has been both template and challenge for the painterly practice of Jansson Stegner.
Typical of Pylypchuk’s figurative sculptures, these are cobbled from everyday objects and junkyard scraps: The “king” is primarily composed of a stack of tires, while the flanking figures are assembled from wood planks and tires, and the rest have soccer balls for heads and utility gloves for feet.
American artist William N. Copley (1919-1996), also known by his adopted moniker CPLY (pronounced ‘see-ply’), is widely celebrated for his eccentric and erotic imagery that combines a distinct sensibility of Pop and Surrealism. In 1948, when the artist was twenty-nine, Copley opened the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills.
Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based figurative painter Louise Bonnet has cool cachet in spades and a résumé to match. Bonnet moved to LA after graduating from art school, but her rise to contemporary ‘It’ artist, with a waitlist of art collectors, was a bumpy transition.
Swiss-born artist Louise Bonnet is a painter based in Los Angeles. She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles. Bonnet explores melancholy, nostalgia, and displacement in her exaggerated, surrealist portraits.
At Akbank Sanat in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district, an eclectic group show has brought a multigenerational slice of Turkish and European art history to Istanbul's core. 'Regular Insanity,' curated by Marcus Graf, includes works by Joseph Beuys and Komet
In a panoply of patterns, textures, brushstrokes and marks done with an array of tools, Rebecca Ness renders the hyper vibrant world before her. Framed exactly the way she perceives them, seemingly unimportant moments in her daily commute and casual snapshots from everyday life are encapsulated in color.
The Finnish Art Society has selected the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja as the recipient of its $15,500 William Thuring Foundation Prize, which was established as an award for midcareer artists between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Susiraja, who was born in 1975 and lives in Turku, Finland, works primarily in photographic and video-based self-portraiture to make art that relates to feminine performance, psychoanalysis, and body humor.
The Finnish Art Society has selected the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja as the recipient of its $15,500 William Thuring Foundation Prize, which was established as an award for midcareer artists between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Susiraja, who was born in 1975 and lives in Turku, Finland, works primarily in photographic and video-based self-portraiture to make art that relates to feminine performance, psychoanalysis, and body humor.
Each of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s acrylic paintings begins as a written story. Even if the viewer isn’t able to know every detail of her narratives, the painter’s work gives us the chance to piece her myths ourselves. The artist offers some personal reasons why this process is so integral to her practice.
I like to highlight how we mask the fact that we are really just animals. There’s something ridiculous about the concept of underwear. To emphasize how we hide. The see-through veil has no practical application. We tend to overcompensate as humans.
Whether referring to the psychological interior, the physical space of the home, or the grand-scale politics of the world, the theme is ripe for artists including Chloe Wise, Vaughn Spann, Natalie Ball, Louise Bonnet, Ginny Casey, and Genieve Figgis, among others.
Unter dem Stilbegriff „Science-Fiction-Expressionismus“ begann André Butzers Karriere als deutscher Maler, der sich genauso an der nationalsozialistischen Geschichte wie an Walt Disney und Micky Mouse abarbeitete.
Rebecca Ness once worked as a particularly sharp-eyed courtroom sketch artist. It’s been a busy year since we last spoke with the Massachusetts native, who recently completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Yale and heads to New York’s 1969 Gallery to present her newest observations in a presentation she calls Twice Over.
Here, the word “Domestic” contains a potent double meaning: it is a reminder that in both one’s home life as well as in a larger cultural context and national life, unintended consequences can occur when external pressures meet internalized anxieties. This exhibition, which includes a number of young and emerging artists, probes the tension between civilized order and chaotic disorder.
Some of Australia’s most respected and celebrated artists, including Polly Borland, Sonia Payes, Danie Mellor, David Rosetzky, Justine Varga, Stephen Dupont and Jacqui Stockdale – just to name a few, will be exhibited at Monash Gallery of Art from 5 October until 17 November 2019. Nearly 700 entries were received this year.
The exhibition Dry Joy by Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja presents a selection of her works from a period of more than ten years. Susiraja creates candid and honest photographs and videos with a sense of warmth and humour. Although she appears in the works herself, they are not simply self-portraits but rather performances for the camera. Susiraja’s photographs and videos will be on display in at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki from March 15 onwards. The show includes both early works and more recent oeuvre.
When Polly Borland met Jacqueline Hunt and Patrick Blue of Jac+ Jack, it was love at first sight. A strictly professional and creative love, of course. While sharing the same building for their respective studios in Los Angeles, they bonded over their shared love for colour and texture. Jac+Jack commissioned the Australian artist to create a series of images, and thus their professional collaboration began. The Polly Borland Project Zine is the sum of these images.
Renowned set designer and artist Gary Card collaborates with Phillips London to transform the auction house’s Berkeley Square gallery into an immersive landscape with a selling exhibition titled HYSTERICAL.
The exhibition will showcase and sell works by the likes of Erik Parker, Harold Ancart, Cindy Sherman, Nicolas Party, Kenny Scharf, Andre Butzer, Ugo Rondinone, Paul McCarthy and Joyce Pensato. Gary Card has created an immersive backdrop to house this vast selection of artwork, which each draw upon on farcical and neurotic themes within contemporary art.
The queer painters taking the stage of contemporary art grew up in a very different world than their predecessors. A generation removed from the AIDS crisis, these artists came of age with relative freedom and security. Now, they are embracing the canon, looking far back into the history of figurative painting and making it their own.
André Butzer recently moved from his native Germany to Los Angeles, and has shifted directions in his painting. Where his last show featured monochromatic black canvases, the artist has embraced color in his vibrant new works. But Butzer doesn’t see the change as particularly dramatic. “Nothing was ever not about color. Color is a potency, a fusion,” he said in a statement.
The Swiss Artist who swapped Geneva for LA in the nineties to paint the visceral weirdness of the human body.
2019's Kids Art Museum Project, the Hammer Museum’s hottest art party for kids, inspired the next generation by providing access to 14 accomplished artists as well as celebrity readings conducted by Ki Hong Lee, Elizabeth Chambers Hammer, Joe Manganiello, Sofía Vergara and John Stamos.
Joanne Greenbaum looks like she’s having a lot of fun at Richard Telles, where her paintings and sculptures possess an energetic whimsy that reflects their improvised creation.
The 37th iteration of Art Brussels, now impressively ensconced in the spectacular Tour & Taxis, the former Royal Customs House, opened to a V.I.P crowd on April 25, and with its high glass roof and industrial proportions, the fair’s 148 participating galleries had a great concrete canvas to work with.
This year for our 37th edition, Art Brussels continues to be pivotal to the development of the city’s dynamic art scene.
Now on view at New York space Kasmin Gallery, artist Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann is mounting a debut solo exhibition, bringing with him a collection of new paintings that see the artist continuing to revel in both gestural abstraction and the history of 20th-century animation, aspects that combine to imbue his work with a rare sense of kinetic energy.
The standouts include two crimson-and-purple-toned paintings by Katherine Bradford, “Brothers” and “Boxers Under Lights,” in which flat male figures are crossed and stacked like I-beams, and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s “Anastasis of the Wild,” in which a gorgeous multicolored wolf trots alongside its own incarnate shadow.
Seeing a reproduction of Louise Bonnet's painting The Pond (all works 2018) on the invitation to her exhibition made me both curious and skeptical. It shows a woman posing in an uncomfortable, if not impossible, backbend curve, her form conjuring a shortened bridge, with her hands and feet under water. What we mainly see is a large body against a dark background.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer invokes the devotional in her portraits and landscape scenes. There is something hallowed in her depictions of the mundane – a gathering of women, a hem on a shawl, a man at an electronic keyboard. A light ekes in, casting an eerie yet pleasant glow. In some works, the artist employs a faint chiaroscuro, transforming ordinary moments into dramatic narratives.
Exciting benefit auction featuring internationally acclaimed artists Isaac Julien CBE RA, James Turrell, Keith Tyson as well as rising stars currently drawing huge attention; Claire Tabouret and Louise Bonnet. This unique auction includes a money-can't-buy experience with renowned photographer Miles Aldridge, who will create a Hollywood film set where he will shoot your bespoke family portrait.
The Eugene native and Portland artist works at the intersection of several mediums, including photography, sculpture, painting, printmaking and site-specific installations. In 2015 she described her work to Oregon Arts Watch as prompting “considerations of material, space, presence and absence".
The evening after Brett Kavanaugh secured his Supreme Court nomination, elite Evangelicals held a party in North Carolina. At the Westin in Charlotte, the Council for National Policy—an outfit that oil heir T. Cullen Davis co-founded after he discovered Jesus and after a jury acquitted him of double murder—had gathered for their annual meetings. Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife, and Nikki Haley attended, among senators and strategists. They were happy that night.
Kowalski’s work is enigmatic in nature – strange yet familiar scenes host an array of mysterious narratives: each work an intricate tableau collected from a fragmented reality. Figures navigate through peculiar landscapes, their bodies changing with the environments around them, consumed by space.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has religion on her mind – not individual faith, which is based in spiritual apprehension, but the equivocal structural systems that grow up around it. Those systems today define much of American life, even if they are rarely considered in art. She seems determined to break the silence.
The German painter Bendix Harms has done few interviews, and so far, all of them have been on his own terms: published by his gallery, and conducted with friends and fellow painters. The talks provide an opening into his lexical world, a place where he invents words to better approximate the meaning in his mind, and where he breaks the restriction of directly answering questions. He uses words with the poetic freedom of his ecstatic brushwork. Likewise, his pictures never illustrate: the narratives they depict are irreducible to common sentences.
Die Ausstellung VOTE im Kunstverein Heppenheim zeigt die beiden Künstler*innen Andreas Breunig und Jana Schröder. Das von den beiden gewählte Konzept sieht einen Wettstreit vor, in dem die beiden gegeneinander antreten.
For Jon Pylypchuk, scraps of wood, expanding foam insulation, some quick spray paint and a handful of found objects have been constructive materials for making sculpture over the years. Five new works show him running at top form.
She counts Nick Cave as a close friend, has photographed Queen Elizabeth and Cate Blanchett and is married to Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat, who is best known for his film The Proposition. For all her black book high-fives, Polly Borland is a force in her own right, and now, in a career first, the NGV will honour the Australian artist with a retrospective, Polyverse.
Louise Bonnet arrived in LA from Geneva as a young graphic designer for a one-year job and never left. Now a painter, she’s inspired by comics, Popeye, Peter Saul, and Surrealism. She inflates parts of women’s bodies — noses, breasts, arms, and legs — to look like bubblegum, balloons, or funny sex toys, then covers the faces with haircuts shaped like a penis.
The art in some exhibitions makes you feel as if the artist who made it is just going through the motions — phoning it in. More common but just as unsatisfying is the feeling that the artist is trying too hard — forcing efforts that mesh with expectations about what art is supposed to do, how it’s supposed to look and what it’s supposed to mean. It’s rare for an exhibition to seem as if it does both simultaneously. But that is what happens at iiu Susiraja’s first solo show in Los Angeles, titled “What Am I?”
In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, critic Jonathan Crary articulates an exasperated, contemporary state of permanent awareness produced by hyper-connectivity and continuous consumption. As if providing an antidote to today’s demand for perpetual presence, the works of Tomasz Kowalski suggest a conception of society where sleep, introspection, dreaming and wakefulness are equally present.
The UCLA Hammer Museum’s much-anticipated biennial survey of new art produced in the city has just opened its fourth iteration. “Made in L.A. 2018” is the best one yet. Part of the reason comes from simple, dramatic contrast. Since the show’s last outing in 2016, American society has been plunged into a period of destructive nastiness and malice. Art is inherently its opposite.
Two shows at The Pit delineate visionary worlds of wacky flourish and dazzling variegation. In The Pit II, Mindy Shapero‘s psychedelic installation vivifies the alienness of Nye’s painted world. As you step inside, it seems discourteous to tread upon the meticulously hand-embellished floorcloth of reflective foil within Shapero’s dystopic funhouse that queasily unravels your sense of orientation.
In L.A. artist Mindy Shapero’s installation “Second Sleep,” the boldly painted walls, sculptures and floor make you feel woozy while never letting you forget that art works in mysterious ways — just like a dream, except that you’re wide awake.
Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude? Paintings of naked women, usually by clothed men, are suddenly sitting very uncomfortably on gallery walls. Male artists wonder whether they can work with the female form, while the world questions what their intentions were in the first place.
I was lucky to see André Butzer’s new paintings on a sunny winter day, with natural light coming in to make visible what is hidden in their black surfaces. There were eight big and nine medium-size dark paintings in Galerie Max Hetzler’s Bleibtreustraße location, along with one very large and colorful canvas, a small work on paper executed in colored pencil and crayon, and an artist’s book.
Louise Bonnet’s figures—male and female, if they can be said to contour to recognizably gendered forms—lean more towards Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. Her current show at Nino Mier Gallery places a heavy emphasis on cartoonish disfiguration and exaggeration: fun, campy, and menacing all at once.
Louise Bonnet's lush (and louche) paintings render the human body as a delightfully grotesque agglomeration of swollen extremities. Louise Bonnet doesn't fit the bill of the fledgling art phenom. The Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based artist has sketched all her life, but she only began painting in earnest a decade ago, well into her thirties.
Occasionally a series of paintings comes across your feed or your email or however you gather your art appreciation, that just blows you away. We had that moment seeing the previews and eventually full body of work that is Louise Bonnet's newest show, New Works, now on view at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles. The ever-expanding legions that inhabit the world of Louise Bonnet’s paintings embody an intriguing and bizarre duality; they tell us very little while manifesting a whole shit ton.
Rebecca's art gets straight to the heart of being young today, urgently questioning, uncomfortable, wanting more. The people in Rebecca Ness's paintings are pictured trawling the internet, washing the dishes, shaving, eating. The unremarkablenss of these scenes however is what makes them interesting. In the often lonely, banalness of everyday life, we recognize ourselves and in Rebecca's figures we see our own experiences illustrated.
In detailed tableaux, the painter, who works in Washington State, adapts the stylized red-and-black figures that adorn ancient Greek vases to explore a personal dilemma in epic terms. Adopted at birth, Heimer was recently given the choice to learn the names of her birth parents, thanks to a 2015 bill passed in her native Montana.
Week after week, reading the women’s stories on the bus ride home, they began to seem like one big story, like the same story told over and over. Someone is always being beaten, someone is always in pain. Someone is always being treated like a slave. A thing.
Nino Mier Gallery is currently presenting Jansson Stegner's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This new series of oil paintings that ascribe male and female figures with exaggeratedly rendered physiques explores the inversion of gender roles within myriad aspects of authority, dominance, submission and beauty.
“I think the best way to find out more about the contemporary art world is to experience it for yourself… immerse yourself in it,” says Annie Vartivarian, co-founder of Letitia Gallery, a new contemporary gallery opening in Beirut in February. “Attend gallery openings, museum exhibitions, talks, auctions and if possible visit artist’s studios.
"I'm dating a committedly masochist painter," my friend Sarah told me about a year ago. "Her name is Celeste." The name and description piqued my interest and kept popping up - on the address line of the airmail letter Sarah asked me to drop in the post, on Eileen Myle's Instagram feed, halfway through Meggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and eventually in my inbox inviting me to Celeste Dupuy-Spencer's most recent show, Wild and Blue, at Marlborough Contemporary this past fall.
Los Angeles based painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer frequently mines news stories and her own personal experiences for her work's content, producing contemporary genre paintings that are politically charged but ambiguous in meaning. Most of the twelve paintings and five drawings featured in "Wild and Blue"—the first solo exhibition in New York for DupuySpencer, who was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial—were made after the 2016 presidential election. Overall, the selection foregrounded the complexity and texture of American life today.
Photographer Polly Borland is not sure where her dark imagery comes from, but she suspects her home town played a part. "Maybe it had something to do with growing up in my household and the suburbs of Melbourne," she says. Speaking on the eve of her latest exhibition, she says that "Melbourne is infected by a darkness, maybe to do with its own history and the treatment of the Indigenous people of Australia ... I feel there's a stain on Australia right up to present day, seen with its treatment of adults and children seeking asylum on Nauru. It's horrifying how official policy can be so cruel and against all human rights".
“We are exploring how artists are expanding the concept of abstraction to reflect the contemporary world,” Deitch said, not one to spoil the surprise. “A number of the artists in the show work on the boundary between abstraction and representation.” All will be revealed when “Abstract / Not Abstract” lets in its first visitors the morning of December 6. Glean what you can from the artist list below, which is still growing and evolving.
Young queer artists today do not face the same kind of social and health crisis as their predecessors in the ’80s and ’90s - when Felix Gonzalez-Torres commemorated the loss of his lover, Ross, to AIDS, and made his sink sculptures in the wake of the epidemic. Many young artists are now free to focus on the joys of life, rather than lamentations of death.
With a wry observation of detail and a near-Fauvist palette, the American figurative painter—a standout in this year’s Whitney Biennial—intertwines the personal and the political. She also works fast: in her characteristically small-scale “Durham, August 14, 2017,” she commemorates the recent toppling of a Confederate statue in front of a North Carolina courthouse, showing the crumpled metal soldier defeated in sunlit grass, the smudgy legs of protesters in the background.
In the sitting room, a Jean Royère polar bear chair nestles among works by Ugo Rondinone, Jeremy Deprez, Allan McCollum, and Stefan Rinck. Lamp by Serge Mouille; Edward Fields rug. Art fills the master bedroom: from left, pieces by Brent Wadden, Piero Gilardi, Stefan Rinck, and Isaac Brest; Vladimir Kagan sofa; Fortuny pendant lamp; curtains of a Pierre Frey fabric.
Today's painting attempts to reconcile dreams, lived histories and the urgent task of modelling new futures". David Greer reflects on the ascendence of figurative painting in recent New York exhibitions - including works by Lisa Brice, Jordan Casteel, Peter Doig, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Mark Thomas Gibson and Emily Mae Smith - and the critical questions it poses about which bodies we depict, for whom and to what end.
Paintings by artists such as Celeste Dupuy-Spencer representing strong butch women of in their lives.
Jordan Casteel paints the street life of Harlem and its black residents, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer the quirky, and often decrepit, trappings of whiteness. But don't let their subject matter fool you. At heart, these two young artists—both of whom are having buzz-worthy solo shows in New York galleries right now— share a common idea: that to deal with our racist past and present, we need to see the world with empathy and care. The results are compelling, and transformative, and, in very different ways, beautiful.
This sui-generis artist has long envisioned—and occasionally realized—exceptionally humane public projects. Her best-known piece is “Wheatfield—A Confrontation,” from 1982, for which the New York-based artist cultivated two acres of grain near the Twin Towers to draw attention to global hunger. In 1993, Denes transformed a gravel pit in Finland into a small mountain patterned with eleven thousand trees, each one assigned its own human custodian.
The work of Louise Bonnet induces both amusement and anxiety in the viewer. Most of her drawings and paintings include an instantly recognizable type of character. Their extremities are mostly blown out to gigantic proportions, and their noses, in particular, expand to titanesque proportions. While all those mastodonic organs – hands, feet, noses – definitely indicate a certain confidence in the precision of our senses, Bonnet’s protagonists usually don’t have eyes, and so one imagines them navigating whatever environment they’re in with an intuitive clumsiness.
Swiss-born artist Louise Bonnet is having her New York solo debut with a set of four new paintings and 11 works on paper. Entitled “Wakefield,” the series of work refers to Rhode Island town, which has become her summer retreat of late and where all of the drawings were born. She opts for her signature style of a protagonist through a torment of deceptively simple impositions — hair helmets, rope ties, attentive nipples, and loopy noses abound.
Even when artists are working with the same subject, the results can be dramatically different, reflecting their personal style, choice of medium, and other artistic decisions. This fundamental truth will be in evidence at the New York Academy of Art’s “Take Home a Nude” benefit auction, where 112 artists, from Ryan McGinness to Natalie Frank, have each donated distinctly unique drawings made of the same nude models.
In Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s first solo show in New York, “Wild and Blue,” don’t expect a respite from polarizing conversations around class, gender, and race. The paintings, now on view at Marlborough Contemporary, are densely populated tableaux that are painstakingly detailed, attributing personalities to a host of characters: demons, cops, cats, lovers, friends, and foes. But just as much as she shows a commitment to specificity, her paintings often edge toward the symbolic.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s voice hints at what type of lover she might be; it’s husky and deep, given texture by the packs of Marlboros that so frequently make appearances in her Instagram photographs, along with The River, her kitten. There’s a painting in “Wild and Blue,” an exhibition of her work at Marlborough Contemporary open through October 7, that does the same.
Art is always political. Shoe design, ceramics, tapestry: all creative acts are made within historical and political contexts. But artists express their politics in different modes. Some critique indirectly, as in, say, the femininity-satirizing works of Sarah Lucas. But others work much closer to the headlines.
How much do you really know about adult babies? The sexual fetish – otherwise known as paraphilic infantilism – is probably one of the most maligned and marginalised in existence. Participants, in an effort to get turned on sexually, wear adult-sized nappies, shit themselves, and co-opt cooing, baby speak. Even for the carnally adventurous, it’s a lot.
For the first time in over 15 years, prolific photographer Polly Borland is showing her photographic series, The Babies, a body of work that dives into the world of adult males role-playing as infants. As an aspect of fetish culture, male infantilism lacks the threatening power dynamic of BDSM, or the eroticism of photographs showing people at the moment of orgasm. For those interested, its attraction lies elsewhere. Through Borland's lens, the men—dressed in diapers and often sucking on a pacifier—look vulnerable and somewhat sad, but always desiring of comfort and care.
The first time Australian photographer Polly Borland heard about the Babies, she thought, "No, that couldn't exist." Her friend assured her it did. There were secretive clubs in England where adult men spent weekends dressing up as babies, napping in cribs, wearing and soiling diapers and sometimes even suckling a surrogate mother's teat.
It’s been 16 years since Australian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Polly Borland released The Babies, a book visually chronicling her extensive time spent over the course of five years with various communities of adult men who like to dress up as and act like babies. Yes, it’s a thing. And yes, when it was released, The Babies was subject to a range of reactions from the public, most of which hovered somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘totally freaked out.’
The selection of works on display features new and recent works by Casey and Reaves that explores the relationship between contemporary painting and sculpture, domestic objects, and decorative surfaces. The exhibit contains more than 30 works many of which were created especially for this show. The creations imagine and re-imagine the form and function of objects encountered in daily life. Surreal still-life scenes of vases, chairs, fans, hammers, tables, and other things of everyday life are represented through Ginny Casey’s paintings.
Brooklyn artist Ginny Casey paints forms that she would have made if she weren’t a painter, and places them in spaces that are not of this world. “Built From Broke” is her first solo show at Mier Gallery and includes six oil paintings as well as small studies for the paintings which are painted on cardboard.
Andrea Joyce Heimer makes small acrylic paintings of scenes from her adolescence and gives them long, narrative titles, which have been written directly onto the walls at Nicelle Beauchene gallery. These titles could pass for flash fiction, but the paintings, with their marbled colors, eccentric drawing style and razor-sharp edges, have an unfiltered excess of detail. What holds them together is their insight into the incongruity of early memories. Here, a house may retain its suggestion of depth while living people freeze in the midst of typical moments, and incidents linked by meandering chains of association all seem to happen at once.
The title of one of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s paintings is so long that Hometown had to bunch some of the words together on the checklist, deleting the spaces between them. Frequently exceeding twenty words and comprising one or more complete sentences, the titles of the works in this exhibition—her first solo show in New York—express sources of the artist’s broad-ranging envy.
Massive amounts of expressive detail fill the paneled divisions in the work of artist Andrea Joyce Heimer. But don't let this description fool you, as Heimer doesn't make comic strips; she creates maximalist paintings characterized by voluptuous figures and multi-dimensional scenes of concurrent action. Within the same work, a couple stretches to a workout video while a woman seemingly masturbates with a teddy bear, a man dissects a rabbit, and another figure sews a blouse. When it comes to action, Heimer's painting seems to relish in the idea that "more is more."
Walking into Mier Gallery in West Hollywood on a sunny day in late December, I couldn’t help but notice that Cologne-based painter Jan-Ole Schiemann wearing a shirt that matched his work: lines and shapes flowing in every direction, like a shattered ice sheet in the Arctic Sea.
When I stop into the Chinatown studio that Los Angeles gallerist Nino Mier keeps for his artists, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer is working on a big still life painting composed of several parts: a newspaper clipping of Muhammad Ali’s dissent of the Vietnam war draft, a recreation of Picasso’s Guernica, and books on a shelf including “Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War” and “Preparation for the Next Life,” a work of fiction by Atticus Lish set on the outskirts of the Iraq war.
Memory is a useful faculty in a painter’s toolbox. It can be used to conjure the color of an emotion or deployed in the pursuit of perspective. It is the mind’s Instagram filter, tinting the images of our past. In the case of Washington-based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer, whose new exhibit, A Jealous Person, is currently on view at Hometown Gallery in Brooklyn (her first New York solo exhibition), memory is wielded as a powerful device for navigating neuroses borne of a set of formative experiences worthy of the Tenenbaum family, and with an equally pleasing palette to boot.
To no one's surprise, Susan and Michael Hort, the New York-based art patrons and philanthropists, are at it again—this time, making the rounds at Art Los Angeles Contemporary and attending the Rema Hort Mann Foundation benefit at Mihai Nicodim Gallery. Here, in their own words and photographs, they tell us about their favorite works.
Ginny Casey’s paintings often cast objects and human forms in allegories for making. On view in her recent exhibition at Half Gallery, for instance, The Potter’s Legs (2014) depicts a purple fleshed figure struggling to carry a vaguely earshaped form toward a large block of gray clay draped with a cutting wire, the image capturing the sense of an artist’s clumsy crawl toward resolution. The influence of Philip Guston is apparent throughout Casey’s work.
As part of its landmark 35th edition, Art Brussels announces a collaboration with internationally renowned exhibition maker Jens Hoffmann and distinguished curator and critic Piper Marshall for the flagship artistic project situated within the fair. Called Mementos: Artists’ Souvenirs, Artefacts, and other Curiosities, the exhibition brings together personal objects and artefacts from the private collections of a diverse group of artists, all of whom are represented by galleries participating in Art Brussels 2017.
Of all the deadly human sins, envy is perhaps the most unavoidable. It makes us mourn the things we never had in the first place while reminding us of what we have to loose. In “A Jealous Person”, Andrea Joyce Heimer’s new exhibition, the artist has made narrative, quilt-like paintings that year for some sense of firm identity. Her complex renderings of flattened domestic interiors and natural landscapes are psychological mini dramas. And there titles, though verbose, are deeply personal.
Designer Sara Story's Proustian Madeleine—the thing that can instantly transport her back to happy times—is the sound of bells, which bring to mind her childhood and the clanging that called her and her sisters to dinner at the family’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country.
You can't really appreciate this Düsseldorf-based artist unless you see the work in person. It is multi-layered, with beautiful line quality.
To be common is to be many things: popular or plentiful, lowbrow or uncivilized, a thing which two or more people can share, an icebreaker. In Blair Saxon-Hill’s exhibition, visitors are welcomed by a theatrical gathering of characters just slightly larger than the average human and constructed from proletariat materials, such as cardboard, clay, sticks, and borrowed wares including umbrellas and handbags. They float on the walls in dialogue or as if they were a choir.
This week, Trump supporters — racist T-shirts and all — appear in a West Hollywood exhibition, artists stage a telethon to raise funds for an old-age home, and more.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has revealed a lineup of 63 participants for the 2017 Whitney Biennial – the first Biennial held in the Whitney’s home in the Meatpacking District. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, the Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 17 and continue until June 11, occupying two gallery floors of the Whitney as well spaces throughout the Museum.
To get a sense of where contemporary art is heading, you could make art magazines your bedside reading. That would either bring you up to speed or finally cure your insomnia.
My (short-lived) muse moment began when the New York Academy of Art called to ask if I would guest model at Will Cotton’s annual Drawing Party. I’ve known Will for years - he’s on of my favorite painters, and people - and who wouldn’t be the slightest bit flattered to be considered a “model”, if only for one night?
In her first solo show at this gallery, Jana Schröder proceeds nonchalantly through a strongly performative pictorial practice. Her large canvases appear like monuments of automatic writing—in this case, notes and doodles—of the type one might imagine psychoanalysts encouraging patients to make in order to gain access to repressed memories.
On Friday evening in Warsaw, a small crowd swelled in an unlit courtyard outside the city’s temporarily closed Museum of Modern Art. Young Polish hipsters and foreign arts professionals rubbed elbows as they edged their way towards a door, with the determination of eager club-goers keen to kick off an all-nighter.
Louise Bonnet uses the language of humor to talk about things that are sad. Her quiet paintings of oddly distorted figures are rendered in a cartoony style reminiscent of artists like Peter Saul or Kenny Scharf, but where theirs are riotous and boldly colored, Bonnet’s are placid and softly luminous. Her first solo exhibition at Mier gallery in Los Angeles feels like a fresh take on the now familiar intersection of painting and comic book style.
NADA has returned to its now familiar haunt at the Basketball City sports complex at Pier 36, continuing its more relaxed counterpoint to the proceedings at Frieze just a short ferry ride up the East River. The fair, which is now in its fifth year, has continued to pioneer its own take on early May’s bustling selection of shows and exhibitions, and continued its strong performance this year with a roster of 105 Galleries and a diverse selection of works on display.
He’s a Cologne-based artist that uses multiple layers of ink, then acrylic to give it depth.
The fifth edition of NADA New York opened yesterday, and as ever, it was teeming with collectors and artists eager to set their sights on the fair’s 108 booths. The largest edition to date, this year sees exhibitors from 18 countries and 44 cities, including 51 first-time exhibitors. It also features an especially strong selection of painting, with works by a fresh generation of young painters—including these 12 you need to know.
During the micro-cyclone of art shows, apocalyptic ferry rides, and island-induced mental breakdowns of Frieze Week in New York, there is a small voice in our heads helping us along the way, whispering: Just hold on, you’re coming home. Yes, that voice is Drake, and yes, he’s speaking to you over the PA system at Basketball City, the actually-accessible East River pier that’s home to the New Art Dealers Association art fair this weekend, where all your friends are waiting.
This week, Trump supporters — racist T-shirts and all — appear in a West Hollywood exhibition, artists stage a telethon to raise funds for an old-age home, and more. A woman with a champagne glass in hand scratches her back a few feet away from an expensive Rothko painting. Bemused and gleeful Trump supporters gather, wearing shirts with slogans such as “Blue Lives Matter.” Two girls in cotton shorts cat-fight in an alley. A guy with midcentury taste, wearing a wife-beater, leans over his MacBook, which he’s propped up beside a record player.
Trawling the booths inside The Barker Hangar during the recent Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair, there appeared to be a quiet desperation among some dealers who seemed a bit nervous about their prospects. This wasn’t the case, however, at a petite slip occupied by Mier gallery, Nino Mier’s new West Hollywood space, which sold out its entire suite of Surrealist portraits by a relatively unknown Swiss-born artist named Louise Bonnet within the first hour.
Rules and the reduction of variables dictate Wachholz’s practice, driven by a profound fascination for supposedly monotonous activities, marked by the endless repetition of reiterative movements. The exhibition, evolving throughout its six-week duration, begins with unmarked panels covered with a custom-blended red phosphorous paint–Wachholz’s own chemical recipe. The panels are arranged in a horizontal line, mimicking the form of the red phosphorous strip on matchboxes. Half of the panels are monochromatic, as seen on American matchboxes and half are made up of the honeycomb pattern seen on European matchboxes.
Ghost Maker brings together Ginny Casey’s new large-scale paintings of still lifes and floating hands. The surfaces of these paintings are lovingly worked over in multiple thin layers which build up the forms, providing a visual depth and a paint history. The colors are mostly muted, adding power to moments of saturation. The namesake color of “Blue Hands” practically glows. These are very considered paintings, self-referentially depicting the unseen acts the painter undertakes to make a final piece.
There isn’t much to look at in German artist Thomas Wachholz’s exhibition at Mier gallery. Opposite walls of the narrow gallery are lined with rectangular panels. On the right row, they are painted in a pattern of tiny red dots; on the left, in a solid rusty red. The Cologne, Germany, artist didn’t create this imagery; his viewers did. The red paint isn’t really paint, but Wachholz’s own formulation of the phosphorous coating found on the edges of matchboxes. Upon entering the exhibition, titled “Strike Gently,” each viewer receives a box of matches, which they can light by striking against the panels.
“Enter at your own risk” reads a sign on the door of MIER Gallery. For tonight’s West Hollywood attendees it’s an unexpectedly ominous welcome. But considering the box of matches that are offered upon entry, it’s only fair. MIER Gallery, owned by Nino Mier, is currently hosting the work of Cologne-based artist Thomas Wachholz. His show “Strike Gently” is an installation of two long wood panels, each painted with the artist’s own recipe of flammable red phosphorous paint.
Bodies haunt still lifes in this New Yorker painter’s enchanting solo début. Eyes peek out from under the lid of a jar. Bulging pots rest on tabletops, suggestively prodded and pinched by disembodied hands in gangrenous tones of blue, green, and purple. The handle of a hammer bends, as if made of flesh. Brushy, soaked-in, sanded-down paint imbues the mottled light and eccentric forms with a subaquatic softness.
Back in 2009, Los Angeles was finding its footing in the art world. The Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) fair started on the second floor of the Pacific Design Center—humble and inauspicious. The city was emerging, up-and-coming, but certainly not a stop on the art fair circuit. It had a rich history and a promising future, but its present was less consequential.
In advance of this weekend's Outsider Art Fair in New York City, I spoke with Andrea Joyce Heimer about her painting practice, her writing practice, and the beauty in people laughing at her work. Heimer is a self-taught painter who grew up in Montana and now lives and works in Washington state.
Woher kamen Deine ersten Bilder, die noch ganz anders waren als heute, voll mit gegensätzlichen Figuren, Referenzen und Geschichte?
André Butzer: Keine Ahnung, man fängt halt an. Und am Anfang ist da so viel wie möglich drin. Man holt alles rein in die Bilder, was man hat, Farbe, Form, Ausdruck, Themen, Widersprüche. Und dann hat man eine Weile Zeit, das alles wieder rauszuschmeißen.
Neons weren’t the only trend to jump out — if the preponderance of candy-colored hues at the fair is any indication, the art world has a sweet tooth.
“Present Conditional” illustrates the exceeding presence of women in the field of painting by showing current large-format works on canvas. The focus of the exhibition lies in the consistently peculiar dynamics of each artist’s respective pictorial methods rather than in pointing out a specifically female tendency or in pursuing a feminist approach.
Mier Gallery presents Present Conditional, the first group exhibition of the gallery. With eight major contemporary female painting positions, Present Conditional will form a powerful, heterogeneous and intergenerational exhibition as a visual and contextual snap-shot. Artists included: Rita Ackermann, Amy Bessone, Ida Ekblad, Sophie von Hellermann, Joyce Pensato, Jana Schröder, Odessa Straub, Anke Weyer.
I first saw this young German painter’s work at EXPO Chicago, where LA-based MIER Gallery gave him a solo outing. The paintings, made with ink on unprimed linen, are all based on gestural moments borrowed from early “Betty Boop” films — a quirky genesis, but one that you don’t need any clue about in order to appreciate the squiggly, kinetic energy of the works.
A German painter who lives and works in Cologne, Jan-Ole Schiemann makes his New York solo debut with a new series of abstract paintings and drawings inspired by the cartoons of Max Fleischer, creator of Betty Boop.
“Most of the time, no one sees these performances,” Miranda July says matter-of-factly when describing her theater appearances, the most recent of which, “New Society,” comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music Oct. 7 through 10. July, of course, is exaggerating just a bit.
Setting aside the ceramics and sculptural works that have dominated his more recent output, for his first solo show at Zero …, entitled ‘Il mio cuore sulla spiaggia’ (My Heart on the Beach), Alessandro Pessoli returned to focus on canvas, using brushwork, screen printing and stencils. While there is no doubt about Pessoli’s deep-rooted belief in the elastic possibilities of painting, here the choice of medium seemed a deliberate trip down memory lane..
…I also seriously covet Mier Gallery’s graphite drawings by Cologne-based Jan-Ole Schiemann, which, culling their imagery from abstract shapes and forms in 1930s Bettie Boop movies, have the energy of comic-book pages with all the players removed and only the explosive remnants of the action left behind.
Tomasz Kowalski: Finding different ways to represent a human being in painting has always been my central interest. The feeling of “de-humanization” that you get when you look at my works comes from an idea of showing the body detached from its inner traumas, but depicting these inner traumas as a landscape. In my paintings, the earthly being is usually placed in a virtual space of its mind, being somehow turned inside out. This space of mind serves as a stage for dummies — like protagonists doomed to an endless play with the given props.
WHITEOUT is a natural condition, found in polar regions, in which uniform illumination from snow on the ground and from a low cloud layer makes features of the landscape indistinguishable, causing a loss of orientation. WHITEOUT also refers to Thomas Wachholz’ technique of whiting out the color on the canvas with ethanol.
On the opposite side of Zombie Formalism, heating up the basketball court, were Jansson Stegner’s highly gurative softcore cheerleader portraits at Brussels’s Sorry We’re Closed gallery. Like a Waspier version of John Currin (if that’s even possible), they demonstrated that the human body still has more than enough life left in it to sustain creative interest.
At a glance, Blair Saxon-Hill’s newest assemblages appear to be the relics of an indeterminate past. Their distressed surfaces and moody hues evoke postwar movements such as Arte Povera and Nouveau Réalisme, and the artist’s iconography feels similarly dystopian in its overt humility bordering on impoverishment.
I first met Jake Longstreth back in 2012 when he had just moved from New York to Los Angeles. As a gallery director, I meet a great deal of aspiring artists who have just relocated and are working to build their burgeoning careers on the West Coast. Rarely do I meet people who are as industrious and easygoing as Jake. I was immediately taken in by his keen eye and witty intellect—qualities that shined through the way he conducted himself and in the stories he shared.
Peter Bonde’s paintings are a continuous series of experiments which the artists has been perfecting for over 30 years, using materials as diverse as doormats, wool, foam, straw, steel wire, gold spray, glass fibre, neon tubes, eggs, fat, coffee, etc. More traditional materials such as oil paint and canvas are also used in his assemblages, collages, paintings, sculptures and installations. Bonde’s art is about the dialogue between spontaneity and consciousness, emotion and intellect, his aesthetic at once expressive and conceptual, his paintings often monumental in size and painted with large, vibrant brushstrokes on top of prints of photographs.
Kurz vor Jahresende präsentierten die Kölner Galeristen Alexander Warhus und Luisa Rittershaus in den ehemaligen Räumen der Galerie Zwirner, dem heutigen Projektraum WERTHEIM eine bemerkenswerte Malerei-Ausstellung. Die 10tägige Schau zeigte Werke junger, im Rheinland lebender Künstler, denen, neben den kuratorisch festgelegten, nahezu gleich großen Bildformaten eines gemeinsam war: die Abstraktion. Doch wieso begeistern sich junge Künstler heute für die Abstraktion? Und was fasziniert ihre Sammler?
Was hat er sich dabei gedacht? "Sollte, sollte, könnte, müsste" - so der Titel der wohl ersten grossen Ausstellung überhaupt in Deutschland. Und das lässt eine erfolgreiche Zukunft von Anna Fasshauer ahnen und hoffen.
“No light for the photos please!” Anna Fasshauer likes twilight in her spacious studio where she has been working for 6 or 7 “or maybe even 10” years. At that time she made sculptures with “scrap or burnt cars”.
Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja uses herself and her home to speak to larger dynamics at play between domesticity and women. In her series of self-portraits, Good Behavior, Susiraja poses with household tools like brooms, oven mitts, and rolling pins — getting about as intimate as possible with such items. In an interview with Dazed Magazine, Susiraja cites a few messages she hopes her art sends: It says that "the abnormal may be normal" and that "at home, you can be yourself, wild and free."
All the paintings in Michael Bauer's second solo exhibition at Lisa Cooley have a similar composition: a central mass of miscellaneous marks and symbols that scatters like shrapnel toward the edges. The 11-footwide Creme Wars—Snoopie (2014), the show's title work, suggests a form of contemporary history painting. The buff-colored ground is packed with distorted body parts (often hyperactive fingers), floating geometric slabs, ghostly nebulae and oozing drips.
Michael Bauer at Lisa Cooley Gallery, through June 22 Bauer is a German artist living in New York, and he wears his native country’s influences on his sleeve (the ghost of Martin Kippenberger floats fairly close by). Pondering the large-scale paintings here, an odd assortment of other artists also came to mind — among them Sue Williams, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Kati Heck.
All of modern painting seems to be contained in the clusters of scribbles, swaths of impastoed oil, half-finished figures, Pop art foodstuffs, and squiggly stray limbs that float around the center of each of Bauer’s paintings. René Magritte and Sue Williams seem especially prominent in the German-born, New York-based artist’s constellation of influences in these new pieces, which are among his biggest and funniest to date.
As opposed to the more angular, square forms prominent in much of the rest of Pfahler’s oeuvre, the Tex series is characterized by rounded forms. The use of rounded shapes softens the relationship between the hard edges and intense color and offers the viewer a much more congruent visual experience compared to many other works painted by the artist. When viewing Nocturn Tex (1964-1970), the eye glides gently over the canvas.
In the April issue of frieze, Dan Fox prefaced his review of the 2013 Carnegie International with some observations about the perplexing lack of consensus around what, today, a biennial is actually for. ‘Portland2014’ is the third in this current formulation (the Oregon Biennial ran from 1949 until 2006) but its agenda and format are still, evidently, very much up for grabs.
Need an antidote to flash and spectacle? Jake Longstreth’s current painting show at Monya Rowe Gallery is a good place to start: A series of monastically simple, refined mountain landscapes, all variations on a theme, most of them a modest 19 by 15 inches in artist-designed frames. The brushy gestures of rock and foliage butt up against gradient-faded skies.
Jansson Stegner has a large number of canvasses on show as part of the “Body Language” exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. I caught up with him during an interview at the Private Press View earlier in November, and asked him some questions about his work. Due to my fixation with feminism, ways of looking and fetishism I have only included the questions and answers regarding this, which demonstrate the role of the patriarchal gaze in art..
American figurative painter Jansson Stegner is known for a hyperreal, highly stylised aesthetic. His work offers a clear social commentary and presents subversions of gender and power. Peppering his canvases with hidden references, ranging from Old Master painting to Pop Culture, he features in the current Saatchi exhibition, ‘Body Language’, where his works present a moral challenge to the viewer.
Around three-quarters of the works on display are paintings and, unfortunately, not many of them are any good. Most of the works feel too derivative of other styles or stand out as offering nothing different to what we've seen before. The biggest exception is Jansson Stegner whose women reclining in free and relaxed poses starkly contrast with the police uniforms they are wearing.
“FAHRT INS BLAUE” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Martina Detterer.
The cool and abstract works by 1983-born artist Jana Schröder carry their own signature: not only does Jana explore the doodle structure over and over again, but in her 'Spontacts Series' she also approaches the specific aesthetic of handwriting. Jana studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Prof. Albert Oehlen and subsequently founded the GSK – Gesellschaft für Streitorientierte Kulturforschung (Society for Conflict-based Culture Reserach), which staged weekly battles between two art works from different artists.
It’s easy to get lost in one of Ginny Casey’s paintings; easy to think that each brushstroke and each decision that she made, were all part of some long, thought-out, meticulously crafted plan. But, according to Casey, that’s not exactly right. “What drives my paintings isn’t strategy or plans, concepts or a narrative”, she says.
The first impression is always one of freedom: Tomas Kowalski flits - almost carelessly, you might say - between his personal imagination and echoes of familiar modernist styles. In the crowded landscape of contemporary painting, it is remarkable enough that an artist not yet thirsty even has a “personal” imagination. In Kowalski’s visual world, fresh invention enters in dialogue with art history.
The 40-ton bronze bust of Karl Marx, built in 1971, still looks on to a major thoroughfare in this east German city, which was once called Karl-Marx-City. In the 19th century, Chemnitz bore another moniker, the Manchester of Saxony, reflecting the factory smokestacks across the horizon. Today, bleak concrete apartment houses border treeless boulevards, remnants of socialist urban planning.
Scott Hug’s a good artist who knows, or knows of, many other good artists. And he’s pulled just over a hundred of them together for this jigsaw puzzle of a summer group show about being outside the social norm and loving it. Give a quick look around and you’ll spot tributes to all sorts of dare-to-be-different heroes: Elizabeth Taylor in a tough-talking Kathe Burkhart portrait; Nina Simone, as enshrined in a rec-room altarpiece by Chris Bogia.
There are customary systems for composing an image which become clear after a long day of trolling artists’ websites— central shapes, which fit comfortably inside the edges of the picture plane, and room for the eye to move back in space. Ginny Casey’s paintings defy that mold, producing the same clunky, sentimental quality that Susan Rothenberg and Phillip Guston do so well. It’s a quality that only happens in painting.
CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER'S wry, and sometimes ominous, paintings possess a self-deprecating humor. This tendency is spelled out explicitly in her painting How to Scare People and Alienate Your Friends. Here, a ghost, smoking a cigarette and drinking wine, reads a book of the same name. In Eviction Notice the danger appears to be eminent as a commune of renters react in fay and dramatic poses to bad news; an eviction slip is handed over to the most central figure in the painting who has chosen to ignore it in favor of his own distress.
Well, Richter at Burger King was first ... then I went to the museum to check out some of his pieces in the real, which was a bit disappointing for me in com parison to the posters. I saw the Jorn paint ing on an upper floor of the museum as part of the Guggenheim collection that was on display.
The specter of language forever shrouds invocations of the body. And if seeing is believing, “Leidy Celeste Nicole,” a group show curated by Lauren Cornell, conjures the manifold spirits of discourse to bold effect. Ostensibly a show about painting and its permutations, the exhibition offers a mordant meditation on the body in contemporary culture.
The title of this rousing three-person exhibition implies that you should be on a first-name basis with its artists, Leidy Churchman, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Nicole Eisenman. And you ought to, if only because they share so much with you: revealing sketchbooks, portraits of friends and lovers, proprietary recipes for art making.
Art fairs are for art lovers. There’s really no way around it. You can say that they demean art, that they’re all about commerce. You can complain about the crowds, the bad food, the poor ventilation. I hear you. And yet if art is something you must have or think you want to have in your life, you stand to gain from perusing one or more of the several art fairs that have set down stakes across Manhattan this weekend.
Joanna Zielinska: The overall image inyourworks is governed by very specific rules. Motifs circulate and paintings - which often have a painting-within-apainting structure - are ftrtherreflected in sculptures and objects...
Tomasz Kowalski: There are no clear boundaries between particular pieces. I picture a rituation:I decide upon a detail and cropit; singular elements are transformed into others... Sculptures work on the same basis; they are often attributes of the figures depicted in figurative paintings.
If there’s anything the last quarter century has made evident for art, it’s that object hood was never a subject that could be left behind. Where one might say that theoretical discourse on the subject certainly waned in the last decade before the new millennium, it’s become pertinent today to recognize the role novel interpretations of the object are having on contemporary art practices.
Visitors to Andre Butzer’s recent show at Metro Pictures found themselves, in the opening gallery, stared down by four giant, cartoon like figures from 10-by-7-foot paintings barely big enough to hold them. All four wear antique, stiff white collars above shapeless clothes. The canvases on which they appear are so thickly impastoed as to verge on the cultural.
Last Friday night continued Mitte’s transformation into an outpost of trendy twenty-somethings from new EU member states, when Zak Gallery filled with young Poles celebrating a coming-out party of sorts for their contemporaries. At 22, painter Tomasz Kowalski has already garnered acclaim in his hometown of Kracow, but this is his first solo show outside of . The slightly more seasoned Anna Orlikowska, 27, with whom Kowalski shares Zak’s small space, has been living in Berlin since 2006 on a Deutsche Bank stipend but this is also her first German solo.
Chris Burden was there, Charley Ray has arrived in ’81, but I did not take classes with him. I was taking new-genre classes; Mike Kelley was there for a semester or so; it may have been his first teaching job out of Cal Arts. I graduated in ’84. I took eight years out of school and went back in ’92 to UCLA graduate school. I had started working there in ’89 for Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden as their lab assistant, as an employee of the state, which was kind of a great job: I liked the space and the facilities.
When I first met Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero a few years ago, she compared her sculptures and drawings to run-on sentences – a point driven home by a 2004 sculpture entitled 'Almost the exact feeling one gets when staring at the blinded by the light for too long just before anything is about to happen', similar to the images that you see when closing your eyes and pressing into your eyeballs (blackness). Such a generously loquacious mouthful of a title is confirmation that the artist, who did a stint in Brooklyn before heading west to attend the graduate programme at USC...
A preview of Alessandro Pessoli's intense, lyrical world, a single phrase - pesci freddi meravigliosi nuotano nella mia testa (marvellous cold fishes swim into my head) - was printed in white on the dark blue invitation. The show itself was overwhelming: around 700 drawings, the majority of which were stuck to the walls like fancy wallpaper or placed on a small table, so that anyone could look through them.
