“Looking at where figurative painting is today, there is more room for creativity and imagination.”

Go Figure, Curated by Eddie Martinez, 6 October – 13 November, 2011
Dodge Gallery, New York

People say “painting is dead” and within that figure painting is mummified. Since painting began, we have used the figure to let people after us know that we existed before them. This is clear when we look at cave paintings wherein the “painted” people and animals and other symbols represented life. Looking at where figurative painting is today, there is more room for creativity and imagination. Take for instance the approach of artists in this show from Erik Parker’s weirdo psychedelic melting faces to Jamison Brousseau’s take on the figure represented by R2D2 from Star Wars. Gina Beavers current approach to the figure looks like studies that would have been done by someone enrolled in the “art students league” in New York City in the 1950’s. Another interesting component of the work in this show are the materials used and the execution of the works. For example Allison Schulnik’s technique is to use paint sculpturally to create her figures. She lays on thick impastos, whereas Daniel Gordon uses photography and collage to manipulate the look and feel of his work, often leaving the figures disfigured and mangled. Denise Kupferschmidt’s drawings evoke a re-imagined historical feel with paired down, Egyptian-meets-sci-fi characters.

Featured Artists:
Joshua Abelow, Derek Aylward, Gina Beavers, Brian Belott, Katherine Bernhardt, Jamison Brosseau, Ted Gahl, Daniel Gordon, Joseph Hart, Denise Kupferschmidt, Jose Lerma, Erik Parker, Allison Schulnik, Michael Williams

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Gallery: Regen Projects, Los Angeles

8 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

“I knew about the gallery before I ever moved to the United States,” says Philippe Vergne, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art who first landed in the U.S. in 1990s. “If you look at the Los Angeles art scene, Regen Projects, together with a handful of galleries, was really the organization that promoted artists working here from my generation. They represent a group that has been extremely important: Liz Larner, Raymond Pettibon and Cathy Opie, who has been a very important to MOCA not only as an artist but as a member of the board.”

This is the gallery that gave the California-born Barney his first solo gallery show in 1991, when the artist was all of 24. And it was the first to represent L.A. artist Opie, whose elegant portraits of drag kings and S&M fetishists from the 1990s sent a gender-ambiguous lightning bolt through the world of contemporary photography. In 2004, the gallery served as the site of Glenn Ligon’s first solo gallery show in Los Angeles, an exhibition of his gritty text paintings, which borrow passages from a vast array of cultural figures, from Ralph Ellison to Richard Pryor.

The story began in the late 1980s, when Shaun Caley met Stuart Regen at an opening at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Regen was part of an art dynasty, the son of prominent New York dealer Barbara Gladstone. He had worked at the experimental PS1 art space in New York (now part of the Museum of Modern Art) and later served as the director of the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica. Caley, an art critic, had just landed in L.A. after a stint in Milan, where she’d served as managing editor of the magazine Flash Art. The two met for lunch. Regen offered Caley a job directing his soon-to-be-opened gallery.

“Stuart had always wanted to have an art gallery,” says Caley Regen, and the ’80s provided just the right confluence of happenings in Los Angeles. “There had been the opening of MOCA and the Broad Foundation. And there was a cluster of interesting galleries: Margo Leavin, Fred Hoffman and Daniel Weinberg.”

“We came to the idea that it would be an exciting venture and it was that simple,” recalls Weiner, who says the couple’s seriousness persuaded him that it would be the right thing to do. “It will sound pretentious, but they talked about the work and how it set a tone for the people they were trying to attract. I’d been showing in Los Angeles since the ’60s. I have very dear friends who I made projects with, from DeWain Valentine to Ed Ruscha. They saw me as an integral part of Los Angeles culture.”

A string of important shows followed: a light exhibition by James Turrell, prints by the innovative German painter Gerhard Richter and participation in a three-gallery tribute to Nicholas Wilder, an L.A. dealer who had helped foster the careers of painter David Hockney and minimalist sculptor John McLaughlin.

The gallery’s biggest coup, however, came in May 1991, with the first solo gallery exhibition by Barney, who would become one of the definitive artists of the decade. The show was a fusion of performance, sculpture, installation and photography. There were objects related to sports (a football jersey) and sex (bondage belts), as well as a metal cooling chamber that harbored an exercise bench sculpted out of petroleum jelly. The exhibition was a surreal examination by the former athlete of the cult of the body in relation to athletics.

“Stuart had seen his work in New York and was blown away,” remembers Caley Regen. “It was indescribable, so protean. He was using materials people hadn’t used: medical things, sports things, the body. I thought it was amazing.”

The show received a glowing write-up in industry bible Artforum. Kristine McKenna, who reviewed the show for this paper, described it as “rivetingly weird,” an installation that drew vital attention “to the complex and fragile interplay between spirit and flesh.”

“You put these things out in the world,” she says. “If you show great art, people will come to you.”

http://www.regenprojects.com
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Couture: Maison Martin Margiela

5 July 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Maison Martin Margiela Couture, Autumn Winter 2011 – 2012, 2011

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Artist: Mark Leckey

22 June 2014

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Mark Leckey, From the Exhibition, See We Assemble, 2013

Mark Leckeyis a British artist, working with collage art, music and video. His found art and found footage pieces span several videos, most notably Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Lights and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize.

Through a multi-disciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, sound, film, and performance, British artist Mark Leckey explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object, or an environment. Drawing on his personal experiences as a London-based artist, who spent his formative years in the north of England, Leckey returns frequently to ideas of personal history, desire and transformation in his work.

Leckey was born in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, in 1964. In a 2008 interview in The Guardian, he described how he grew up in a working-class family and became a ‘casual’ in his youth. He left school at 16 with one O Level, in art, and at 19 became obsessed with learning about ancient civilizations. In the Guardian interview he described himself as an autodidact, “That’s why I use bigger words than I should. It’s a classic sign.” Following a conversation with his stepfather he took his A Levels and went to an art college in Newcastle, but didn’t enjoy it: “It was the early 1990s, when critical theory had swept the nation. The place was full of hippies from down south who were reading Mervyn Peake and Tolkien, and suddenly they were made to read Barthes and Derrida. It was like a Maoist year zero. I became very suspicious of the merits of critical theory…”

Mark Leckey’s video work has as its subject the “tawdry but somehow romantic elegance of certain aspects of British culture.”He likes the idea of letting “culture use you as an instrument.” but adds that the pretentiousness that artists sometimes fall into is destructive to the artistic process: “What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it’s going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you’re fucked: you’re never going to advance.” Matthew Higgs has described his work as “possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife’s edge where art and life meet”.

On Pleasure Bent is a body of work in which Leckey attempts to form a kaleidoscopic memoir, assembling his past from the imagery that he believes conditioned him. The exhibition will include all new works, several being exhibited publicly for the first time. Objects will include LED screens featuring looped animations, animated screens made up of highly-magnified computer screens silk screened with images, as well as cinema lobby style ’standees’ and a trailer for a new video.

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Sculpture: Zuzanna Czebatu

5 February 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Zuzanna Czebatu, Happy-Go-Lucky-No I â€“ III, 2016 and Within Meadows And Rolling Hills, 2016

Zuzanna Czebatul (born in 1986, Miedzyszecz) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main in 2013. She is currently working towards her MFA at Hunter College, New York, as Fulbright Fellow. She is also a recipient of the 2015 SOMA Scholarship, Mexico City. Czebatul works as a sculptor, producing her own materials, and creating works that merge the differentiation between commercial product and artistic production. Her work is influenced by the aesthetics of ancient sculptures, modern forms of display and presentation, as well as the club culture of the 1990s.

“I grew up with rave culture and DJ a little bit today. Clubbing is a density of so much, the epitome of desire, break-out, expression, positioning. The way music leads the crowd in a certain direction, the side effects of reaching borders, the club itself is a place with it’s own set-up of rules: all this is like a micro map of what we’re looking for and it’s diversity. Techno is symptomatic for this, an endless loop suggesting the possibility of salvation kicks for every weekend.”

Working between media and place, Zuzanna Czebatul extends cognitive possibilities and relational aesthetics through the sculptural architectures of her installations. Reconfiguring spatial representations, Czebatul maps environments that read as site-specific studies from an aerial perspective.

“I’ve been always interested in the relationships between recipient and object, their context and the mechanisms of their display. There are hierarchies and power structures but in the end the viewer generates the value which makes all participating elements arbitrary. At the moment I am working on a six meter long plush sculpture in form of an broken obelisk, shattered on the floor. Quite the opposite of concrete and steel— a giant symbol of power, making space for something new in it’s collapse, availing the positive aspects of destruction and ability to see ‘chance’ even in subjective moments of personal failure.”

Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at Gillmeier Rech, Berlin; Opelvillen Rüsselsheim; and 1822-Forum, Frankfurt/Main. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Center, Berlin; 1m3, Lausanne; Heidelberger Kunstverein; and Villa Romana, Florence.

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Marfa Journal, Issue 1

8 June 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Magazines Main No Comments

Marfa Journal, Issue 1, 2013

Marfa Journal Issue 1 is a new publication created by artists for artists to connect contemporary high-end fashion and art. Marfa Journal‘s overriding concept is inspired by the small desert town of the same name in Texas, which has attracted the art world since the 1960s and continues to be a capital of cultural disorder despite only having a population of 2,000. The first issue premieres with a bang, with two cover options featuring either Erik Brunetti shot by Victor Saldana or the cast of the new film The Total Princess shot by Alexandra Gordienko. The magazine is split into six sections: raw, casual, decadent, romantic, obscure and progressive.

http://marfajournal.com/issue-1/

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