Monday 5 November 2012

Friday 27 July 2012

Roxy Music

 Flesh & Blood (1980)

Avalon (1982)

Roxy Music | Ladytron (1972)

The Specials | Blank Expression

Gabriel Dawe

The Density of Light, April 2012,  Lot 10 Gallery, Brussels, Belgium


Plexus no. 15, 2012
Site specific installation at LSU Museum of Art
gütermann thread, painted wood and hooks, 28' x 4' x 16'

Plexus no. 14, 2012
Site specific installation at Galerie Lot 10
gütermann thread, painted wood and hooks, 8' x 8' x 11'

Plexus no. 5, 2011
Site specific installation at pump projects 2011 Texas Bienial
gütermann thread, wood and nails, 12' x 12' x 12'

Plexus no.11, 2011
Site specific installation at East Wing X, 
gütermann thread, painted wood and hooks, dimensions variable

Gabriel Dawe's work is currently on view as part of the biennial exhibition at the Courtauld Institute examining ways in which materials have been used in contemporary art.

East Wing X, The Courtauld, Somerset House, London, 20 January - July 2013

Gabriel Dawe | Plexus C2 at Long Beach Performing Arts Center

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Monday 16 July 2012

George Herms

Delusional Shift, 2010
Collage on Paper, 14 x 11 inches

 Snow Job IV, 2011
Collage on paper, 26 x 20 inches

Sann Diego Rose XI
Collage on paper, 26 x 20 inches

Delusional Shift, 2010
Collage on paper, 14 x 11 inches

Since the late 1950s, George Herms has been a central figure in the development of the West Coast assemblage aesthetic. Influenced by the Beat generation more attuned to the musical nuance of the everyday than the modernist requiem to order, Herms’s commitment to counterculture is expressed through his repurposing of used materials and his rejection of compositional structures in favor of loose associations of objects and ideas. Herms salvages elements from the trash heap of popular culture, combining them with words and phrases to create final entities that are neither pure thought, nor pure object—they are both prop and proposition. At times, Herms has been associated with landmarks of the developing L.A. art scene—Wallace Berman and Semina, Walter Hopps and the Ferus Gallery, Dennis Hopper and the film culture of Easy Rider—but his art has refused any singular identification. An advocate of all things free—spirit, material, and love—Herms is the spiritual godfather to an art of the unknown, forging something out of nothing, which continues to be a driving compulsion of artists today.

George Herms, Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown), MOCA, 2011 
George Herms, OHWOW

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Edgar G Ulmer | Detour (1945)

Edward D. Wood Jr | Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Haute Couture: The Polaroids of Cathleen Naundorf


 La Fille En Plâtre IV (version 1)

Les Mariées

My Little Darling

The Crying Game

Paris-based photographer Cathleen Naundorf releases her publication Haute Couture: The Polaroids of Cathleen Naundorf.
Focusing predominantly on six fashion houses, to whose archives she was granted unlimited access, Naundorf's large format photographs illustrate the stunning couture of Armani, Chanel, Dior, Lacroix, Elie Saab and Valentino in decadently poised settings, sheltered against the easily rectified whims of digital photography. The inherent imperfections of the developmental process, described by Naundorf as "a gesture of homage to the unique nature of the haute-couture fashion", often leave smattering of imperfections across and around the image, making it as singular and inimitable as the fashion it enshrines.
Timeless and infallible, Naundorf's images are more redolent of the artisanal craftsmanship of photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn than of her contemporaries; she uses a large format camera, either a Deardorff or Plaubel, with polaroid film in a format difficult to source, in order to do justice to the otherworldly essence of couture. Her key influence and mentor, German fashion photographer Horst P. Horst, is also prominent throughout the book. In Homage to Horst P. Horst, Naundorf photographs a young, bobbed model in a Chanel gown against the backdrop of Coco's former Ritz apartment, in the very same armchair in which Horst photographed Mademoiselle Chanel herself some seventy years earlier. Even the motif of lace-backed corsets, which Horst first immortalised in Mainbocher Corset, 1939, runs throughout the publication in tribute to the iconic photographer.
Haute Couture: The Polaroids of Cathleen Naundorf, published by Prestel, is available now.

The Historical Box, Hauser & Wirth, London

The War Room, Wally Hedrick, 1967—2002
Oil on canvas
8 parts, 335.2 x 167.6 cm / 132 x 88 in each

 Jouster, Robert Mallary, 1960
Wood, steel, cardboard, tarpaper, dirt and polyester resin
259 x 126.3 x 22 cm / 102 x 49 3/4 x 8 5/8 in

Illuminations Drawings, Simone Forti, 1972
Charcoal and ink on newsprint
3 parts: 61 x 48.3 cm / 24 x 19 in
3 parts: 48.3 x 61 cm / 19 x 24 in

6 Film Stills, Stan VanDerBeek, 1957—1965
16mm films transferred to DVD, Exhibition Loop

The Historical Box, 23 May - 28 July 2012, Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London
‘The Historical Box, curated by Mara McCarthy, director of The Box, Los Angeles showcases key pieces by influential American artists including John Altoon, Judith Bernstein, Simone Forti, Wally Hedrick, Robert Mallary, Barbara T. Smith and Stan VanDerBeek. This exhibition brings together a collection of important performance, film, dance, drawings and sculpture created during the political and social turmoil of the Sixties and Seventies in the USA. It aims not only to broaden the canon of art history, but also to highlight the contemporary relevance of the issues which these artists confronted over three decades ago.

Friday 29 June 2012

Sunday 24 June 2012

Saturday 26 May 2012

Saturday 19 May 2012

Sunday 29 April 2012

Thomas Ruff | Interior

 
Interior (6B) 1980
C-print 21.5 x 27 cm, 8 1/2 x 10 2/3 inches


Interior (7B) 1980
C-print 10 2/3 x 8 1/2 inches


Interior, 1982
C-print 21.5 x 27 cm, 8 1/2 x 10 2/3 inches

Tom Burr Deep Wood Drive | Bortolami Gallery NY

Untitled Pink Piece, 2012
Wool blanket and upholstery tacks on plywood 72 x 72 x 3 inches
Berlin Blue, 2012
Wool blankets and upholstery tacks on plywood 72 x 72 x 3 inches
An Orange Echo, 2012
Plywood, mirrored plexiglas, used theater seats 72 x 42.5 x 36 inches (each)

In Deep Wood Drive Burr continues his visual exploration of the physical and psychological dimension of objects, and the fantasies we project upon their surfaces. Integral to the exhibition are works from the new series of “Clouds,” which are wooden wall panels covered with woolen blankets meticulously arranged and pinned to convey states of comfort and discomfort, order and disarray. These works are shown alongside floor-bound sculptural works that engage notions of containment, biography, and protectionism in the context of public view.  The title of the exhibition refers to a childhood location where Burr grew up, where particular instances of trauma and ecstasy were played out, remembered, and then restaged at various moments in the development of his work. This exhibition refers back to that childhood moment, but also to subsequent stages of it’s reimagining, with several of the works are being conscious re-visitations of earlier themes, brought together with the “Clouds.”Burr describes the “Cloud” series as “imprints, instead of having the neutral associations that various materials hold: canvas, fabric, paint, ink, etc., the blankets hover solidly between being a utilitarian object and a material that conforms to the work of a painting. Or a painting that is impersonating a sculpture, or inversely, a sculpture impersonating a painting. Another focal point of the exhibition is a large eight-foot black metal cage, a theme that the artist has employed before. This piece, entitled Baited like Beasts, will sit in the center of the gallery’s main room, both blocking the space and framing it. There is no door to the cage, instead there are openings on each side, cut outs, or windows through the bars, allowing clearer views into the interior on the cage, and through to the surrounding exhibition.
DEEP WOOD DRIVE BORTOLAMI PRESS RELEASE 

Monday 13 February 2012

Saturday 28 January 2012

Sunday 22 January 2012

Ellsworth Kelly | Reliefs 2009 - 2010, Matthew Marks Gallery, LA


Mr. Kelly has been experimenting with the notion of painted reliefs since he lived in Paris in 1949. “I began with cardboard painted reliefs,” he said. “Some of them were all white. And I’ve continued this relief work ever since. I like the relief of Romanesque architecture.”  Creating these unframed relief paintings, he explained, is his way of “going into the viewer’s space,” adding, “If I painted it all on one canvas, it wouldn’t have the depth. It would be flat.”

“What I’ve made is real — underline the word real,” he added. “It becomes more of an object, something between painting and sculpture.”

He draws constantly, sometimes making tiny sketches on a scrap of paper, even a folded cigarette carton picked up on a New York City street because the shape caught his eye. Often he’ll save these bits and use them years later as inspiration. Some start out as drawings and over time morph into a painting or a monumental sculpture. The lyrical, folded sculpture outside the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, for example, started out as a three-inch piece of cardboard that developed into a sketch, then a sculpture in wood, then aluminum, then steel, becoming refined with each incarnation. “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch,” said Mr. Marks, his dealer. “He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”

An obsessive archivist, Mr. Kelly has kept examples of his work from every decade of his career, studying them continually for inspiration, as a way to move forward. “He’s the last artist to repeat himself,” Mr. Storr said. “But he always comes back to his basic vocabulary: surface, scale, color, image. And he always gets it as simple as he can.”