Couturier Gallery welcomes, with great pleasure, Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton, the two doyennes of contemporary Puerto Rican ceramics in their duo exhibition Encuentro (Meeting). The exhibition will include recent hand-built figurative and architectural clay sculptures which when seen together may represent entire communities. The exhibition will take place from June 1 through July 13, 2013. The opening reception will be Saturday, June 1, 6-8pm.
 
Susana Espinosa and Toni Hambleton have had a significant role in Puerto Rican ceramics, a tradition that existed long before their arrival on the island but never consolidated into an identifiable movement nor did there exist a learning center dedicated to ceramics. Toni Hambleton (b. Mexico City, 1934) studied fashion design at the School of Design and Decoration in her native Mexico City (1956-59). It was only when she moved to Puerto Rico in 1963 she began studying and working with clay in the very late ‘60s. Susana Espinosa (b. Buenos Aires, 1933) arrived in Puerto Rico five years later, in 1968, already an accomplished ceramist. These two expats subsequently met and in 1980, recognizing the dearth of studios or training opportunities on the island, co-founded (together with Jaime Suarez, another important figure in Puerto Rican ceramic history) Casa Candina, a ceramic school and gallery. The influence of these two women on contemporary ceramics in Puerto Rico is reflected in the move away from the functional vessel forms that prevailed in large part to satisfy the commercial tourist trade and traditional throwing techniques that were predominant up to that time. Their encuentro, or meeting, resulted in a small revolution of form and idea in Puerto Rican ceramic history.
 
Susana Espinosa’s hand-built sculptures are typically figural- male and female, full length, elongated figures, or robust busts, with their inscribed, worked and crusty surfaces, some cloaked literally and figuratively with mysterious auras and secrets lurking underneath their surfaces, figures that at once are in and part of their own landscape. Espinosa’s use of glazes is spare preferring to use it only as accent, instead allowing the fire and oxides to give the monochromatic hues to her work. Her “École Française,” a new work to be shown in this exhibition, consists of seven women: two matronly figures, the other five more demure, all cloaked in large skirts and all but the largest of them (Mme. La Maitresse, perhaps) clasping their bodies in typically female guarded fashion. They are the embodiment of worldly schools, bringing with them knowledge of the depths of the oceans and the heavens as represented by the sgraffito sea life and celestial heavens inscribed in the clay forming their dresses. Each has her own story, and collectively they represent a community.
 
In contrast to Espinosa’s figures, Toni Hambleton’s elegant and rhythmic architectonic forms reflect the structures of her environment: the buildings, walls, network of pathways that make up a pueblo, village or city be it from the memory of her native Mexico or wanderings throughout the island of Puerto Rico. Her slab-built sculptures may be pierced like windows of a house or doors in a wall providing a look inside though the contents are left to speculation. Hambleton prefers not to adorn her sculptures with the polychrome of glazes, not unlike Espinosa, instead allowing the fire of the kiln and oxides to provide coloring and shading. Her forms may be the very environments which Espinosa’s figures inhabit. The sculptures of these two artists together combine remarkably to form very diverse and elegant clay communities.
 
Susana Espinosa’s and Toni Hambleton’s work may be found in numerous private and public collections worldwide. Public collections in which Susana Espinosa’s work may be found include: Art & Handicraft Center, Porvoo, Finland; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, PR; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Museo della Ceramica D’arte de Faenza, Italy; Museo de la Cerámica, Ichon, Korea; Museo de la Cerámica: Mimara, Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
 
Public collections holding Toni Hambleton’s ceramic sculptures include: Centro de Arte de Maracaibo: Lía Bermúdez, Maracaibo, Venezuela; Colección Casa Candina, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Compañía de Turismo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección Instituto Statale D’Arte, Teramo, Casteli, Italy; International Keramike Studio, Kecksmet, Hungary; Museo Ariadna, Geneva, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico; Museo de Cerámica, Ichón, Korea; Museo de Cerámica, Mino, Japan; Museo de la Ceramica, Zagreb, Yugoslavia; Museum of Ceramics, Brisbane, Australia; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA
 
For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery at cg@couturiergallery.com or 323-933-5557.

GUSFORD | los angeles is pleased to present Burdens of Excess, an installation by Swiss-born sculptor Andrea Hasler. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Hasler will transform the entire space into a chic, glittery boutique, filled with works from her Desire series. Through her deconstruction of high-end designer items, Hasler’s wax sculptures transform consumeristic ‘must-haves’ into organic, fetishistic objects.
 
Hasler’s work focuses on constructions of identity and collective desires, and is characterized by a tension between attraction and repulsion. The works in the Desire series, in particular, focus on the obsession of projections of affluence and glamor. Reworking designer bags, shoes, and accessories into organ-resemblant sculptures, Hasler’s works engage with the psychological aspects of consumerism, blurring the lines between what you are and what you must have.
 
Through the transformation of GUSFORD’s Melrose Avenue gallery space into an indulgent, glamorous shop, Hasler’s installation embodies the epitome of luxurious excess, and looks to a dystopic future, where organs may one day be the ultimate fashion accessory.
 
Andrea Hasler was born in 1975 in Zürich, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design, and her work was recently exhibited at the 1st Santorini Biennale of Arts in Greece, 2012. Her recent solo exhibition Irreducible Complexity will be featured in the upcoming documentary Snapshots of Shoreditch, looking at the people, culture and underground scene in the East End of London. Hasler also chairs artist talks at Next Level Projects and regularly lectures on contemporary art, with a focus on women and the body, at various institutions including the Sotheby's Institute of Art, London. 
 
For further information, images or interview requests, please contact michelle@gusfordgallery.com
 
Opening Reception | Thursday, June 6, 6-9pm, RSVP to rsvp@gusfordgallery.com
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm

Here is Elsewhere Gallery and Grégory Bernard are pleased to present Write a Book about WHAT?, the first exhibition in the US by Barzolff. The French-born artist, based in Los Angeles, works in a range of mediums including graffiti, 3D animation, video installation, drawing, and painting. The exhibition will introduce his latest large-scale paintings, stereoscopy, video installations, and drawings sold by the gram.
 
Barzolff started out as Numéro 6, a groundbreaking graffiti artist in the Parisian street art scene who emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of the genre. According to Paris Tonkar magazine, Barzolff is “a masterful illustrator and an iconic figure, who transformed the standardized imagery used in French graffiti in the second half of the 90s.”
 
After obtaining his BA in Visual Arts, Barzolff went on to study film animation at the Gobelins l‘école de l’Image in Paris. While most alumni of the prestigious program became recruits for Disney and other major American animation studios, Barzolff was compulsively spraying walls. His apt portrayal of the street culture he was heir to resulted in two series that aired on the iconic Canal+ television station in Europe: the cult animated series Les Lascars (The Rascals), lauded for capturing the zeitgeist of that era, and more recently the disturbingly absurd The World According To F. R. Jeansac.
 
For a few “lost years” (in his own words), Barzolff worked in the advertising and music video industry, gaining recognition and winning many prestigious awards in the field including the well-known People‘s Choice Imagina Award and Best Music Video Award in Annecy, France. He also won the famed D&AD Award in the UK for his seminal work. In 2010, he turned his back on the “soul-sucking” advertising machine to live as a recluse in Burgundy and devote himself to blazing new trails in the fine arts. Now ensconced in Beachwood Canyon, he’s creating his most powerful pieces to date.
 
Monstrous, stunning and often baroque in their style, the subjects of his paintings feature arresting characters which elicit both disgust and compassion. Fascinated by the lesser albeit universal human trait of stupidity, he glorifies its aesthetic to the point of beauty. Reinventing the craft and form he devoted his childhood and adolescence to mastering, his pieces could be summed up by the Baudelaire quote: “I only ask of every man that he show me what remains of Life.” Flesh, folds, and meat are at the forefront of his opus. To quote Deleuze on Francis Bacon, it's the “logic of sensation” which consumes him. “Every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernibility.” Ultimately, these works are radically new in contemporary art, a unique mix of fin-de-siècle aesthetic with 21st century street art and new media style.
 
A fruitful anachronism lies at the base of another distinctive new body of work: his stereoscopes. Stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from given two-dimensional images viewed through a stereoscope. With this archaic medium, Barzolff invites the viewer to travel into his digital universe as he poetically mixes new technology with a late 1800s aesthetic, utilizing an optic tool that was once used for filmmaking in Hollywood. The exhibition also includes an installation in a 1950s television featuring a selection of videos from his fake UFO hoax project which received over 20 million views on YouTube. He therefore creates a “retrocipation,” to quote critic Arnaud Pierre, “conjugating in the past future visions of a now obsolete future.”
 
Beyond his experimental mind, humor and irony are integral to Barzolff’s style. His work transports the viewer to the point where the absurd becomes sublime, while revealing the non-sense of consumerism and its impact on our everyday life. With his Art by the Gram, art becomes a commodity: 15 years of Barzolff’s small drawings, sketches, restaurant napkins & phone doodles are cut up, weighed, and packaged in plastic baggies that individuals can buy by the gram, like in a grocery store. “First and foremost art’s purpose is to feed the artist,” says Barzolff. The same sarcastic wit imbues the animated music videos that he recently did in Los Angeles, for musicians such as Flying Lotus, Boys Noize and Mr. Oizo.
 
Here is Elsewhere Gallery is dedicated to exploring the hidden history that links artists from here (Southern California) with artists from elsewhere (the rest of the world). Created in 2010 by its director, Yann Perreau, Here is Elsewhere has exhibited artists such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Larry Bell and Henry Taylor, among others.
 
For additional images and information, please contact the gallery at info@hereiselsewhere.com or 310-904-8966.

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), and the LAMAG Associates are pleased to announce the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowships Visual Arts Exhibition on view at LAMAG from May 19 to July 7, 2013. Awarded each year by DCA, the C.O.L.A. Fellowships honor a spectrum of the City’s most exemplary mid-career artists and support the symbiotic relationship between LA, its artists, its history, and its identity as an international art capital. The C.O.L.A. Performances will be held on June 28, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. at Grand Performances. For more information about the C.O.L.A. Exhibition and Performances, please visit culturela.org.
 
The 2013 C.O.L.A. award recipients in the visual arts are: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Krysten Cunningham, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Samantha Fields, Judithe Hernández, Carole Kim, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Rebeca Méndez, and Rebecca Morris. The 2013 C.O.L.A. award recipients in the performing arts are: Malathi Iyengar and Michael White. Admission is free. The C.O.L.A. Exhibition showcases new work by each artist created with the aid of the $10,000 award from DCA.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, On Art
 
I can’t believe it. No, I will not lie, I can easily conceive of it.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy
 
If I do everything in my own interest, it is because the interest I have in myself comes before everything else.
– Seneca, On Benefits
 
This exhibition focuses on the evolution of certain forms of production that are realized by the dismantling of external elements and uniting them into an internalized and intentionally conflicted whole. This activity is inherently schizophrenic and therefore results in a multifarious yet not unresolved output.
 
The title roughly translates to “before returning home you must burn down the house” – which could mean, among other things, that engaging with oneself one requires continual processes of disassembly in an effort to form a united, cohesive self. The linguistic shift in the exhibition’s title is representative of the passage from one state of being to another, with inevitable (and intentional) slippages in implication. Also at play are fractured, interrupted systems: disassembly/assembly, self/duality, subjectivity/influence, privacy/publicity, singularity/multiplicity. The exhibition seeks to locate itself in the fold between these states, in moments of transition and contradiction.