Marine Contemporary is delighted to present, Unfinished Business, littlewhitehead’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. After their successful U.S. solo debut in 2011, the Glasgow based duo are back for what they see as an opportunity to resolve and build on ideas that were born out of their first trip to Los Angeles and the unresolved nature of some of their most recent works. This exhibition focuses on new sculptures and a series of prints made from found photographs. This is littlewhitehead’s first exhibition where they‘ve made their work in what they consider to be "a proper studio” and feel that it has affected the way they produce their work. Unfinished Business broadly explores the ideas of failure and ambition, which could be interpreted as commenting on the process of being an artist, but also just as much on being a human being.
 
’Failure‘ is a combination of all of littlewhitehead’s failed sculptures over the last few years. A comic boulder of epic proportions, littlewhitehead explain, “it’s as much a monument to our persistence as it is to our shortcomings. Some of the items in the boulder have been exhibited before. But sometimes we only realize a work’s failure once you see it in a show. Recycling our failed work is something we’ve always done. Initially it was a financial thing, but now it just seems more cathartic. One of the reasons the elements of “Failure” failed, is because we tried too hard to make them”. The duo find the idea of leftovers interesting. To them the detritus of creative ideas is essential to taking the work where they want it to go: “Debris can also be more interesting than the finished work. But it’s also about honesty. Understanding why something failed, is very important in avoiding its reoccurrence.”
 
littlewhitehead have always worked with found photographs as source material, with many found images filling the walls of their studio. The prints in this exhibition are all images from a British man’s holiday to the US in the late 1970’s. They are snapshots of everyday Americana that felt completely foreign to his eyes. Much like the taker of these photographs, the social and cultural landscape of America still feels foreign to the artists and they were intrigued by the idea of selling a foreign America back to Americans.
 
Sigmund Freud defined the concept of the uncanny, or ’unheimlich‘, in an essay in 1919. He was describing the sensation of discomfort or displacement when familiar objects are made unfamiliar and emerge in forms that horrify and create a sense of profound unease. Uncanny objects make us aware of our repressed hidden selves. It is the sensation that can accompany dolls, puppets, mannequins, waxworks, robots, and even figurative sculpture in its widest sense. Things that are human and inhuman, dead and alive. Things that express collective anxiety. littlewhitehead’s work fits perfectly into a vein of art that addresses the uncanny - artists like Mike Kelley, Hans Bellmer, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Cindy Sherman. The duo trained and are based in Glasgow but have an immediacy that is very different from the drier aesthetic approaches of the city. They strive and succeed to make work with an immediacy to it that functions alongside and before theory. These are artworks that move into an instinctive place first, touching on the darker (and darkly humorous) parts of our psyche.
 
littlewhitehead is Craig Little (b. 1980, Glasgow, Scotland) and Blake Whitehead (b.1985, Lanark, Scotland). littlewhitehead are children of the 80s: brought up on a diet of video nasties, computer games and the post-industrial landscape of socialist Glasgow. Their sculptures and drawings are the product of a very idiosyncratic and private dialogue. As a result, all of their work is steeped in their very own brand of humor. It is through such humor they manage to negate any particular ideological position, and instead try to foster reflection on many ontological and ideological absurdities. Past shows include Newspeak: British Art Now at Saatchi Gallery, London and a solo show at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Recent shows include, Constructions at Helene Bailly, Paris, The Cyclic Gate at Sumarria Lunn, London, How Art Things at Nest Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands. littlewhitehead were included in the book “100 New Artists” by U.K. critic Francesca Gavin. “100 New Artists” highlights new themes, media, imagery, and ideas emerging in contemporary art practice. littlewhitehead currently live and work in Glasgow.

Santa Monica, March 2013 – Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Lucia Koch. This will be Koch’s first solo exhibition in the United States and her first with the gallery. Koch uses interventions, installations, videos and photographs to explore the means for effecting change in one’s experience of the environment. She often covers the façades, skylights and windows with translucent materials, filters, or laser-cut panels of patterned wood or metal, creating new layers between inside and outside. Her interest lies in generating altered states of place, where invisibility and interruption short circuit perception.
 
In imagining the opportunities architecture presents for art, Koch will build a site-specific installation, transforming the anatomy of the main gallery. Here, “architecture” is less the construction of an object than a strategy for occupying space. Also on view will be a video work and large-scale photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, installed as virtual extensions of the environment. This series represents Koch’s ongoing engagement with understanding how a space is converted into place.
 
Koch (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1966) lives and works in São Paulo. She has participated in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011), the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006), the 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011), and When Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009) which was also on view at Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Her work is in the collections of such institutions as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

Controlled Chaos, Peter Kempson
 
Known for his photo-realistic acrylic L.A.andscapes, Peter Kempson has been exploring a wide-range of subjects and new media for a little over a year. His new works include a portrait of Steven Spielberg rendered as a montage of scenes from his movies, and “20th Century Modern,” a large piece celebrating modernist architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. There are also color studies, an ode to the film industry, entitled “Cinemetropolis,” (which imagines an entire city devoted to film history, production and Hollywood ephemera like Angelyne’s billboards) and a tongue-in-cheek piece called “Abstract Painting Hung on an Inappropriate Wall.” Like a modern-day Hieronimous Bosch, Kempson renders these diverse subjects with meticulous attention to detail, employing photo-montage and painting together with a dose of social satire.
 
Spliced, Patricia Doede Klowden
 
Klowden’s current series, Sliced, continues her examination of the figure in ceramic and bronze, with representational forms as well as abstractions that invoke the figure without full representation, and ceramic vessels that approach the physical body from a more intuitive perspective. Each of the ceramics has been sliced into horizontal bands that are then re-pieced together to form the whole. Heads, torsos, vessels and abstracts, all sliced and re-made, with a resulting repetition of horizontal line that breaks the vertical pieces into complex compositions, and offers a sense of play mixed with dynamism. Klowden finds fascination in the resulting reconstructed forms, and the way in which the edges refuse to be re-pieced as they once were. The eye of the viewer then has the opportunity to conceive of the original form, and to make its own connections. The bronze figures, remaining whole and un-sliced, stand as a counterpoint and reminder of the unaltered physical body, while the multiple glazes Klowden uses on the surface of the ceramics in blues, greens, purples and golds offer luminous cool depths, with moments of warmth pulling us back in to a feeling of flesh.
 
The Food Series Continues, Gary Polonsky
 
In his latest exhibition, artist Gary Polonsky further explores large-scale food studies, focusing his most recent work on classic American confections. Working from real food while using non-traditional canvases of balsawood, styrofoam, and wire mesh, Polonsky’s three-dimensional works break the surface and effectively blur the line between painting and sculpture. “Each piece in this series attempts to advance my ability to describe, recreate, and emphasize the beauty and wonder that can be found in almost any object,” says Polonsky. Magnifying his subjects’ detail, Polonsky’s wall-based constructions echo themes of nostalgia while beckoning viewers to take a closer look at an array of tantalizing salty and sugary treats - just short of taking an indulgent bite.
 
Download press images here: Include cl.ly/1u2t3o0u2Z2T (pdf/Cloud) link

Lora Schlesinger is pleased to announce Adonna Khare’s fourth solo-exhibition with the gallery. In the Clouds features new drawings by the artist. The exhibition opens with the artist’s reception on Saturday, June 8 from 5 to 7 pm and is on view through July 20, 2013.
 
Adonna Khare’s new drawings are whimsical, meticulous, solemn, playful, and humorous. Filled with an array of complex narratives, Khare’s drawings make it easy to abandon the world around you and delve into her mystifying world of Bears, Antelopes, Chimp, Bunnies and Butterflies. Backgrounds filled with tornadoes, whirlpools, waterfalls and storm clouds represent life’s unpredictability, ever-evolving change, and the unknown. All of Khare’s animals caught in the foreground of a storm brewing behind them, a storm of change and uncertainty; once it arrives you don’t know whether there will be severe damage or you’ll come out unscathed and better off.
 
This past fall Khare won the Public Award at ArtPrize 2012, the largest art competition in the world, which consisted of 1,619 works of art by artists from 56 countries. With over 400,000 attendees Adonna Khare took home the first prize. In the Clouds is Khare’s response to the changes in her life that have past and the changes that are yet to come since winning the award.
 
Adonna Khare received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Her drawings were selected for the Surrealism Today exhibition at the Nassau County Museum in Roslyn NY. She was included in the Long Beach Museum of Art’s “Sweet Subversives, Contemporary California Drawing 2009-2010” and was given a one-person show in 2010 titled “The World of Adonna Khare: Beasts, Backpacks and Curious Creatures”, at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carslbad, California.

The East Gallery presents Cindy Kane’s second solo-exhibition, Gravity, featuring new paintings on ceramic tiles by the artist. Kane visits the themes of family life, anxiety about the environment or politics, and the repetitive patterns in nature. Her work exudes an intimate visual conversation between the mind and the hands, and the exploration of materials. Centered around a 40 x 40 inch piece which serves as the theme of the show, “Gravity” depicts a black bird falling through space, framed by a colorful border which anchors the bird in a perpetual free fall to the earth.
 
Cindy Kane lives and works in Martha's Vineyard, Ma.. She has exhibited nationally with various galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver, and with museums such as the Art Complex Museum in Massachusetts, The Katonah Museum in Katonah New York, and the Hunterdon Museum of Art in New Jersey. In the fall of 2013 Kane will have her first public installation at the Flatiron Prow Art Space in New York City.
 
The shows open with the artists’ reception on Saturday, June 8 from 5 to 7 pm. The gallery is located in the Bergamot Station Art Center, 2525 Michigan Avenue, T3, Santa Monica. For additional information please call (310) 828-1133, view our website at www.loraschlesinger.com, or e-mail: gallery@loraschlesinger.com.

gallery km is proud to present The Conversation, our first solo show of work by Los Angeles-based artist Christine Frerichs. The
exhibition is presented in two distinct but related series in the west and east galleries, one featuring a series of ten sequentially
grouped mid-sized mixed-media paintings on canvas, and the second featuring one large and several small paired canvases. The
exhibition will take place from June 15 through July 27, 2013, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, June 15th, from
6-8pm.
In The Conversation, Frerichs presents work that integrates abstract and representational references to tell the story of reconciling and
expressing various sides of the self, and the interplay between passion, vulnerability and control. Through the use of densely textured
layers of interlocking paint, and the complex interplay between color and pattern, Frerichs creates abstract portraits in which colors
become stand-ins for people or places, transforming the pieces themselves into abstract diagrams of relationships, senses, events,
and the physical body. Each painting begins with a layer of textured paint forming a radiating figure”8” pattern, with the measurements
of the figure eight based upon Frerichs own body—the top loop corresponding to her eye level, and the base loop to her navel—and
with the form itself made by carving grooves into a thick layer of modeling paste. Superimposed on these textured foundations are
imagery and mark-making that oscillate between eruptions of color, light and form that read as spontaneous, to very controlled lines
and patterns, speaking to the range of emotional experience that Frerichs describes as moving from “explosively exaggerated
performance” to “a restrained seizing of the body”.
In these paintings, the physical body (as paint on canvas) receives, reflects and reveals, but also very definitely acts and projects. The
emotional content of past memory and the transformational potential of present experience abut and challenge one another, and often
do so with a powerful sense of play. Frerichs expects these conversations to provide a cacophony of possible dialogue, with actors
including body and mind, past and present, internasl and external, self and other, artist and audience, all available and collapsed into
fleshy, uncomfortable, beautiful, intelligent, messy and yet highly choreographed compositions. The titling of the pieces as
“conversations” invokes the social structure of interaction—the rules and conduct governing how we connect to each other—and the
constant tug of war between the desire to connect and the need for self/society-protective guidelines, as well as the tension between
controlled narrative and disruptive emotion.
The self, as represented in both physical and ephemeral form in Frerichs’ canvases, becomes memory’s receptacle and its visible
interpreter as it moves through the present. In the smaller series of paired paintings, each piece is formed by two canvases placed
next to one another, with a pattern similar to the figure eight but split and reoriented so that each half of the under-pattern faces
outward (instead of forming an internally complete whole). The paintings in this series more clearly invoke landscape as referent, but
they too remain a kind of portraiture, with the remembered or imagined landscape acting out the interplay between self and other, and
between self and self. Though doubling is present in both series through the underpainted texture and often through surface content,
Frerichs presents not duality but dialogue, opening space for multiple voices and levels of experience.
Christine Frerichs lives and works in Los Angeles, has exhibited at ACME, CB1 Gallery, Kaycee Olsen Gallery, and Young Art in Los
Angeles, Duchess Presents in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, among others, and was recently featured in a
solo exhibition of work with gallery km at VOLTA NY, New York. Her work has been reviewed by ArtForum and The Los Angeles Times,
and published in New American Paintings. She received her M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside in 2009, has taught at U.C. Riverside and U.C.
Irvine, and is currently Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and Adjunct Faculty at East Los Angeles College.