Munch Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions.
 
‘I Believe in Death after Life’ by Morten Hemmingsen (DK)
‘Summer Home Collection’ by Jeffrey Owen Ralston (US)
 
Both artists will be present at the Opening Reception Saturday, June 1 from 7-9 pm.
 
MORTEN HEMMINGSEN – I BELIEVE IN DEATH AFTER LIFE
Hemmingsen’s approach is not without humor, when he takes on the substantial topics of life and death. It’s not the loud slapstick humor, but a quiet subtle one that might make you chuckle, but there is often more at stake, an underlying thoughtfulness and sincerity. The exhibition contemplates our final destination, and invites the viewer to engage and reflect, but the artist himself has a significant view on life, and the aftermath in particular, which is expressed across multiple media.
 
With puns and play, Hemmingsen creates his iconic blue/white banners. Carved in wood but ceramic in appearance, they draw references to the tattoo and Danish/Dutch porcelain traditions. It’s an illusion of fragility paired with quirky lines and images. The banner with the exhibition title ‘I Believe in Death after Life’ emphasizes that life should be lived here and now - there is no “on the other side”. This is the artist’s conviction, and it is not the only work of art where Hemmingsen battles religious beliefs. Similar sentiment can be seen in the monochrome inverted black cross, with the carved text ‘Good God’. A work that attracts the viewer with its immediate exquisiteness, but behind the superficial glossiness the message appears cynical and questions the construction of our lives, and the faith in redemption. Death on the other hand becomes very tangible in the series ‘Victim’ where the remains of dead animals are explored – a dissected frog, a dismembered horse, an canidae autopsy.
 
Besides wood cuts carved with one-liners or illustrated with every day objects, the exhibition will also present some of his other work; paintings made on the back of vintage school posters along with selected gouache work. This is Hemmingsen’s second exhibition at Munch Gallery.
 
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JEFFREY OWEN RALSTON – SUMMER HOME COLLECTION
It’s a typical morning. I am sipping tea, flipping through a CB2 catalogue, and listening to HGTV’s ‘Design on a Dime.’ I’m dressed and ready for a day trip to Ikea. I’m not looking for anything in particular, but just feel like browsing. My cart fills fast with random and perfectly matching objects. They all make so much sense to me. I’m back home and anxiously unwrap the packaging. I’m disappointed. Nothing seems to be how I imagined; nothing matches anymore. Everything is too small to fit anything into, and everything looks really cheap. I get a spoon for my ice cream and click the remote. There is a commercial on the television for Cindy Crawford’s Home Collection. I feel like Cindy is looking directly at me as we both lay on the sofa. I notice how flawless her collection is, how perfectly relaxed she is, and then I ask myself, “Why does she have a home collection?” I want my own home collection.
 
I created a Summer home collection that demonstrates the harmony of a curated store display. The items have a close relationship to one another, undisturbed and in unison. However, this is easily interrupted when an object leaves the group. A person once told me “The painting is only yours until somebody else sees it.” The same goes for this show, only re-phrased, “The home collection is mine, until somebody takes something from it.”
 
‘Summer Home Collection’ is made with household trash bags and disposable plastic tablecloths, a medium that is usually used in my work. Although I have always been attracted to it’s aesthetic qualities, I feel that I should recognize that the plastic used for this installation has a much deeper voice than times before. Its semi-gloss appearance along with it’s cheaply produced and disposable history resembles the manufactured merchandise found at many retailers. Beautiful in the context of a gallery or showroom, the plastic becomes nearly trash when taken home.

The final exhibition of P!’s six-month cycle on copying revives recent histories through spatial fiction and wild expropriation. Like musicians who simultaneously “cover” and claim a favorite song as their own, the works in Permutation 03.4 rewrite the linearity of succession and influence. Techno-conceptualist Thomas Brinkmann reengineers the very instrument on which records are performed. Presented at Documenta X in 1997, his double-armed turntable stretches, syncopates, and contorts the playback of any track — effortlessly yielding albums that remix and elude their original source. In contrast, Semir Alschausky exhibits a 7 ½ foot wide “copy” of Paolo Veronese’s 1563 painting, The Wedding at Cana. Painstakingly rendered in a circular line pattern, Alschausky’s drawing challenges the amnesiac rhythms of cultural reference through its pen-on-paper hatchmarks and obsessive retracings. The impulse to resurrect and reimagine the past is also ingrained in Katarina Burin, who displays the archival publications of a little-known female Czech architect, Petra Andrejova-Molnár. Within the historicized narrative of Modernist architecture, these unlikely treasures question the curated canon as a “collective” memory. Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism examine myths of autonomy through their reactivated structures. In “Night Curtain by Rey Akdogan Edited,” an original installation at P!, they “elaborate the dispersed kind of Situationist Post Minimalism” that is apparent in their recent architectural and exhibition projects. Their “interest in the specificities of light […] result[s] in the gallery shifting its hours” to the evenings, and also means that a system of periodically dimmed lighting units creates “an almost cinematic dance of shadows on the walls.” The final piece in the exhibition is a reinstallation of Oliver Laric’s video essay Versions, which first appeared at P! in March 2013 and is currently on view in the exhibition A Diferent Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial. Using Laric’s work as a basis, The Julliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts have created a multimedia performance version of the video that —overwriting its non-definitive predecessor — is presented at P! as a new work. Undermining inscribed architectures and black-and-white narratives, Permutation 03.4 proposes the copy as a mere historical fragment: a critical moment of repetition and repression.

Rosanne Olson
Rapture ( series )
May 8 – June 16, 2013
 
The Robin Rice Gallery is pleased to present Roseanne Olson’s third photography exhibition, Rapture. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, May 8th, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
 
“The magic of the pool—the un-weighted body, the solitude, the distortion, that has always fascinated me.” In the invitational image, Bournee, a woman is suspended in soft hues of blue water but appears to be floating upwards, ascending into the clouds. Arabesque, her model in the pool is turned gracefully upside down, arms outstretched, in a gossamer dress fanning against the backdrop of faint clouds in the sky. Her color images come off dreamy, surreal and mysterious. In most of the images there are reflections on the water and refractions of light, like watercolors bleeding together, with undefined shapes leaving us with more with the feeling of a painting.
 
Olson describes Rapture as, “a biography of my dreams,” intrigued by the world that lies just beyond our consciousness—where time shifts, gravity loosens and we slip into dreaming. She conveys the dreams she’s had since childhood—women donning 100 year-old vintage dresses suspend languidly as though they are defying space and time, floating through the sky. In reality, Olson is photographing them from above in swimming pools in Seattle, Oregon, where her female models appear to be tumbling and turning, falling and slipping out of dresses. The effect is ethereal. Her models could be construed as angels.
 
Despite each image’s balanced composition, Olson claims the process of capturing floating objects on film is haphazard and spontaneous. She shoots instinctively on the fly, reacting as clothing and body position continually change. Yet when it comes to her models she strives to create a meditative situation, “the subjects need to be relaxed so the water is calm, which is hard to do when gravity is pulling down.”
 
Rosanne Olson works in both fine art and commercial photography. She obtained her master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over the past 25 years, her photographs have won many awards and were included in numerous photography annuals including, Graphis and the cover of Communication Arts. Her work has also been featured in View Camera Magazine, Lens Work and Photo District News. In 2008 Rosanne authored a book titled, “This is Who I Am—Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes,” a book about women and body image. She teaches lighting, portraiture and creativity at various photographic schools, colleges, and conferences. Roseanne is represented by Robin Rice Gallery in New York and galleries in Aspen and Boston. This is her third solo show at the Robin Rice Gallery.
 
To view all the images from the exhibition go to www.robinricegallery.com

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds
A solo show, Color Photographs
May 8-June 30, 2013
 
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, May 8th with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
Sasha Wolf Gallery is proud to present, Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds.
This is Wolkoff’s second solo show with the gallery.
 
Katherine Wolkoff’s show Deer Beds consists of seven pictures made on Block Island, located off the Rhode Island coast. The pictures are of the imprints made in the grass by sleeping deer. Wolkoff found these deer beds by following the paths of the deer to the nests where they spent the night. Each time she came upon a bed she felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving its warm impression on the earth. She was always aware of their proximity. The photographs are at once a physical reminder of a living breathing animal and an abstract rendering of a field of grass. In this work, Wolkoff continues her decade-long investigation of the flora and fauna of this small, unique island, where she also photographed the collection of birds for her previous show, Found.
 
This is Katherine Wolkoff’s second exhibition at the Sasha Wolf Gallery. Her photographs have been widely exhibited, including exhibitions at Danziger Projects, the New York Photo Festival and Women in Photography. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of Art and the Norton Museum of Art and the Yale Library. Born in 1976, Wolkoff graduated from Barnard College and received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art.

 
JONATHAN VANDYKE
The Painter of the Hole
 
Opening: Sunday, May 5, 5 - 8pm
Exhibition dates: May 5 - June 23, 2013
 
Scaramouche is pleased to present The Painter of the Hole, Jonathan VanDyke‘s second solo exhibition with the gallery. VanDyke’s new work evolves from his wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures, first exhibited at Scaramouche in 2009, that “perform” as they continuously drip paint directly onto the floor, and from his many recent live performances, in which actors and dancers move silently for hours while paint drips upon them and passes from body to body. The works offer signifiers we associate with painterly process - canvas, stained and marked with color, appears in objects and is represented in photographs - yet VanDyke has pushed and pulled painting in such a way that these signifiers are displaced. Undoing media-specific boundaries, VanDyke re-orients modernist conventions, conflating painting with fiber arts, fashion, dance, textile design, and photography. With multiple collaborators and processes involved, the work subverts notions of painting‘s singularity and challenges the idea of individual authorship.
 
The title of the exhibit is borrowed from a series made by George Grosz in the late 1940s. Grosz portrayed a figure who, searching for a new vocabulary of making, found himself endlessly painting an image of a hole. Into this void VanDyke proposes, “painting not as a form so much as a restless mood, a conduit, a matrix that includes the making, presenting, perceiving, desiring, acquiring and physical decaying of paintings...I want to perform The Painter and perform painting, this stubborn manner of coloring that doggedly mirrors, marks, and circles us.”
 
A series of large-scale, sewn canvas works in the exhibit evolved from a long-term collaboration with the dancers Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana, who are also a couple. In a durational, live performance entitled Cordoned Area, the two improvise from VanDyke’s score, wrestling, dancing, and negotiating each other‘s bodies while liquid paint drips and seeps from their costumes: they start clean and conclude covered in sweat and color. In the midst of spectators, Ellis and Botana publicly navigate that space between a performed and an actual relationship. Following Cordoned Area, VanDyke invited the two back to the studio to work with him away from public view. There Ellis and Botana, with paint inserted in their clothing, interpret VanDyke’s directions, dancing and making contact atop raw canvas. The paint serves as an unconscious trace, a trail of their interaction. This studio process results in a group of massive, marked canvases. VanDyke uses the canvases as raw material, cutting them into pieces and intermixing them to form opulent geometric patterns, and then sewing them back together. The patterns themselves reference 19th-century Amish quilts, Sonia Delauney fabric designs, the pants of Picasso‘s harlequins, the brickwork of a modern Danish housing block - patterns found next to and near the body.
 
Each painting is displayed on a partition placed in the midst of the space. The backs of the paintings, with their web of seams, are revealed, while the walls of the gallery remain empty. Hanging behind each painting is a photograph. For the creation of this series, Ellis and Botana’s canvases (in their uncut stage) were used as backdrop and floor in elaborate studio sets. Models (friends and performers from other works) strike poses that exist somewhere between private ritual and fashion shoot. This image of the still body in front of the marked canvas recalls VanDyke‘s own 2011 solo performance The Long Glance, in which he stood and stared at a major Jackson Pollock work for 40 hours, making himself immobile in front of an “action” painting. The photographs also reference the work of artists who used the camera to explore private realms aside of their primary practice, such as the 1920’s self-portraits of Gertrud Arndt ­- an important fiber artist at the Bauhaus - and the charged tableau of George Platt Lynes, who made elaborately staged photos of performers, his lovers and friends. The heavily made-up models in VanDyke‘s series wear Mondrian necklaces and Jackson Pollock jeans amidst ab ex curtains and geometric partitions. We are reminded that, despite the value and language we add to it, despite the relentless preservation of its surfaces, painting exists, too, as swaths of fabric: like an outfit or piece of clothing, it moves out into the world, embedded with its own histories, posing and projecting meaning, always becoming something else.
 
Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo projects include The Long Glance at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; With One Hand Between Us, a project for Performa11 in New York; and Obstructed View, a performance and installation commissioned by The Power Plant in Toronto for the exhibition Coming After. VanDyke received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2005, attended the Skowhegan School in 2008, and in 2007 attended the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, White Hot, Artslant, Art Papers, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. VanDyke’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, and Islip Art Museum, both in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, Florida; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Rutgers University, New Jersey; University of Wolverhampton, England; and Exile Gallery, Berlin, among others. He has received awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has served as a Visiting Artist Fellow at the University of Chicago and Illinois State University. Upcoming VanDyke's work can be seen in No Name at On Stellar Rays, New York, and do it (outside), the newest iteration of the instruction-based exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
 
Image: Jonathan VanDyke, Painting No9 (detail), Performance canvases, stained linen shirting, and waxed cotton in S. Delauney cloak pattern, 47 x 66 in.
 
Special thanks to fiber artist Brenda Colling for her work sewing the paintings.

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present On The Passage of a Few, an exhibition of works by Alexandre da Cunha, Terence Gower, Luis Molina-Pantin and Lisa Tan. The exhibition opens on 19 June and runs until 4th August, 2013.
Borrowing its title from Guy Debord‘s 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, the exhibition explores the relationship between citizen and environment, while it simultaneously critiques and pays homage to decaying modernist ideologies. Each artist dismantles the structure of modernist systems by exploiting and transforming the materiality of cultural and architectural tropes in order to make way for new narratives.
Terence Gower’s installation The Red Wall (El Muro rojo) dominates the gallery space. An enormous red wall frames a black and white restaged photo of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 image of Casa Barragán. By reducing Luis Barragán‘s exuberant colours to grey tones, the work highlights Barragan’s aesthetical concerns with emotional experience and architecture. Known for playful appropriation of everyday objects such as plungers, mops, fans or bottles, Alexandre da Cunha uses critical wit to topple hierarchical modernist language. With Full Catastrophe (drum XIV), the simple gesture of liberating a rusted industrial cement mixer from its original function raises complex questions of trade and labor. Luis Molina-Pantin is an obsessive chronicler. Whether using photography, books, everyday objects or postcards, Luis creates inventories of our over-looked cultural landscapes. Non-fiction reviews, is an installation consisting of sixteen fictional vintage books, each cover depicting an airplane disaster. Objectifying the book through the lens of the archive, the series becomes a strategy of representing failed ideologies - the imagery of flight, a classic modern aspiration displayed as a dystopian failure. Lisa Tan incorporates personal and collective histories in order to explore her long-standing preoccupation with the indefinable. In this instance, Alter Nordfriedhof casually documents a cemetery in Munich on a spring day. Overgrown vines and flowers obscure the tombstones into abstract shapes. Through the use of repetition and the apparatus of archival structures, an elegant ontological study transforms into a poetic meditation on mortality.
 
Biographical Information:
Terence Gower (b. 1965, Canada) lives between New York, France and Mexico. He has exhibited widely including; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; ICA Boston; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; Queens Museum, New York; Labor, Mexico City; Galeria HR, Mexico City; The Power Plant, Toronto; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver; Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin; Aun Gallery, Tehran, Iran.
 
Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969, Brazil) lives and works in London, UK. He has exhibited extensively and had recent solo exhibitions at CRG Gallery, New York; Centro Cultural Sao Paolo, Brazil; Camden Arts Centre, London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Witte de With, Rotterdam. He has also been included in Sao Paulo Biennial, 2012; the San Juan Triennial, San Juan, 2009, Prague Biennale 2, Prague, 2005; the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003 and the Liverpool Biennial, 2002 among others.
 
Luis Molina-Pantin (b.1969, Switzerland). Lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela. Recent solo presentations include; Faria-Fabregas Galeria, Caracas; Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona; Valenzuela Klenner Galería, Bogotá; Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas; Fondazione Villa Bardini, Florence. His work has also been showcased at the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Korea; The Cisneros Foundation, Miami; The 4th MERCOSUR Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil. He is currently included in ICP Triennial, New York and a solo exhibition will open at Henrique Faria, New York on 20 June 2013.
 
Lisa Tan (1973, New York). Lives and works in New York and Stockholm. She has been included in solo and group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as Artists Space, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; Arthouse at the Jones Center, Texas; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Galería Parra & Romero, Madrid; D’Amelio Terras, New York; LA><ART, Los Angeles; and FRAC Bourgogne (Dijon). She is co-curating an exhibition with Lisa Oppenheim for Art in General that will open this September.
 
For further information, please contact the gallery via email at office@simonprestongallery.com or call on +1 212 365 4495.

 
Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Köln-based artist Andreas Schulze. The exhibition will run from 17 May through 23 June 2013. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a group exhibition organized by Todd von Ammon.
 
Andreas Schulze’s practice has most frequently resulted in immersive installations that simulate domestic settings, such as that mounted at Team’s Wooster Street space in April of 2012. Schulze appropriates familiar modern design typologies and manipulates their aesthetics into bulbous cartoonish forms, creating environments that are simultaneously familiar, uncannily bizarre and somewhat ominous. For this exhibition, Schulze has created a new cycle of paintings, all representations of windows, which play with art historical attitudes towards the authority of perception. They will be presented here within a standardized white-cube setting, thereby undercutting their illusionistic tendencies.
 
Particularly in the Baroque era, painters tested their mastery by creating trompe l’oeil tableaux, literally fooling their viewers into believing that the painting in front of them was a real, tangible mise en scene. A genre of window paintings developed from this tradition, where the frame of the painting became analogous to the frame of a window; the actual painting was supposed to represent a vista and create the same sensation as looking out of an actual window. Schulze carries forth with this tradition, reducing it to its formal essentials: frame, rendered in his typical bulbous style, and view, completely sfumato and flattened. His windows complexify the tradition of the landscape in painting history by introducing a more contemporary notion – the void. Drained of scenery, these muted vistas subvert our expectations and create, in Schulze’s own words, “a feeling of yearning by means of perspective.”
 
Five of the paintings feature handles on the frame of the window, as if to invite the viewer to open them. The two large-scale paintings in this cycle deviate from the rest and give way to views of ambiguous spaces. Through one set of windows the viewer sees an interior courtyard, while through the other, one sees simplistically rendered vines climbing the façade of the building from which the viewer is “looking.” The imagery in these paintings is opaque enough that, while they establish a plausible setting (perhaps a country villa), they resist the creation of a narrative. In this sense, these paintings reveal a kinship with the landscapes of de Chirico and Magritte; they are barren and seem to point to an underlying melancholic psychology, as well as a metaphysical sense of dislocation between past and present. Alarmingly sharp contrasts between light and shadow create an aura of poignant yet foreboding mystery in an otherwise blank scene. To gaze into a Schulze Window is to gaze into the joyously inscrutable.
 
Schulze destabilizes our intimacy with familiar, mundane subjects to question not only our relationships with these objects but the very nature of seeing. Emerging in the fertile Köln scene of the 1980s, during a renaissance of painting, Schulze became associated with a group of young painters of the Mülheimer Freiheit, the name of a shared studio in which they exhibited their work. This group included the painters Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger. Though working closely and frequently collaborating with these peers, Schulze has developed an anomalous and haunting painting practice whose influence is more and more widely regarded.
 
Schulze was born in Hannover in 1955 and has been exhibiting his work since 1981, his longstanding relationship with gallerist Monika Sprüth beginning in 1983. Schulze’s work has been exhibited at museums internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstaele in Berlin and at the Kunstverein and the Sammlung Falckenberg, both in Hamburg.
 
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, Sunday noon to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please call 212 279 9219.

 
Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to present a group exhibition entitled Old Black organized by Todd von Ammon. The exhibition will run from 06 June through 26 July 2013. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 47 Wooster Street, cross streets Broome and Grand. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house a solo exhibition by Andreas Schulze entitled Windows.
 
“They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space.” (1)
 
Named after Neil Young‘s most used guitar — a worn out, heavily modified 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop — Old Black is an ensemble of works by artists whose shared tactic is the abuse, distortion and misuse of standardized methods of making. The collaborative strategy of the show is to evoke a mood that ricochets between an abject melancholy and a jagged tension as commonly reflected in filmic visions of dystopia. Old Black could be viewed as a display of artwork culled out of a used-up and burned-out occidental landscape — a future we’ve already seen and bonded with through the pessimistic but curious lenses of film and literature.
 
Old Black will include sculptural objects and spatial interventions by Harold Ancart, Edith Dekyndt and Banks Violette; photographs by Jack Pierson and Mariah Robertson; and paintings by Robert Janitz and Donald Moffett.
 
Gallery hours for this exhibition are as follows:
 
Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm and Sunday, noon to 6pm, during the month of June.
 
Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm during the month of July. (Please note: Additionally, the gallery will be closed on 04 and 05 July.)
 
For further information and/or photographs please call 212 279 9219.
 
(1) McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 46.

James Juthstrom
(1925-2007)
 
FIGURES:
paintings and drawings, 1950s - 60s
 
Curated by James Cavello
 
May 11 – June 29, 2013
 
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC exclusively represents
the Estate of James Juthstrom
 
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC is pleased to present an exhibition of figurative paintings and drawings by James Juthstrom. For 50 years this reclusive artist dedicated himself solely to the creation of art in his SoHo loft. Even though he lived near a thriving gallery scene and created artwork alongside the camaraderie of New York School artists and Abstract Expressionists, he was reluctant to find representation. The drawings and paintings on view reflect Juthstrom’s intensive exploration into his private inner life as an artist.
 
The 27 works of art on exhibit provide insight into Juthstrom’s lifelong quest to balance his representational concept with his abstract vision. Trained at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, he studied life drawing and created an expansive body of work. In a New York Times review of a Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition, Roberta Smith speaks of drawing as “the most intimate and honest of all art mediums.” Juthstrom’s drawings are indeed very personal, meant as an artist’s exploration of form and line.
 
From the early line drawings, masterful in their simplicity and expressiveness, Juthstrom moved on to large scale paintings on canvas, challenging his perspective within the confines of space. His idiosyncratic depiction of his loft and the anonymous figures populating the empty rooms provide a unique psychological portrayal of an artist who severed his ties to the world of commercialism. The paintings always depict the artist’s studio with emphasis on the floorboard and a faceless figure, most likely the artist himself. The scenes of the interior become cryptic, with mirror like boxes reflecting hidden figures or space. Shadowy figures lurk in the background, watching the interior from behind screens; no faces are visible, except maybe as reflections. Often, the symbolic compositions disintegrate into pure color, line and form, reminiscent of fauvism. The narrative is always mysterious; his dystopic vision is most explicitly expressed in his color figurative drawings, which can be seen as a diary of the secretive artist’s innermost experience. The paintings illustrate the artist’s decision to withdraw from the outside world and create in the solitude of his studio.
 
James Juthstrom’s artwork has recently been re-discovered, uncovering five decades of painting, drawing, etching and sculpting. Westwood Gallery NYC is archiving the artist’s work of five decades including paintings based on circular abstract shapes and series of esoteric figurative work.
 
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James Juthstrom was recognized by critics early in his career and was included in numerous museum group exhibitions, including Whitney Museum of American Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of the Arts and Brooklyn Museum. He also had several solo exhibitions at galleries, including Gallery G in New York, which received a review in the New York Times, Paul Schuster Art Gallery in Cambridge and Landmark Gallery in New York. He died in May of 2007, leaving behind a legacy of his lifetime dedication. Since the release of his estate collection, museums and collectors are reviewing the artwork for acquisition and discovering the history of this brilliant artist. Juthstrom’s most recent retrospective exhibition was reviewed by ARTnews and Art in America.