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.

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.

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.

John Opera, a priori
Opening Reception: May 30th, 2013, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 30th-July 3rd, 2013
 
Longhouse Projects is very pleased to present a priori, by John Opera. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
 
John Opera’s recent introduction of the cyanotype into his repertoire of photographic approaches symbolically reflects his gradual evolution from empirical research to a more clinical, methodical study. His trajectory began with carefully honed and cropped landscape photographs, moving to abstract anthotypes—a photosensitive process of bleaching out images created from a fruit or vegetable based emulsion. His latest body of work centers around a focused meditation on seemingly everyday objects translated in a very specific Prussian Blue on a residue-washed linen surface. The process of the cyanotype is a now almost obsolete technique that is not too far removed from the anthotype, using liquid chemicals and ultraviolet rays to develop the images. It was originally conceived to reproduce notes and diagrams, and later blueprints. Opera’s photographic paintings curiously address this explicit objective by making notes out of rock collections and label-free bottles and diagrams out of ropes, chains, and posed hands.
 
There is a linearity that is often avoided within today’s art trends, given the progressive shift toward interdisciplinary activities and confluence of media, but part of the power in Opera’s work comes from his voracious consumption of his own personal previous bodies of works and the accumulated integration directed back into new projects. a priori literally means “from the earlier” and Opera willfully chooses to pull from the earlier and push forward. His landscape photography came from his interest in better understanding the world around him, the anthotypes came from an interest in scrutinizing and creating directly from the same locations (the fruits and vegetables used to create the photographic emulsions are sourced from the same places), and the cyanotypes come from an interest to further understand his own investigation into the history and process of photography. From one project to the next, one can trace the complicated contrapositions inherent in each of the works—particularly the heightening of contrasts between formal techniques and conceptual concerns specifically tied to photography and painting, as his work has always been mutually comprised of these two mediums. The cyanotype represents for the artist a refreshing return to an earlier mode in order to look at things anew.
 
John Opera (American, b. 1975) lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, where he has had four solo exhibitions. Other recent exhibitions include a two-person show with Matt Sheridan-Smith at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO and group shows at Carter and Citizen and Country Club in Los Angeles, Monya Rowe in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
 
For further information, please contact Keith J. Varadi at keith@longhouseprojects.com

Hot House
Opening Reception: May 30th, 2013, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 30th-July 3rd, 2013
 
Longhouse Projects is very pleased to present Hot House, a group exhibition comprised of Tisch Abelow, Seth Alverson, Ivin Ballen, and Ariel Dill.
 
“Hot House” is a bebop standard made famous by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the early 1950s. The 50s are an era that many Americans have placed in a saccharine time capsule, where World Wars were in the past and a prosperous suburban life was seen to be in the near future, creating a new ideology based around conformity. The Civil Rights and Counter Culture movements that spawned in opposition made for hot houses, indeed. This was the beginning of a shift in Modernism.
 
At this point, the art world has its own specific nostalgic history and this has seemed to forever include a healthy skepticism of moralism, ever since Greenberg’s skewed idealistic notions of conformity. Though, this skepticism has recently transformed into a somewhat aloof translation of irony. Within this evolution, many artists have stepped out and stirred a soft rebellion toward expectations. This often has resulted in works that have become described as ‘modest,’ ‘humble,’ ‘abject’, ‘non-objective,’ or ‘provisional.’
 
The four artists presented here have sidestepped and/or shuffled these expectations. Their paintings are seductive and deceiving, but they do not ask, “What is enough?” Instead, they ask, “What is this?” In doing so, they firm up this recent ‘soft rebellion’ and resuscitate suspicion and criticality. However, the real complication derives from their complicated comfort in superficiality—each of these painters, simultaneously revel in vicissitude and beauty, offering both a single and a flipside.
 
Tisch Abelow lives and works in New York, NY. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007. Recent exhibitions include group shows at Shoot The Lobster (New York, NY) and Minus Space (Brooklyn, NY).
 
Seth Alverson lives and works in Houston, TX. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. He has had three solo exhibitions at Art Palace in Houston, as well as group exhibitions at major Texas institutions.
 
Ivin Ballen lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006. He has had solo shows at Winkleman Gallery (New York, NY) and Susanne Hilberry Gallery (Detroit, MI) and has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.
 
Ariel Dill lives and works in Queens, NY. She received an MFA from Hunter College in 2006. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Southfirst (Brooklyn, NY), and group shows at Halsey McKay (East Hampton, NY) and 247365 (Brooklyn, NY).
 
For further information, please contact Keith J. Varadi at keith@longhouseprojects.com

James J. Williams III
Leave a stain
30 MAY— 6 JULY 2013. WED – SUN. 12 - 6
OPENING 30 MAY 6-8PM
 
envoy enterprises is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by James J. Williams III, Leave a stain. Each element of the show represents a farewell letter. Together they form a set acting as and waiting for the curtain call.
With each work Williams expresses how ritual and objects can be a method of release, even as the person, the place, the self has already said goodbye.
The installation is a series of pleas for acknowledgement as they hover over farewells. Some somber, some bitter, some vicious and vacant. As the viewer moves through the set each piece is a skin shed, a bridge burned. Leave a stain is one last plea for regard and becomes the voice calling back, “Let go.”
 
James J. Williams III is a Brooklyn native, is an artist, curator and creative director. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, London, Paris, and Washington DC. Since 2003 James has served as the director and founder of the Thorstein Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Opium Magazine, Art Cal, NY Art Beat, Lapiz, Double Magazine and The New York Times.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Maria E. Piñeres
PLAYLAND
May 17 – July 7, 2013
 
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6-8pm
 
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present PLAYLAND, MARIA E. PIÑERES’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. PIÑERES’s signature medium of stitched needlepoint places the nude figure in an optical duel with the eye-catching graphics of the pinball machine playfields and backglasses of her adolescence.
 
PLAYLAND, a now defunct 1980s’ Times Square gaming arcade, stood as a shiny, visually stimulating beacon to youth, nestled in perverse contrast with the then ubiquitous porn palaces, peep shows and sex shops. PIÑERES’s works set youthful rent boys and pin-up girls into the contextual backdrop of pinball, where their sexuality can be seen in a playful and sentimental light void of shame and smut. Preserving the common pinball themes of luck and chance, the Latin phrases that appear as machine names lend airs of levity and existentialism, alluding more to the real game of life than one of fantasy.
 
Hic et Nunc (Here and Now), Ex Malo Bonum (Good out of Evil) and Caveat (Beware) are among PIÑERES’s largest works to date and their heroic nude figures enliven more narrative landscape scenes. Varied stitching patterns and angles create a mixture of textures and added shading, allowing for the expansion of the image graphics while referencing historic Bargello needlework. The Latin phrases recontextualize the imagery and mask the actual pinball game names, which are often double entendres.
 
PIÑERES lives and works in Los Angeles. Other solo exhibitions include Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles). Group exhibitions include Stitched at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design (New York) and Celebrity at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ). She has been included in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, Time, The Village Voice and V.
 
The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 21 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester).
Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon -6pm.
For further information, please contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.

Aaron Williams tends to work with cheap, fallible materials like book pages and posters, interested in the populist, stock imagery that has very little physical value but maintains great cultural and emotional currency. While examining the differences between a hand-made mark and a photographic image ( particularly one that has the popular appeal of a music or film star ) they become abstracted images: “ideas of portrait” rather than an actual portrait.
In this sense a famous picture of the Alps exists as an idea of a landscape rather than a singular, personal record of an experience. This critical distance allows the artist to move more freely in manipulating the imagery and also opens up questions and unexpected visual directions in the studio.
Working at the intersection between image and material; the space between the emotive capacity of the image and the physical reality of the paper and printing process, Williams questions the validity and reality of the images he works with, particularly in light of them being so broadly disseminated.
 
Aaron Williams was born in Rhode Island and holds a BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University. His work has been included in venues throughout the United States, including Bill Maynes, Max Protetch, Lu Magnus and Stephan Stoyanov galleries (NYC), Howard House (Seattle) and Rosenwald- Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia). He has had solo shows at Baumgartner and Max Protetch galleries in New York as well as at OH+T gallery in Boston. He has received reviews in the Boston Globe, the NY Times, the Seattle PI and L Magazine in addition to several online sources. Upcoming shows include the Portland Biennial at the Portland Museum (ME) and a solo show at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston in the fall. Aaron Williams lives and works in Queens, NY.

Mulherin + Pollard is very pleased to present , “a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell” a recent body of work by Brooklyn-based artist Saira McLaren, which explores issues of femininity, residue and saturation.
 
“Colour ...is a kind of bliss...like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell,” Roland Barthes
 
Falling lapsing into overwhelming hallucinatory - colour - spreading flowing bleeding staining, soaking merging into both the dream and the nightmare.
 
The pinks, the reds, the feminine threaten to engulf you — slipping over the white lines, off the white walls.
 
In paintings, fabric dyes on raw linen and small ceramic works, these ideas associated with chromophobia, the feminine and of generally what is good taste versus the garish, the clashing, and the `made-up` are explored.

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.

 
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.

Launch F18 is delighted to present 1XX, a group exhibition curated by Sam Trioli. The exhibition opens Saturday, June 1st from 6:00 - 8:00 PM and will remain on view until Saturday, July 27, 2013.
 
In the May 2011 issue of Frieze magazine, Ronald Jones wrote an article titled Whatever Works, a discussion on design methods and the integration of systems thinking in the 1950s. In the article Ronald quotes Jack Burnham from a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which he writes: “In the past our technologically conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”
 
1XX discusses this very concept within the parameters of the artist book and the forum in which this medium has been used on the contemporary art stage. Collectively, the work within the exhibition addresses the diversity of design and social structure that has reshaped the cultural standard of the medium, allowing for it to become more than only a product of simply purpose. As a result, many believe that the medium will slowly vanish as technology advances and the idea that printed matter could become obsolete to functional form. However, is this very idea merely a shift in design, as Burnham discusses, rather than being a truly undesirable product?
 
Within 1XX this thought is explored as it traces through a range of styles, printings, functions and techniques. Each of the works examines the function and identity of the art publication by delving further into its text, at a page, its binding and the cover. The books are experienced, not just through sight, but with the rare pleasure of tactile stimulation that is often missing from fine art exhibitions. At their roots, these works are relatives to a medium that traces back to the 27th and 26thcentury BC, which through its history has been continuously redefined and re-designed.
 
Participating artists and works by or on them include: Joshua Abelow, Ross Bleckner, Joy Drury Cox, f.ART magazine, Dianna Frid, Gypse Eyes, Johanna Heldebro, Sean Lamoureux, McDermott & McGough, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Adam Stennett and Peter Young. A selection of books will be traveling to the Sharon Art Center in September for the exhibition con(TEXT) which is being curated by Tim Donovan.
 
Sam Trioli is a artist, curator and musician based in New York City.

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.