Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by French artist Anne-Lise Coste, on view from June 20 – through August 9, 2013 at our 195 Chrystie Street location. The artist has shown extensively in Europe for almost 15 years and this is her first with Eleven Rivington.
 
The exhibition will feature new paintings executed primarily in spray-painted acrylic. In the main gallery, an immersive series of 12 black and white canvases based on details of Picasso’s Guernica breaks down the highly complex and visually dense painting into singular appropriated and abstracted scenes. In the smaller second space of the gallery is a display of a new series of text-based works and abstract paintings. All share a unique balance of severity and airiness, in addition to sharp wit. Impulsiveness is characteristic for her work—often painting over previous attempts with gesso until satisfied. Treating letters as units of words allow her to bypass the strict rules of language and convention. With her decisive use of a spray gun to articulate with pigment, she fuses the vitality of expressionism (direct and intuitive mark-making) with the aloofness of Pop (mechanized paint application). Coste frequently raises existential questions - the social and political content of Picasso's regarded masterpiece is undeniable - articulating them by cropping details, re-articulating or subverting specifics, or executing gestures or texts in the form of direct statements / re-statements that expose every single pore. The tangled whole of her practice is a many-voiced inner monologue, a maze whose paths seem to know only two ways out: either an implosion of meaning via repetition, or an explosion through pure overload.
 
Anne-Lise Coste was born 1973 in Marseille, France and currently lives and works in New York. She studied in Marseille at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and in Zurich at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst. Recent and upcoming shows include Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, Germany; Fundacio Caixa Madrid, Spain; Esslinger Kunstverein, Esslingen, Germany; Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Santander, Spain. This exhibition is presented in association with Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona.
 
Eleven Rivington’s two locations are at 11 Rivington St and at 195 Chrystie St, NY, NY 1002, USA. Summer Hours are Tues – Fri 11 AM – 5:30 PM. The gallery is closed July 4 and 5 for Independence Day Holiday. Please contact gallery@elevenrivington.com or 212-982-1930 for more info.

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in New York by American artist Israel Lund, on view from June 20 through August 9, 2013 at the gallery’s 11 Rivington Street location.
 
Israel Lund’s paintings are a record of the static within a system of reproduction. There is a point at which they commenced, but they began with an image of nothing, as Lund initially burned an open rectangle approximately 8.5 x 11 inches into a silkscreen, unevenly forcing black ink through the blank image onto a canvas. By affecting a copy of nothing, Lund imports no other information to the painting’s surface but that which is already inherent to the process of reproduction itself (e.g. the black ink, its semi-mechanical application, the data assumed to be copied), thereby allowing the system to generate the image. As he distorts, enlarges, degrades, and re-inserts these copies further, Lund extrapolates a recursive and deconstructive method of reproduction that continually re-doubles upon itself, imparting a physical and conceptual liquidity to each individual painting, alleviating the burden of originality from any work and the artist himself.
 
The works on view at Eleven Rivington have long since distanced themselves from this beginning, having appeared in an artist book, then haphazardly rearticulated through three-color process paintings (cyan, yellow, and magenta), scanned and digitally distributed on his and others tumblr pages, and presently re-photographed through a PDF generating application on his phone, the images from which provide the basis for this exhibition. The paintings are altered as much by their actual, physical production, as by their dissemination, each step in this process degrading the copies further, purposefully leaving us with no original by which we can ground the work. The paintings only change slightly from iteration to iteration, but they flood the system with copies of themselves, polluting the essential qualities of the work with its innumerable duplications and the mutations that accord such a process.
 
Four of the paintings are hung on the front windows of the gallery, which may best represent the simultaneity of their production, consumption, and dissemination. Facing the paintings from the front, the stretchers and braces cast a shadow through the canvas, the central rectangle not only reflecting, but also emitting light that shines through its surface. With greater contrast between the shades, and a certain bald luminescence to the highlights, the paintings appear to frame dull jpegs of themselves. They are then both image and the thing itself, and, given their relatively inevitable online distribution, the physical paintings occupy an experiential stage with their reproductions, anticipating the future life of the painting through the past life of its various copies, and its present appearance. Lund’s work temporarily flattens these transient moments into one space and context, aware, however, of the slippery identity of paintings.
 
Israel Lund was born in 1980 in New York. He was educated at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers Univeristy, NJ (MFA) as well as Pacific Northwest College of Art, OR (BFA). He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Rob e rt s&T ilt on, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA, and Elaine Levy Project, Brussels, Belgium.

Krause Gallery presents “Emerging to Established”; a unique perspective on our annual summer Group Show.
Krause Gallery will give new and emerging artists the opportunity to show their works in a gallery setting as well as showing some of the galleries established artists new works.
Each artist will show 2 or 3 pieces of their work. One being what they are known for and one possibly a step in a new direction. This is interesting because for the emerging artists they are just beginning but already testing the waters. For the Established artists its a chance to feel out their collectors in a new direction. The show is split into two parts – June 20th – July 16th and July 20th to September first.
 
June 20th - Artists include, Jordan Eagles, Emil Alzamora, Sang Sik Hong, Chris Dean, Hanksy, Gilf, Curtis Readel, Steve Seeley, Ben Frost, Shaun O'Connor, Nathan Vincent, Mr Two Three, Noah Scalin.
 
July 20th – Artists include: Peter Feinbaum, Aaron Thornton, Cope2, Matt Colagiuri, Stephan Zirwes – Eric van Straaten.

Signing, sealing, swallowing, flogging, revealing, casting, unsealing, regurgitating, healing, releasing. Reflection, nested in opposites, is betrayal—this has to be the axiom that marks our starting point, even if we have always already started, always already find ourselves halfway down the road to perdition. Perdition is grace. We have cast our inconsolable eyes on the heavens. We’ve call this Genesis as a way to absolve ourselves. To look up then, this is what eyes are for—eyes in the universal absence of consolation. And this is why the wise, as the Assyrians remind us in their sand-blasted books, sometimes gouged them out with sharpened flint and fed them to the hogs. To see in blindness the blindness of seeing. The binary falters and fails. It fails us. It fails at the moment that the demons are cast out. Masterfully cast out. Dark castings. To cast is to release, to pull from a mold, to make a figure by filling negative space. The opposite of—not the reflection of. From the cast of the godly, then, something ungodly. Legion is not the name(s) of the problem. Only its prompting, the road—a road that bifurcates from the one that leads to graceful perdition—to unsealing the location of the always open but hidden Secret Text, spread out like the firmament itself, that is, the very theological substrate, that reveals that the One is not reflected in the Other, that Good is not the counterpart of Evil. Sealing and unsealing, swallowing and regurgitating, flogging and healing, casting and releasing. Evil and Evil are Two—both released from the same godly mold, but neither, as the shape of its negative hollow, congruent with it. This, then, will be about bearing witness, but not from a margin, not even the margin of seeing. The witnessing of the released. So it will be about failure instead, insofar as “being about” can still sustain itself at the cliff’s edge of incomprehension. Bearing witness in the unwitnessing opened up by the plunge of the witness into the void. The witnessing of the dead witness, the witness without perception. This will be about witnessing and about theology as bearing witness: attestation, testimony, testament. The voiceless testament. The binary falters and fails. The leaping over the side of the cliff can “bear witness” to a theology. It can promise it, it can be a response to it, as to a testamentary promise. Indeed it must, it cannot not, do so. But it is an unworded promise. It’s very unwording is the promise. It can so not do so. And in doing so, it reinforces the very commitment that safeguards it as a testamentary promise. But not with the idea of applying a previously existing form of theology, or of referring to one as to a charter written somewhere else, or of obeying its laws like a transcendent authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act of its event, which is also the act of its debasement insofar as suicide is the graceful disgracing, the foundation of a theology. Of an a-theology. An other theology. A theology of filth. A theology with no believer. Always witnesses, always multiple. But not a theology of the pack, either. Not wolves, not rats. Despicable shit-eaters, never gorging the fecal pies in unison. A theology, an a-theology, of grovelers, of mud-inhabitants. A theology that is no cast, no model, no laws, just pure release. It would be a matter, then, of the suicided witness constituting, through its decision, collective always but never of a collectivity as such, its own theology, a-theology, an un-atheist a-theology that must also, through its generality, become, invent, institute, offer for reading, in an exemplary way, signing it, at the same time sealing it and unsealing it, the possibility of this a-theology, of this bearing witness through death. In the singular. In this instance only. For it can only happen once—this unveiling of the good Evil, of what the good or the godly releases without this release being like itself. Inscribed with the hoof of the suicided in protest, in an effort to illustrate. But this is the space of the un-illustrational. The binary fails here again. The a-theology comes, emerges, consolidates, in the event itself, in the double-event of the suicide and the witnessing of the suicide, false of mirror or no mirror but a witness of the double-event of the Christ’s casting out and casting in the demonic. It is the mastery of casting in, of possessing the living with the demonic, guiding this event. This double-event is its singularity (suicide as witnessing), even as it imperfectly doubles, while un-doubling it, another singularity (Christ jamming the demonic in the bodies of the innocent). It’s its repeatable—insofar as it is theology—unrepeatability. At a particular date, on the day that the Christ cast the demons across the species-boundary, in an absolute violation, a violation of not any law in particular, by a violation as itself, as such, as Event, abominable enough to instill mortal fear in the villagers, at the both unique and repeatable—that is, unrepeatable repeatable—date of a signature, of a signed abominable act of exorcism and possession, the negation of itself already nested in the act, canceling it out, making it the historical negative act par excellence, the Evil Event, something—or rather a nothing—that could be answered, that could be attested to, that could be witnessed, and, at the same time, flogging the binary one more time, witnessed only by an act of negation equally radical, radically enough to establish a counter-theology, an outside to theology—the leaping of the hogs over the side of the cliff. The immaculate assumption of the impossible task.The generation of a reminder, a trace that vanishes with the life of the suicide, outside of the Two—of the evil of the demonic and of the evil of the Christ. The jump, in other words, is the inscription of evil in the world, not the evil of the leapers, the porcine evil, but the very evil that is at the heart of the figure of the Christ, the evil that marks the release—the figure—constituted in the hollow of the godly cast. The swine are the lambs that unmask the Lamb as Goat, that establish the undeniability of the Two. The leap carries reference beyond itself, beyond reference, to where evil establishes a different kind of world, clocked in the veils of theology, of ungodly Son birthed by the God-Father, the Cast of Perfection, establishing the universal absence of consolation. The swine is inedible because it belongs to a world we can’t measure up to.

An interior earth sculpture.
250 cubic yards of earth (197 cubic meters)
3,600 square feet of floor space (335 square meters)
22 inch depth of material (56 centimeters)
Total weight of sculpture: 280,000 lbs. (127,300 kilos)
 
The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.
 
The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 580 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long.
 
This work is the companion piece to De Maria's 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer at Kassel, Germany. In that permanently installed earth sculpture, a brass rod of the same diameter, total weight and total length has been inserted 1,000 meters into the ground.
 
The Broken Kilometer has been on long-term view to the public since 1979. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.