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.

The Cut
 
The cut on her face
The blood from under her skirt
A red fountain carries me
Towards my destiny
 
The cut in the sky
Out pour father‘s eyes
Dive deep in the snow
Cold seed for the spring
Harvest of my creativity
 
The cut on her face
Portal of our race
Spurned majesty sighs
For that cut!
 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present The Cut, a solo exhibition of work by Antony on view from May 31st through July 12th, 2013.
 
Antony has created a body of work including drawing, collage, and sculpture alongside his critically acclaimed musical career as both a singer and composer. Both his music and visual art are marked by intuitive and accumulative practices that reflect a shared visual and psychological vocabulary. The initial inspiration that provided the framework for the exhibition was a poem written by the artist entitled The Cut, which describes the source of creation as a slit in the sky. The marks that the artist makes on the surface of his artwork can at once be understood as scars as well as applications that have the ability to heal the surface of the paper, fabric, or canvas. A delicate line can be juxtaposed with a harsh application of paint or a torn edge. Many of the works are intimate in scale and ephemeral in their materiality, but they are monumental in the emotional depth that they convey. Like Joseph Beuys, Antony’s work originates in personal experience yet it also addresses universal artistic or social ideas and poetically suggests the healing potential of art.
 
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971, Antony currently lives and works in New York. Since 2000, he has released four studio albums with his band Antony and the Johnsons. A special edition of the band’s 2010 album Swanlights was accompanied by a book published by Abrams Image featuring drawings and collages by Antony as well as photographs by Don Felix Cervantes in collaboration with Antony. Solo exhibitions of his artwork have been presented at Isis Gallery, London in 2009 and The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles in 2012. His work was included in It’s not only Rock’n’Roll, Baby! presented at BOZAR, Brussels in 2008 and at the Triennale Bovisa, Milan in 2010. In 2009 he curated the group show 6 Eyes at galerie du jour agnès b., Paris. Antony’s performance projects include Miracle Now (1996); TURNING (2004/2006), in collaboration with Charles Atlas; and The Crying Light (2009). Antony was musical director of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011) in collaboration with Abramović and Robert Wilson. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his performance Swanlights debuted at Radio City Music Hall in 2012.

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.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of photographic works by ten Nigerian artists who are among a new generation of African photographers that explore unique visions, strong emotional and aesthetic perspectives to tell their own stories and challenge assumptions about the African continent. Each of the artists is widely traveled and well exposed to Western art modernism both by training and contact. Each represents a resonant voice, one that achieves it's own distinction and clarity amidst changing realities. Their creative voices are simultaneously instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory. For many of the artists, this would be their first show in New York.
 
The reception is on Thursday, May 30th, 6-8pm
 
GO-SLOW: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos
New Directions in Contemporary Photography
 
Aderemi Adegbite
Ade Adekola
Akintunde Akinleye
Uche James Iroha
Chriss Nwobu
Adeniyi Odeleye
Abraham Oghobase
Charles Okereke
Uche Okpa-Iroha
Adeola Olagunju
 
Exhibition dates: May 30th - July 31st, 2013
 
In spite of the dynamic, lively, and often intensely volatile elements of life in Nigeria’s largest city, all who live there share in a daily narrative of delay. Lagosians experience go-slow in the form of impenetrable traffic jams, on the part of political leaders who make promises quickly followed by excuses, and when even a simple task becomes a major undertaking.
 
While the phenomenon of go-slow is a common cultural reference, its effects and impacts are as individual as the people who experience them, resulting in reactions that range from frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety to resignation, acceptance, and innovation in the face of a seemingly immutable reality.
 
Most showing for the first time in New York, ten Nigerian photographers explore the particular phenomenon of the Lagos go-slow through the context of personal or collective experiences demonstrating a keen awareness of the role that photography plays in strengthening the crucial links between culture, politics, and social agency.
 
Curator: Amber Croyle
 
10 LIVELY FRAMES - ONE SUBJECT: GO-SLOW-GO-SLOW
 
“Go-slow: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos”, as this photography exhibition is titled and focused, is a reality as well as a metaphor for the drudgery that characterizes diverse aspects of structural mobility in cosmopolitan Lagos. Fela Anikulakpo-Kuti, the veteran Afro-beat musician, satirist and social critic in 1978 put out a record track titled “Go-Slow”. The track explored the metaphoric gradations of “Go-Slow” as a reality in the day to day life of the Lagosian. The refrain of the track “go-slow, go-slow” aptly conjured the truth of the phenomenon while assuming landmark status of a resonating rhyme in the collective consciousness of Nigerians.
 
The diverse social and historical contexts that frame this seeming eternal characterization of Lagos have often provided photographers the contexts to invest their creative time and thoughts. The result is a corpus that keys into the testament projected by the city of Lagos as it allows for the exploration of the nuances of “go-slow” beyond a spatial identity.
 
The lively frames that the concept “go-slow” yields are thus presented in this exhibition from the experiences or encounters of cosmopolitan Lagos by the artists. Thus, from Aderemi Adegbite, Ade Adekola, Akintunde Akinleye, Uche James Iroha, Chriss Nwobu to Adeniyi Adeleye, Abraham Oghobase, Charles Okereke, Uche Okpa Iroha and Adeola Olagunju comes a bouquet of visual interpretations of the Lagos “go-slow” experience in representational and conceptual frames.
 
The exhibition plan designed to introduce to the New York audience “new directions in contemporary photography” by a crop of modern generation photographers from Nigeria is apt considering how identities are constructed. However, this objective presupposes a hierarchy that hosts these artists. Hence, I engage a brief narrative which situates the genre in Nigeria. Early uses of photography in the West Coast of Africa, from Gambia to Nigeria were documentary commissions from the English colonial authorities (Erin Harney, 2010). These include the works of J. P. Decker, a Gambian, and N. Walwin Holm, a Ghanaian who had a branch of his photography studio in Lagos. Apart from the portraitures associated with his studio, he also worked for the British as a documentary photographer. A Nigerian of note of Ijo nativity from Bonny, Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873 – 1905) was similarly engaged by the British colonial administration in Nigeria. His many choreographed portraits and group images are counted among over three hundred photographs from his atelier between 1897 and 1905. One of his very famous works that entrenches the memory of the British punitive expedition against Benin City is the apparently dehumanized Ovoramwen N’gbaisi, the Oba of Benin in the expedition year 1897.
 
It is interesting to note that Adagogo Green’s seal for his photographs bore his name with an added inscription; “Artist Photographer”. In spite of this claim, considering also the strong foregrounding of photography in the practice of the visual arts, it is only recently that its status as high art was acclaimed. This recognition has inspired new initiatives to track the multilayered history of the genre in Nigeria. Equally, exhibitions of photography now compete with those of other arts. However, an austere history of photography in Nigeria accommodates the following personalities; George S. A. Da Costa, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Dotun Okubanjo, Sunmi Smart-Cole and Don Berber. Don Berber is, within this history, a mentor to many new generation photographers who have featured in this exhibition with their visual interpretation of go-slow in Lagos.
 
In reality, the history of photography in Nigeria is in tandem with the global history of photography. This is that photography, as an expressive mode that documents phenomena as fleeting time permits, is governed by epistemes, which are palimpsest, and allow a loose ordering of identities. The image-turn, which is on the ascent in the contemporary, bears witness to deep creative exploits with the lens and the digital interface. Invariably the production and consumption of images in the artistic-scape in Nigeria has remained strong probably because of the power of the image to determine our demands upon reality. These realities shape the metaphors of focus here their enduring vehicular and often pedestrian gridlocks. This is Lagos.
 
Frank Ugiomoh, 2013
Art Historian
University of Port Harcourt
Port Harcourt, Nigeria

vimeo.com/64899161

ROBERT GRENIER
“Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013”
May 18 - June 30, 2013
Reception for (& presentation by) the artist, Sunday, 19 May 4 - 6 PM
 
SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013,” a retrospective exhibition tracking (via notebooks, holographic & published texts, archival materials and works on paper) the evolution from early typewriter-generated forms to more recent four-color drawing poems in the work of American poet Robert Grenier between 1970 - 2013. The show will be on view from May 18 – June 30, 2013.
 
On Sunday, May 19, 4 - 6 PM, Robert Grenier will introduce the ‘idea’ for the show, and speak to/read from & provisionally ‘interpret’ certain of the materials set forth in the room.
 
Over the past 40 years, poet/artist Robert Grenier (b. 1941) has constantly pushed poetry into new frontiers of practice and utterance. His handwritten poems, produced in the last two decades, cross the upper limit of inscription to be both writing and drawing. His works include Series (This Press, 1978), SENTENCES (Whale Cloth Press, 1978), Oakland (Tuumba Press, 1980), A Day at the Beach (Roof Books, 1984), Phantom Anthems (O Books, 1986), and OWL/ON/BOU/GH (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), as well as more recent online color drawing poem sequences like POND 1 and PENN SCANS. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, Grenier has received two NEA fellowships for poetry writing and a 2013 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An archive of his work is housed in the Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections. He lives in northern Vermont.
 
SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Fri., Sat. and Sun. from 1 - 6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.
 
SOUTHFIRST
60 N6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718 599 4884
www.southfirst.org

Stux Gallery is delighted to announce Not a Rose, a solo exhibition of photographs by neo- conceptual artist Heide Hatry. Seamlessly juxtaposing flowers assembled from grotesque, immaculately manicured flesh debris and picturesque, nonchalant nature, Hatryʼs works bring aesthetics and ethics into an explosive head-on collision that is both conceptually corrosive and visually arresting.
Hatryʼs serene scenes of flowers are actually photographs of trompe lʼoeil arrangements of the offal, sex organs and other residues of deceased animals. Their simple compositions almost recall scientific illustrations, whose directed focus on the flowersʼ anatomy heightens their fragrant aroma and delicate beauty. Her commitment to recreating the physical beauty of flowers renders the viewerʼs realization of the photographs' true materiality particularly jarring. The instantaneity of photography confronts the ephemeral blossoms with the persistent momentum of death and decay, and invites viewers to interrogate our cultural conception of flowers and their function as, essentially, “sex organs for plants”. Elegant yet deeply disturbing, these works call into question the foundations of aesthetic perception (and perception in general) and the ethics of our use and abuse of living animal-plant nature.
This exhibition at Stux coincides with the new CHARTA publication: Heide Hatry, Not a Rose, which addresses the nature of our relationship to flowers with unprecedented scope. Her images and the writing of 101 prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists together channel Richard Wagnerʼs pursuit of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, an interdisciplinary “total artwork” that offers a dynamic, holistic expression of its subject that is not constrained by the division between contemporary artistic genres. Contributing writers include Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jessica Hagedorn, Donna Haraway, Siri Hustvedt, Lucy Lippard, Robert Kelly, Kate Millett, Rick Moody, Steven Pinker, Avital Ronell, Stanley Rosen, Peter Singer, Klaus Theweleit, Franz Wright, and Luisa Valenzuela.
 
-Lucy Li
 
For further information please contact the gallery at andrea@stuxgallery.com.

Studio10 is pleased to present The Devil Tricked Me, an exhibition of work by Matt Freedman. The exhibition is organized around the recent publication of Relatively Indolent but Relentless, a graphic journal Freedman wrote last Autumn.
In July 2012 Freedman learned that he had Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, a rare and slow growing cancer. Treatment entailed thirty-five days of radiation and weekly doses of chemotherapy over seven weeks. Just before treatment, a friend gave Matt a blank notebook and suggested he should fill it up. Matt did complete the therapy and the notebook as well. He said, “It seemed like it would in the end give me the last laugh over my cancer treatment.” This exhibition serves to extend Freedman’s experience of his treatment, the subject of the journal, into the six months that have now passed between the end of treatment and this exhibition’s opening.
All thirteen works take as their subject bad luck. This idea is embodied in Freedman’s iconic constructions that portray folk admonitions. These signs seek to control bad luck by taking such precautions such as avoiding walking under ladders or opening umbrellas indoors. Another significant component of the show is the notion of disability. Freedman continues to feel side effects from his treatment as well as from the drugs he takes to quell those effects. Though functioning effectively, the fact that he should not drive because the narcotics would render him technically “under the influence” is for Freedman an objective marker of what he feels and knows to be true: He is not himself or at his best.
The idea of disability is communicated by hand written signs of explanation, which function as the conceptual framework for the exhibition. Freedman’s sign details the reasons for the restrictions he placed upon himself for the creation of the work: each work consists of totally “de-skilled” labor. He collected objects either from the street; broken umbrellas and cigarette stubs, or from his house and studio; A couch, a collection of pennies. He also allowed himself to use components from previous work repurposed for the show.
Matt Freedman is a sculptor, performer, writer and curator. He has exhibited with Valentine Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, vertexlist, Flipside, Fivemyles, The SculptureCenter and Long Island University. Venues of performances include PS 1 MOMA, The Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Fireproof, Brooklyn Academy of Music at Fivemyles, Galapagos Performance Space. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at The University of Iowa, Parsons the New School for Design, The Pratt Institute, The Rhode Island School of Design. NEA Sculpture (1987, NYFA, Fiction (2000). Freedman has written for Art News, Review and Cabinet, among others. For more information and images, please contact Annelie McGavin at (718) 852-4396.

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present new works by Marcia Kure in her second solo exhibition with the Gallery from 9 May to 15 June 2013. A reception for the artist will be held Thursday evening, 9 May from 6 to 8 PM.
 
—
 
We feel content and safe within the confines of the world we understand. “Tease” intends to poke holes, cut into, and fragment the perceptual matrix that is our world; daring the viewer to imagine existential possibilities beyond the familiar and the ordinary. “Tease” is a populated space, a universe of hybrid bodies and masked and secret things existing at the very edges of our daily lives.
 
The realities described by drawings, collages and sculptures in “Tease” are only imaginable through access to terrifying and exhilarating knowledge-knowledge we gain by prying open the locked closet, gazing into the dark sky, chanting a ritual song, or opening closed windows of the mind.
 
With familiar objects such as children's toys, kitchen utensils, bed sheets, rugs, and other common household items, “Tease” probes our fear of the unknown and the hidden, and tickles the pleasure of revelation. It asks the question: to what extent does the acquisition of more knowledge contribute to the (un-)making of the human? What is the existential value of curiosity, that primal urge to peer into the unknown? What desires are fulfilled or lost in encounters with partially obscured images and objects on the verge of disappearance/recovery?
 
“Tease” is a place of possibility, a space of becoming; it is an unsettling, off-kilter space, not unlike the world outside. It is at the moment of our greatest discomfort when we are compelled to ask the most important questions about our lives, and our world.
 
“Tease” is that place.
 
- Marcia Kure
 
—
 
Born in Nigeria, Marcia Kure has appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland. Most recently her work was featured at the Palais de Tokyo in the Paris Triennial 2012; “The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti” at The New Museum, NYC; The 7th Sharjah Biennale; and the 2nd Seville International Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Observer, Time Out, Frieze, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts and Flash Art among others. The work will be exhibited next in a three person exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City in the Fall.
 
The exhibition will be on view at the gallery located 522 West 24 Street Tuesday to Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM. For additional information please contact Susan Inglett Gallery at 212/647-9111, or info@inglettgallery.com

 
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.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tracy Williams, Ltd. is pleased to present Richard Dupont’s third solo exhibition with the
gallery, Shadow Work. The exhibition will consist of a variety of new works in bas-relief:
sculptural enlargements of small handmade burlap paintings, altered vacuum-formed rubber
and vinyl topographical maps, and poured and peeled silicone rubber reliefs. Shadow Work
invites a variety of readings, from references to Jungian psychology, mapping and surveillance,
and the Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich’s 1981 book, Shadow Work.
For Sacco (1) and Sacco (2), Dupont used a high-resolution scanner to laser scan a small
series of elemental canvases in burlap and gesso, enlarged the originals roughly 500%, and
cast the results in white resin and marble dust. The ensuing monochromatic reliefs open up
dynamic new spaces of inquiry for Dupont: They engage abstract painting as a dialogue with
external methods and meanings, sample aspects of collage and the readymade, and extend
elements of performance into the art object. Collapsing hierarchies of media, these works are
part digital enlargement, part sculpture, and part painting. As the titles suggest, the works may
allude to Alberto Burri’s Sacco paintings, which he began making on discarded sugar sacks
while interned in an American prisoner of war camp after the Second World War.
The exhibition also includes new work based on U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) topographic
relief maps and large-scale West German relief maps. With origins in territorial boundaries, the
USGS—along with several other international bodies—has now surveyed and mapped via
aerial scanning every inch of the earth’s surface. Dupont inverts and embosses the backside of
these found rubber maps with cryptic titles appropriated from Walt Whitman poems, which he
translates into binary code. In doing so, he creates objects that are at once Orwellian and
transcendental.
Issues of mapping are further explored in Shadow Aspect (light) and Shadow Aspect (dark).
Dupont brushed rubber over a positive form based on a scan of his head, and then peeled the
rubber away as if a “skin.” Visceral and process oriented, these “skins” were collected and
assembled on wood panels, and then additional silicone was brushed and poured over them.
More unconscious and spontaneous than deliberate, the forms within these compositions may
have derived originally from a digital replica of the body, but ultimately devolve into the
scatological and formless.
Defined largely by dialectical juxtapositions, these works present simultaneous contradictory
conditions: light and dark, revealing and concealing, seen and unseen, natural and industrial,
the thing itself and its representation, the two dimensional and the three dimensional, and the
handmade and the machine made. They also extend Dupont’s exploration of the techniques of
digital and computer-assisted fabrication, as well as the broader social uses and implications
of these processes. As the critic Hunter Braithwaite writes, “In 2004, [Dupont] traveled to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in order to truly map his body. This endeavor,
which at first seems like a Whitmanesque pilgrimage of self-discovery, is mediated through the
contemporary American military-industrial complex…the resulting data used to construct a
‘surrogate body’ is normally sold to arms contractors making blast helmets and flack jackets.
It’s also sold to big-box retailers such as the Gap looking to design clothing to fit target
demographics….the same research is equally applied to the clothing and the destruction of the
body.”1
Dupont’s work of the past few years has been characterized by strong visceral and material
content and a process-oriented approach. As he recently wrote, “I have always been much
more interested in physical, material residue than information, but technology is a great tool as
long as you disrespect it…using things, whether ideologies, machines or materials, in ways
that they were not meant to be used, can be a good way to work.”2
This fall, Richard Dupont’s work will be included in Out of Hand (Materializing the Postdigital) at
New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. His solo museum exhibitions include The Middlebury
College Museum of Art (2011) and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (2008). His
work is included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, The Hammer Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The New York Public Library Print
Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) among many others.
In addition to Shadow Work at Tracy Williams, Ltd., Richard Dupont will present a
simultaneous solo show at Carolina Nitsch Project Room, Going Around by Passing
Through, opening also on May 2 from 6-8 pm. The exhibitions will run concurrently and
will both consist of entirely new works in various media.
For more information, please call 212.229.2757 or email jacqueline@tracywilliamsltd.com.
1 Hunter Braithwaite, “Surveiling The Relics” World Sculpture News, January 2012
2 Richard Dupont, “Biopic” Modern Painters, April 2013

HANSJOERG DOBLIAR: “HYSTERIE UND ABSTRAKTION”

May 3 – June 15, 2013
 
Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce German artist Hansjoerg Dobliar’s first solo show with the gallery, Hysterie und Abstraktion (Hysteria and Abstraction). For the exhibition, Dobliar presents a new body of paintings on canvas and aluminum. Additionally the artist has designed an immersive wallpaper scheme for the rear room that serves as backdrop for an installation of paintings.
 
Dobliar’s paintings engage with the oil medium on a very material level. In his works, Dobliar builds up thick but fluid brushstrokes to form images. Dobliar’s practice strongly recalls and builds upon the traditions of German expressionism. In Dobliar’s engagement with abstraction, he enlivens the tension between figuration and abstraction. Subjects can be recognized, but only uncertainly, as if through a haze. In this way, he prioritizes the expressive handling of the material, neither blending his strokes to render his hand invisible, nor abandoning a subject in favor of pure abstraction. The expressionist brushstroke is understood for its ornamental value. This exchange is a theme also explored in his works on paper. By overpainting onto old magazine pages, Dobliar selectively obscures and represses the figures in these images. By intervening in the imagery of mass circulation, Dobliar symbolically questions cultural narratives, and the ways in which reality is undermined by myth.
 
Among the works in the front gallery is a series of small paintings on canvas. Referred to by Dobliar as the “dot paintings,” these works appear like a series of bullseyes, or a string of echoed permutations. In exploring a similar composition over a large number of small canvases, Dobliar enacts the decorative concealment of abstraction, and expresses a fixation with the aesthetic surface. These issues of representation and presentation also inform his practice of designing the manner in which his works are displayed. Previously, Dobliar has installed wallpaper, constructed shelving, and painted on the walls to modify the atmosphere in which his works are received. Dobliar continues this practice for his show at the gallery.
 
Dobliar’s vibrant paintings evoke the psychic worlds of the subjective experience. In his energetic and tactile engagement with the paint, Dobliar creates works that point beyond the limits of our knowledge, and force the viewer to ask where the abstraction ends and their projection begins.
 
Hansjoerg Dobliar was born in Ulm, Germany in 1970. Dobliar's work has been exhibited internationally, including Sammlung Rheingold at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Sammlung Falckenberg / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Oldenburg; and Beijing Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Sies + Höke gallery, Düsseldorf; Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam; Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin as well as a solo presentation at INDEPENDENT art fair in New York in 2011. He lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
 
Since its inception only two years ago, the gallery has taken on a challenging program leading to a change of location in November 2012. Johannes Vogt Gallery is committed to bringing attention to the complex artistic and cultural ties that bind New York to both Europe and Latin America.
 
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
 
For further details please contact Samuel Draxler at samuel@vogtgallery.com or at 212.255.2671

FEATURING
Matthew Brandt
John Chiara
Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk
Agnes Eperjesi
Curtis Mann
Klea McKenna
Amanda Means
Floris Neusüss
 
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present UNIQUE, a group show of non-editioned photography. Often made without negatives or a camera, the exhibited work is created with unique and diverse techniques that result in one-of-a-kind photographs. The included artists represent several generations, including Pierre Cordier and Floris Neusüss, who have been pioneers in the field of camera-less, unique photography since the 1950s.
In 1956, the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier invented the chemigram, a technique that employs resists to protect areas of the photosensitive paper from successive submersion in developer and fixer. Since 2011, Cordier has collaborated with the Austrian painter Gundi Falk. Floris Neusüss, a German photographer, explores the technical and visual possibilities of the photogram to create an innovative body of work that includes ethereal silhouettes of nude women and mysterious images of the natural world at night. Cordier and Neusüss share a spirit of experimentation and a desire to explore the infinite possibilities inherent to the chemistry of photographic paper and processes with the younger artists in the show. Following in Cordier’s chemigram tradition, Amanda Means delicately scores light-sensitive paper with a grid pattern and flows developer over it, creating organic abstract compositions that are inspired by her close connection with nature. Means worked for many years as a master printmaker for other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the fluid process she employs is liberating in contrast with the exacting precision that work required. Matthew Brandt uses the subjects of his Western landscape photographs as ingredients in their production. He soaks images of lakes in water from the same source, distorting colors and abstracting the captured vistas. John Chiara travels the California coastline with a room-size camera obscura of his own creation hitched to his car, capturing landscapes directly on photographic paper. His method invites exposure and processing anomalies, making the process part of the imagery. Although he starts with representational photographs, like Brandt and Chiara, Curtis Mann moves toward abstraction by obstructing journalistic scenes of conflict with chemically etched circles and stripes. Drawing on the tradition of photograms of the human body and of the natural world that Neusüss explores, Klea McKenna uses light-sensitive paper to capture images of elements, such as raindrops, while the Hungarian photographer Agnes Eperjesi projects multilayered and brightly colored shadows of hands, flowers, and household objects.
 
For further information or visual materials, please see vonlintel.com or contact the gallery at (212) 242-0599 or gallery@vonlintel.com.

African Photography from The Walther Collection
 
Distance and Desire:
Encounters with the African Archive
 
June 9, 2013 – May 17, 2015
 
The Walther Collection
Reichenauerstrasse 21
Neu-Ulm, Burlafingen 89233
Germany
info@walthercollection.com
www.walthercollection.com
 
The Walther Collection is pleased to present “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” the third exhibition devoted to African photography and video art. This exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, brings together late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, album pages, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa, set in dialogue with recent photography and video by contemporary artists who have engaged with photographic archives. “Distance and Desire” offers new perspectives on the legacy of anthropological and ethnographic visions of Africans, reimagining the poetic and political dimension of the archive, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York, and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” co-organized by The Walther Collection, New York University, and University College London, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue edited by Tamar Garb.
 
“Distance and Desire” unfolds in three thematic sections:
 
“Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin”
A juxtaposition of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa” and Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950” introduces the concept of the photographic archive as both a repository of documents and an assemblage of representations. Duggan-Cronin, an Irish South African who lived in the mining town of Kimberley, set out to depict what he considered the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, entitled “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa,” published between 1928-1954, includes photographs, descriptive captions, and anthropological essays. In addition to presenting all eleven Bantu Tribes books, a complete sequence of photogravure plates from “The Nguni: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe” (1954) will be on view, alongside a selection of vintage gelatin-silver prints by Duggan-Cronin, which had previously circulated as individual objects.
 
In contrast to Duggan-Cronin’s renowned and contested ethnographic vision of African heritage, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950” portrays the modern self-representation of African subjects. In the early 1990s, the artist Santu Mofokeng collected family studio portraits from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa and transformed the images into a slide show, complete with narratives about the sitters. He also produced a series of gelatin-silver print reproductions of the portraits, which are on view together with a selection of the project’s original vintage prints and Mofokeng’s research notes. Envisioned as a “counter-archive,” The Black Photo Album challenges fixed ideas most often associated with images of Africans.
 
“Poetics and Politics”
The cornerstone of Distance and Desire is a presentation of previously un-exhibited vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and album pages, produced from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. Extraordinary in range and style, these images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in Africa and the exceptional skill of photographers working in the studio and landscape. “Poetics and Politics” offers a remarkable opportunity to view the narratives that emerge from this African photographic archive, describing in particular the experience of the studio: the curiosity between photographer and subject, the emergence and circulation of types, the range of portraiture, the negotiations of costume and pose, and the will for self-assertion.
 
The presentation investigates typical European depictions of Africans, from scenes in nature, to sexualized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in elaborate studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender, race, and identity. Original album pages of landscapes and ethnographic imagery are displayed alongside a series of carte de visite portraits of Africans, circulated in the 1870s from the Diamond Fields of Kimberley and popular “ethnic” post-cards from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition also features several double-sided displays of album pages, showing striking combinations of personal and stock images, and the juxtapositions of prominent figures in both African and Western contexts. Among over 150 images, the exhibition includes some of the finest examples of works by Samuel Baylis Barnard and the Lawrence Brothers of Cape Town, George T. Ferneyhough and the Caney Brothers in Natal, Barnett & Co from Johannesburg, W. Rausch from Bulawayo, and G. F. Williams from Port Elizabeth, as well as images by unidentified and unattributed photographers.
 
“Contemporary Reconfigurations”
Centering on contemporary photography and video by African and African-American artists who have engaged with photographic archives, “Contemporary Reconfigurations” shows how a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era provides material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Carrie Mae Weems, in her powerful series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” appropriates mid-nineteenth-century anthropometric photographs of African-Americans, overlaying the images with poetic texts. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, and Sue Williamson rework historic or ethnographic photographs onto collages. Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Kudzanai Chiurai create exuberantly staged studio portraiture, using backdrops and sets to critique stereotypes and identities. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Zanele Muholi examine sexuality, costume, and ritual, while David Goldblatt’s and Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white portraits portray mineworkers and former military personnel as they chose to been seen in “traditional” clothing.
 
Sabelo Mlangeni’s photo essay “Iimbali” documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. His series “Country Girls,” in contrast to the multiple visions of women posed “in nature” throughout the ethnographic archive, chronicles small-town transvestites who self-consciously perform their adopted identities for the camera. Pieter Hugo’s series “There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends” examines ethnicity and skin tones through mug shots and Guy Tillim makes a typology of child soldiers training near Beni, in the eastern Congo. Jodi Bieber, in a reversal of previous voyeuristic visions of the black female body, presents women self-consciously posing in settings where they are in control of their own images. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in “Snow White,” and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in “Secretly I Will Love You More.” Together, through their work with the African archive, these artists pose compelling questions about identity and memory, leading to new readings of the exhibition’s vintage photographs.

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.
 
—————————————————————————————————
 
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.