A painter and draftsman by calling and choice, Gerard Ellis establishes an interesting dichotomy between the practice of painting and social critique. His pictorial work is highly expressive and vigorous for those who directly or indirectly participate in the multiple strata of the contexts of which this artist speaks. The violence, corruption and lack of willpower characteristic of our times are central topics of his meticulous pictorial work. There is a studied connection and interdependence between what is his work and what constitutes his life experiences, which translates into a certain underlying politicization of life’s experience. Self-referential and sometimes autobiographical, his dynamic yet intensely personal and authentic compositions serve on dual levels; not only are they effective in presenting the viewer with truncated iconoclastic narratives, but they also possess a strong visual vocabulary of technical styles.
Ellis competes in a direct relation to the animal, this time, no longer domestic (an owl, a cybor-dog, among others) with the man and are constant companions to the figures in the paintings. Equipped with a dramatic quality, the plastic movement of each one of the works speaks of speed and stillness, paralysis and aggression, being the diachronic dichotomy of the mental movement of the spectator.
Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1976, he graduated from the National School of Fine Arts and the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Selected to be part of the “S-Files”, the 6th edition of the El Museo del Barrio Biennial in NY, 2011. Has been recognized with three awards of Excellence by The Society of News Design, 2007-2008. In 2007 was invited to be part of the IX edition of the Cuenca International Biennial, Ecuador. His work has been exhibited in group shows in the Nassau County Museum of Art, NY, The IDB Cultural Center and The Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. Selected to be part of the National Biennial of Visual Arts and the XX edition of the E. León Jimenes Art Contest (Biennial), where he received the Prize for painting, both in the Dominican Republic. He participated in the “Sarmiento Public Art Project, 2007” in public areas of the city of Santo Domingo.
International contemporary art fairs include: VOLTA NY, Scope, Pinta and Arte BA. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA; Fundación para la Pintura, Canaria, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Drawing and the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo; The Dominican Congress and in private collections in New York, London, Miami, Spain, Panamá, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo.

June is an exciting month at Angora Gallery this year, with three memorable exhibitions to get the summer off to a great start. The Manifestation of Milieu shows artists taking the familiar and adding a sense of the unusual to it, with each work of art becoming a window into a world similar to ours, but where anything seems possible. In Pulse of Abstraction, a feeling of energy, movement and fulfilling life infuses the works, reaching out to touch the audience and encourage us to respond with courage and conviction. In Kaneko Johkoh's solo exhibition, thoughtful consideration merges with an attractively impulsive method to create Sumi ink paintings of power and potency. The exhibitions open on June 4, 2013 and continue until June 25, 2013, with an opening reception on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2013. Entrance is free and art lovers are invited to attend and refresh themselves with inspiring, evocative art.
Exhibition Dates: June 4, 2013 – June 25, 2013
Reception: Thursday, June 6, 2013, 6-8 pm
Gallery Location: 530 West 25th St, New York City
Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 11a.m. - 6 p.m.
Event URL: www.agora-gallery.com/receptionexhibitions/6_6_2013.aspx
 
Featured Artists:
The Manifestation of Milieu
CHAREST | Jim Cobb | Carolina Ferrara | Gwen Freeman | Steven R. Hill | Gary E. Koeppel | David Rolandeau | Eduardo D. Rubin | Ivan A. Tomicic | Iryna Torskaya
 
Witness, a State of Being: Kaneko Johkoh / a Solo Exhibition
Kaneko Johkoh
 
Pulse of Abstraction
Zivi Aviraz | Ermina Avramidou | Marisa Bernotti | Sharon Brill | PAGLIUCA | Rivka Fuchs | LeeAnn Gorman | Jessica JCK | Tamera Lee | Satoshi Mima | Gerd Rautert | Donna Shaffer | Yana Yami
 
About Agora Gallery
Agora Gallery is a fine art gallery, established in 1984 and located in the heart of New York City’s Chelsea art galleries district. It is famous for showcasing a spectacular array of talented artists from around the world and around the corner, while providing quality and original art to collectors. Exhibitions are usually group exhibits, presenting the work of a number of artists, but sometimes solo exhibitions focus on the work of one particular artist. The gallery publishes ARTisSpectrum Magazine, a bi-annual magazine that is distributed to museums, galleries, art institutions and art schools around the world. It provides artists, collectors, museums, galleries, art organizations and enthusiasts with access to the work of international talented artists as well as feature articles, reviews and interviews. Agora Gallery is the proud sponsor of ARTmine, one of the most comprehensive resources available worldwide to view and purchase fine art. The gallery also runs Agora Art Blog, a blog designed to provide helpful information and advice for artists while providing a forum for artists to help one another by sharing their experiences and thoughts.

In conjunction with the May release of the beach-bag-size edition of Life’s a Beach, Aperture is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the best selections from Martin Parr’s beach photography.
 
Parr has been photographing beaches for thirty years, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool.
 
What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and, of course, the UK. The exhibition brings to the fore Parr’s engagement with a cherished subject matter—that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.
 
This selection of photographs shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.
 
Martin Parr (born in Epsom, England, 1952) is a key figure in the world of photography, recognized as a brilliant satirist of contemporary life. Author of over thirty photography books, including Common Sense, Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight, and Boring Postcards, his photographs have been collected by museums worldwide, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, London. A retrospective of his work continues to tour major museums around the world since opening at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. Parr is a member of Magnum Photos.
 
RELATED EVENT:
Portrait Shoot and Beach Party with Martin Parr
Saturday, May 18, 9:00 am-6:00 pm
For more details, visit www.aperture.org/events

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present Carolyn Case & Jens Schubert, a two-person exhibition of paintings and prints. Each artist combines an omnivorous interest in symbolic systems derived from ancient, contemporary, and religious iconography with rigorous technique. Case, American-born, has studied and travelled in multiple cultures, and found inspiration in Indian miniature painting, Andean textiles, Persian palaces, and trans-cultural conceptions of mortality and the afterlife. Schubert, a young German artist, similarly points to the ubiquity and perpetuity of signs and symbols as they reappear across time, and today in music, video games, anime, fashion and other forms of pop culture.
 
Case‘s paintings, while intimate in scale, present grand universes of limitless space, overlapped by areas of teeming detail, such as tiny dots on stalactite-like drips. Flat silhouettes of ancient urns and vases float through each painting. Schubert’s graphic linocuts of overlapping geometry and repeated images explode with color, pattern, and texture. His series “Realms of Heaven” explores the different meanings and associations of heaven and sky, starting with the premise that in German, the word is the same for both “sky” and “heaven”. Schubert‘s series of unique prints explore the traces of old myths within our current imagination, while disrupting the desire for narrative.
 
Schubert and Case strategically confound and even erase the specific national or cultural origin of each inspiration in order to create a post-modern quilt of imagery. Each artist travels far to get to a personal place where, as suggested by cultural thinkers such as Robert Campbell or Carl Jung, we can each access a subconsciously embedded understanding of basic archetypes.
 
Carolyn Case lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Originally from California, Carolyn Case earned her MFA from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD, and her BFA from California State University in Long Beach, CA. She has shown throughout the Mid-Atlantic area, with solo exhibitions at Loyola University, McLean Projects for the Arts, and The Art Registry in Washington D.C. She has also participated in two-person and group exhibitions at Joyce Goldstein Gallery, John Fonda Gallery, and the Delaware Museum of Art. Residencies include the School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kanoria Art Center in Ahmedabad, India. Case's works are featured in the Spring 2013 New American Paintings, and have been reviewed in the Baltimore Sun.
 
Jens Schubert was born in 1983 in Schwarzenberg, Germany, and lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, and has had solo exhibitions with Mewo Art Gallery, Memmingen, M2A Gallery, Dresden, and Bongout Gallery, Berlin, among others. Group exhibitions include Instituto de Artes Gráficas, Oaxaca, Mexico, the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Museum of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig, and Biksady Gallery, Budapest. His work has been exhibited at the Volta Art Fair, NY, and the Preview Art Fair, Berlin, in 2012, and in 2011 he received the Marion Ermer Prize.

Curatorial Statement by A.E. Benenson:
At the birth of modern computing, a paradox: only after Alan Turing theorizes an infinitely large computer do we begin to plausibly imagine how our world could be digitally remade as small as possible. That is, it’s
only after Turing fixed our technological gaze outwards onto infinity that we began our relentless dwindling inwards, towards miniaturized circuits and virtualization. Taking this contradictory movement as both its content and form, the exhibition Vanishing Point presents views of a contemporary digital vastness that is both boundless and barely there.
 
By understanding computing as an ongoing experiment in the incommensurate, the artists in this exhibition draw the discipline of computing into various unlikely associations: outer-space, the afterlife, Abstract Expressionism, Greek Tragedy. And yet at the same time, there is a move to deconstruct the traditional aesthetic associations with the infinite (e.g. “the sublime”) in terms of a contemporary virtual sprawl that is often pathetically insignificant, banal and quotidian. These analytical impulses are tempered with modes of address that are more lyrical, less direct; formal experiments within the contradictions of a new vastness that is simultaneously too large and too small to be fully apprehended.
 
Here, “vanishing point” refers not only to the infinitely distant and small destination where everything rushes to converge, but also to a potential moment of disappearance – an event horizon where technology swallows something once and for all…what exactly – irrationality, expressivity, scarcity, suffering? Nothing in this exhibition claims to know with certainty. The objective is not to make predictions, but to press ourselves a little closer to the arc that bends towards the limit.
 
the universal Turing machine, 1936
 
Exhibited Works:
Annie Dorsen, “Hello, Hi There”, 2011-2013
Kyle McDonald, “Only Everything Lasts Forever”, 2009
Boris Meister, “Above the Cloud – Archaeology of Social Networks”, 2012
RAND Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, 1955
Elaine Reichek, “SETI”, 2004
Sebastian Schmieg, “Search by Image”, 2011-ongoing
Mungo Thomson, “Einstein #1”, 2008
Clement Valla, “Paintings from Wushipu”, 2009
Siebren Versteeg, “doorformsbitman6000x6000_323 (2x3)”, 2013
 
This exhibition marks the US debut of artist Boris Meister, and the NYC premiere of recent works by Kyle McDonald, Sebastian Schmieg, Clement Valla and Siebren Versteeg.
 
Public Program:
A tour of the exhibition with curator A.E. Benenson will take place Thursday, June 27, at 5:00 PM.
It is free and open to the public. RSVP: info@bitforms.com

The Battle of Carnival and Lent, Judith Schaechter‘s new exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery, tackles one of the most  fundamental struggles known to man, the war humankind wages between good and evil.  Dancing on the psychological border between spiritual aspiration and human suffering, the Artist questions the association of an environment of confinement/reflection in the name of self betterment and the harsh realities of the physical experience of imprisonment; She is  speaking about the ’prisons‘ we all encounter, be they mental or physical.
 
Schaechter’s title window in the exhibition (and the largest in scale), inspired by the 16th century Brugel painting with the similar name “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, contains 96 figures (almost all previous Schaechter works  contain only a single figure) locked in a mythic battle between virtue and vice.  Depicted here by somber monks and garish clowns, hilarity and mayhem seduce impulse control; no blood is spilled in the Artist‘s rendition; here, softened by humor, we see the constant battle we face between our will, our desires, and our choices.
 
Inspired by the history of Philadelphia’s notorious gothic castle-like structure,  Eastern State Penitentiary, where they were on temporary exhibition, these 17 works draw on mythology, the Bible, and even famous works of art from ages past.  Schaechter‘s archetypes struggle with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, exploring in turn the stories of Atlas, Prometheus, Noah, Icarus, Mary Magdalene and Andromeda.
 
Along with the figurative/narrative windows, there are a matching number of purely decorative patterned works which Schaechter calls “militant ornamentalist”, a nod to the great strength of 13th century European cathedrals, such as Chartres.  Although ornamentation suffered in popularity during the Modernist period of art history, its power to move people has not been diminished.  One has only to look to the great traditions of Islamic or Asian art to see the hypnotic and spiritual relevance ornamentation has.
 
Elisabeth Argo, Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says of the work, “When I saw Judith’s new works, my thoughts went to Guernica, Bruegel and Diego River‘s murals on industry or Otto Dix’s paintings looking at war.  She‘s (Schaechter) looking at this moment and the issues of humanity and those artists were too.”
 
Says Schaechter of these works: I have strong feelings about this work appealing to those who are in transition, those who have known pain, grappled with despair.  The parallels between cell and cathedral go beyond just appearances.  In a church the windows are charged with profound meaning; the “windows” here are more than a mere “ray of hope” for the churchgoer and incarcerated alike.
 
Judith Schaechter’s works of art are included in the permanent collections of many important museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K. She has been included in preeminent Biennales including the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Among other prestigious awards, Ms. Schaechter is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and two NEA grants.

David Zwirner is pleased to present the world debut of a new series of sculptures in the gallery’s West 19th Street spaces.
 
One of the most prominent artists working today, Jeff Koons is well known for his bold paintings and sculptures. Typically working in series, his art holds up a mirror to contemporary consumer culture, using the photorealistic, commercial aesthetic familiar from an earlier generation of Pop artists to generate his own unique and universally recognizable style. His subjects range from toys to inflatables to household items to luxury goods and sexualized imagery. His references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures often involve smooth, glistening surfaces while his paintings employ bright and saturated colors.
 
Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976.
 
Beginning with his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons has exhibited steadily in the United States and abroad. His work was the subject of four major solo presentations in 2008, including a large survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Celebration sculptures shown on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; and an exhibition at the Château de Versailles, which opened its doors to a living artist for the first time with Jeff Koons: Versailles. He presented the Popeye series at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2009, and Artist Rooms, a collection of contemporary art jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, toured until 2011. In 2012, the artist had his first solo show in a Swiss museum at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel as well as concurrent shows in Frankfurt at Schirn Kunsthalle, with an exhibition of paintings, and at Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, where his sculptures were shown alongside permanent collection works.
 
A major retrospective is being organized by Scott Rothkopf, Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Opening in January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, it then goes to the Whitney in June, and travels to Centre Georges Pompidou in December, with possible additional venues in Europe. This will be the first ever one-person show to occupy all five floors of the Whitney. It will mark the final exhibition at the Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue, before the Whitney moves into its new building in downtown Manhattan, near Chelsea and the High Line.
 
Koons earned renown for his public sculptures, such as the monumental floral sculpture Puppy (1992), shown at New York’s Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Another floral sculpture, Split-Rocker (2000), was installed at the Palais des Papes in Avignon and at the Château de Versailles.
 
Koons has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his cultural achievements. In 2012, he was recognized by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for his participation in the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. Created to promote deeper cultural understanding through sharing art, the program — which marked its 50th anniversary in 2012 — selects and displays artwork purchased or borrowed for embassies, consulates, and ambassadors’ residences. In 2009, he received the John Singleton Copley Award from the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust and the Governor’s Awards for the Arts (from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts), where he was given the Distinguished Arts Award. In 2007, former French President Jacques Chirac promoted Koons to Officier de la Légion d’honneur.
 
Work by the artist is in numerous public collections, including The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

For Immediate Release
 
Season Review Group Show
June 13 - July 31, 2013
 
Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce Season Review a group exhibit comprising of works from gallery artists and a selection of works from artists who participated in the gallery’s 2012 - 2013 season. This overview will reflect a diversity of approaches in a wide variety of mediums from ink on paper to mixed media multi-panel works, large scale paintings on canvas to steel and tin sculpture.
Artists to be included:
 
Andrea Belag
Matthew Blackwell
Cora Cohen Neil Farber
Sarah Gamble
Clare Grill
June Leaf
Rachel Malin
Henri Michaux
Judith Simonian
Andrew Spence
Gary Stephan

“In the early 1990‘s it was very evident the computer was changing the mystery genre as we knew it. ’Place' as we know it does not exist in the cyber world, this confluence of media is redefining the lines between what we refer to as fiction and reality. Each diptych from the ”Mysteries“ has a chronology: the scene on the left is the past of the scene on the right, which is its future. But the chronology is incomplete. The time n the pictures is as broken up as the space.”

Evan’s paintings primarily focus on the purely natural California landscapes surrounding him. To Evans, the places he paints are precious. They are close to his home, while not part of his everyday life; places driven past or walked by unnoticed in the usual course of events, blending in with the neutral gray of the common place-trees invisibly growing, clouds drifting by, the river flowing on and on without calling attention to itself. For Evans, each of these places holds vibrant secrets of intimacy and grandeur which, when revealed, revives him with life sustaining energy and a peaceful awareness of being embraced and protected by the whole world.
 
“Equilibrium is a state of balance between opposing forces, influences or effects. My work in creating landscape paintings involves the art of balancing compositional elements of water to sky, sky to earth, shadow to light, and original to reflection. As a painter I seek to strike a balance between the tactility of paint on the surface of the canvas and the illusion of depth and distance. As a member of a complex technological society I struggle to balance work and play, the conflicting economic forces of art and business, and the range of emotions in personal relationships. The contemplation of pure nature and the activity of artistic expression help me to find and keep my balance.” Christopher Evans 2013
 
Born in 1954 in Bremerton, WA, Christopher Evans trained in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. This is his third Solo Exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery.

Daisy Craddock's seductively minimalist diptychs play on many senses. Seen from a distance they appear to be abstract color studies. Upon closer inspection they reveal the variation of tone and texture of individual fruits and vegetables. The left side of each pair presents the skin that first attracts our attention while the right side evokes the more subtle shades of the flesh that delights our palate. The physicality of the medium—oil pastel and oil stick layered, scraped, spread and burnished—all evidence the artist’s hand. They are sui generis incidents in much the same way that an actual rather than an idealized “Persimmon” or “Berkshire Plum” varies in patterning, surface sheen, and of course, taste.
 
Daisy Craddock a native of Memphis, Tennessee has lived and worked in SoHo for many years. She summers in the Berkshires and frequently travels to other places with equally delicious fruits and vegetables. She received her BA from Rhodes College and her MFA in painting from the University of Georgia. This is her fourth Solo Exhibition at Fischbach Gallery.

Fred Torres and Alain Briscadieu-Farjas are very excited to present works by nine French masters. An opening reception will be held this Thursday, May 30th from 6-8pm.
 
The exhibition marks a unprecedented demonstration of contemporary French talent, the first major New York exhibition of painter Jean-Claude Farjas, and an introduction to our newest artist, photographer Seb Janiak. A limited-edition catalogue will be available to accompany this exhibition, featuring a critical essay by Carter Ratcliff, The Art of Reverie.
 
“From the earliest days of the republic, American artists followed France’s lead. So did the artists of many other countries. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Americans felt a new sense of independence. New York took the place of Paris as the capital of advanced art and New Yorkers paid little attention to the world beyond their city—or, to be more precise, beyond the island of Manhattan. In recent decades, borders have been blurred. Visions have enlarged and the world of art has become international. Nonetheless, French art is still underrepresented in New York, which has meant that the legacy of a great visionary tradition has not been felt for decades... As the title of this exhibition notes, we share the same sky. We share as well the power to determine for ourselves the nature of everything the light of that sky reveals.”
 
— Carter Ratcliff
 
from The Art of Reverie

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
 
PETER ALLEN HOFFMANN OUTER SPACE @ FREIGHT+VOLUME, MAY 30-JULY 6, 2013
 
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
― John Berger
 
In John Berger’s classic treatise on art and artists (and subsequent popular BBC television series) Ways of Seeing, he describes how the act of looking at an object, person or landscape with fresh eyes each time enables the viewer to actually convert the subject through his own vision, giving meaning by the act of seeing. In a later essay, The Shape of a Pocket, Berger states: The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles. Nowhere is this pursuit more evident than in the paintings of Peter Allen Hoffmann, bringing his first solo show in five years to Freight+Volume with a new body of work, Outer Space, at the end of May.
 
About the show’s title, Hoffmann writes, I‘m fascinated by the ways in which an image or object can be a symbol which is universally understood, and yet cannot be considered a cliche…The concept of outer space is a projection of our own feelings of possibility, as well as a projection of our fears— whether it’s imagining aliens, nothingness, or death. It‘s the spatial equivalent of the other, a mirror of ’inner‘ space.
 
The canvases in Outer Space range in size and subject matter, even style, dramatically – from formal abstractions steeped in color theory, such as Viibryd, to lush, old master-style renditions of bucolic pastoral scenes and still lives. The majority of his larger abstract work is influenced by American pieced quilts, while scenes like Ithan Creek, At Ballybawn or Still Life with Pomegranate seem lifted from prints in dusty museum catalogs or nineteenth century artist collectives, with particular references to Courbet, Rembrandt and deMolijn. About the quilt-paintings, he writes,
 
The process of crafting these quilts is similar to how I approach the paintings— a lengthy process of detailed planning, and then execution. Women worked from existing traditional patterns, but also processed and interpreted these patterns based on their own personal, religious, regional, and historical context…the metaphor of the pieced quilt extends to the other work as well. While the sources of the imagery are disparate — art historical, observed from life, abstraction — they exist for me equally as images I have experienced, continue to experience, and for whatever reason, cannot let go.
 
But whether realist, landscape, or abstracted subject matter, the theme remains consistent: the artist is in a constant process of revising and revisiting his own and other artists’ work. What seems to be a landscape is a really a painting of another artist’s 19th century version of a landscape; what appears to be five color stripes on a canvas is actually an interpretation of another geometric canvas, from another era. The role Hoffmann plays is to sample these various eras and techniques and styles, much like a rapper or composer edits and samples snippets of other musicians’ work into his own composition. Never exactly copied or appropriated, these works are distinctly painted with Hoffmann’s unique brushwork and paint handling. Despite his multiple degrees of removal from the subject, his specific approach lends an indelible stamp of personality on each one. He sums it up this way: I don’t see the distance between the historical and the contemporary in art as being significant: the context may change, but the content remains the same.
 
Hoffmann conceptually and radically expands the expression “a painter’s painter” into three or four dimensions – a painter’s painter’s painter, and so forth – implying that artists tend to paint the same scene over and over, copying each other through the centuries, until the source is obscured entirely. In one work in particular, 9 Years, he has worked and reworked the same canvas for literally nine years. Hoffmann seems to say, despite the existence of cave art, there is no original, “first” painting any more than an original, first artist; the evolution of art is about repetition and constant self-referral, a continued sampling – back and forth – of what came before and what will come to be.
 
Peter Allen Hoffmann received his MFA from Hunter College of CUNY in 2005, and his BFA from Bard College in 2001; he has had numerous solo and group shows at Freight+Volume, The Painting Center in NY, Thomas Robertello in Chicago, the Wexford Art Centre in Ireland among many others. He has received awards and travel grants from Hunter College, CUNY and Cow House Studios in Ireland. His work has been reviewed extensively in a variety of national and international art and literary publications, including Art Korea, The Chicago Tribune, and Useless magazine. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
Please join us for a public reception with the artist on Thursday, May 30th from 6-9pm. For more information please contact Nick Lawrence @ 212-691-7700 or nick@freightandvolume.com.

Friedman Benda presents Campana Brothers: Concepts, the renowned Brazilian designers’ first solo gallery show in the U.S., from June 5-July 3, 2013.  An opening reception will be held at the gallery on June 5, from 6-8 PM.
 
Loose and experimental in nature, Concepts will see the Campanas exploring a series of new approaches to their practice while overturning previously held certainties and expectations. They will introduce several new bodies of work that demonstrate a different direction, while offering a complex and in-progress view of their practice as it stands during a pivotal moment in their careers.
 
The five new series exhibited at Concepts include:
 
Boca series—cowhide wall-mounted bookshelf, table, and standing shelf
 
Racket collection—chairs and a screen in bent brass with a nylon stitched base and a hand-stitched motif made from remnant Thonet chair backings
 
Fitas —a buffet, cabinet, and table made from bent steel
 
Ametista collection—a series of glass hanging panels adorned with Sao Paulo-sourced amethyst rocks
 
Alligator — new banquette this time created out of a series of life-like stuffed alligators

Guided by Invoices is pleased to present Signature Works, a group exhibition of work from gallery artists.
 
The exhibition will include recent paintings from Charles Andresen, Cora Cohen, Nora Griffin, David Rhodes, Sean Scherer, Carol Szymanski, and Rafael Vega. Additionally on view will be new curved-crease origami from Erik and Martin Demaine, a sound installation by Sebastien Leon, and in situ work on the gallery’s windows by Stephen Pusey.
 
Fluorescents after dark, the palette of satellites, Isaac Newton’s solfège rainbow, and hyperbolic origami in red, white and blue: I guess it’s Summer 2013.
 
For further information, please contact info@guidedbyinvoices.us or visit the website www.guidedbyinvoices.us.