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.

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce Loop, the first one person exhibition by Jorge Macchi in New York.
 
For this exhibition Macchi will divide the gallery into three spaces. Each space will contain works which manifest the measure of time and reiterate its extension in space through a series of projections, objects and watercolors. Jorge Macchi’s finely tuned vocabulary results in works which are simultaneously poetic and uncanny.
 
Time stands still in a number of Macchi’s recent works. Pendulum, 2013 a curved I-beam supported by two plastic stools, appears to buckle under its own weight. As the title suggests, this tensile irregularity also demarcates the path of a pendulum’s swing, as if to solidify the infinite number of repetitive momentary positions of its arc. First Second, 2013 employs a similar logic, capturing a moment in a material. Macchi has cast the narrow wedge between the hour marking twelve and the tick of the first second on a clock’s face in concrete. This cast triangle renders space-time solid while at the same time leaving open the possibility of development, like a step on a spiral staircase of simultaneity.
 
The video installation, XYZ, 2012 will occupy the rear space of the gallery. The image of a station clock with hands frozen is projected in such a way that the three hands rest perfectly into the seams of the corner of a darkened room. In his work Macchi fuses architecture, space and time into a simple yet unfamiliar congress.
 
The two-channel video projection From Here to Eternity, 2013 will be shown on the gallery’s second floor. This work is the most recent collaboration between the artist and the musician Edgardo Rudnitzky. Two clips were extracted from the classic Hollywood film: the first from the opening title sequence and the second while the words ‘THE END’ appear on the screen. The clips have slightly different lengths creating a chaotic sound mixture and are combined with a third audio channel in real time using notes from the original soundtracks and from music sung by women.
 
Jorge Macchi was born in 1963 in Buenos Aires where he continues to live and work. Since the mid-1980s, his work has been shown throughout the Americas and Europe. Currently, ten large-scale installation works from 2007–2013 are being shown in ‘Container’ a one-person exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne. In 2011, his work was the subject of a survey exhibition, ‘Music Stands Still’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK) in Ghent. His work was represented in the 11th Biennale de Lyon (2011); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); ‘All of this and nothing’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); ‘Brave New Worlds’ at the Walker Art Center (2007). In 2005, Jorge Macchi, in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale. His installation for the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, Refraction will be exhibited in June in the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel.
 
For press inquiries, please contact Sabina Roslyakova at 212 367-7474 or sr@alexanderandbonin.com.

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to announce Pavel Wolberg’s first exhibition at the gallery and in New York. The exhibition will open on May 4 and will be on view through June 15.
 
An objective yet empathetic observer, Wolberg intuitively photographs moments of wonder, spectacle, and solitude. He began his career in photojournalism, where his instinctual way of working allowed him to capture climactic and historic moments. Yet his photographs, which often depict various communities and their respective rituals in Israel, lean more towards the poetic than the political.
 
An avid museumgoer as a child growing up in Russia, he is inspired by great masters like Gericault and David, and his photographs often feel like paintings. Whether close to the action or revealing an expansive perspective, Wolberg maintains the position of a foreign observer and refrains from passing judgment or designating right or wrong. Renowned journalistic photographer Micha Bar-Am says of Wolberg, “He understands that life is sufficiently dramatic and theatrical and he has the proper combination of the laws of the chase and knowledge, in making a visual and artistic statement.”
 
Whether capturing the revelry of Purim, men dancing in gay clubs in Tel Aviv, sacred moments of a Hasidic wedding, or conflict-laden landscapes, Wolberg handles all of his subjects with sensitivity and respect, always aware of his responsibility as a visual communicator.
 
About the Artist
Born in 1966 in Leningrad, Wolberg moved with his family to Israel when he was nine years old. Upon completing school he joined the Army, and then after working various odd jobs, he studied at the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv. Wolberg later worked as a photographer in the news department of Ha’aretz, and with the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA). He is the recipient of the Gérard Lévy Prize for a Young Photographer, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum. His work was featured in the 2007 Venice Biennale, and is in the collections of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum (New York), the Kadist Foundation (San Francisco, Paris), and many notable private collections.
 
For all press inquiries, please contact Courtney Richter at courtney@andreameislin.com

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.

SERGEI ISUPOV: Call of the Wild
May 4 – June 15, 2013
 
NEW YORK – Barry Friedman Ltd, in collaboration with Ferrin Gallery, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of figurative sculpture by contemporary Russian artist, Sergei Isupov. This will be the artist’s second show with Barry Friedman Ltd, and will open with a public reception on Saturday, May 4 from 2-6pm.
 
Call of the Wild, a body of 14 new works in porcelain and ceramic, produced at Project Art, Cummington, MA, creates a conversation about conflict and resolution driven by the instinctual drives of man, woman, animal, and beast. Symbolic and metaphoric imagery gleaned from classical art training in the former Soviet Union, introduces allegorical biblical content and iconic presentations of portrait and landscape. The artist’s choice of ceramic materials provides the opportunity to create interlocking images with three-dimensional form and two-dimensional illustration. The human, male–female dilemma is examined throughout. Isupov explains, “Somebody saves somebody, someone loves the other more, they are mutually supportive and destructive, they are opposites — there are contrasts… One is more powerful, they are both survivors.”
 
Often called an erotic Surrealist for his daring representations of sexuality, relationships, and human encounter, Isupov takes narrative subject matter and merges it with ceramic sculptural form. Drawing on personal experience, and human observation, he creates works that integrate autobiography with universal narrative. He states, “Everything that surrounds and excites me is automatically processed and transformed into…an artwork. […] The essence of my work is not in the medium or the creative process, but in human beings and their incredible diversity. When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them, perhaps they create me.” While the robust, and racially distinct facial traits make each sculpture unique, they also make the body of work capable of representing universal experiences. The bold color palette, heavily tattooed faces, and textured surfaces relate these works to the aesthetics of traditional Russian art, as well as to contemporary styles of illustration.
 
Sonya Bekkerman, Vice President of Russian Art at Sotheby’s has written about Isupov and his artistic style within the context of Russian art history: “Sergei Isupov was born in the ‘60s, a decade in which Russian artists began to actively question and defy the prescribed artistic ideology dictated by the Soviet Union, and he left in 1983, just before the turbulent artistic breakthroughs incited by Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1987. […] Like many of his contemporaries who sought to express their individuality away from party control, Isupov emigrated to the United States, where he has never stopped looking inward and revealing truths, free associations, and sheer id, no matter how cryptic, filtered through an American and Russian lens.”
 
Sergei Isupov’s work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition “Bodies Speaking Out: New International Ceramics” at the Museum of Arts & Design, NY opening in September 2013, followed by a mid-career survey at Racine Art Museum in 2014.
 
Isupov’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Finae Arts, Houston; Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Art and Design, New York; and Museum fur Angewandte, Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. Isupov has had solo exhibitions at Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, Arizona and The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri. He has participated in group exhibitions at the 2009 World Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition at the 5th World Ceramic Biennale in Korea; The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft; Fuller Craft Museum, Massachusetts; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin. He lives and works in Cummington, MA.

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
April 30, 2013
 
Dia Art Foundation presents Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument from
July 1–September 15, 2013
 
Thomas Hirschhorn’s first Monument in the United States and Dia’s first public commission since Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks in 1996
 
(New York, NY) – Dia Art Foundation will present Gramsci Monument, a new artwork by Thomas Hirschhorn, on the grounds of Forest Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development in the Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx, New York. Gramsci Monument will be open to the public from July 1–September 15, 2013.
 
MONUMENT
“My decision to do Gramsci Monument does not come from an understanding of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci, rather it comes from my understanding of art and my belief that art can transform.” — Thomas Hirschhorn
 
Gramsci Monument is the fourth and last in Thomas Hirschhorn’s series of “monuments” dedicated to major writers and thinkers, which he initiated in 1999 with Spinoza Monument (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), followed by Deleuze Monument (Avignon, France, 2000) and Bataille Monument (Kassel, Germany, 2002). This fourth monument pays tribute to the Italian political theorist and Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), famous for his Letters and Prison Notebooks (1926–1937). Gramsci Monument is based on Hirschhorn‘s will “to establish a definition of monument,’ to provoke encounters, to create an event, and to think Gramsci today. My love for Antonio Gramsci is the love of philosophy, the love of the infinitude of thought. It is a question of sharing this, affirming it, defending it, and giving it form.”
 
NON-EXCLUSIVE AUDIENCE
Over the years, Hirschhorn has maintained a commitment to presenting his work in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries, but also in “public space”: urban settings, sidewalks, vacant lots, and communal grounds of public housing projects. Every work of Hirschhorn’s aims to include the Other, and address what he calls a “non-exclusive audience.” “The Gramsci Monument will remain an affirmation of an autonomous art work that is made as a gesture of love. This gesture doesn’t necessarily call for an answer; it’s both utopian and concrete. I want to create a new form, based on my love for a “non-exclusive audience.”
 
“Gramsci Monument is a defining project for Dia, and working with Thomas is both a privilege and a learning experience. Every day we learn from his uncompromising commitment to art and audiences,” says Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Gramsci Monument reinforces Dia’s commitment to off-site commissions, which is at the center of our mission. I am confident that through this project Dia will become a different, stronger institution — one that is even more engaged with the reality of art today.”
 
PRESENCE AND PRODUCTION
With Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn will apply his guidelines for “Presence and Production” by being present and producing on location during the full course of the project. “To be ‘present’ and to ‘produce’ means to make a physical statement, here and now. I believe that only through presence—my presence —and only through production —my production— can my work have an impact in Public Space or at a public location.”
 
Hirschhorn’s ambition is to create through his work, a form of “co-existence,” where questions of autonomy, authorship, and energy are addressed, challenged, and ultimately reinvented.
 
FORM/PROJECT
Gramsci Monument will take the form of an outdoor pavilion constructed with easily available, “unintimidating,” everyday materials. The structure will be built—and later dismantled—by local residents of Forest Houses, coordinated by Hirschhorn and Erik Farmer, Forest Houses Resident Association President and long-time resident. As was the case in his previous monuments, it is the artist’s intention that Gramsci Monument be built and run with the help of local residents, employed temporarily and involved at every stage of the project.
 
The structure will include an exhibition space with a selection of archives and a library with books by (and about) Antonio Gramsci, borrowed from the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome, Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci in Ghilarza, Italy, and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York, a theater platform, a workshop area, a lounge, an internet corner, and the Gramsci Bar, which will be run by local residents. The Gramsci Monument will be open daily, offering a daily program of lectures by philosopher Marcus Steinweg, a children’s workshop run by Lex Brown, a play titled the Gramsci Theater, a radio station, and a daily newspaper. Weekly programs will include Gramsci Seminars led by eleven scholars, Poetry Lectures and Workshops led by eleven writers, Art Workshops led by Hirschhorn, open microphone events coordinated by the community, and field trips organized by the project’s “ambassador,” Dia curator, Yasmil Raymond.
 
In order to be continuously present on location throughout the production of his artwork, Hirschhorn will temporarily reside in the South Bronx (from July 1 - September 15) with Lex Brown, Marcus Steinweg, and Dia’s curator, Yasmil Raymond.
 
“It has been a privilege to work alongside Thomas as he puts forth a new idea of the monument and creates an active space of exchange between people, ideas and communities. The depth of his engagement is exceptional. Thomas has the absolute will to include others, and wants to put the whole world in his work,” said Raymond,. “We are deeply grateful to NYCHA Chairman John Rhea and the hardworking team at NYCHA for embracing this project. Above all, our most profound gratitude goes out to the residents of Forest Houses —in particular Erik Farmer, Clyde Thompson, and Diane Herbert —for joining us in this beautiful effort and offering a firm handshake from day one.”
 
Hirschhorn has also created a website as part of the Gramsci Monument. It is an informative platform offering texts, notes, pictures and videos documenting the process of the artwork, from its earliest sketches. The website will be updated daily with the productions, philosophy lectures, newspaper and radio streaming that have taken place. It will also offer a “press-kit” with pictures and texts available for publication (free of rights). The website, following the monument’s guideline, is meant to be temporary, and will end on December 31, 2013. For additional information, visit www.gramsci-monument.com.
 
LOCATION
To realize this project, Dia and the artist are collaborating with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Hirschhorn began “field work” two years ago, visiting forty-six Public Housing sites all around New York City, and meeting with residents in three boroughs, before focusing on seven locations in the Bronx: Castle Hill, Soundview, Monroe Houses, Patterson, Bronx River, Claremont and Butler Houses and Forest Houses. The “encounters” at Forest Houses with Diane Herbert, Clyde Thompson and Erik Farmer were decisive for Hirschhorn: “I was challenged and taken seriously. These were the real encounters between me and the Other—and one can easily understand that without these encounters, no decision regarding a possible location can be taken. This is why the Gramsci Monument will take place at Forest Houses.”
 
“The New York City Housing Authority is very much looking forward to our residents engaging in this very special endeavor,” said NYCHA Chairman John Rhea. “We especially thank artist Thomas Hirschhorn for bringing his unique vision to public housing, and totally involving Forest Houses residents. And we thank Dia Art Foundation for its generosity in making this artistic effort possible.”
 
Gramsci Monument will be Dia’s first public commission in New York City since 1996, when Dia extended Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks on West 22nd Street from 10th to 11th Avenues. The opportunity to work with Hirschhorn represents a new manifestation of Dia’s commitment to enabling artists to achieve ambitious projects that cannot be realized within the museum context. In anticipation of the Gramsci Monument, from September 15–November 3, 2012, in New York City, Dia presented Timeline: Work in Public Space, which comprised a 30-foot linear layout of images, written statements, and text excerpts chronicling Hirschhorn’s interventions in “public spaces” in urban and rural sites from 1989 to 2011.
 
Dia Art Foundation offers special thanks to the New York City Housing Authority. Major support for Gramsci Monument has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Maja Oeri and Hans U. Bodenmann. Generous support has been provided by Dia’s Commissioning Committee: Jill and Peter Kraus, Leslie and Mac McQuown, Genny and Selmo Nissenbaum, and Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk August Radke; public funds from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council; and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida, Stéphane Samuel and Robert Melvin Rubin, Lenore and Adam Sender, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
 
RELATED PROGRAM
Conversations and Lectures
Thomas Hirschhorn in conversation with Yasmil Raymond
 
Saturday, May 11, 2013, 6 pm
545 West 22nd Street, NYC
 
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1957. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich from 1978 to 1983. Over the past thirty years, Hirschhorn has become internationally renowned for his critically engaged and humanistic aesthetic. He has created over sixty works in public space that pair everyday materials with a universalizing approach that proposes that both the work of art and the process of artistic creation are collaborative and accessible to a broad ranging audience. Since his first solo show in 1986 (Bar Floréal, Paris), Hirschhorn has garnered much critical attention and has had solo exhibitions at international venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago (1998); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2001); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2008); and Secession, Vienna (2008). In 2009, he completed a new homage to Spinoza entitled “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival,” in Amsterdam, and he has most recently held solo exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2010); Les Ateliers de Rennes, France (2010); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2011) and Gladstone Gallery, New York (2012). Among many group exhibitions, he has participated in Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1997); the Venice Biennal (1999 and 2011); Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002); São Paulo Bienal (2006); the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Brighton Photo Biennal (2008); Tirana International Art Biannual (2009); the 8th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); Moma PS1 (2011) and, most recently, at the 9th Shanghai Biennale; La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012) and Kunsthalle Mannheim (2013). Hirschhorn has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Preis für Junge Schweizer Kunst (1999), Marcel Duchamp Prize (2000), Rolandpreis für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (2003), Joseph Beuys Prize (2004), and Kurt Schwitters Prize (2011). He has been living and working in Paris since 1984.
 
Forest Houses
Forest Houses
Bronx, NY
Gramsci Monument is located on the grounds of Forest Houses, off Tinton Avenue between 163rd and 165th Streets.
 
Directions
Subway: 2, 5 at Prospect Avenue
Head north on Prospect Avenue
Turn left onto 163rd Street
Pass Union Avenue
Turn right onto Tinton Avenue
Take first left onto pedestrian pathway leading into Forest Houses
 
New York Housing Authority
NYCHA is committed to increasing opportunities for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers by providing safe, affordable housing and facilitating access to social and community services. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in NYCHA‘s 334 public housing developments around the five boroughs, and another 235,000 receive subsidized rental assistance in private homes through the NYCHA-administered Section 8 Leased Housing Program.
 
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974, is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany, and The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico; and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Dia also commissions original artists’ projects produced for the web and produces scholarly publications.
 
Dia currently presents temporary installations, artist lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.
 
For more information please visit www.diaart.org.

Jaye Rhee
 
The Flesh and the Book
 
May 16~June 15, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6~8PM
 
DOOSAN Gallery New York is pleased to announce The Flesh and the Book, a solo exhibition of Jaye Rhee, from May 16 to June 15, 2013. The exhibition occupies her four-channel video and installation which explores the intersections between performance, the moving image, and sound installation.
 
Casting original dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Rhee renders the human body as minimalist shapes that convey an improvisational selection of ‘notes’ within a musical composition co-created with Elliott Sharp. The dancers’ movements, both choreographed and organic, shift horizontally across the row of screens. At times, the movements flow synchronically with the sound while in other moments the relationship between the visual and aural becomes a series of independent juxtapositions.
 
As in many of Rhee’s works, at the heart of The Flesh and the Book lies an irreconcilable tension; here it exists between physical dance and musical notes. The dancers perform within a ‘musical staff’ made of five thick rubber bands that are suspended at different heights yet are equidistant from each other. A visual loss occurs when the two-dimensional music notes transition into the three-dimensional dance, and vice versa. As more notes are gained, more dancers are lost; the two must maintain a balanced yet opposed existence.
 
Jaye Rhee was born in 1973 in Seoul, Korea. She received her M.F.A and B.F.A from School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and artists residency program in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has had solo exhibitions at Cais Gallery (2010, Seoul, Korea), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (2010, New York, USA), Corridor Gallery (2010, New York, USA), KCCLA (2009, Los Angeles, USA) and Gallery Factory (2007, Seoul, Korea). Her works has also been included in Norton Museum of Art (2012, Florida, USA), Mori Museum of Art (2012, Tokyo, Japan), CU Art Museum (2012, Colorado, USA), Seoul Museum of Art (2011, Seoul Korea), and St. Cecilia (2010, New York, USA).

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.”

Nicole McCormick Santiago is a painter of the domestic narrative. Her autobiographical images explore the contrast between unabashed indulgence and the selfless constraints of motherhood.