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.

James Weingrod: Hush Open Window Project
April 11 - July 27, 2013
 
Lori Bookstein Fine Art is please to announce a new installation by James Weingrod. This will serve as the inaugural exhibition of The Open Window Project and the artist‘s first solo-exhibition with Lori Bookstein Fine Art and his first solo-exhibition in New York.
 
The Open Window Project was conceived as a project space by which to showcase the work of emerging artists and those artists who may not necessarily fit into the gallery’s program. While the gallery has always maintained the tradition of representing a focused group of core artists, it is excited about the ways in which working with other artists through the Open Window Project will enhance the dialogue surrounding the gallery's primary agenda. The Open Window Project will occupy the street front window on Tenth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets.
 
James Weingrod: Hush will feature a singular, kinetic installation that actively engages street viewers. Comprised of a twirling birdcage and a series of two-way mirrors, the installation becomes an other-worldly environment where images are repeated ad infinitum within the eerie enclosure. Fascinated by the complex scientific and mathematical principles by which we have come to understand the expanses of the universe and infinity, Weingrod attempts to visually depict the ways we have come to understand the universe through theory instead of observation. Admitting the inevitable failure of such lofty ideals, he has developed an artistic practice more akin to experimentation, whereby, through trial-and-error, he hopes to develop a larger dialogue around the ways we have come to understand the incomprehensible.
 
James Weingrod received his BA in visual arts from Brown University (2004) where he was the recipient of the Roberta Jocelyn Award for Excellence in Art. He received his MFA from Hunter College (2009). Weingrod has been exhibited in several group shows in New York, including “Big Drawing” in 2008 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and in his hometown of Providence, RI. Weingrod was an artist in residence at The Wassaic Project in 2010 and 2011. Upcoming exhibitions include his first Philadelphia Solo Exhibition, which is scheduled for September 2013. Weingrod lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
James Weingrod will be on view from April 11 - July 27, 2013. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 11th from 6:00 - 9:00 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. Summer hours begin Monday July 8th and will be Monday - Friday, 10:30 - 6:00. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@loribooksteinfineart.com.¬

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

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.

Kent Fine Art is pleased to open a special project, Hypnotherapy, in tandem with The New Yorker‘s Passport to the Arts event on May 4, from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. Hypnotherapy, which continues through June 29, presents a multigenerational group of artists working in several media who share an intense and introspective working process:
 
Hypnosis is a way to connect with the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. The mind accepts what the subconscious creates, however bizarre. Among these artists there is a common thread of a relentless, even myopic, focus on work so personal that its intrinsic value is much greater for the artist than for the audience. Their bond lies in their obsessiveness, idiosyncrasy, and disregard for the mainstream.
*
 
JOHN BRILL (b. 1951, Newark, New Jersey) is a school-bus driver and self-taught photographer, whose work has been recently seen in exhibitions at the Austrian Cultural Council in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. He has been the co-chair of the Photography Judging Committee of the American Killifish Association since 1982 and is a former instructor with the International Center of Photography.
 
LLYN FOULKES (b. 1934, Yakima, Washington) came up in the Los Angeles art scene of the early 60s and has been both a maverick and a force to be reckoned with ever since. His recent exhibition credits include the 2011 Venice Biennial and Documenta 13. Foulkes’s current retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Ali Subotnick, is a tribute to his craft, his dark humor, and his relentless vision of America on the edge. The retrospective travels to the New Museum in New York, where it opens on June 12.
 
PABLO HELGUERA (b. 1971, Mexico City) is a visual and performance artist whose projects have included a school that traveled from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego, complete with portable schoolhouse; the recording of dying languages on wax cylinders; a memory theater; and the founding of the Instituto de la Telenovela. His work has been seen most recently at CIFO in Miami, the 2012 Havana Biennial, and the Centro de Arte Reina Soffia in Madrid. Helguera‘s first solo show with Kent Fine Art will open in September 2013.
 
DAVID LYNCH (b. 1946, Eagle Scout) was studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, painting “figures just sort of coming out of the darkness,” when he made his first film, in 1966: “The only reason I did a film the first time was to see a painting move . . . and feel a mood.” In the 70s Lynch began to work seriously in film and made his name with Eraserhead in 1977. Although he went on to make many more acclaimed films, he has continued to paint and exhibit. In 2007 the Fondation Cartier in Paris mounted a forty-year survey of his art, film, and music.
 
JILL SPECTOR (b. 1976, York, Pennsylvania) has called her sculptures both “performers” and “performances” . . . and has even referred to a sculpture as “she.” Working in improbable combinations of materials, she builds movement from the inside out, in open structures that offer audience and backstage views. Spector’s work was included in the recent exhibitions Drawing, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils, curated by Diana Thater for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
 
Special Appearance by ALEISTER CROWLEY.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Frank Nitsche | General Inn
May 31 – July 20, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, May 31, 6-8 PM
 
PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION: 459 WEST 19TH STREET
 
Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to present “General Inn”, Frank Nitsche’s third solo exhibition with the Gallery. “General Inn” centers on new paintings and a corresponding column of empty beverage cans that are wrapped and covered with commercial stickers collected throughout Nitsche’s world travels. The exhibition extends Nitsche’s considerations of the ubiquitous lines that permeate urban landscapes. The juxtaposition of the paintings and commodified pillar hints at the artist’s source material and reveals a formal consolidation of circulated signs into large-scale geometries.
 
In Frank Nitsche’s most recent work one encounters a filtering of process that traces the artist’s painterly trajectory towards elemental components. Working from his extensive archive of collected media clippings that range from images of catastrophe to financial graphs, Nitsche mentally and physically catalogues these materials to develop a contemporary and comparative ideation of form. These forms do not necessarily represent a static sum, but instead illustrate an evolving typology of images that shape and inform social codes.
 
Nitsche’s visually restrained paintings emerge from an intricate progression of previous experiments that belie the elegant simplicity of the final image. The artist sands, corrects, rebalances and overpaints, creating an opaque palimpsest that translates his cataloging process to the canvas. The result is deceptively minimal paintings. Nitsche completes the clearly defined shapes with hooks, ties and lines, as if transposing the ligatures of an unidentified calligraphy. The architectural compositions are familiar but impenetrable; the smooth and slick surfaces, along with the serial titles, intentionally obscure their varied referents.
 
Nitsche’s methods neither articulate nor influence; rather they elicit the potentiality for experience. For this reason, Nitsche’s work concentrates on form rather than language; materials are already fraught with meaning. To this end, Nitsche has narrowed his color palette to blacks, greys and whites. This tonal restraint isolates and intensifies an examination of structure, vertices, lines and how they intersect. While this may be initially interpreted as an ascetic reduction, the gradual physical changes and layered history of the paintings unveil the hidden opulence of the color white. Rather than presenting his paintings and sculpture as a fixed or complete language, Nitsche offers the viewer an atlas.
 
Frank Nitsche’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Art & Public, Geneva; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris. Recent group exhibitions include I am a Berliner, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; HELLO CHINA, Brandenburgerischer Kunstverein, Potsdam, Germany; Abstract Confusion – Malerei, Skulptur, Video, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany; and the Prague Biennale 5. His work is featured in the collections of: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Museum Ludwig, Köln, Germany. Frank Nitsche lives and works in Berlin.
 
Gallery hours of operation are Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6 pm. For further information, please contact the gallery at +1 (212) 334-9255 or info@leokoenig.com

Curated by Nina Horisaki-Christians, Andrea Neustein, Victoria Rogers, and Jason Waite, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program
 
Maintenance Required examines the large-scale systems that construct our daily lives through an investigation of the diversity of maintenance tasks. Durational by nature, maintenance networks provide life-perpetuating mechanisms of care, yet these systems have the potential to invisibly direct or limit life’s possibilities, even manifesting as malevolent systems of control. By dismantling our collective blindness toward maintenance activities, we can begin to examine how they condition our lives. Bringing maintenance into view exposes a constantly shifting set of social, political, and affective relations. Acknowledging maintenance systems invites questions about what needs to be maintained and under what conditions that maintenance occurs. Taking as an entry point Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969), in which the artist redefines maintenance activities as art, Maintenance Required focuses on artistic practices that frame and critically engage these invisible systems of life support: practices that articulate the paradoxical tensions of large-scale systems of maintenance whose power to sustain life may run parallel to the power to constrain it.
 
With works by Michael Bramwell, Goldin+Senneby, Ashley Hunt, Masaru Iwai, Yve Laris Cohen, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Salvage Art Institute, Karin Sander, Taryn Simon, Pilvi Takala, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
 
Public Performances
Integral to the exhibition, performances will be occurring over the duration of the exhibition in the gallery and “maintenance” spaces such as the back rooms of the Kitchen and at Regus offices on Wall Street. All events are free and open to the public; for seated events, seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
 
Masaru Iwai
 
Washing Stage
 
Thursday, May 30, 5:00pm
 
Saturday, June 1, time TBA
 
Saturday, June 22, time TBA
 
Further performances TBA, please check website for updated details.
Repurposing the act of cleaning, the Tokyo-based artist Masaru Iwai will focus on the ritualistic act of cleaning and its relationship to the body while foregrounding the aesthetic materiality of the purifying act.
 
Yve Laris Cohen
 
Seth
 
Saturday, June 1, 8:00pm
 
Thursday, June 20, 8:00pm
 
In a new site-specific performance, Yve Laris Cohen meditates on the unused and unseen spaces of The Kitchen, responding to the history of the institution, the neighborhood, and the medium of performance. Exploring duration, perception, and the limits of human movement, Laris Cohen considers how maintenance, as well as the lack thereof, reveals our predilections and desires. This program is free of charge and open to the public. Space for the event is extremely limited. Reservations required; please register at maintenance.required.2013@gmail.com.
 
Ashley Hunt
 
Corrections
 
Thursday, June 6, 7:00pm
 
In his ongoing interdisciplinary project The Corrections Documentary Project, artist and filmmaker Ashley Hunt investigates the institution of the prison: how it helps to structure and preserve racial and economic divisions within society. In Corrections (2001), Hunt specifically looks at the privatization of the prison system, exposing the conflict between for-profit corporations focused on pleasing investors and the communities which must deal with the consequences of high incarceration rates.

“I was born to a father who wore an airline uniform. For most of my childhood, he lived and worked in another country. Each summer I would be flown from Beirut to Dhahran as an unaccompanied minor, but he always made sure he booked me on a flight where he knew at least one, if not all, of the Flight Attendants, or rather stewardesses as they were then known.
 
I always flew First Class, looking like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, a tiny kid in a huge chair. I was totally coddled, fed, and entertained by the stewardesses who took personal care of me until I was delivered either to my dad or to my aunt, when returning to Lebanon. Flight Attendants epitomized international glamour and adventure to me. Growing up, I often dreamed of becoming one, until I took my first class in photography as a junior in high school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.
 
Like most Lebanese parents, mine would have greatly preferred my becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or an architect. Although I did have an interest in medicine, I had been passionate about photography ever since I developed my first print—an abstract array of shopping carts—in a tray of Dektol. As my eighteenth birthday approached, I also realized that my airline benefits would soon come to an end. I wouldn’t be able to jaunt around the world at will, for free—something I had been used to all my life.
 
My only solution was to follow my childhood dream and become a Flight Attendant. A few months before turning twenty, I started sending applications to Pan Am and TWA, two of the major international airlines at the time. I was hired by¬ Trans World Airlines on my twentieth birthday, and on February 26, 1978, I reported to Breech Training Academy, the most renowned and modern flight attendant school in the industry.”
-Lucien Samaha, April 2013
 
Lombard Freid Gallery is pleased to present New York-based photographer Lucien Samaha’s The Flight Attendant Years: 1978-1986, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Samaha has been a photographer since high school and has obsessively documented his personal and professional life for over 40 years, producing a rich, highly autobiographical body of work. This show will debut vintage color and black-and-white photographs from his time as a Flight Attendant for Trans World Airlines, giving a behind-the-scenes look at a bygone era. These striking, intimate images will be exhibited with a variety of archival objects, including Samaha’s golden flight wings, personal correspondence, and TWA memos.
 
Samaha’s photographs from the late 1970s and early ‘80s record a particular intimacy between Flight Attendants, pilots, and passengers that was rarely revealed at the time—and is certainly not seen in today’s climate of heightened airline security. The Flight Attendant Years covers all aspects of daily life: training sessions, uniform fittings, in-flight fraternization, and layover breaks. Samaha’s eye for detail and composition, matched with his direct access to his subject matter, allows for his documentary photography to exist within an extremely personal and aesthetic milieu. His images—Polaroid snapshots, elegant candid portraits, and group photographs—emphasize the spirit of adventure and conviviality integral to his surroundings.
 
Samaha has continued to be in touch with many of his former colleagues, and the gallery will serve as a portrait studio for current and former flight attendants who are being invited (through postings at airlines and hotels) to visit the gallery on Saturdays, June 8, 15, and 22, from 12:00 to 5:00 PM. The portraits will be on view in the gallery and posted to lombardfreid.com and luciensamaha.net.
 
Lucien Samaha (b. 1958, Beirut) is a New York-based photographer whose work has been shown internationally, including in exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland. He was a finalist for the 2004 Nam June Paik Award. After his time at TWA, Samaha worked for Eastman Kodak Company and then as a DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, continuing to document his hours at work and his personal life.

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.

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

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to present Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void. This show marks the first time the gallery has brought the intricate and enigmatic works of the artist together in a solo exhibition. Born in Argentina in 1969, Bontempo moved with his family to Spain at the age of 6. He currently resides in Ronda, a culturally edifying city known for its stunning views and rich history. Bontempo, often viewed as complex and elusive, spends his days walking his dog through the town pocketing inspiration from the creative energy and natural beauty of the world that surrounds him.
 
In addition to his kinship with nature, Bontempo’s ingenuity can also be traced to his intermittent battles with schizophrenic episodes. Unencumbered by the outside world, the artist finds clarity in his work. Driven by both his environment and personal demons, Bontempo sits alone in his studio every day painting his own emotionally charged world filled with mental dissonance, adversity, and subtle glimpses of the hope aroused by the healing power of creation.
 
The exhibition brings together a powerful selection of paintings from Bontempo’s highly personalized and unique body of work. Bold in color and marked by ardent brushwork, the pieces portray a multifarious array of distorted bodies, floating in the pictorial plane while engaged in a disconcerting yet mystifying dance. His figures- some human, others more animalistic- emanate a personified amalgamation of cognitive agitation and freedom through physical malformation and cathartic expression. To create these lively and emphatic paintings, Bontempo uses ink or acrylic paint in combination with salt or iron. His dark palette of deep reds, blue, gold, and black embodied in fervent gestural abstraction are seemingly indicative of a primacy, misplaced and overthrown, and serve as a gentle reminder that both pain and normality are relative to one’s own experience.
 
Marcos Bontempo’s gentle and honest deportment is memorable on both a personal and professional level and he remains a welcome addition the gallery. His work is in several private collections in both the United States and Europe. Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void will be on view at Ricco/Maresca May 16- June 15, 2013.

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

“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.”

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.

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.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present I Am The Magic Hand, a group exhibition organized by Josephine Halvorson that brings together the work of Allison Katz, Carmelle Safdie, Jane Corrigan, John Gutmann, Lisa Milroy, and Paula Wilson. The exhibition takes its title from a chalk inscription on a wall that appears in John Gutmann’s 1937 photograph of the same name. The outline of a hand and the inky stains of handprints surround the text, drawing attention to human presence and the animate nature of the wall itself. The works in this exhibition, like the wall, show traces of their makers yet speak in the first person. They emit their own liveliness.
 
Heads of cabbage pose for their picture in Allison Katz’s canvasses, which sit atop shelves made by Liudvikas Buklys. The cabbages’ untrimmed, languid leaves suggest natural informality, yet they’re in the spotlight, confidently attracting the attention of a man as he breathes in their earthy scent. On one hand, these are amorous images placed as keepsakes on shelves for visitors like us to notice. But on the other, painting itself is nature morte. Like cabbage, it exists in a vegetative state: aroused but not necessarily conscious.
 
Carmelle Safdie’s long banner-like rubbings evince a literal closeness to the individuals whose graves they mark. The gravestone, newsprint, chalk pastels, and Safdie’s gestures fuse together, creating a new layer of experience between the artist and the dead. What we see are instances of this encounter, preserved in pigment, and a metaphor for art. These color studies, as Safdie refers to the works, shift between the inert and the animate.
 
In Jane Corrigan‘s shoulder-width paintings, strokes of oily color become figures in action, forever unaware of being watched. Like a dream, these scenes are conjured yet undetermined, where Corrigan is a viewer into a world that she herself creates. The discernable paths of the paint and the enigma of the narrative form a riddle that Corrigan hands to us in a shared pursuit of interpretation.
 
Lisa Milroy’s life-sized painted dresses step away from flatness towards a willing body. We are made aware of our own nakedness and the way fabric feels against skin. The passive stance of painting is inverted: personal space is threatened, a seduction forthcoming. Or, the dress steps back into the frame of the pictorial after being out in the world, embodying memories of its wearer, a vestige of another time and place.
 
Between Two, Paula Wilson’s freestanding tapestry made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, takes an impression of an urban façade. Felt, canvas, and paper blot the living history of two buildings, their residents, and passersby, picking up in relief architectural details and the sense of accrued time. Brick by brick, the seams of labor construct a composite identity, whose portrait is made by Wilson, and recognized by us.
-Josephine Halvorson
 
I Am The Magic Hand is organized by artist Josephine Halvorson. Halvorson works on site, collaborating with the environment to make paintings that become records of experience and time. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including a US Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, ParisArt, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. A recent article written by Halvorson appears in the Winter 2012 issue of ArtJournal. She teaches painting at Princeton University and The Cooper Union, and is a critic in the MFA program at Yale University. Halvorson lives and works out of Brooklyn, New York.

Carolee Schneemann
 
Flange 6rpm
 
May 11 – June 22, 2013
 
Reception: Saturday, May 11, 6-8pm
 
P·P·O·W is pleased to present Carolee Schneemann’s fourth exhibition at the gallery entitled Flange 6rpm. Originally a painter, Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer of extended media, from her explorations of ‘geometry of motion’ in Lateral Splay, 1963, the provocative group performance Meat Joy, 1964, her self-shot erotic film Fuses, 1965, and the meditation of solitary movements in Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-76.
 
Upon entering the gallery the viewer is immersed in the projected foundry fires of Schneemann’s latest multi-sensory installation, Flange 6rpm. Seven motorized sculptural units; containing hand-sculpted components are uniquely, cast in aluminum from a lost wax process. The aluminum sculptures are not polished, but maintain a rough textured sill marked from the fire of the foundry. The sculptural units are each mounted on a motorized base which moves them at six revolutions per minute – slowly, side to side, as well as forward and back – in a continuous motion so that the sculptural elements are almost touching, creating a sense of tension and unpredictability.
 
Schneemann notes ‘The fundamental life of any material I use is concentrated in that material’s gesture — gesticulation, gestation, source of compression (measure of tension and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action. Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.' This statement reigns true to the materials of the four Dust Paintings, 1983-86, that occupy the walls of the second gallery. Degraded materials, ashes, soot, layers of dust, spilled paint, circuit boards, posit a visual correlative to the endless bombardments of Lebanese and Palestinian villages.
 
Saw Over Want, 1980-82 and Vulva’s Morphia, 1995, are composed from photographic grids separated by strips of text that accentuate and destabilize their associated images. The text in Saw Over Want, is taken from Schneemann’s childhood alphabet exercises. The words “saw”, “want”, and “over” have been repeatedly practiced. Strips of text underline images of ordinary objects and self-shot erotic body details. This contrast produces an aesthetic seepage. Vulva’s Morphia consists of thirty-six images which address normative taboos within an undulating grid of Paleolithic vulvas inscribed on rocks as well as sacred, obscene, scientific, and self-photographed vulvic images. Each sectional grid is underlined with a taboo reflection. For instance, “Vulva reads biology and understands she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires....”
 
A feature length film on Schneemann’s work and history entitled Breaking the Frame by Marielle Nitoslawska has recently been completed and shown at the Telluride Film Festival, BFI/London Film Festival, FNC Montreal, Glasgow, Cleveland and this month at the WRO Biennial, Wroclaw, Poland and Videoex, Zurich. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was A Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles and Imaging Her Erotics–Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). Color brochure to accompany the exhibition with essay by Melissa Ragona.