Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Sunsets and Pussy. This exhibition brings together two classic themes of summer wonder – so saccharine and ubiquitous we forget their awesome power. Spanning three generations, artists Ed Ruscha, Lucien Smith, Betty Tompkins, and Piotr Uklański each engage in the delight of exposing the clichéd beauty and banality inherent in these timeless images.
 
For further information regarding Sunsets and Pussy or images of the works, please contact Veronica Levitt at 212.680.9889 or veronica@marianneboeskygallery.com.

Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present a questionable low point in our program: Birth of a Legend, by nomadic artist Cameron Gray. Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz claim that “Cameron Gray is too big too fail,” and Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City asked for “more cheddar” with her order of Cameron Gray. Gray’s latest exploit serves up a Dionysian smörgåsbord of state-of-the-art digital technology, where kaleidoscopically bright palettes and hypnotic kitsch run rampant. With your senses utterly titillated and suitably doped, you‘ll discover his artistic touch is as light as his work is raucous; speed of play carefully calibrated, execution satirically dead-pan, and content spot-on HOT. Straddling the line between comfort and the disquietingly uncanny, Gray’s gargantuan installations flash, blink, twirl, and pulsate off the walls in utter pandemonium, culling visual and auditory white noise from the vast Internet in something akin to a holy art apocalypse. As Gray descends into the deepest realms of the web world, we can only look on and marvel at the chaos that we have created.
 
Frequently likened to the second coming of Koons and thoroughly rooted within postmodern sensibilities, Gray is an incredibly articulate forager of the irreverent. In I Was Made For Dancin’, All, All, All Night Long, Gray achieves near tantric nirvana, emblazoning a glossy, hollowed Leif Garrett poster with psychedelic patterns and prismatic forms; two all-seeing eyes flicking every which way as he sluggishly sings the work’s eponymous and utterly cheeky song. Acid Zen Garden imbues a glowing cherub figure and assorted fauna with Gray’s unrivaled knack for mischief. Like-wise, in Ice Cream for John Wayne, a duo of melting waffle cone treats take residence upon John Wayne’s dreamy visage. Not content to simply tear the ‘mask’ off such iconic machismo, Cameron spatters many a surrounding wall with fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark paint—effectively taking on Abstract Expressionist bravado as well.
 
A shaman of digital technique and reprographic means, Gray sets forth an alternate universe rife with under-auto black lighting and over-the-top pop, instinctively splaying nonsensical sights and sounds across an ambitious range of mediums: video collages chock-full of outlandish abstractions, including an all-encompassing 12 foot wide work comprised of 27 monitors; an epic 7-foot-tall pin bricolage in which 3,000 photographic images abut embedded 3-D video, spinning disco-lights, and utterly unrelated bric-a-brac; manipulated c-prints of classic American icons; and circular, Archimboldo-like smiley-face sculptures in which fake food is adhered to densely-patterned, wood-mounted table-cloths, with fake plastic ‘turkey dinners’ forming the eyes of one piece, and a glazed faux Jell-O mold its nose. Simultaneously chaotic, organic, orgasmic, and narcotic, Gray delivers the Cadillac of collage, the epitome of hyper-stimulation, and the ultimate state of transcendence – a meaningless yet tantalizing void, where nothing is sacred. Indulge yourself this summer in this orgiastic, optical feast and celebrate with us the 10-year anniversary of Mike Weiss Gallery.
 
Cameron Gray, Birth of a Legend.
 
Born in Geneva in 1980, Cameron Gray lives and works in London, Basel, and Los Angeles. Graduating egregia cum laude from Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Gray also holds no less than six degrees from such prestigious institutions as Yale, Columbia, and UCLA. Prior to his ascension into the upper levels of the art historical pantheon, Gray will have participated in two Venice Biennales, including the one to take place in 2015, and three Whitney Biennials, including those in 2016 and 2018. In 2012, Galerie Eva Presenhuber included his work in the seminal show I Wanna F*ck You But We‘re Just Gonna Cuddle, and one of Gray’s massive pin collages was a show-stopping success in The Gag Reflex is Mysterious at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2011. Grey‘s work is included in the Ludwig-Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT; and 17 other prominent collections. Cameron Gray is currently represented by Mike Weiss Gallery, David Zwirner, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprueth Magers, White Cube and Pace Beijing, amongst others.
 
Your mom loves Cameron Gray’s work. Ask her, she told us so.

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

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.

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

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.