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.

Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Mark Shetabi, The Grand Tour. In new paintings and sculpture, Shetabi explores ideas about travel, transition and escape.
 
Several sculptures of Campers serve as points of departure on this tour of relics. Their exteriors are neutral in color and the windows emit a soft, glowing light. Resting on cylinders, with no attachment to a car or a truck, they could be new or old, ready for use or abandoned. Their simplicity recalls early examples of modernist architecture or sculpture.
 
Another sculpture, Arcade, is a pared down version of a video game, circa 1980. Its outer form is like a shell, a repository for a technology that was once dazzling, now obsolete. Even so, the screen still gives off a faint light.
 
Girl on a Bicycle is a painting of a girl pedaling down a sun-dappled road - a moment of leisure drawn out in the slow time of painting. It is difficult to date the image, as the girl’s clothing might be from the 1950s, ‘80s, or even today. Caspian Sea Hyatt depicts the once chic lobby of a 1970s hotel. Like other hotels before and after it, its style has become passé.
 
Other paintings and sculptures recall forms that constitute the visual white noise of the adolescent memories of the artist: a double-kick drum set on a glowing stage is modeled after a kit played by Keith Moon; or the heroic opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 
Within this framework of the familiar and archetypal, Shetabi seeks to depict objects and images in a way that invites further consideration. Addressing these subjects through the static forms of painting and sculpture, Shetabi provides a place for resistance against the eventual disappearance of things.
 
This is Shetabi's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. He is a 2002 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Exhibition reviews have appeared in Art in America, The Philadelphia Enquirer, artnet.com and other publications. Shetabi lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art.
 
For further information or images, please contact the gallery at 212.989.0156 or info@baileygallery.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.

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.

JOHN ZURIER
 
A spring a thousand years ago
 
April 25 – June 22, 2013
 
Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by John Zurier entitled A spring a thousand years ago at 20 West 57th Street. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 25th from 6-8 pm. The exhibition continues through June 22nd.
 
On view are new monochromatic paintings created in 2012 and 2013, influenced in part by Zurier’s travels in Iceland. The title of the exhibition comes from a poem by the Icelandic poet Stefán Hörður Grímsson.
 
John Zurier explores colors and hues, nuances of light and shadow, and various atmospheres; by doing so he creates a material response to the phenomena of the natural world. His paintings are pared-down, lyrical and yet stark, highly poetic in their condensed expression of emotion and feeling.
 
His choices regarding the physical materials of the paintings — canvas or linen for the support, oil or distemper (dry pigments mixed with rabbit skin glue and water) — are influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics, particularly mono no aware; late-medieval wall paintings in Swedish churches, as well as modern painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Franz Kline.
 
Above all, he is questioning the quality and meaning of painting. He aims to find the right balance between the raw materials (which he calls “the given”) and the transformation of these materials into the finished paintings. In doing so, he keeps the inherent quality of the materials present and visible.
 
John Zurier was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1956 and lives in Berkeley, CA. He received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 Zurier participated in the Sao Paulo Biennial. He has exhibited at the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (2010), Berkeley Art Museum, CA (2009, 2004, 2002, 2001), Gwangju Biennale (2008), New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA (2006), the de Young Museum, CA (2005), and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
 
For additional information and photographic material please contact Renée Albada Jelgersma or David Blum at art@peterblumgallery.com (Tel: 212 244 6055). Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm.

New York, NY. Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce Never Ending Story, a solo exhibition highlighting the new works of Jennifer Murray opening with an artist’s reception on May 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, an artist talk and music listening party on May 30 and continuing through June 22, 2013.
 
Charcoal, ink, acrylic, photography and animal skulls are simply the beginning of the story to Jennifer Murray’s second solo exhibition at Porter Contemporary. Murray imagines a totemic tribute to the power of mythology rooted in nature through a digital and technical lens. Murray will explore the ways in which we experience the power of the natural world using the color white in its varied patterns as the basis for inter-connectivity. In Ornament (Falcon) the white is the micro—the construction of space around living creatures that characterizes an era of surveillance and crowding. Tempest Drawing illustrates the macro of planetary movement, of weather patterns, of the increasingly interconnected ecosystem and world. Murray continues to explore this idea throughout Never Ending Story through various mediums and juxtapositions of work.
 
“The ‘story’ in these works is my contribution to the timeless practice of harnessing the primordial power of animals and nature to express the mythology of human imaginative existence. That this mythology must constantly be reimagined and retold for each new time is what makes it never ending,” says Jennifer Murray.
 
Listing Information
 
What: Never Ending Story – Solo exhibition of new works by Jennifer Murray
 
Exhibition Dates: May 23 – June 22, 2013
 
Opening Reception with the Artists: May 23, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
 
Press Preview: May 23, 4:30 – 6:30 PM
 
Artist Talk & Music Listening Party: May 30, 6:30 – 8:30 PM (RSVP required)
 
Where: Porter / Contemporary, 548 W. 28th Street, 3rd Floor, NYC
 
Gallery Hours: Tues & Wed by appointment; Thurs 11 - 8 PM; Fri & Sat 11 - 6 PM
 
General Inquiries: info@portercontemporary.com
Press Inquires: media@portercontemporary.com
 
About Jennifer Murray
 
Jennifer Murray is originally from Livermore, California. She utilizes both her study of visual art at Carnegie Mellon University, and, more recently, her study of sociology, history, and gender politics at NYU, to construct a body of work that chronicles her personal observations of social unrest, power structures, and the fallibility of culture. In addition to multiple locations in New York City, Jennifer has shown her work in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Miami, and Mermaid Beach, Australia. She has participated in International art fairs in both New York City and Miami, most recently the Aqua Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach. She lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
 
About Porter Contemporary
 
Launched in 2006, Porter Contemporary is dedicated to showcasing emerging and established artists from around the world whose work embodies both skill and risk taking. The mission of Porter Contemporary continues to be based on founder Jessica L. Porter‘s vision of opening contemporary art collecting to a broader audience. Over the past seven years, the gallery has earned a dedicated following of new and established collectors who value art that pushes boundaries.
 
In addition to presenting many distinctive exhibitions throughout the year, Porter Contemporary also provides art consultation services, collection management and artwork installation. Porter Contemporary is located in New York’s Chelsea district at 548 West 28th Street, just steps away from the beautiful High Line Park — like the gallery, a place to experience art and life from a new perspective.

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.