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.

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Renegade Trajectories, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Oliver Vernon. This is Vernon’s third solo show with the gallery, and the artist will be present at the opening reception on May 30.
 
Combining elements of landscape painting, figuration, and abstraction, Vernon’s practice pushes all of these categories beyond easy distinction, creating a hybrid visual language all his own. “The picture plane is a continuum of give and take,” says Vernon, “where positive and negative space give way to each other in rhythmic intervals. Energy oscillates and migrates, initiating changes along the way. And color is a navigational tool to guide the eye through the chaotic scape.”
 
Vernon lives in the Sierra Nevada region of northern California, and glimpses of these breathtaking vistas turn up frequently in his work. However, landscape is never a subject or even backdrop, per se, but instead a visual cue toward the expansive scale of Vernon’s abstraction. In many works, this takes the form of a wave-like torrent of arching brushstrokes and cascading patterns that dominate the canvas, devouring mountains, valleys, clouds, and the horizon, or nimbly swirling everything into the overall composition. The effect is destabilizing, imposing an abstract system on the more common notion of a fixed, physical reality—landscape gives way to visual frenzy, flights of imagination, and transformation.
 
In Renegade Trajectories, Vernon explores this dynamic with twelve medium-sized acrylic on linen or canvas paintings and a suite of twelve ink on paper works. The exhibition will showcase several large-scale paintings, the largest measuring nearly 8-x-7 feet. In the painting Excavation, a jagged cyclone of geometric shapes, architectural elements, and quasi-anatomical forms swirl about a distant horizon, pulling it in or ushering it forth. In the dramatic painting Flashback, this force takes the form of an orange and violet-tinted flood, inundating the picture with a chaotic rush of brushstrokes, graphic patterns, and semi-figurative material. As the artist notes, “These incidents or events take place in worlds within worlds. Everything is whirring with activity as parts of systems engage with other systems in a state of constant flux.”
 
In his works on paper, Vernon’s use of Sumi ink imparts an even sharper contrast of forces, of positive and negative space, in black, white, and subtle gray scale. Hard-edged but somehow serene, these pictorial spaces draw viewers into a spiral of connected facets (or dimensions)—cascading flower petals, lozenge forms, pulmonary or lung tissue, honeycomb—giving way to a brightening horizon beyond. Ultimately, the distinctions of figuration/abstraction, figure/ground, are not the artist’s primary interest. In all of his work, Vernon is most fascinated by the dynamic interplay between these surreally juxtaposed elements—in his own words, “not the what but the how.”
 
Reception Thursday May 30 from 6-8pm

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.

October 18, 1977 opens at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert 524 West 19th St, New York, NY on Thursday, June 20, 2013- Friday, July 19, 2013. Summer hours start July 8: Mon-Fri 10 am – 6 pm
 
An exhibition organized by Birgit Rathsmann in collaboration with Michele Abeles, Erica Baum, Neil Bender, Becket Bowes, Tania Cross, Grayson Cox, Anthony Lepore, David Lukowski, Oliver Kossack, Jessica Mein, Filip Noterdaeme, Dominic Nurre, Paul Pfeiffer, Jochen Plogsties, Claudia Pena Salinas, Daniel Rich, Siebren Versteeg, Jenny Vogel, Kristof Wickman and Jeff Williams.
 
New York, NY April 18, 2013 — On a single night, three terrorists in a high-security prison die, allegedly by their own hands; a fourth is hospitalized with allegedly self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest. Ever since, the events of the “Death Night” of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group have reverberated through German society and culture. But what might those events mean to artists in another country gripped by fear of radical terrorists, albeit a generation removed and an ocean away? How might today’s artists respond to iconic pieces that addressed the events in their immediate aftermath? Those are the questions that guided Brooklyn artist Birgit Rathsmann as she worked with 19 other artists from the U.S. and Europe to develop October 18, 1977. The exhibition is a meditation on that infamous night when Andreas Baader and three others were found dead or wounded in their prison cells — as well as on the images that earlier artists created in response to the events of that night. Rathsmann “commissioned” new pieces and collaborated to varying degrees with the participants in the exhibition. This created a dialog among artists who share Rathsmann’s interest in the questions raised by the events of October 18, 1977 and those raised by earlier artworks that address those events. In other words, Rathsmann didn’t curate this show; she served as its catalyst. Many of the questions she and the exhibition’s other artists examine have lingered for 36 years: Did the terrorists have a suicide pact? Was it set into motion when they learned that a hijacking intended to win their freedom had failed? If so, how did Andreas Baader and another terrorist manage to get guns into the isolated, high-security cells where they were held in solitary confinement? How did Baader manage to shoot himself in the back of his head? Why were there no fingerprints on either of the guns? How was the sole survivor of that night able to stab herself in the chest four times? Is there evidence to support her allegation that the deaths were summary executions rather than suicides? Those and other questions about that night encapsulate the dramatic relationship between the state and violent non-conformists — a relationship that becomes more relevant with each new act of mass violence. A number of works in October 18, 1977 respond directly to the eponymous cycle of 15 paintings by Gerhard Richter which depict the dead terrorists and the prison where they died. The paintings are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (169.1995), far from the location of their creation and the events that inspired them. Other works in this exhibition directly address specific aspects of the deaths and their cultural setting: the psychological effects of prolonged solitary confinement, the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century German institutional architecture, and the era’s proliferation of ‘zine-like publications that openly expressed sympathy for terrorist organizations. Some works even go so far as to imagine alternative histories. Taken together, the works in the exhibition present a multifaceted examination of that confounding historical moment in the Germany of 1977 and its lingering cultural influence — an examination that’s especially relevant in New York City of 2013.
 
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For more information please contact: HYPERLINK “mailto:gassergrunertsummer@gmail.com” gassergrunert@gmail.com 646.944.6197 For press inquiries and images contact: Margaret Fasel HYPERLINK “mailto:margaret@gassergrunert.net” margaret@gassergrunert.net 816.289.2693

Sheryo and YOK created a body of work that portays the modern world using an ancient technique – painting on porcelain vases. They combined eastern & western elements to portray the values of ideology, devotion, relationships, dharma and karma, depicting a narrative from the rich tales of their journey in SEAsia. They re-interpret the traditional folklore and fables of old Chinese times by injecting their own personal stories with their iconic styles. They use a variety of media to bring these stories to life including the treasured fine art of porcelain vase making. Working in the very factories that have produced these exquisite vases for centuries they paint their warped characters and modern stories using the same age old techniques that produce a bold and unique body of work.

Launch F18 is delighted to present 1XX, a group exhibition curated by Sam Trioli. The exhibition opens Saturday, June 1st from 6:00 - 8:00 PM and will remain on view until Saturday, July 27, 2013.
 
In the May 2011 issue of Frieze magazine, Ronald Jones wrote an article titled Whatever Works, a discussion on design methods and the integration of systems thinking in the 1950s. In the article Ronald quotes Jack Burnham from a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which he writes: “In the past our technologically conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”
 
1XX discusses this very concept within the parameters of the artist book and the forum in which this medium has been used on the contemporary art stage. Collectively, the work within the exhibition addresses the diversity of design and social structure that has reshaped the cultural standard of the medium, allowing for it to become more than only a product of simply purpose. As a result, many believe that the medium will slowly vanish as technology advances and the idea that printed matter could become obsolete to functional form. However, is this very idea merely a shift in design, as Burnham discusses, rather than being a truly undesirable product?
 
Within 1XX this thought is explored as it traces through a range of styles, printings, functions and techniques. Each of the works examines the function and identity of the art publication by delving further into its text, at a page, its binding and the cover. The books are experienced, not just through sight, but with the rare pleasure of tactile stimulation that is often missing from fine art exhibitions. At their roots, these works are relatives to a medium that traces back to the 27th and 26thcentury BC, which through its history has been continuously redefined and re-designed.
 
Participating artists and works by or on them include: Joshua Abelow, Ross Bleckner, Joy Drury Cox, f.ART magazine, Dianna Frid, Gypse Eyes, Johanna Heldebro, Sean Lamoureux, McDermott & McGough, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Adam Stennett and Peter Young. A selection of books will be traveling to the Sharon Art Center in September for the exhibition con(TEXT) which is being curated by Tim Donovan.
 
Sam Trioli is a artist, curator and musician based in New York City.