LOW SUBJECT
 
David Bayus // Kate Bonner // Nico Krijno
 
May 10 - June 21, 2013
Opening Reception: May 10 6pm - 10pm
 
The Popular Workshop
1173 Sutter Street
San Francisco Ca 94109
415.655.3765
 
A work of art being understood as something that embodies itself is perhaps the oldest myth in art. A painting or sculpture is a reflection; a documentation of a process. If transparency is possible in the production of art, acknowledging this condition is the first step. The second one is acting on it.
 
The Popular Workshop is proud to present Low Subject opening May 10, 2013, featuring new work by David Bayus, Kate Bonner and Nico Krijno.
 
Through an elaborate process of composite photography, abstract diorama-like assemblages, gyclee printing and meticulously rendered oil painting, San Francisco-based David Bayus‘ work oscillates between abstraction and representation, creating an uncomfortable and self-reflective tension.
 
Using a process of reduction and transformation, San Francisco-based artist Kate Bonner’s work withholds explanation and proposes simple fictions. Made of degenerated photocopies, cuts, and MDF board, her structures value perceptual failures and contain real boundaries, literal walls, windows and frames that limit visual access.
 
Both staged and spontaneous, Johannesburg-based photographer, Nico Krijno’s images frequently reference their creation, establishing a new, parallel reality that puts our imagination and our objective perception at loggerheads.
 
The field of documentation, a popular subject of discourse in contemporary art, and specifically the subject of documentation as art is explored here by these three artists. Their work challenges both the notions of what it means to photograph a work of art as a starting point for a piece, the piece itself, and the following dialogue that ensues. Bayus, Bonner and Krijno's work inhabits all three of these spaces simultaneously. When viewing any of these works, one finds themselves looking at shadows on the wall, with the “original” artwork somewhere hidden from our view behind a curtain, or perhaps not at all. In a sense, this body of work reveals the false promise of all images, that there was ever an original in the first place.
 
The exhibition opens May 10th, 2013, will be on display until June 21st, 2013 and is open to the public.
 
Low subject was curated by Luca Nino Antonucci, Andy Hawgood and Nate Hooper.

Material Record introduces samples from a larger body of work in which I contemplate discarded objects in my immediate urban environment as archaeological finds in an unknown and distant future.
Archaeologists rely on the material record to explain the behaviors of prehistoric, pre-literate cultures. But even when a historical record is available, material data provide crucial, unbiased revelations. Interestingly, a considerable amount of information is gleaned from the study of ancient trash.
Convinced that our own junk carries coded explanations of contemporary habits, I analyze discards from gutters, sidewalks, thrift stores and the tops of refuse bins, reading patterns, folds, curves, colors, holes, prongs, breaks, fissures, hollows and solids for information.
Perhaps future archaeologists will find our trash and take it to be treasure…or perhaps they will find our discards re-engineered, jerry-rigged tools and talismans, manifestations of creative necessity in the face of limited resources.
Whatever they discover, I imagine advanced beings lining up to view our refuse enshrined in protective cases, fascinated by what it describes.
 
Born and raised in Colorado, Kristina Lewis currently lives and works in San Francisco. Kristina received her BA from the University of Colorado and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively in the Bay Area, including Mission 17 Gallery, Queen‘s Nails, Johansson Projects, Ampersand, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Oakland Museum of California’s Sculpture Court at City Center and Sonoma State University Art Gallery. Her work has also been exhibited at Next Art Fair in Chicago and Aqua Art Fair in Miami—as well as being included in group shows in Seattle and Los Angeles.

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce Continuous Wave, an exhibition of new paintings by Ian Kimmerly. Kimmerly boldly embraces the disparate by integrating various styles and techniques into each painting. Softly blurred photorealistic figures slip between abstract gestures while gleaming, thickly impastoed streaks of paint are counterbalanced by bright, geometric pops of color. Though the final paintings depend on a number of different factors, his process typically involves the same set of steps: after priming the canvas with an acrylic glaze and placing the figures, Kimmerly begins adding generous layers of paint that he manipulates and scrapes away while still wet. Figures subsequently get moved around and incorporated into the surrounding ground while he builds up his painting’s surfaces. 
 
Within the tensions generated between nonobjective and illusory space, notes of Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Expressionists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, Gerhard Richter, and John Singer Sargent are evident. As accumulations of styles and influences—and ideas and experiences—Kimmerly’s paintings look almost as if “they’re being constructed in front of you. You can see the seams holding them together and, at the same time, you can also see them falling apart. I like when you can see how something is built. There’s a sense of tenuousness about it.” With respect to his fragmented, deconstructed aesthetic Kimmerly explains: “I try to ask questions about reality through my paintings. What is actually holding everything together? To have an image that’s in the process of breaking apart and reforming before your eyes touches upon that question.”
 
One of the earliest inspirations for this body of work can be traced back to a personal project to convert old, VHS home movies to DVD. Initially intrigued by distortions that occasionally occurred during the conversion process, Kimmerly began to ask himself what the goals of such projects were and whether or not technology somehow assists with or alters memory. Do we, for instance, only remember certain incidents because a parent took a video or picture of them? Such questions led Kimmerly to consider how modern innovations, particularly social media, and the ulterior motives of mediating technologies, such as touchscreens and rotating billboards, have altered not only how we think and remember, but also how we interact and exist.
 
Kimmerly’s paintings explore these issues by attempting to both embody the complexity of human consciousness and reflect how modern “advancements” have rendered it increasingly fractured and disoriented. To create paintings that are as complicated as those experiences we live, Kimmerly often uses images of people and objects cast as reflections in windows, or will mix artificial elements (such as mannequins) with landscapes to create a subtle sense of dissonance. Figures both
“real” and artificial are awash in a kind of visual static that produces a sense of distance between viewer and subjects: “I’m trying to show a struggle to have a close relationships with the subjects,” Kimmerly explains, “there’s always a distancing. There are things you’re fighting against to see what’s happening.”
 
Water Logic (2012) exemplifies the struggle to know, grasp, and connect—to reconcile the self with the subjects and setting. Inspired by an image in the pages of a vintage National Geographic, Water Logic depicts a family soaking in a Finnish hot spring. Each person’s face is hazy though particularized, while pools of simmering mineral waters masquerading as abstract gestures flow over and around their bodies. Water is, of course, something that you have to look into, through, and depending on its opacity, beyond. To know what is on the other side you have to acutely engage the mind and imagination. Water is also a unifying and harmonizing force that envelopes its bathers both and aligns them with the rhythm of its currents. By using abstraction as an analogue to water, Kimmerly asks us to consider how art and, in particular, painting, can help return us to the real. His painting—themselves material, tactile objects—embody and activate sensory experiences that force us to see the natural symmetry that binds all together.
 
Ian Kimmerly was born in Northport, Michigan in 1980. He earned his BFA from the University of Michigan in 2002 followed by his MFA from the University of Arizona in 2005. He has exhibited across the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area, including most recently at San Francisco’s Southern Exposure. This will be his first solo show the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

Andy Vogt | Submerged on the Surface
May 11 - June 29, 2013
Opening Reception Saturday, May 11, 4-7pm
 
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Andy Vogt, Submerged on the Surface.
 
Based on the sculptural potential of lumberyard detritus and repurposed rough-cut Douglas Fir lath, Vogt's works take on the materials in both graphic and architectural terms as well as the gray area between. His vision of well-worn, structural demise finds a language in the crisp edges and broken off-cuts of discarded plywood and lath and their shadows.
 
The artist will transform the gallery space producing a mixture of site specific installation, sculpture and drawing using his found palette of materials. Here, shadows become plans for sculptures and edges of lath emerge as a drawing medium in works that blur the ephemeral and permanent.
 
“Vogt’s lath works combine the dumpster and blueprint, the geological and the architectural, merging manmade and natural environments.” – DeWitt Cheng
 
Vogt earned a BFA in Intermedia, focusing on time-based media, performance and installation, from Carnegie Mellon University. He has exhibited numerous times in the Bay Area, including at The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco State University, UC Davis Memorial Union Art Gallery, and The Luggage Store. Andy Vogt lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Highlight Gallery is pleased to present ‘Silk’, an exhibition that draws together the work of Etel Adnan, Ramin Haerizadeh, Hayv Kahraman, Timo Nasseri and Hesam Rahmanian. Devised by the British curator, Jane Neal, Silk was born from Neal’s investigations into art and issues of visibility and invisibility. The word ‘silk’ served as a catalyst for the beginnings of exploration. It is a thread, both beautiful and strong, but it is also synonymous with the ancient world and the silk route. This evokes a binding connection to place, and being ‘tied’ but paradoxically it is simultaneously exotic – taking the silk road suggests the beginning of an adventure; a journey through wild and wonderful terrain. In the past the word and the route were bound up also with empire and colonialism, and thus negative associations with the abuse of power, which could also be addressed and paralleled with events of today.
 
Primarily perhaps, silk evokes the age of the traveller and explorer, trailing through Europe and across Asia. The idea of the silk road is an emotive one for daydreaming as it conjures up many interesting mental as well as physical images for the dreamer. Silk also has currency in our contemporary culture. We live in a time when globalisation has become one of the defining terms of our age and diaspora and displacement from culture and family is commonplace. The exhibition ‘silk’ links together artists who share origins in ancient civilisations along the silk route. It also brings together several artists who for various reasons have ended up living and working far from their original home. ‘Silk’ will explore the work made by these diverse and interesting artists, and consider the dialogues that can take place between works that share this commonality but that differ greatly in terms of personal inspiration and execution.
 
Etel Adnan (Beirut, 1925, lives in Paris, France and Sausalito, CA) is as known for her writing as she is for her painting. In 2010, Hans Ulrich Obrist described the woman who has long been regarded as one of the most important cultural voices to have emerged from the Middle East as: ‘One of my heroes.’ He went on to say: ‘She is one of the great poets of her time and also a wonderful visual artist…What is so key about Etel is also how many artists of the younger generation she inspires. And that’s how I found her. She is an artists’ artist… in the same tradition as many figures in the past who were painters and poets’. Adnan herself never tires of telling people how much she has been influenced by the different languages and landscapes she has encountered in her journey across the cultures she has inhabited. She is loyal to the locations that have a place in her heart and one of her most passionate and long lived loves is with Mount Tamalpais that graces the skyline of the Bay Area of California. Time and again in her pared down, vivid paintings of various pastel-coloured hue, she returns to depicting the mountain that she looks out on from her home in Sausalito. Her fascination for this mountain is always active, never passive. She comments: ‘Love of nature is not harmless..it can compromise the whole of existence.’ Adnan’s paintings are small but redolent with this persistent passion that has come to define her creativity.
 
Ramin Haerizadeh (Tehran, 1975, lives and works in Dubai) works across a variety of media that encompasses photography, drawing, painting, film, animation and collage. He often collaborates with his brother, Rokni, but the two artists are highly individual, with Ramin Haerizadeh creating multifaceted and often highly amusing works bastardised from photographic media sources. These he perverts in order to reclaim and transform them into witty, but often disturbing scenes of humanity. A feature of Haerizadeh’s practice is the motif of the fractured self in the form of multiple, cross-gendered self portraits. Often depicted alone, bearded and veiled, he is forever popping up in various entertaining, even shocking guises. Vali Mahlouji has written that in Haerizadeh’s collages: ‘he depicts himself as a simulacrum – a chaos of appearances’. Certainly in his screen shot collages, Haerizadeh exploits the humour inherent to far fetched juxtapositions between the soft and the bestial, the political and the personal. In this way he could be said to be exposing the hypocrisy that threads through our world, and the sometimes grotesque manipulations of societies by those in power.
 
While Haerizadeh’s work can be read as a form of protest, he is very much grounded in ancient and recent art historical traditions. The spirit of creative play that is manifested in his practice through careful characterisation and attention to detail makes it possible to trace a connection between Haerizadeh’s work and the fields of ancient Persian story telling, epic poetry and the Persian miniature tradition. His use of slogans and an adoption of a snappy, advertisement-like style is reminiscent of theoretical feminist artists’ work, such as Barbara Kruger. Haerizadeh is slippery, and this is the point; to be unpredictable and outrageous is to preserve the integrity of the self from the pressure of confirming to authoritarian expectations.
 
Hayv Kahraman (Baghdad, 1981, lives and works in Oakland, Ca) works across media, predominantly in painting and installation. The underlying thread that runs throughout Kahraman’s practice is her attempt to decipher notions of space and her ongoing exploration of social spatiality. Kahraman questions and re examines issues of hybridity as a result of diaspora and re negotiates the boundaries of personal and political space. The artist has often used her practice to look at the historical and current implications for female identity in her homeland and positioned the body as object as well as subject. For ‘Silk’, Kahraman was inspired to produce new work for the exhibition in addition to a site specific piece. Her research centred on the legendary round city of Baghdad, built during the Abbasid era of 726AD, known as ‘the City of Peace’. Little is known to archaeologists about the city but literary sources reveal that it consisted of two, large concentric circles with four gates, symmetrically placed and radiating outwards. One of these gates, the ‘Khorasan Gate’, opened to the Silk Road. For the site specific work in ‘Silk’, Kahraman will draw the lines of the gate floor plan onto the floor of the gallery, thus creating a liminal space that permits entrance and exit into two spaces and introduces a past archeological structure in its most basic form into a current western space. Once the exhibition is over, the plans will be erased.
 
During her research, Kahraman discovered that the use of white earthenware with tin and cobalt oxide glazed pottery was invented in Baghdad in the 9th century; the technique then spread through the silk route. Chinese porcelain had reached the area by this time and in an attempt to imitate the medium, Iraqi ceramicists rediscovered a combination (used earlier by Egyptians) of tin and cobalt oxide glazes that then served as a source of inspiration to ceramicists in the Iranian province of Khorasan. Kahraman has responded to her discovery by making a ceramic that instead of being decorated with calligraphy (which is what would have been painted on with the cobalt), will instead be painted with the floor plan of the Round city itself. The viewer can then walk into the gallery, interacting with the floor plan (the gate) and will then be introduced to the actual city itself through the ceramic object.
 
Timo Nasseri’s (Berlin, 1972, lives and works in Berlin) practice encompasses photography, drawing, installation and sculpture. He started out as a photographer but gave this up in favour of making sculptures and drawings that were fuelled by what he describes as his interest in: ‘looking for parallels between cultures, combining the heritage of the Islamic and the western world’, and along the way being inspired by: ‘memories, religious references, the universe, infinity, mathematics, space and volume, ornament, language, eclecticism and exoticism, constructivism, universal principles of science, and the inner truth of form and rhythm.’ Born to a German mother and an Iranian father, unlike many artists who feel themselves drawn to Berlin, Nasseri has always lived and worked there. However his artistic journey and interest in learning more about the Iranian side of his heritage has drawn him across the world, including making extensive travels along the Silk Route. It was while he was travelling with his father that he encountered an element in Islamic architecture known as a ‘muqarnas’. Highly decorative, they normally occur in the entrances to mosques, usually beneath an arch or a vault. Nasseri was intrigued to know the system behind it: was it mathematical, did it originate from drawing, where did it come from, and how was it done? He succeeded in discovering that there is in fact a very logical mathematical system behind it, which he describes as: ‘somewhat similar to the way planes work.’
 
In his exquisite drawings and sculptures, Nasseri explores some of the motifs inherent in Islamic architecture. The way he chooses to carefully examine the interface between shape, form, perception and science, and to stretch the boundaries is becoming increasingly emblematic of his unique style. More recently though, Nasseri has been hugely influenced by the studies of Jacob Steiner (1796 – 1863), a Swiss mathematician known for his contributions to the development of modern synthetic geometry. As a result, Quantum theory and the notion of infinity are the inspiration behind Nasseri’s beautiful, thread-like drawings that evoke the possibility of infinite parallel universes, endlessly expanding across all possibilities.
 
Hesam Rahmanian (USA, 1980, lives and works in Dubai). Life, death and regeneration are recurring themes in Hesam Rahmanian’s work. Until recently bull fights, animal slaughter and political arenas had dominated his subject matter but this aggressively confrontational imagery has now been replaced by a more circumspect, painterly approach. What has remained consistent is the depth of his involvement in his own private universe; a fantastical place where the carnivalesque exists alongside an ever changing parade of animals, people and inanimate objects in a manner that suggests the influence of both modern day movement such as surrealism and, with their poignant but often whimsical titles, the decorative, narrative traditions of middle eastern art.
 
Rahmanian has a fondness for impastoed paint, rich colour and the patterns that can be derived from working with buttery, globules of paint. His collages are themselves derived from the excess material that he scrapes from his painting. This self conscious recycling seems to inform the subject matter of Rahmanian’s ‘reincarnated works’ which are often hybrid or fantastical in nature. A strong sense of narrative is twinned with a certain playfulness in Rahmanian’s practice that implicates all involved with the display and digestion of his practice. He challenges us to consider the connections between his images and to alter the narrative according to the placement of his works. Though playful, Rahmanian understands that there is a balance of power that can easily be affected by the repositioning of a particular image in front or behind another and clearly enjoys playing with narrative in this manner, tracing an invisible thread for the viewer and thereby drawing the into his world.

“Ballad Del Toro”
May 17 - July 13, 2013
 
Featuring new paintings by Johnpaul Altamirano, Sean Cheetham and Jeff Nentrup
 
Opening Reception for the artists:
Friday, May 17th 2013, 7 to 9pm
 
Fouladi Projects
1803 Market St. @ Octavia
San Francisco, CA 94103
fouladiprojects.com 415-621-2535
 
Fouladi Projects is pleased to present a body of new work by three Los Angeles based painters, Johnpaul Altamirano, Sean Cheetham and Jeff Nentrup. The work created for this show is inspired by an enduring history of close friendship and the many years spent collaborating as musicians in their bluesy rock band, “Del Toro”. For this exhibition, the three artists explore their own western heritage and the primal motifs that manifest when they are let loose to bond in the wilderness: Guns, campfires and whiskey…. sombreros, serapes and guitars. All three are accomplished portrait painters in their own right and we are thrilled to see them join forces in a personal celebration of the fundamental pastimes enjoyed when being one with nature.
 
Please join us on Friday, May 17th 7 to 9pm for the artist reception and a special live musical performance by the artists’ band, “Del Toro”.
 
For images or more information please contact holly@fouladiprojects.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
 
Fouladi Projects’ Maker Program is pleased to present two window installations by Esque Studio, featuring the glasswork of Justin Parker and Andi Kovel, in collaboration with Travis Harvey.
 
Opening reception: Saturday, June 22nd, 3 to 6pm
 
Powered by 15 years of experience collaborating within their medium, Portland, Oregon based Esque Studio has established itself as a master visionary in glass design. Owners Andi and Justin have skillfully merged their vast talents to create uniquely modern objects inspired by both nature and function. Playing with scale, traditional shapes and contemporary tastes, the two have succeeded in pushing the boundaries of how glass can be used, all the while celebrating the inherent elemental beauty and translucent light embracing qualities of their material.
 
For this exhibition, Esque has created a body of glass artwork referencing the concept of “Modern Heirlooms”. It is inspired by the notion that people desire to be in the company of nostalgic objects as they can then be reminded of a simpler, more comforting era. On view will be colorful organically shaped vases, birdhouses, hand sculpted figurines, and objet d’art.
 
About the Maker Program:
 
As a compliment to our stable of contemporary fine artists, the Maker Program aims to cultivate and further expand our ever-evolving community of artists, collectors and art enthusiasts. Ranging from wood furniture, ceramics, glass, and beyond, the functional art and design objects are all imaginatively conceived and exquisitely crafted. Alternating within our regular program of fine art exhibitions, Fouladi Projects will introduce new Makers throughout the year.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jennifer Draughon
Andrea Schwartz Gallery
545 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
415.495.2090 – Phone
415.495.2094 – Fax
jennifer@asgallery.com
www.asgallery.com
 
Donald Bradford
Love & War
June 19 – July 26, 2013
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
 
Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition, Love & War, featuring new paintings by Donald Bradford opening Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Growing up around the family owned wedding chapel, Donald Bradford’s paintings reference his childhood memories of love and marriage. The home where he spent much of his childhood functioned as a full chapel, set just off the kitchen, complete with pews, an organ, and stained glass windows. The chapel was open 24 hours and couples waiting to get married often spilled over into the living and dining rooms of the house. Bradford’s paintings are influenced by the themes of love, weddings, and marriage that dominated the landscape of his early years. In his latest series, Bradford adds elements related to gay marriage and the controversial Proposition 8, which is soon to be decided by the Supreme Court. His paintings of bulletin boards and love letters blend images of “traditional marriage” with the iconography of social equality.
 
Born and raised in Yuma, Arizona, Donald Bradford now resides in the Bay Area. He received a BFA from University of Arizona, and a MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara. This is his first solo exhibition with Andrea Schwartz Gallery.
 
Andrea Schwartz Gallery was established in 1982 and is located in the South of Market district of San Francisco in our new gallery space located at 545 – 4th Street. ASG exhibits contemporary work of mid-career artists from the Bay Area and across the country. ASG is a member of SFADA. Gallery Hours are Monday - Friday 9 - 5, Saturday 1 – 5. The gallery will be closed 7/4. For further information and materials please contact Jennifer Draughon at 415-495-2090 or jennifer@asgallery.com. Additional information may also be found on our website, www.asgallery.com. Thank you!

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present new work by Nicholas Nixon, his fourteenth solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprised of approximately thirty works dating solely from 2012 and 2013, this will be Nixon’s first exhibition to interweave photographs made both in black-and-white and color.
 
Known for penetrating portraits of couples, the ill and elderly, and an ongoing annual portrait (begun in 1975)of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon is a master of rich, telling detail. His new work is comprised of intimate self-portraits with his wife, Bebe, and landscape views made in France and his neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 
Grounded in a vocabulary of precision resulting until now solely from large format black-and-white negatives, Nixon here also introduces digital photographs made with a high-resolution hand-held camera. The primary setting is home life; the subtle register of daylight on skin, a close crop of backyard grass, detailed studies of eyes, faces and hair. Other views from further afield also appear—swaths of grass and sweeping wheat fields echo his close-up studies of tangled hair, and underscore a sometimes-overlooked connection to the natural world.
 
Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. His work is widely published and in the collections of numerous important museums around the world. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and elsewhere.

Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to welcome Irmel Kamp and Joachim Bandau from Germany in 2 solo exhibitions. Joachim Bandau will present Motion, new watercolors and sculpture. Irmel Kamp will present Modern Architecture, gelatin silver prints. The exhibitions open June 6th through July 27th. Reception for the artists is Thursday, June 6th, 5:30 - 7:30pm.
 
Joachim Bandau (b.1936) belongs to a protean group of German artists, along with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Imi Knoebel, who came out of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. Bandau has had an uninterrupted schedule of major museum and gallery exhibitions dating back fifty years.
 
It‘s difficult to capture Bandau’s history in a few brief paragraphs, however there were key periods worth commenting upon. Beginning in the late 70’s, Bandau created steel and lead sculpture which were anchored to the ground by sheer weight, then eventually pushed underground. Prior to this, works were mobile, as in Documenta 7 in 1977, where polychrome sculptures were animated by mechanics made by Mercedes Benz. As with Carl Andre’s development of the floor sculpture, and Bruce Nauman’s concrete casting of the empty space under his chair, this new art form “Bodenskulptur”, Floor Sculpture, gave Bandau an independent and important context.
 
Following his inclusion in Documenta 6, 1977, came “Bunkers”, lead covers over wooden cores, then “Särge” (coffins), and “Mumienkästen” (boxes for mummies), which continued his referent to the human condition and form, along with Germany‘s complex post-WWII re-invention. Moving into the 80’s, Bandau synthesized his political and social commentaries in linear, geometric shapes, one such, a series of lead spiked sculptures titled, Field of Tears that today are in the Ludwig Museum collections of Cologne and Aachen. Bandau continued to explore and define sculpture in many important exhibitions including, “Inside. Outside. An Aspect of Contemporary Sculpture” at the MUHKA in Antwerp in 1987.
 
In 1983, Bandau began making large format watercolors that arose from his densely hatched sculptor’s drawings. Measuring several inches, or feet, the watercolors resonate the lines of his sculpture, a slow precise brushstroke of various widths and density, layered on heavy deckled paper, using Japanese brushes. The veil of pigments form a slow volume outlined by fine pigments. Alternating a process of painting, then drying, the new works form a rhythmic syntax, moving from light to dark, and edge to edge. The dynamic brushwork may have a vortex within the format of the paper, then layer upon layer begin it’s ascent, or descent off the edge.
 
Most recently, Joachim Bandau turned to another medium to explore his complex language of form, a series of works titled, Bagan-Lacquer“ red and black wooden wall sculptures. The Bagan Lacquer sculptures are affixed to the wall by steel nails, where they hover just off the surface. Their core of balsa and air-plywood is layered multiple times with the gum of the Melanorrhea Usitata tree, which has been used for lacquering in Burma for over 1000 years. The sculptures are a convex, or concave shape, which form subtle refractions of light in their high gloss finish. Although the density of the color suggest great weight, their hovering presence gives the viewer some sense of the fragility of these elegantly crafted forms.
 
In the current exhibition PSG is pleased to present new watercolors, a series of small sculptures that were exhibited at the Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum Köln, September 2005, black wooden wall sculptures, and 2 steel floor sculptures from the early 90‘s.
 
Joachim Bandau is represented in over 45 museum collections, with over 20 public installations, including the Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum Nurnberg; Jewish Museum, Berlin; Suermondt-Ludwig Museum Aachen; Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen; and the Aachenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Bandau’s work can be viewed at Art Basel, Art Cologne, Art HK12 Hongkong, along with other international art fairs.
 
German photographer Irmel Kamp (b. 1937) has documented Modern Architecture of the late 1920’s through the 1930’s in nine European cultural capitals. Her resume includes Tel Aviv, New Building, 1930-39; the zinc covered houses of the Belgium-German border region; Brussels, Les Annees Trente, Neues Bauen, New Buildings in Brussels, and now regions in the former Eastern Bloc countries. Kamp has devoted her multiple decade career photographing International Style Architecture in regions overlooked for their modern architectural treasures. Through her singular approach of pure, cool neutrality, Kamp has preserved an historical record informed by contemporary tableau. Her photographic projects have enlivened debate, and encouraged preservation of buildings designed by leading architects of the era. Her last project, Les Annees Trente, Modern Architecture in Brussels, began an International Tour at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen.
 
In this exhibition Kamp will present photographs from The Netherlands, Italy, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Tel Aviv. Irmel Kamp's meticulous process necessitates that she produce her own gelatin silver prints. The photographs are not retouched, toned or otherwise altered from their original intention. As a photography master, Irmel Kamp is able to preserve the same directness in style and thought, as International Style mirrors.
 
Irmel Kamp has exhibited in museums in Hungary, Germany, United States, Israel, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Estonia, Czech Republic and Austria.
 
For further information and press materials please contact the gallery at 415-788-5126.
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday 11:00 - 5:30 pm; Saturday 11:00 - 5:00
Email: contact@patriciasweetowgallery.com
Website: www.patriciasweetowgallery.com