A recent graduate of California College of the Arts, Toyin Odutola is already celebrating her second show at Jack Shainman Gallery in NYC. The energetic artist produces ink works…
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A mad tea party of paintings
Initially catching our eye at the recent NADA NYC fair, Michael Bauer has made an impression in the European art market for years with his energetically moody compositions. The German artist recently set up shop in New York, and in celebration of his move from Berlin to NYC he is holding his first solo show at Lisa Cooley Gallery, dubbed “H.S.O.P. – 1973“.
Bauer spent much of 2012 experimenting with collage and drawing, a practice that has invigorated his new paintings with what the gallery calls an “openness, dynamism, lightness and mischievous humor” not seen in his previous work. Still, certain elements from his early career remain, most notably his small, meticulous markings and his predilection for highlighting and obscuring physical deformity. According to the Saatchi Gallery, “Bauer uses the qualities of abstract painting as a deviation of representational portraiture, allowing the media to replicate the characteristics of physical matter.”
Even as his compositions become tighter and more centralized, Bauer seems consumed with making figurative elements from the marking of his medium. He describes the work in “H.S.O.P – 1973” as “portraits of gangs, families, music bands, collectives, or mobs—a grouping of characters revealed through the occasional eye or profile emerging from shadowy abstraction. Flat, crisp, bright, patterns usually provide the structure from which these organic nebulas originate.”
The title for the exhibition is a little obscure, and Bauer calls “H.S.O.P.” an “arbitrary reference” to the Hudson River School of painting, and because there’s a foot or foot-like shape in each painting, the accompanying numbers indicate European shoe sizes. The other elements aren’t quite so random. Bauer adds circular shapes to the corners to make them more like playing cards, with each painting like a “character in an unfolding cast, a mad tea party of sorts.”
”H.S.O.P. – 1973” is on view at Lisa Cooley Gallery through 17 June 2012.
Ari Marcopoulos presents richly degraded photography, photocopies and film in a new solo show
Dark, densely textured images seem to float on the stark white walls of the Marlborough Chelsea, the mostly massive black and white photographs fill the space with an almost unrecognizable, vaguely ominous mood. “Wherever You Go” is a considered collection of new photographs, photocopies and film by renowned photographer, filmmaker and artist Ari Marcopoulos.
“It’s as much about photography as it is about printmaking,” says Marcopoulos about the selection of high-contrast images. Shot predominantly with a 35mm point-and-shoot, the large-scale pigment prints and smaller photographs on rice paper are often printed multiple times and blown up to expose a gritty quality. Similarly Marcopoulos experiments with additional, non-photographic printed matter by layering photocopied imagery that evokes a visceral experience enhanced by the ability to walk up close and really see each minute detail of the bigger picture—a signature characteristic of Marcopoulos’ shows. But while each image finds identity in its distinct textures, the subjects themselves strike a cord with the viewer as well. “I think there is certain power in the images, a certain strength when you look at them. They’re kind of heavy images,” admits Marcopoulos.
Best known for his portraiture, Marcopoulos starts to stray from the expected with the inclusion of some more abstract images that remove all apparent context. “I like the idea of looking at something where you dont have an exact idea of what it is. It’s nice to make something where your first reaction is not words but just a feeling.”
Feeling this way upon seeing the unnamed image dated 5.8.08, we asked Marcopoulos to elaborate on the compelling photograph of stained skin. “It’s very close up,” he says. “It’s hard to tell what it is. It kind of has to do with the idea that as a photographer or in photography so often the images are about what it is you’re looking at. So this is kind of more about just creating a rectangle, that doesn’t really inform you as to what it is. It’s open you know. It’s more of a mood or a feeling.”
While some artists may shoot specifically for a show, Marcopoulos prefers to focus on a vague idea, letting the body of work develop organically. “A lot of thought goes into it, but in the end it’s very intuitive, it’s like improvisation,” says Marcopoulos. “You have an idea in your head and you do what you feel is needed to get it done. That idea is often not a wordy idea because you work in images, so the ideas are images in your head. The only way to get it done is actually select images—it can be one image, but it’s often two or three—and then put it together. Sounds very abstract but that’s kind of how it is. There is not ever one theme.”
While the large-scale prints and enlarged photocopies dominate the show, Marcopoulos chose to include a projected film with a colorful splash of life that contrasts nicely with the still black and white environment. Entitled “City Riders”, the voyeuristic piece was shot in a few short months with Marcopoulos’ BlackBerry, capturing about an hour’s worth of unsuspecting NYC subway commuters.
“Wherever You Go” opens tonight at NYC’s Marlborough Chelsea with a reception from 6-8pm. The show will then run through 16 June 2012.
Installation image by Ari Marcopoulos
Lin Tianmiao’s presents a thread-covered apocalypse at Beijing BCA
by Alessandro De Toni
After two years of absence from the art scene, Lin Tianmiao is back for the largest solo exhibition of her career with new works at Beijing Center for the Arts (BCA). As one of the most important Chinese contemporary female artists, she’s renowned internationally for her ability to transform threads and textiles into staggering works of art, as seen in “The Same”.
Her latest exhibition makes an amazing descent into an inner world in which life and death coexist—objects, mainly artificial bones, are covered in gold or meticulously wrapped in colored silk threads. A massive amount of ox, lamb, pig, dog, cat, rabbit bones, tools and wires are crafted into enchanting objects and recombined to create a powerful visual effect.
In one room entirely lined in black cashmere, scattered animal bones and whole skeletons create a sort of dark apocalypse. What at first sight seems like a scene of fierce violence and chaos soon reveals the stunning beauty of a seemingly endless exercise of craftsmanship. More than twenty people have been working for three days to stage this single installation, in which every single piece has been covered entirely with gold foil.
The exhibition continues on the basement floor of the BCA, with an installation of paradoxical tools wrapped in grey silk thread–half organic, half mechanical—and gigantic, tri-dimensional canvases.
The title of the exhibit, “The Same” speaks to its recurrent concept that what seems uniform from a distance gives way to reveal the subtle differences which exist within a world of opulence and diversity.
“The Same—New Works by Lin Tianmiao”
Through 10 March 2012
Beijing Center for the Arts
No.23 Qianmen East Street, Dongcheng District
Beijing 100006
Ari Marcopoulos documents NYC’s incognito surfing community in his upcoming solo show
Photographer Ari Marcopoulos, who got his start as an assistant to Andy Warhol, documents the diverse and often gritty subcultures of American youth. His new solo exhibition, “Dark Sun”—opening tonight at Nike’s Bowery Stadium in NYC—casts an eye on the lesser seen community of surfers who call America’s largest urban metropolis home. Shot on 35mm over just two weeks, Dark Sun takes a raw look at a handful of New York’s surf breaks and the people who ride them.
The sculptural wave installation of the Bowery Stadium, thoroughly thrashed by members of the local skate and surf community, offers a complimentary backdrop for Marcopoulos’ grainy black-and-white photography. A calm sense of spirit can be seen in his portraiture, as each subject conveys the strong sense of confidence and enigmatic style of East Coast surfing.
Dark Sun will be on display at Bowery Stadium through 26 September 2011. For those in NYC this evening, make sure to swing by for an opening night celebration of East Coast surfing with a live performance by Hanni El Khatib from 7-9pm.
Chains, ring pops and weapons in a master glass designer’s latest experiments with crystal
Though master of crystal and glass design Orfeo Quagliata, 39, has been producing his own transparent wonders for several years (he’s been working with glass since age 12 and heads up Phuze Design), a recent collaboration with Swarovski Elements has led the Mexico-based artist to explore a more subversive side of the material. After the success of his initial partnership with the crystal leaders (he made five exclusive martini shakers for Skyy Vodka, like one that evokes Mr. Big’s character and a lipstick tube, for the Mexico City Sex and the City 2 premiere), Quagliata’s new work featured in a show at San Francisco, California’s Velvet Da Vinci’s gallery this month makes almost a 180. Celebrating both the beauty of Swarovski’s crystals and showing a “lack of respect” by fearlessly grinding and melting the pieces, Quagliata’s irreverence and a playful approach to material mark his sleek designs.
Among his more outlandish explorations in jewelry, glassware and sculpture is the aptly named “Crystal Death,” a design inspired by gladiators’ iconic morningstar weapon. This crystal implement is a prime example of Quagliata’s tendency to transform something with negative associations (in this case, a piece traditionally used for killing) into a stunning work of art.
Quagliata describes the show’s one-off designs (that inspired Phuze’s new production line) as “coming out of necessity.” While he primary occupies himself with beauty and combining unexpected materials, Quagliata also focuses on functionality. In the case of his geometric glassware, the cups are made from Pyrex (a sturdy heat- and chemical-resistant material) for those craving chic, faceted mugs for their coffee. Drawing from his work for the exhibition, Quagliata simplified the production design from tall glasses with elaborate handles to short cups with a single colorful knob.
Other offshoots of the exhibition include Phuze’s Disco Line for which Quagliata removes the crystals’ foil with acid and fills hollow pieces with them. Unlike standard jewelry with crystals fixed into settings, the Disco Line’s pieces are “shimmering little worlds for the crystals to live in.” A standout from the line’s delicate rings, earrings and pendant-like pieces, the “Alpha Chain” contrasts the lightness of the crystals with heavy steel links.
For a look at Quagliata’s one-of-a-kind pieces, catch his show before it ends 28 August 2011. Visit Phuze Design for a look at Quagliata’s other jewels, like his glammed-up glass candy rings colored with ground crystals. Currently showing at Swarovski’s booth for Accessory Circuit Intermezzo in New York, his work will hit London and Shanghai soon. While his pieces are now available for purchase from his London distributor, they will be sold at MoMA next year.
Parisian street artist brings his gritty vision of Oz to NYC
As rebels against not just art world norms but against conventions for public space, many see graffiti as by definition disagreeable. Artists like Ugly-Kid Gumo embrace that position, providing commentary through art that originated on the street. Gumo’s raw, emotional figures and faces draw attention to the flaws and fallacies in our urbanized society by literally and figuratively staring straight at them.
The 30-year-old Parisian street artist Nicholas-Gumo first became involved in underground public art while he was still in high school. Going on to graduate with a degree in fine arts from Paris’ Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, since then he has taught art to children and dabbled in fashion design before turning back to graphic arts.
Gumo’s work emphasizes the cruelty of life in the city. “It’s a constant questioning and reinterpreting the brutal code of the city, again, especially in the suburbs—its plasticity, or rather the abstract figurative aspect of it,” he explains, continuing, “it depends on the moment, it depends on the music in the MP3. It’s brutal, romantic as a dinner with black light.”
Often the urban environment itself becomes the medium (like in his graffiti paint chips series, pictured top and below) with materials varying based on his location. When in Paris, the artist works mainly on the streets of the city, but while in NYC most of his process takes place in his studio location—even bringing in chunks of plaster from Paris to pursue his passion in the remote location.
Oz, the mythical city created by L. Frank Baum and perpetuated by Judy Garland, figures as a driving force in Gumo’s work. According to Gumo, attempting to understand the world around us is comparable to making sense of Oz. “These stories are actually metaphors for the social problems that plague the American society but which are transferable to every corner of the world or human lives. Oz is never far from us,” he suggests.
The mythical city is the only recurring thread in Gumo’s work, as he prefers to work organically from a feeling, rather than basing it on an abstract idea. “When people ask me to describe my work, to explain which wave I’m close to, I just want to answer: I don’t know. I’m honest. I don’t have a strategy or a project study, only maybe with OZ. I was too bored at school because we needed to justify our reasons and explain our influences. I find nothing more annoying. The important thing is that we’re here and together.”
New York got a preview of Gumo’s collection,”Oz, le visage du mal,” in a one-day gallery showing last fall, but his first solo show at Dorian Grey Gallery, curated by Marianne Nems opens tonight. It includes a wide variety of Gumo’s work, ranging from spray paint on paper and acrylics on canvas to cardboard and mixed media. The reception tonight from 6-7pm will have a live performance, “Mask,” by performance artist Blizard, and the show runs through 24 July 2011.
Photographer Bryan Graf’s intoxicatingly tinted view of nature in an NYC solo show
Bryan Graf uses nature to make photos that are incredibly beautiful without being overly romantic. In his 2010 series “Wildlife Analysis,” the artist’s photographic studies of the woods and swamps around his native New Jersey using black and white film might sound like an austere treatment of familiar subjects—plants, flowers, butterflies and deer—until you see the densely-layered end result.
To achieve the gorgeously re-imagined everyday scenes, Graf (who honed his skills with Yale’s MFA program) makes color negatives without a lens which exposes the film directly to ambient light. Bringing the two negatives together in the darkroom creates images reminiscent of photographic screw-ups like light leaks and double exposures. In Graf’s hands however, dizzying abstract patterns of light and color flow across the paper, introducing an array of hallucinatory hues rarely seen in contemporary photography.
Images from Wildlife Analysis, along with a selection of Polaroid “sketches” from “The Sun Room: Interchanges, B-Sides & Remixes” and a sculptural piece called “An Encyclopedia of Gardening” are currently on view in the exhibition “Field Recordings” at NYC’s Yancey Richardson Gallery until 15 July 2011.
Moody sculptural paintings by an emerging NYC artist
Stark yet colorful works that fall somewhere between painting and sculpture, NYC-based artist Eli Ping’s practice is a study of unexpected tension in form, subject and tone. Ping says he’s “ultimately interested in materials and process, and accomplishing a form that conveys energetic resonance to the viewer,” a feat accomplished by keeping spontaneity alive in otherwise highly-considered compositions.
This ruminative approach to art-making shows up in his current solo exhibition at NYC’s Susan Inglett Gallery, but also signals a shift. Where he previously worked heavily with resins, Ping found that their toxicity was a “major impediment to accomplishing intimacy” with his materials and switched to applying paint-soaked cotton to canvas.
The resulting fluid shapes have a sense of order without appearing overly worked—a tipping point for Ping. If a piece becomes too “fussy,” he will often flip it over or turn it upside down, a technique borrowed from Impressionism. Ping explains, “they would often paint over an entire area, some people would say that is a waste of energy but even if it’s not visible, it still informs the work.”
A painting resembling a classic Rorschach test clearly illustrates Ping’s labor between intention and impulse. While symmetry abounds, he likens the unbalanced composition’s structure to that of nature. Repetition develops organically without feeling forced, the result of a process that, like contemporaries such as designer Maarten Baas, lets ideas evolve over time.
A photo of a church steeple shot through a drinking glass several years ago, now appears as a “stretched from the top” form in some of his sculptural pieces. Ping stresses that he doesn’t set out to replicate what he sees, adding “I have a sense of what qualities I aspire to, usually in response to a feeling of lack in a previous piece. Any pre-envisioning doesn’t go farther than that.”
Looking to the future however, Ping says his work will fall more in line with his simplified lifestyle. Moving forward he will create pieces that, unlike his current complex and often quite fragile works, need not “to be handled with kid gloves” and can instead become a part of a person’s life, rather than just hung on a wall.
Eli Ping’s third solo exhibition runs through 4 June 2011 at Susan Inglett Gallery.
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