Maja Ratkje live in Paris, 1995.

Artist: Paul P.

Venue: Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv

Exhibition Title: The “X” Factor in Beholding

Date: April 12 – June 2, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of  Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv

Press Release:

Placing a diffuse focus on the romantic presence of his subjects, Paul P. is known for intimate renditions of seaside landscapes and nonchalant young males in suggestive postures. P.’s imagery is at once seductive and distanced, personal and contemplative, impressionistic and loose. With a palpable flair for Whistler’s haze and aesthetics admittedly at the foreground, his practice belongs to a pre-digital era without precluding contemporary references and abstraction.

On the occasion of his first exhibition in Israel, P. is proposing a homogeneous ensemble of works in two intertwined yet distinct groups: 16 small-sized ink drawings ranging from figuration to abstraction depicting Venetian balconies and architectural details, elusive Los Angeles seashores at dusk or dawn and statuary from Parisian gardens. Hung against walls painted in light hues of yellow or grey, they are presented in combination with 3 custom-made pieces of furniture inspired by the aesthetics of the British Design Reform, particularly as manifested in the oeuvre of designer E.W. Godwin.

This new body of work shall further assert P.’s shift from realistic erotic male representation and emphasize his current interest in abstraction, while retaining the identifying aspects that have characterized his work to date. Extending into the three-dimensional realm will constitute a pivotal moment in P.’s practice and lay ground for further experimentation with what he terms “a strong impulse to address the physicality of the exhibition space.”

Paul P. (b. 1977) lives and works in Paris, France.

P. has exhibited worldwide since 2003. Previous solo exhibitions were held at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery (Paris and Sazburg, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009), Daniel Reich Gallery (New York, 2003, 2007, 2010), Maureen Paley (London, 2008), and Marc Selwynn Gallery (Los Angeles, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011).

Link: Paul P. at Tempo Rubato

Eric Holubow "Downstaging Uptown"; 2009; Uptown Theater; Chicago, IL; 33 in. x 60 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Walking through Chicago Cultural Center – past the Doric columns of the Grand Entrance, beneath the 38-foot wide Tiffany Dome, and beside the ornate marble of Preston Bradley Hall – to the gallery featuring Eric Holubow’s photographs is like a visual confrontation of the before and after effects of society’s collapse. Displayed within the vast Neo-Classical halls of the Cultural Center, Holubow’s highly aestheticized images of crumbling opulence are a weary reminder that America’s hard times are far from over.

The show, titled “In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins,” contains images of grand architectural interiors; cavernous theaters, expansive churches and synagogues, and cathedral-like auto factories scattered throughout the mid-west and rust belt, all captured in late moments of decrepitude. Holubow’s images are strikingly beautiful; full of luminous colors, dynamic compositions, and extraordinary details that highlight the breadth and magnificence of these ambitiously crafted spaces as well as the monumentality of their decline. Wide-angle shots and large-scale prints encapsulate the magnitude of his subjects; structures that once served the cultural and spiritual wishes or economic needs of the communities for which they were built. Ultimately, these buildings are corpses and the photographer’s work is a record of their deaths.

St. Stephen’s Great Hall (2008) shows a hollowed shell of a cathedral. The stone grey interior is gutted of its pews, leaving behind an empty portico. The expansive drum, dome, and oculus over the nave harken back to the Pantheon, though the century old Chicago church looks far more decrepit than the Roman temple built two thousand year ago. Modeled after the idealized architecture of an ancient empire, St. Stephen’s represents the defunct historical aspirations of American society at the turn of the 20th Century.

"Hollowed Ark" 2011; Agudas Achim Synagogue; Chicago, IL; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Wall texts displayed beside each picture relay the histories of the structures depicted, from glorious, innovative, or utopic origins to disrepair and abandonment, revealing the migration of communities and economies that happened along the way. Chicago’s Agudas Achim Synagogue, photographed in Hallowed Arc (2011), for instance, was once a lavish place of worship for the Jewish residents of Uptown, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city. As those families moved to suburban villages like Skokie and Rogers Park, the synagogue’s rainbow colored Byzantine arc, stained glass windows, and gold mosaics fell into decay. The image itself is of a lofty vertical interior that was clearly gorgeous in its heyday, though now the space is a ruinous mess littered with debris.

With an emphasis on crumbling buildings that were designed in the styles of various imperial aesthetics like the Byzantine and the Roman, the exhibition reflects the hubristic self-image of the “American Century.” Clearly these buildings were created to reflect principles of prosperity and stability by mimicking the grand styles of past empires. This impulse becomes uniquely American when high concept design trickled down to Roaring 20’s movie theaters, such as the palatial Uptown Theater shown in Downstaging Uptown (2009). Like a Parisian opera house from the days of Marie Antoinette, the Baroque-inspired theater is dripping with lavish ornamentation. Shot from the vantage point of the stage, the slight lens distortion depicts a panorama of vacant seats bulging at the center.

"Room with a View" 2008; Packard Auto Plant; Detroit, MI; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Images such as Room with a View (2008) and Engine Room of Bethlehem Steel (2009) – respectively showing the decomposing, overgrown, and exposed factory floor of a Detroit Packard Auto Plant, and the silent rusted engine room of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation – are reminders of the now defunct industrial giants that powered the post-WWII and Gilded Age boom eras. Hartsville Nuclear Power Plant (2010), a picture of a half-finished cylinder made of concrete and rebar sitting in a pool of filmy water, is like an oversize postcard from an industrial future that was gone before it happened. Holubow’s photographs are documents of these places and serve as reminders that powerful institutions rise and fall, even when they are housed in buildings designed to stand the test of time.

“In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins” will be on view at Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, IL through July 8, 2012.

Pedro Reyes

Work from his exhibition at LABOR.

“WORK opens new headquarters and reopens its doors with a solo exhibition of Pedro Reyes (1972). Puzzle includes a series of studies in which the architecture of narrative structures combined with anthropological classification methodologies.

Among the pieces on display are Mutants , a polyptych consisting of 170 plates with images of ancient and modern mythologies. Like the periodic table, the origin of myths is organized by a shaft on which animals and objects are combined with human anthropomorphic characters (male and female) resulting in a rational structure for the products arising from irrational human imagination.

Hand-chairs is a new development within the combination of sculpture and design that Reyes explored in the past. Each pair consists of a left and a right hand with articulated fingers that allows the user to manipulate and gestures to explore non-verbal language settings.

The presence of design as narrative structure we find in the Museum Of Hypothetical Lifetimes , the model of a museum whose architectural plan includes galleries and corridors that correspond to different moments in the life of a person. In this activity the participant can choose from miniature objects with different meanings which placed in rooms ranging from birth to death. The school, work, relationships become themed rooms that will be illustrated by the objects selected and the participant will cure an exhibition, while prospective and retrospective of his own existence.

In a new series of sculptural portraits is the piece Pico della Mirandola , based on a passage from the Italian Renaissance philosopher who in “Prayer for the Dignity of Man” (1486) states the concept of man as “a being with no particular function, inconclusive, it should work on your self to become an angel or a demon. ” This volcanic stone sculpture is washed with a core drill in which you can insert other stone pieces representing eyes, nose, hair, mouths, etc.. The sculpture then becomes a kind of puzzle that constantly changes shape depending on the various interactions with the public.

Finally, in a shelf attached to one wall of the gallery are a series of paintings entitled “How to lose the fear of Painting”. Each of the twenty images presented have been subjected to various operations. Reyes has faced its own paint to treat these fabrics as “flat sculptures.” Literally, the statue has been lacking in one dimension only to recover the depth of the possible permutations of two-dimensional array. A similar analogy to the sentence which Luis Cardoza y Aragón used in contemporary painting in Mexico (1950) to describe art criticism: “The Venus de Milo holding the head of the Victory of Samothrace in his hands.” – LABOR

Artist: Shimabuku

Venue: NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona

Exhibition Title: Leaves Swim

Date: March 28 – May 15, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona. Photos by Roberto Ruiz

Press Release:

NoguerasBlanchard is very pleased to announce its third solo exhibition with Japanese artist Shimabuku. The artist’s most recent video work Leaves Swim (2011) is presented with two installations, Onion Orion (2008) and Something that Floats / Something that Sinks (2008). This exhibition portrays the beauty and poetry of allusions. While Shimabuku’s work is often inspired by personal anecdotes, collective experiences or humorous discoveries made on his travels, another aspect of his work overrides the narrative and takes on a more contemplative focus, connecting objects and situations in richly poetic visual constellations.

The installation Something that Floats / Something that Sinks stands in the center of the gallery. By making the literal physical comparison between fruits that float and fruits that sink, this work reveals Shimabuku’s interest in the poetry of the everyday and the strangeness inherent in the most quotidian of situations. In the words of Shimabuku: ‘Some tomatoes float and some sink. Some vegetables float and some sink. This is something I always noticed while cooking, and always found mysterious. So I decided to make a work about something mysterious, leave it mysterious and have people experience it just as it is’. Shimabuku often makes works about food or cooking. For the artist, art and cooking are both about unexpected meetings of faraway ingredients to create something delicious, something good. The chance encounters between people, wildlife or found objects can be seen throughout Shimabuku’s practice, in early works such as Encounter between an Octopus and a Pigeon (1993) or Shimabuku’s Fish and Chips (2008).

The work Onion Orion, also underlined by a union of poetic associations, results from the similarity between the word ‘onion’ and the constellation Orion. An installation made with onions outlining the stars of the constellation lies at the entrance to the gallery. In the video Leaves Swim, from which the exhibition takes its title, an ornate portrait of a seahorse filmed underwater, confronts the viewer with an exotic scenario. Shimabuku encourages us to simply appreciate the beauty of this spectacular creature, as it naturally camouflages in floating algae. Through his ongoing practice, Shimabuku playfully challenges our desire to define the unfamiliar, suggesting that art provides a space to accept the incomprehensible and to appreciate the unknown.

Shimabuku (Kobe 1969). Recent solo exhibitions include: Shimabuku, Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lübeck, Germany (2011); Man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms, Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, Vassivière, France (2011); On the water, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2011); My Teacher Tortoise, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2011); Kaki and Tomato, Air de Paris, Paris (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011); Our Magic Hour. How much of the world can we know?, Yokohama Triennale 2011, Yokohama; Somewhere Else, NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona (2011); Kaza Ana / Air Hole: Another Conceptualism from Asia, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011); Arts and Cities, Aichi Triennale, Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan (2010).

Shimabuku’s work Shimabuku’s Fish and Chips will be presented at the upcoming edition of Art Unlimited, Art Basel.

Link: Shimabuku at NoguerasBlanchard

Artists: Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Lara Favaretto, Marisa Merz, Ugo Mulas, Alessandro Piangiamore, Carol Rama, Santo Tolone, Giuseppe Uncini, Vedovamazzei

Venue: Campoli Presti, Paris, and Campoli Presti, London

Exhibition Title: Dormitorio Pubblico 1954

Curated by: Marianna Vecellio

Date: March 17 – May 19, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Campoli Presti, Paris, London

Press Release:

Link: “Dormitorio pubblico 1954″ at Campoli Presti

Because NEA funding cuts recently prompted Art21.org to stage a telethon, because this is fundraising season (a number of non-profits, included Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, had their annual auctions, galas or other fundraisers this month), and because I’m preoccupied with MOCA’s recent Transmission L.A. festival — which I mentioned in last week’s column –, I wrote the below. It originally appeared on Art21′s blog.

Screen shot of Debo Eilers and crew performing "My Little Sunshine" during the Art21 Telethon.

When I tuned into the Art21 Telethon this past Sunday, the 8-hour performance-filled fundraising marathon had been live-streaming for just over 3 hours and brought in just under $4,000. Curator and co-host Miriam Katz, wearing a great silky floral top, was saying, “Our next act was going to be an animal act but I think there was an issue with insurance.” Instead, artist Debo Eilers’ crew was setting up nearby amidst microphones and floor mats. They were wearing white tunics like hospital gowns and red animal masks that made some look like turkeys and others like floppy-eared dogs.

“You can [perform] however long, but right now longer might be better,” said artist Ronnie Bass, the “official” host, who had conceived the telethon along with Katz and Art21 artist Tommy Hartung, after NEA budget cuts left PBS programming financially crippled.

“And since the act that didn’t come was supposed to be an animal act, if you want to put in an animal theme, that could be helpful,” Katz added.

Then everyone seemed confused for a while, and Katz accidentally blocked the camera as the group slowly began singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” in childlike voices. It took a while before they were in unison. One of the performers beat the wall with a strap and held a strobe light, and continued to do this after the song ended, until Ronnie said “Thank you” and re-explained to viewers how to donate.

The artists featured in Transmission L.A. posing outside MOCA

I tuned into the telethon right after leaving the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, where the 19-day Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a festival funded by Mercedes Benz and curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., was on its last legs. It actually, weirdly, had a vibe similar to the telethon, a mix of confusion and free-for-all comfortability.

The festival was free, so people wandered in and out of MOCA at will. Artist Tom Sachs had designed a DJ booth that was out front, and galleries were full of video and light work (hip stuff — like Cory Arcangel and Takeshi Murata, who made even filmmaker Mike Mills, with his montage of appropriated pop images, seem like the fogey), and a black box theater in the back, where Lauren Mackler of the alt space Public Fiction had staged a series of performances. When I arrived, artists Ali Prosch and Meghann McCrory were “setting up” for their performance No Signal in Mackler’s black box. At least, I thought they were setting up — the set up turned into the performance so seamlessly that I didn’t notice at first. The artists wore all black and slowly moved scrims in front of lights, turned on projectors, and started up a fan that would rotate and cause fluttering, glittery light to move around the room.

Ben Jones video installation at Transmission L.A.

It was a durational, always-in-progress light show that ended with disco balls and tap dancing, and people felt free to walk into and leave whenever. (A little girl gasped when one rotating black box was disassembled to reveal a disco ball, but the same little girl lost interest and was ushered away by her mother about three minutes later.)

A lot of people wandered into the performance from next door, where the new Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé was on display. The Coupé had debuted the festival’s opening night, and it now sat under lights that flashed on and off to the cues of specially composed music you could listen to by putting on headphones suspended under spotlights. You could also, apparently, touch the car — I watched a young-ish blond guy in board shorts spent about five minutes trying to close the back door he’d opened while three security guards stood on with arms crossed, not helping.

Because of these cars, the strobe lights, the Beastie Boy curator, an L.A. Times article and rumors I’d heard, I was sure Transmission L.A. was a durational fundraiser, what Art21’s telethon might have been if corporately sponsored and planned by a rapper. Why else would a museum debut a luxury car in its galleries? I put this fundraiser theory in print before I realized I was wrong.

Transmission wasn’t a fundraiser. MOCA would not benefit financially (at least, not significantly). The luxury cars weren’t a sponsor’s self-promotional push, I was told. They were there to be experienced like everything else in the galleries.

“LA is all about car culture. The tricky thing is to get people out of their homes,” says Mike D. in the Transmission A.V. leaflet. “[W]e’re trying to create this all encompassing sensory-rich environment.”

It was sensory-rich, and people did come out. And it was fun to travel through the mish-mash of cultural strata and sensibilities (luxury car, DJ, performance artist) and try to understand how they related to each other. But I didn’t know who had the power (MOCA, Mercedes, Mike D., the artists?), which is why, when I went home to live-stream the telethon for the evening, I felt less antsy. There, people who cared had the power: artist were raising funds for arts programming and mostly soliciting pre-exisiting art fans to do so.  Who knew a fundraiser could be a relief?

La quinta edizione del festival hardcore Three Days of Struggle, organizzata da Codalunga, progetto indipendente a cura di Nico Vascellari, è ospitata come di consueto dalla città di Vittorio Veneto e si offre come luogo di sperimentazione sonora e visiva. Unici headliner i Wolf Eyes, i cui membri presentano i loro progetti solisti (Failing Lights, Henry and Hazel Slaughter, Regression). Si esibiscono inoltre nel corso dei tre giorni Dracula Lewis, Enrico Malatesta, Hiroshima Rocks Around, Inquisition, Lorenzo Senni, Marco Samorè, Matt Bordin, Ninos Du Brasil, Opium Child, Palm Wine, Squadra Omega. Il programma del festival prevede anche l’inaugurazione della mostra di Carlos Casas 1812 (Archive Works #06), proiezione in loop di un video di 40 minuti ispirato al film Guerra e pace (1967) del regista russo Sergei Bondarchuk.

Dal 18 al 20 maggio.

Artist: Elad Lassry

Venue: David Kordansky, Los Angeles

Date: March 23 – May 26, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of David Kordansky, Los Angeles. Photos by Brian Forrest.

Press Release:

David Kordansky Gallery is very pleased to announce its second exhibition of new work by Elad Lassry. The show will be held at Gallery 2. It will reflect an expansive sense of the picture as an ontological category, one in which a viewer’s customary associations with familiar forms are exposed to physical and perceptual paradoxes.

Lassry has increasingly looked to diverse media––including drawing, sculpture, and performance––to test current possibilities for engagement with pictures. In each case, the ability to recognize a given subject presents itself as a faculty on the verge of failure, a dissonant constellation of formal characteristics and competing cultural histories. By incorporating objects and immersive situations into his practice, Lassry blurs the boundary between the tangible and cognitive experiences of a picture. As such, his work is indicative of the way in which the virtual defines contemporary culture, not merely on a technological level, but as an embodied mode of perception.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way Lassry has transformed the gallery space into a tool to activate specific cognitive patterns. A long, thin aperture in an otherwise obstructing wall provides a view into a partially enclosed space. Inside, a second wall has been built to half-height, its upper edge shaped into a series of wave-like forms that support painted wood objects. Seen in conjunction with the row of pictures that hangs behind it, this wall-sculpture suggests that the space of the picture is neither wholly flat nor wholly dimensional, but a fluctuating quantity that collapses and expands depending on movement and context.

In Lassry’s work, picture and object alternate as framing devices for one another. Framing is revealed as an integral––and sometimes dominant––facet of any composition. For example, a sculpture that resembles a small bed has been constructed from wood reminiscent of the frames that often distinguish the artist’s photographs. Adorned with four crosses, it simultaneously tempts and denies a host of readings: the functional and symbolic possibilities of the artwork are communicated precisely when and where they disrupt one another.

Similar issues are raised by a group of charcoal drawings on view. Here, Lassry alludes to the photographic precisely by undermining its status as the go-to medium for the making of pictures. In these depictions of ornamental and ephemeral objects, the cultural mediation of the photograph confronts the immediacy of the hand. As a result, it becomes impossible to fix agency to the images, and a supposedly ‘trustworthy’ medium like drawing is subjected to the doubt usually reserved for techniques like digital manipulation. Analog images are shown to be haunted by pixels.

Mediation is explored perhaps most radically in Untitled (Presence 2005), a performance work featuring members of the New York City Ballet that has taken place at an off-site theater before the opening of the exhibition. While dance and questions associated with the notation of choreography have previously served as subjects for the artist’s films, this work directly challenges the role of documentation in conceptual practices. Rather than asking one picture to stand in for another, Lassry insists that the performance function by virtue of its absence. He anchors tangible artworks in an elusive experience to which direct access can no longer be granted, and reveals how even physical spaces are permeated by the virtual.

Elad Lassry’s work was recently featured in ILLUMInations, the International Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, and this year will be the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway; Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy; and The Kitchen, New York. Solo exhibitions have also been held at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glasgow. Recent group exhibitions include Beyond. International Curator Exhibition of Tallinn Month of Photography, KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum; Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and CAPC de Bordeaux; Time Again, SculptureCenter, New York; Les Recontres d’Arles 2010 / Edition 41, Arles; and New Photography 2010, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Link: Elad Lassry at David Kordansky

»Artist’s Book Club: Hakuruberri Fuin No Monogatari«, 2010 by Simon Fujiwara.