Tomokazu Matsuyama
November 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I have an awful lot of catching up to do, so the next couple of posts will be short. Tomo Matsuyama’s show at Joshua Liner Gallery closed in October, but was a great collection of new work, showcasing not just paintings and drawings but sculptural and installation motifs as well.
Tomo’s work is a great hybrid of both traditional Japanese themes and contemporary urban style. Often one will come across a large canvases with a feel of historical narratives, such as horsemen in battle, but using bright neon colors with built-up layers of paint. There is a dynamic looseness to the work even though the compositions are tightly constructed. Tomo also creates murals, and is influenced by street art, and some of the scale and levity of these pursuits can be seen in these works, especially the small works on paper he had on display here.
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Additional installation images and information can be found on the Joshua Liner site.
David Kramer
October 8th, 2011 § 2 Comments
The 1970′s (at least, everything that the 1970′s was supposed to be) is still alive and well in the drawings and paintings of David Kramer. The NYC-based artist has just opened a new show at Heiner Contemporary in Washington D.C. I first came across him at the Laurant Godin booth in last year’s Armory Show, and it is a pleasure to be able to see more of his work now.
The main image sources for Kramer are magazines from the 70′s, with their colorful ads and glossy pages, the cars and the cigarettes and the naked women and the hot tubs. Crazy color schemes and clashing clothes, turtlenecks under tweed jackets, headbands, swingers, hi-fi, jai-alai. Kramer utilizes these sources to great effect, giving his work an older visual reference style but keeping it fresh and contemporary. The fact that the works are more sketchy than completed helps keep them from being just windows on a time period. A number of artists use porn magazines from the 70′s and 80′s, and it is good that Kramer looks beyond that. His is a broader scope, his quest isn’t for a pre-AIDS sex romp, he wants a pre-Regan smoothness.
The artist also includes text in his work: thoughts, funny stories, observations. Kramer doesn’t want to re-live the 1970s, he wants the kind of life that was promised to him when he was growing up there. The words, then, are personal and intimate, funny and a little sad, as the artist struggles with adulthood. The fact that the works tell us he has come up shorter than he would like make them accessible to anyone who views them; we are all part of the same club.
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All artworks are copyright David Kramer. A nice interview of the artist by Matthew Smith can be found on the New American Paintings blog. All images were borrowed from Heiner Contemporary, where the exhibition continues through October.
Jakob Roepke
August 31st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The work of Jakob Roepke seems to inhabit one room. Granted, it is a room of endless possibilities, where patterns layer on top of patterns, and fish can fly, and dinosaurs are pets. Each work is populated by an everyman, sometimes two, in subdued casual office clothes. He never seems surprised by the weirdness he finds himself in, each work is a new, twisted situation through which he saunters with relative ease, or labors in oblivious to the implications.
Roepke is a German artist, whose body of work is an endless re-creation of this basic format with paint and collage. The works are a bit surreal, but colorful and playful. While they are limited in scope, when viewed as an overall group one can’t help but admire the variation used. Limits force us to work in interesting ways, to look at something from more than one angle. Roepke’s works are filled with a dedicated sense of nuance.
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All artwork is copyright Jakob Roepke. All images posted above were borrowed from the site of Jarmuschek + Partners Gallery, who represent him.
James Gallagher
August 20th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
James Gallagher works solely in collage.
His is a hybrid of styles, where influences can be seen but he still manages to maintain his own style and pattern. The age of Hannah Hock can be seen in his selected images, which come from vintage skin mags, old stationary, National Geographics, finance charts, etc. One can see the sense of negation that is so central to Baldessari’s work, and the playful cropping with paint that Franz West so brilliantly achieves in his gouache / magazine page works.
Gallagher uses vintage porn imagery quite a lot in his work, and I have chosen to focus on other aspects of his work here. Not because I am a prude, or am opposed to re-purposing porn, but because his other series have a little more going on in them, they work on several more levels. The Finance Series (top two images) and the Domestic Series (bottom two) are more interesting to me: the use of design furniture, or facts and figures, are denied their purpose and real look but maintain their identity, and they interact with the more decorative elements in a way that the nude works don’t, because the focus of that series is on the nude images themselves.
In this age of DIY rugged construction and Mad Men mid-century nostalgia, these works sum up the current aesthetics quite well.
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All images are copyright James Gallagher, and are borrowed from his website.
Yang Jiecang
August 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This a limited edition by Chinese artist Yang Jiecang, published by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in 2008. It is hand-painted porcelain and produced as an edition of 250. The work references Yang’s ‘Underground Flowers’ project, an installation of 3,000 porcelain bone fragments housed in wooden shelves reminiscent of a Natural History Museum archive.
The series is a central example of Yang’s attempt to meld traditional Chinese artistic methods with foreign and / or contemporary forms (in this case the European Momento Mori, perhaps).
I really want one.
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To purchase, or learn more, visit the Ullens Center online store.
Hou Chung-Ming
August 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Gallery Ver in Bangkok has just closed its exhibition of Taiwanese artist Hou Chung-Ming’s third installment of his “Asian Fathers Interview Project.” In each of these happenings, the artist will interview locals about their fathers. He will present them with a series of questions about their relationship with their father, memories of and experiences with the father. He will sketch ideas and make notes while each interview occurs. Afterwards a portrait of the father figure will be created, and the artist will then interview the person about their reaction to the depiction.
This sort of location-centered and evidence finding sort of relational aesthetics has become quiet popular. The theme of the interviews seems a little thin: was your father important to you? One would have to argue that a father figure is important and leaves an impact, whether it is for good or ill. Even the total absence of a father figure leaves a significant impact on a person. The visual creations that stem from the interview are a little more interesting, in that they are more symbolic than documentary. The overall effect is stronger than if this was just a video project, for example.
The drawing portraits above seem to have been made on children’s flash cards, or pages from an early language book. These add color and context to the drawings, but one has to wonder about the effect of children’s books on a symbol of the father. One continues to have experiences, both good and bad, with one’s father well into adulthood.
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All images are copyright Hou Chung-Ming, and were borrowed from the Gallery VER website.
Andrew Hem
July 24th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Andrew Hem has a solo show opening at LaBasse Projects in Culver City, CA. Of Cambodian decent, his family fled the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, and he grew up in the States.
In addition to painting, Hem is a graphic designer, and as often happens with designers a flatness and elongation appears in his figures. I myself happen to be a fan of this effect, and of artists who cross-over in general. In addition, Hem has worked on a number of murals, which naturally increases this effect. Over the last several years his paintings have really developed, moving away from illustrative conceits to more complex compositions. The narratives have deepened, and in this new show the artist has said that he is focusing more on the emotional loneliness and conflicts that arose from his family’s diaspora.
A little gem, though, are the small sculptures and images of notebook sketches that the artist has posted on his website. I recommend taking a moment to view them, because they really show another side of Hem’s work and personality. When viewed all together he has a direct connection to the work of Lyonel Feininger, whose work I also love.
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All images are copyright Andrew Hem, and were borrowed from his website. For images and information on the new exhibition visit the site of LeBasse Projects.
Ryoji Ikeda
May 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite is an amazing installation that is on view in the 67th Street Armory through June 11th. Centered in the vast and darkened drill hall, Ikeda’s creation is the kind of artwork that really has to be experienced to be appreciated. This is not installation art, or video art, or a performance. It is, instead, an environment. It requires viewer participation, but without the overt self-consciousness that often floods ‘relational aesthetic’ happenings.
The work is both digital and audio, on a very large-scale over a screen that stands in the center of the hall and a portion of the floor. Viewers can either stand on the side or enter onto (into?) the work, where black and white lines morph and evolve, pulsating to an all-encompassing electric audio heartbeat. The video portion is informed by Ikeda’s manipulation of a vast amount of information, digitized and arranged in a mad configuration.
The effect of The Transfinite is eerily zen in the monochromatic abstractions that unfold. The atmosphere it creates relays the sense of walking through a rock garden, a regression back into the womb, and receiving commands from some future dystopian overlord, all at the same time.
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More information on the project can be found on the Park Avenue Armory‘s website.
Fernando Bryce
May 16th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Fernando Bryce’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. has opened at Alexander and Bonin Gallery in New York. Bryce, a Peruvian artist working in Berlin, was one of the more impressive contributors to The Drawing Center’s recent Drawn from Photography show.
At Alexander and Bonin the artist has installed two works, both of which are collections of a large number of drawings. Fernando Bryce reproduces printed material by hand in large format, uniformly sized ink on paper drawings. The drawings are exacting in nature. While there is an obvious hand-made quality to the works, they are devoid of personal touches, embellishments or flourishes. Instead, Bryce makes a statement with the subjects he chooses and the contrasts that arise from his groupings of the drawings under a curatorial theme. The artist is concerned with news and information, and how it is disseminated to and perceived by the culture at large. He finds inspiration and source material in old newspapers, pamphlets, movie posters, cartoons, comics, and similar ephemera.
In this show Bryce has focused on World War II, though in two very different ways. Das Reich / Der Aufbau combines drawings of the front pages of two very different newspapers: Das Reich is the Nazi publication created by Joseph Goebbels, while Der Aufbau is the German Jewish newspaper published in New York. Bryce has reproduced various front pages of the two papers from the same period, just after the D-Day landings and the liberation of Paris. The propaganda of one is offset by the realizations of the death camps, victory and defeat are simultaneously portrayed.
The other work in the show, El Mundo en Llamas, shows both the troubles and distractions of a world that feels very far away from the Peruvians who read the newspapers and posters. New York Times fronts, nuclear test explosions, B-Movie posters, and Hollywood propaganda films all huddle together, familiar to us, even 60 years later, and yet foreign, as some have been translated to Spanish, and made to appeal to a non-American audience. The effect is one of a twilight zone, neither here nor there. The all-surrounding nature of the installation adds to both the information overload and the confusion that can come with the cultural imperialism that follows America’s central global position.
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All artworks copyright Fernando Bryce. My photographs of the exhibition do not do the work justice. Much better ones can be found on the Alexander and Bonin website. Information on the Drawn from Photography exhibition can be found on the Drawing Center website.
Ashley Bickerton
May 16th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Ashley Bickerton, one of my favorite artists, has opened a new exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery with a collection of “Nocturne” paintings. Ever since his early days in the 80′s East Village scene, his works have had a fascinatingly baroque quality to them. Compared to his other “neo-geo” contemporaries his constructions, such as metal wall boxes with corporate emblems, had a visceral bite and literal edge to them. Bickerton has always enjoyed a sense of being alone in a crowd. His cynicism applied as much to corporate subsidization of mass culture and individual identity as it did with an artist’s own ego and sense of self-branding. Very early on he saw the glitzy, over-hyped circus the artworld was turning into.
One of his solutions was to leave it behind, ending up in Bali. Ashley Bickerton’s intellectual honesty stayed true even there. He has never “gone ethnic” in the sense that he tried to pretend to be an adopted native. His Bali works have continued to critique the world he sees around him: the cheesy tourist knickknacks, Asian sex tourism, the false idea of a perfect “island life” and the conflicts of looking for paradise. These works, digitally altered photographs printed on canvas with painted additions, are housed in large wood frames with intricate inlays and additions. The frames become part of the work, much as Seurat’s did, while also poking fun at the “larger is more expensive” nature of contemporary art.
The new Nocturne paintings are a darker turn. Previously Bickerton seemed to working with issues of the struggle to find contentment, starting a family in Paradise. These new works seem to be the answer to the searching questions of the earlier works. There is no escape from the modern world, the sick and perverted aspects of human nature will track us down. There is a depressingly beautiful nihilism to these nocturnes, with their smutty neon signs, clownish bar girls, lost boys and gluttonous rakes. In addition, Bickerton has re-introduced some of the corporate symbols and artist branding seen in the 1980′s works. This is more of an indication, to me, that the past is catching up to him, that we cannot escape who we are and where we come from.
I look forward to seeing where we go from here.
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All artwork copyright Ashley Bickerton. A new monograph is about to be published by Other Criteria. More information on his work can be found at the Lehmann Maupin site.
