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.
NY Gallery Week
May 16th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
John Chamberlain at Gagosian Gallery
John Chamberlain at Gagosian Gallery
Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks Gallery
Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks Gallery
Richard Long at Sperone Westwater
Richard Long at Sperone Westwater
Richard Long at Sperone Westwater
Richard Tuttle at Pace Gallery
Richard Tuttle at Pace Gallery
Gillian Wearing at Tonya Bonakdar Gallery
Kentaro Kobuke
May 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Kentaro Kobuke was born in 1975 in Hiroshima, Japan. The artist works with colored pencil, usually on boards of cherry wood, but also on collaged pieces of paper, such as envelopes. Kobuke works in a faux naive fashion, in similar fashion to Dubuffet, James Ensor, Dusty Boynton and John Lurie.
These paintings/drawings are colorful ruminations on nature and urban anxiety, traditional Japanese motifs revolving around animism, erotica, innocence and design. In a sense, they are ugly in their primitivism, but interesting in their strangeness, and I think that the look of the colored pencil on wood doesn’t translate well in jpeg form…they should be seen in person, if just to be able to appreciate their true size. I find myself drawn to their humor and quilt-patch quality. They are off-putting, but make me happy at the same time.
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All artwork copyright Kentaro Kobuke, who is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London. All images were borrowed from the gallery’s website.
5PRCITY
May 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
United Nude, a rather trendy shoe design firm and store, likes to stay on the edge of design through collaborations with architects, photographers, industrial and fashion designers, etc. Given the global reach of the firm (UN’s creators, Rem D. Koolhaas and Galahad Clark, have opened stores in Europe, New York, and China) have also branched out and into the global art scene.
5PRCITY is a limited edition photobook, made in collaboration with a number of edgy and inventive photographers from China. According to the UN website, the theme is “women in the city”, and the selected artists include (in order of the images posted above) Song Liu, 223, Qiu, Yiki Liu and Baichuan. Additional photographers include Pingshen, GT and Quist. These artists all come from one of the main 5 urban centers of the Chinese economic boom (Shanghai, Guangzhou etc.). The works are both urban and urbane, combining a New York sexiness with a very contemporary low-fi lifestyle aesthetic. Then again, other images seem almost a throwback to pre-war sophistication.
The book is available in two versions, a limited edition of 500 ($75) and an uber-limited edition of 80 which is also signed by all 8 photographers. I believe that these can be purchased at United Nude’s Bond Street (NYC) location.
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I was originally made aware of this edition through Crane.tv’s Facebook page, so thank you to Crane for letting me know about it. The images are also borrowed from their Facebook page. Crane.tv also has a video feature with UN co-creator Rem Koolhass. United Nude also has (limited) information on the project on their own website.
Suzannah Sinclair
April 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Suzannah Sinclair studies printmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art, but I have only seen her paintings. Sinclair paints in watercolor on birch wood panels. She finds inspiration and reference in the large collection of vintage (1960s – 1970s) men’s magazines she has amassed, such as Playboy.
She selects her images carefully. There is a softness in each image that translates well to the thin coats of watercolor that she uses. The underlying wood panel comes through the image, in different degrees in places. Sometimes the natural patterns in the wood are used to compose a partial figure study. The effect is beautiful. These are nudes, yes, but there is an other-world calm and mystery to them, and they are devoid of the raunch of modern hardcore pornography.
In her exhibitions Sinclair has started to install plants, benches and rugs similar to those depicted in the paintings. This has the effect of making the context of the installation mesh with the images on the wall, and creates a more private and civilized environment for the work.
Pictured above are: She Was Good and Mad (2008), Untitled- Brown Flower Bed (2005), There’s A Lot of Good (2010), And Then I’ll Be Gone (2008), and The Clover Has Three Leaves (2009).
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All artwork copyright Suzannah Sinclair. Most of the images are borrowed from the artist’s website, while two were borrowed from Samson Gallery in Boston, which has held several exhibitions of her work.
Daniel Richter Prints
April 17th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This set of four untitled color woodcuts with etching were made my Daniel Richter in 2007. They are big, each print is 60 x 43 inches. Richter has altered original found images of Medieval torture devices and scenes. The horror of the machines is offset by the artist’s addition of colorful birds, the tormented faces of the victims are covered by simplistic drawings of faces, a la Dubuffet or Munch. Richter has added a decorative beauty and calm to them that is deceiving and disturbing in its effectiveness.
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All artwork is copyright Daniel Richter. The artist is represented by David Zwirner Gallery, and the images have been borrowed from the gallery’s website.
Genevieve Chua
April 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Genevieve Chua is a fantastic artist from and working in Singapore. Starting with a strong interest in drawing, her work has evolved to become inter-media, and now incorporates photography, installation, video, and web-based formats. What runs beneath and through these various works is a macabre world, often incorporating unsettling narratives, scenic composition and dark moods. These works can be both complex and beautiful, and reference fear, hostility, sexuality as well as the flora and fauna of Southeast Asia.
The first image is from the After The Flood series (2010), in which thoughts on a hypothetical flood are combined with observations on the nature and characteristics of the vines that grow and can smother the trees of a tropical rainforest. The next two images are screen captures of the Full Moon and Foxes series (2009), which can be viewed online here. This is a visual story of death and self-realization, and has the feel of walking through a creepy shadow puppet tale, and brings chills to one’s neck almost akin to a Twin Peaks episode.
Black Varieties No. 2 (2010) is from a series of hand-colored photographs inspired by the Adinadra Belukar found in Singapore. These are flowers that grow in the lesser soils of the forest, flowering at night.
Genevieve Chua has been selected to participate in the current Singapore Biennale.
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All works are copyright Genevieve Chua. Most images were borrowed for from her own website.
David Sandlin
March 22nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
David Sandlin has installed two giant paintings in the windows of the old Donnell Library, across the street from MoMA, and they are fantastic. Titled Walpurgisnachtmart, the two canvases are on view 24/7 from the street and well worth a visit.
I have been a fan of Sandlin’s work for a long time. His paintings are often large and dense and complicated, filled with humor, allegory, history, and trippy narratives that take time to decipher. Born in Belfast, he later moved to Alabama. David Sandlin has made dynamic hay with the odd dichotomy of American Puritanism and Religiosity and the country’s hedonistic capitalism, one that is fueled by advertisements, patriotic snake-oil salesmen, and delusional self-righteousness. At times we see Sandlin and his own family in the works, such as those above, as they stand fast against the onslaught of Sin. It is as if we were watching Hogarth’s Rake turn his back on the Devil, instead of making his Progress.
Sandlin explores these narratives in several forms. This can include drawings and installations, but is most impressive in the handmade gate-fold screenprinted artist books that he painstakingly publishes over time. Some of these are available at Printed Matter.
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Walpurgisnachtmart will be on view until March 27th, and is made possible by the Chashama organization. More artworks are available on David Sandlin‘s website.
