KENNY SCHARF – HODGEPODGE

Posted on 2012-03-26

For this exhibition, Scharf has created several new bodies of work that survey his particular aesthetic approaches and sensibilities. The show features paintings, sculptures, a Cosmic Cavern installation, and a customized Cadillac, as well as an opening night performance by longtime collaborator, Ann Magnuson.

As a child Scharf was fascinated by television and consumer culture. Sitting only inches from the television screen, young Scharf became obsessed with vibrant and surreal imagery of cartoons and low budget sci-fi films. Optimism oozed from these dewy forms of popular culture, reflecting an era when the medium of television was still new and shiny. The outlook towards the future during the 1950s and early 1960s was a lustrous one filled with invention, cutting-edge products, space travel, and an unabashed vision of a better life. Coming on the heels of World War II, the hopefulness of this era was authentic. Various new industries and the jobs they developed were flourishing alongside the comforts of peace and suburbia. There was an aura of progress and prosperity, creating a seemingly realistic expectation of eternal euphoria. This feeling of positivity unhinged is threaded throughout all of the works in Hodgepodge.

Opposite – Globomundo, 2011

Exhibition runs from April 14th to May 19th, 2012

Honor Fraser
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
California
90034

www.honorfraser.com

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CORINNE WASMUHT

Posted on 2012-03-26

Wasmuht is widely known for her large-scale, multi-layered oil paintings. Her work derives from an array of pictorial inventions, culminating in an aesthetic tension that aims to reconcile what the artist refers to as the “dualism of modernism,” a melding of representational and abstract structures in painting. The paintings’ images are generated from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that Wasmuht sources from a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographs.

The images, both appropriated and her own, mine daily life, nature, science and art, fusing into staged abstracted productions. As Wasmuht describes her process, “In a film, one image is followed by another, whereas I pile the images up on top of one another.” Above all, her labor-intensive painting technique characterizes her work. She applies countless translucent thin layers of paint onto wooden boards that have been repeatedly whitewashed and polished, making her pictures shine and appear to be illuminated from behind while giving their surfaces an immateriality that is full of movement.

Opposite – Transverse NXL, 2012

Exhibition runs through to April 28th, 2012

Friedrich Petzel Gallery
537 West 22nd Street
New York
10011

www.petzel.com

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ANTONY MICALLEF – A LITTLE PIECE OF ME

Posted on 2012-03-26

A Little Piece of Me’ consists of ten new examples based on his ongoing ‘Head’ series, each titled ‘A Little Piece of Me’ one to ten. Antony paints his Head pieces at the beginning of a painting process and is his way of getting his creative juices flowing, they serve as a way of capturings a certain sentiment – or vehemence.

Antony’s relationship with the Head paintings is spontaneous, intimate and physical: “The end result is never known before I begin. The mark making creates the expression of the face, changing it with each stroke. I’m constantly picking up the canvas, turning it around, trying to control the drips and throwing it back down.” The Head paintings endure a rigorous edit, and many are destroyed before they make it on to gallery walls.

Exhibition runs through to April 28th, 2012

The Outsiders
8 Greek Street
Soho
London
W1D 4DG

www.theoutsiders.net

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