HUGO CANOILAS – MAGMA

Posted on 2013-04-15

With its foundations in painting, Canoilas’ work is often collaborative and incorporates video, sound, sculpture and performance as well as research-based projects. Over the last decade painting has led him to establish a dialogue between abstraction and a style that nods towards social realism. With a strong interest in modernism and literature, Canoilas’ practice revisits histories from a political, poetic, religious or existentialist perspective and has a capacity to be in a limbo between some of these subjects.

For the past 3 years Canoilas has been collecting pages from free newspapers both at home and whilst travelling. Each page is selected either because of his inability to understand or comprehend the content both in terms of language and subject. These pages then form the ground for a series of paintings made ‘blind’ in which Canoilas presses the paper face down into paint. For Workplace Gallery, Canoilas has collaged a collection of these works by overlaying specifically selected and framed works with paintings projected from transparencies on analogue overhead projectors.

For his recent installation Paradise Birds – at 30th São Paulo Biennial – Canoilas created a series of epic scaled paintings on unframed, unprepared canvas using a process of dipping, staining, and drawing in Ink rather than paint. Depicting characters who first explored the interior territories of Brazil the paintings move between figuration and abstraction, performance and propaganda calling into question the status of both the works as art objects and their subjects as either national hero or political tools.

Exhibition runs through to May 4th, 2013

Workplace Gallery
The Old Post Office
19/21 West Street
Gateshead
NE8 1AD

www.workplacegallery.co.uk

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NATHAN MABRY – SHAPESHIFTER

Posted on 2013-04-15

Mabry’s Heavy Handed (Separation Anxiety) and Heavy Handed (Tocca Ferro/Horns Up) will be presented in gallery two. The Heavy Handed works are large-scale sculptures made of steel that resemble block-like human hands, making gestures ranging from the benign to the profane. They reference sign language, colloquial symbols and other forms of gestural communication that can be simultaneously illustrative and provocative.

In gallery three, Mabry will exhibit his newest series of work, which comprises oversized terra-cotta heads resting atop aluminum bases that reference minimalist sculpture, specifically Donald Judd’s milled aluminum works. The heads, hand-sculpted by Mabry, are derived from architectural elements – tenon heads found at Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Columbian religious and political site built by the Chavín people in Peru. The Chavín religion involved human to animal transformation, or shapeshifting, achieved through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Mabry’s heads incorporate animals commonly associated with Chavín iconography, specifically jaguars, eagles and snakes.

The stark contrast of these ancient figurative forms to the cool reserve of their abstract minimalist bases creates, in Mabry’s words, a “crashing together” of cultural aesthetics; this juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary is a common theme in Mabry’s oeuvre.

Opposite – Heavy Handed (Tocca Ferro/Horns Up), 2013

Exhibition runs through to May 4th, 2013

Sean Kelly Gallery
475 Tenth Ave
New York
NY
10018

www.skny.com

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ESTHER STOCKER

Posted on 2013-04-15

Esther Stocker’s modernist form language manifests itself in a variety of artistic media, addressing a theme that dates back to the abstraction of painting in the early 20th century, when Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square on White (1915) transferred painting to the non-representational realm and introduced a spatial dimension. The departure of painting towards a three-dimensional approach that goes beyond figurative representation created a wider range of possibilities to view art as a holistic experience of philosophical issues.

In her works, Stocker uses diverse media to address the resumption of a Malevichian discourse on abstraction geared to the theory of space. The artist systematically checks the validity of the two-dimensional logic of imagination in painting and breaks up its spatial limitations. By using black-and-white patterns and textures, she releases the viewer from the perception of colour and draws their attention directly to spatial structures. Stocker’s artistic work deals with the juxtaposition of painting, photography and sculpture as an interaction between theories that encompass all spatial dimensions.

In her most recent works, black squares in grid patterns are transferred in a repetitive form onto the surface of objects that are suspended in space. By folding and creasing the original paintings on paper, she creates “clusters” or reliefs on the wall. The process of creasing the black-and-white grid patterns creates a distorted array of variously arranged squares, thus also alluding to instances of Op Art and subsequently transferring them into the three-dimensionality of space.

Exhibition runs through to June 1st, 2013

Krobath
Eschenbachgasse 9
A – 1010 Vienna
Austria

www.galeriekrobath.at

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