JASON FOX – BEWARE OF DARKNESS

Posted on 2018-03-19

Jason Fox’s first solo show was held at Feature in New York in the early nineties, just after MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (the first major exhibition to address “the relationship between modern art and popular and commercial culture.”)and only two years before Mike Kelley organized The Uncanny at the Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem. Fox’s work itself acts as a link between these events, and they in turn allow us to chronologically situate his acts of borrowing from both art history and from record sleeves of the seventies. Although considered as common practice today, this kind of artistic approach was not so widespread at the time.   
In a recent interview with artist Joe Bradley, Fox explicits his position: “The early nineties was another death-of-painting period and to be making expressive paintings that had nothing to do with appropriation was going against the tide. […] From the start I was interested in a kind of cyborg/extreme figuration. For me Guston was the big shadow to get out from under. He did what I wanted to do. He’s this giant shadow, and to get out from under it my strategy was to go extreme. I was listening to Howard Stern, watching early Cronenberg movies, looking at S. Clay Wilson and Crumb. I wanted to blow the figure up and rebuild it in a Frankenstein-ish way. Art history and comics were the body parts.”

Opposite – George with Dragon, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 7th, 2018

Almine Rech Gallery
20 rue de l’Abbaye
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium

www.alminerech.com

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IMAGINED CHARACTERS

Posted on 2018-03-13

Sid Motion Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition, Imagined Characters, which includes paintings by Charis Entwisle, Pat O’Connor, Jennifer Louise Martin and Daniel Wheeler.

Charis Entwisle (b.1997, Bristol, U.K.) is currently studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in London.

Pat O’Connor graduated from Royal College of Art London in 1996. O’Connor’s recent projects include Lived on the Bone, Govan Project Space, Glasgow 2018; Zennor Project Space Residency, Cornwall 2017; Paw, Arcade, London 2015 and Night of the Big Tops, The Dentist, London 2014. She won the Studio Voltaire, Aldeburgh Beach Lookout Residency Prize and was selected for the John Moore’s Painting Prize, 2012.
She currently lives and works in London

Jennifer Louise Martin (b. 1980, London) completed a Diploma in Art & Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design before going on to do Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Leeds, U.K. She then went onto complete a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, Central Saint Martins, London.
Recent solo exhibitions have included a Brand Collaboration with Zanzan Eyewear & Laura Bailey, Alex Eagle Studio, London, 2017; The Absence of Presence, Gallery 151, New York, 2013 and (Re) Fashioning the Gaze, Oak Tree & Tiger Gallery, London.

Daniel Wheeler (b. 1976, West Yorkshire, U.K.) lived and worked predominantly in Europe, later returning to the U.K. to study Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, 2009-2013.
In 2014 Wheeler was shortlisted for the Clyde and Co Art Award and the Jerwood Drawing Prize. In that year he was also longlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.
He currently lives and works in Southend.

Opposite – Charis Entwisle – Some free time remains 2, 2017

Exhibition runs from March 22nd – April 14th, 2018

Sid Motion Gallery
142 York Way
London
N1 0AX

www.sidmotiongallery.co.uk

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GEORG HEROLD – BEVERLY’S COUSINE

Posted on 2018-03-12

At the beginning of the 1980s, Georg Herold, who studied under Sigmar Polke from 1977 until 1983, questioned art and the art business in a radical and sarcastic way together with Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen. During the 1980s, the group developed an oeuvre which seems like a dada-inspired encyclopedia of the provisional. Their paintings, sculptures, installations, objects, texts and videos with their character of being created en passant reflect an artistic core belief that confronts the myth of perfection and masterpiece with calculated “unfinishedness.” Georg Herold’s works which are made from everyday objects and materials critically and ironically deal with art historical, social, political, ideological and religious ways of thinking and constantly surprise the viewers by confronting them with their own expectations of art.

Opposite – Beverly, 2011- 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 21st, 2018

Contemporary Fine Arts – CFA
Grolmanstrasse 32/33
Charlottenburg
10623 Berlin
Germany

cfa-berlin.de

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ALEX HUBBARD – PRIVATE LIVES

Posted on 2018-03-12

Hubbard’s practice unites both disciplines in a symbiotic way whereby the examination of the performative process and its physicality are equally at the center. Three large-format paintings made of layers of pigmented urethane, resin, and fiberglass are at the core of this exhibition. Underlying stencil drawings are being washed-out by layers of synthetic materials. Its temporality withdraws every deliberation and explores accidental compositions, colors, and depths, typically found in the work of Hubbard. In juxtaposition are four small-scale cabinet pieces, oscillating the instability between painting and sculpture on one hand and abstraction and figuration on the other. Each shadow box reveals behind semi-drawn curtains a painting – both abstract and representational. Framed by shapes and colors of outdated wallpaper they presume a continuation of the domestic space apparent in the artist’s Bar Paintings whilst introducing an unprecedented intimacy inherent in each cabin. The question of the supremacy of painting, of what abstraction is today, and the re-examination of Hubbard’s own practice prevails.

Opposite – Constantly Native, 2018

Exhibition runs through to April 29th, 2018

Galerie Neu
Linienstraße 119 abc
10115 Berlin
Germany

www.galerieneu.net

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GERWALD ROCKENSCHAUB – GEOMETRIC PLAYGROUND

Posted on 2018-03-12

For geometric playground (flamboyant edit), Gerwald Rockenschaub designed a new wall installation in the main showroom space. Four wall works complement one another, a counterpoint comment on each other and thus form a rhythmic whole. The wall works consist of painted surfaces and objects made of acrylic glass. Because of the different materiality of the wall and the mirroring acrylic glass, it is difficult to tell from afar whether the work is flat or three-dimensional. In a way it is both: the 1/8 inch thick objects are three-dimensional, but they are silhouetted against the walls not through their plasticity but rather through their surface effect. The acrylic glass diffusely mirrors the spectators’ movements through the space. The work thus questions two basic properties of walls — their planarity and their statics.

Perfectly crafted and flawlessly installed, the wall works render an aura of hyperrealist perfection. The acrylic glass objects are put up with acrylic screws—and thus ironically appear as functional objects, while being so perfectly chosen and installed that functionality itself appears as a gesture. Playing with function and pseudo-function, Rockenschaub blurs the boundaries between art and design. The painted surfaces with their translucent colors both repeat and are attuned to each other, creating a rhythm of minimal forms that leads the eye through the room. Their size gives structure to the space, while their mirroring effects give rise to a dialogue between architecture, artwork and spectator, constantly renewing the relationship of the latter to the former two.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 29th, 2018

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
39 Great Jones Street
NY 10012
New York

www.presenhuber.com

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LORNA SIMPSON – UNANSWERABLE

Posted on 2018-03-05

Simpson continues to develop the language of the found image as a source for her work, incorporating photographs from her collection of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. These publications focused on subjects of lifestyle, culture and politics from an African-American perspective and are credited with chronicling black lives and issues so sorely under-represented elsewhere in the media.

Through layering and collage, Simpson’s recent works reconfigure imagery of the female form and reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of, and response to, contemporary culture and American life today. An installation, entitled ‘Unanswerable’ (2018), is composed of over 40 individual photo collages each of which is unique and created from original source material and archive photography. A series of female protagonists are often the focal point of the images and Simpson splices these with architectural features, animals and natural elements to create scenarios that are at once poetic and arresting. In this way the artist deftly suggests compelling new narratives that emerge from the unexpected settings and contexts.

Opposite – Ice 4, 2018

Exhibition runs through to April 28th, 2018

Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row
W1S 2ET
London

www.hauserwirth.com

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