STACY LEIGH – NERVES

Posted on 2017-05-01

Each of the recent portraits on view conjure women who appear to float in the middle distance, ungrounded. Leigh’s solitary figures – painted with acrylic on canvas – are imperious and aloof; they present themselves at a studied remove from the viewer.

The palette of these works likewise contributes to their energy. Leigh uses background colors to create undulating waves of tones. Their values gradiate as they pulse farther from the subject, recalling aura photographs. Jewel-like blues and deep maroons create a ghostly and mysterious tenor, and help to create an atmosphere of nowhere.

Leigh builds up the paintings over time, delicately rendering their slightest details with tenderness. Networked veins run below the translucent skin on Carolyn’s arm; the imprint of a bikini tan line suggests a sunburn on Amara’s voluptuous, otherwise pale thighs; a constellation of freckles cover the majority of Sadie’s body as her head tilts to the side, pubic hair slightly visible from her translucent underwear. Each painting suggests a story with no certainty, offering only clues and narrative speculation. Are these figures sexual avatars, or tense young women? Does the “nerves” of the title refer to a mental state of anxiety, or the literal muscle fibers within our bodies? These works sit in the uncanny valley of representation, eliciting, at once, empathy and mystery, desirability and emptiness.

Opposite – Madolyn

Exhibition runs through to June 11th, 2017

Fortnight Institute
60 E 4th St
New York
NY 10003

fortnight.institute

  

VANESSA PRAGER – ULTRAVIOLET

Posted on 2017-05-01

Prager’s work has garnered critical acclaim for its rich impasto, which bends and refracts light across deeply layered three-dimensional surfaces, offering the viewer a variation of perspectives. Up close see the varying rhythms and nuances in the artist’s brush strokes and stratified layers of paint. There is a physicality that needs to be explored face to face in a personal way. However, pull back from the work and the light again shifts, revealing a face or a figure slyly staring back at you, as if to say “what took you so long?”

The December 2016 issue of Cultured magazine, said that Prager’s work “both conceals and reflects” and that it “dissects people intensely.” Her paintings were described as “tortured souls rendered with thousands of thick richly colored marks, a nearly 3D, ultra-impasto style that places her in a historical lineage after Frank Auerbach or Willem de Kooning.”

Ultraviolet marks an important evolution for Prager as she turns the brush on herself, revealing who she is, or possibly who she wants to be. Full figures are also beginning to emerge, but overall she moves toward the inclusion of colorful, luscious, painterly abstraction. Another impressive achievement is Prager’s ramping up of her scale: one of the new paintings measures 8 x 12 feet, inviting the viewer to more completely enter her assumed world; they become experiential.

Opposite – Blue Velvet, 2017

Exhibition runs from May 13th through to June 17th, 2017

Richard Heller Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #B-5A
Santa Monica
CA 90404

www.richardhellergallery.com

  

MEL BOCHNER – VOICES

Posted on 2017-04-24

Who is speaking? To whom? In his new work Bochner assumes various voices from the super-serious to the absurd. A strong vein of irony and humor flows through them. As poet Jeremy Sigler writes in the catalog:

“… I would argue these paintings un-bracket painting’s prematurely celebrated death as they simultaneously put brackets around Mel Bochner. They do this by manifesting a character, a protagonist, who may or may not be Bochner… a cantankerous maverick who paints lines like ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’ In such lines, one can sense Bochner’s sly subversion, his exciting and menacing wit, his willingness to bite the hand that feeds him.”

Words and phrases are scattered across the whole surface. They are often painted over each other, in many cases obliterating themselves in a palimpsest of illegibility. Some paintings simply repeat a single word, like “gobbledygook,” over and over again, rendering the text itself gobbledygook. “Bochner’s runny paint literally drools, oozing letters of cold, harsh, impersonal sentiment” (Sigler). In the torrent of paint, any belief in language as communication is washed away.

Opposite – Dead As A Dodo, 2016

Exhibition runs through to June 10th, 2017

Peter Freeman, Inc.
140 Grand Street
NY 10013
New York

www.peterfreemaninc.com

  

IVÁN ARGOTE – LA VENGANZA DEL AMOR

Posted on 2017-04-24

Multiple layers of punctuated sheets are mounted in front of each other creating a palimpsest pervious to air. The imprinted slogans, borrowed from political pamphlets, form a concerted arrangement of voices. The colorful display acts as a filter. Some events will pass the barrier without leaving traces; others will be eternalized. The artist, who often speaks of history as “texture”, creates allegorical images of the past and thereby deconstructs the present. The punched-out holes can be read as a loss of memory, or as a breeze of fresh air.
“La Venganza Del Amor” is also Iván Argote’s response to the current political climate in the US, triggering a lot of hostility towards foreigners and especially Spanish speaking immigrants. The title is a reference to both politics and cultural stereotypes (it could also be the title of a telenovela) with the assertion that love will always win.

Opposite – Among Us – We Hope They Hope, 2017

Exhibition runs through to June 11th, 2017

Perrotin
130 Orchard Street
NY 10002
New York

www.perrotin.com

  

WILHELM SASNAL

Posted on 2017-04-24

This prescient grouping of works features portraits of prominent politicians, such as Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Marine Le Pen, and former UN leaders: Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan, and Kurt Waldheim. Alongside these political portraits are scenes of a serene and contemplative character: a winter sky in Poland, a pile of discarded rubber tires, or rock formations near Southern Israel’s Mitzpe Ramon.

The double histories of such political figures are explored through the depiction of Angela Merkel in her youth as an East German, Hillary Clinton’s past position as First Lady, and the passing of the torch from Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine as the president of the French National Front. Sasnal’s attempt to connect the past with the present is strikingly exemplified in the portrait of former UN Secretary-General and President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, whose hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes was exposed late in his career.

The motivation to engage with present events is rooted in the desire to dissect the past. Sasnal approaches the potency of these figures and geographies through their inherent network of narrative and formal references, and his interest in how images that seem straightforward in one context are made elusive in another.

Opposite – Angela Merkel 2, 2016

Exhibition runs through to May 20th, 2017

Anton Kern Gallery
16 E. 55th Street
NY 10022
New York

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

ARMIN BOEHM – INTIMACY AND VULNERABILITY

Posted on 2017-04-17

In “Brain Manipulation Conference” a party of mighty men sits at a table. At first sight, it seems they are having dinner together. But on the table, instead of the plates, there are holes through which one looks directly at human brains.
A minaret, a warplane and a Jewish star stand out in the background, an apparent suggestion of the Middle East conflict. The characters under the table only look human, while in the inside, instead of organs, they are made up of mechanical parts. Nearby, a saw horribly lacerates two animals.

The grotesquely distorted double faces allude, even without accuracy in the portraits, to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad.
Armin Boehm’s art is stylistically influenced by the 1920s Expressionism as well as by the fabric collages typical of Arte Povera. The association, for example, with the “Pillars of society”, through which George Grosz set up as a satirical criticism of the society in the Weimar Republic, is quite intentional. In the same way, Boehm’s picture looks at the menacing political conflicts of our time. Yet Boehm is not a mere political painter. Rather, he portrays in his dreamy, surreal sceneries visions and fears not only universally dominant but also personal.
Sometimes the artist processes his own dreams. Human body, seen in its vulnerability, plays a central role in all his images. In this picture, the mighty are portrayed while materially manipulating human brains, as a metaphor for a “brainwashing” carried out also by unilateral media coverage and conscious “fake news”. Armin Boehm’s art can be placed in the modern tradition of a sceptical view of the positive and also technical utopias. One of the central motifs of this dark Modernity is the attacked, dismembered or destroyed body, the “Body in Pieces”, which art historian Linda Nochlin analyzed as a “metaphor of modernity”. Refusing abstraction, Boehm brings narrative directly on the stage. A “different” Modernity is also the one represented by the gay-lesbian communities, to which Armin Boehm with the “Queer Orgy” pays homage. Leigh Bowery, Freddie Mercury, Klaus Nomi, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith are in the party, and the DJ on the desk is the philosopher Michel Foucault. But behind the exuberant party lurk illness and death. Many of the celebrities died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.

Opposite – The Brain Manipulation Conference (war version), 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 29th, 2017

Francesca Minini
Via Massimiano, 25
20134 Milan
Italy

www.francescaminini.it