Art : EXIT

RON NAGLE – ICE BREAKER

Posted on 2017-02-06

The sculptures, all from 2016, are presented in niches and glass vitrines designed in collaboration with the artist, their heights determined by his ideal viewing angle for each work. The lowest vitrines display sculptures with titles such as Historical Land Mind and Sandmandia, which the viewer is meant to look down upon, while the niches present several works, including Intangible Assets and Glorious Assemblage, whose branch-like forms and scroll-like bases evoke the art of bonsai. Although several sculptures employ crackle glaze and other nods to traditional pottery, the works in this exhibition are notable for the wide range of effects achieved with such contemporary materials as epoxy resin, catalyzed polyurethane, and high-gloss automotive paint mixed to the artist’s specifications and applied with an airbrush.

Nagle has referred to these works as three-dimensional paintings. Most can be read as either still lifes or miniature landscapes, and all are composed with the same formal considerations of color, texture, and proportion. Among his primary aesthetic influences, Nagle cites shibui, the Japanese notion of simplicity balanced with complexity. He has also spoken of his experiences with San Francisco’s hot-rod culture of the 1960s and the connection he feels to the art of Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston, both of whose work he first encountered at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Opposite – Intangible Assets, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 8th, 2017

Matthew Marks Gallery Los Angeles
1062 N. Orange Grove Ave.
Los Angeles
CA90046

www.matthewmarks.com

CONTEMPORARY VISIONS VII

Posted on 2017-02-06

Contemporary Visions VII is BEERS London’s seventh annual open-call group exhibition. This year, over 4,100 applicants were adjudicated Philly Adams, Senior Director Saatchi Gallery; Kurt Beers, Director of BEERS London & Author of ‘100 Painters of Tomorrow’; Carlye Byron, Collector; Byzantia Harlow, Artist and Contemporary Visions VI finalist; Hugh Montgomery, Deputy Arts Editor and Writer with I News; Gemma Rolls-Bentley, Artsy UK Gallery Relations Liaison.

Opposite – Silkscreen wall print by Kyung Hwa, sculpture by Sebastian Neeb and painting on right by Erik Olson

Exhibition runs through to March 4th, 2017

Beers London
1 Baldwin Street
London
EC1V 9NU

www.beerslondon.com

MATT JOHNSON – WOOD SCULPTURE

Posted on 2017-02-06

The objects depicted in his new works are the casual detritus of art studios or building sites, whose forms are the result of usage and discarding. Crumpled cardboard boxes, shards of cut drywall, a discarded cup, pizza box, and rolls of blue painter’s tape are preserved in stasis, forms that would normally be realized only in the temporality between utility and refuse. These simple moments of dispossession become the generators of their own poiesis, as their incidental elegance is preserved through replication as sculpture. In a conceit to the transient fragility of sculpture proffered by artists like Fischli & Weiss, a certain lack of the essential qualities that confer existence upon an object is imbued in Johnson’s forms. This impermanent nature is borne out by the sculptural constructions themselves, as their wooden armatures form the supports for objects that you would usually expect to see crumble in front of you.

Johnson’s approach to display lends the exhibition a scientific quality, as objects are arranged in constellations that seem to hint at a gravitational attraction created by their masses and the spaces between them. Long concerned with creating rifts in the negotiation between expectation and reality, Johnson’s sculptures are arranged to communicate with each other, and seem to morph according to their imposed relations. The rubble of production, artistic, commercial and otherwise, is used to create a new type of codification, one in which objects between states and materials in flux become their own profligate and surreptitious communicators. An incorporeal form of predicate dualism begins to take hold, wherein an object can be both itself and signify a potential beyond both form and function.

Opposite – Untitled (4 Stacked Tape Rolls), 2016

Exhibition runs through to February 25th, 2017

303 Gallery
555 W 21 Street
NY 10011

www.303gallery.com

PETER HALLEY – PAINTINGS FROM THE 1980s

Posted on 2017-01-30

The exhibition comprises a selection of paintings that surveys an important period of Peter Halley’s work, dating from 1982-1987.

Over the past four decades, Peter Halley has pursued a rigorous, theoretical approach to painting that takes influence from structures of organisation and communication. The works in this exhibition show the development during this decade of relationships between flat and textured geometric elements that the artist refers to as ‘cells’, ‘prisons’ and ‘conduits’. For Halley, these elements comprise a formal vocabulary that reflects the increasingly geometric divisions of social spaces of the world in which we live. Halley’s work is consistently concerned with abstraction not only in art, but in broader terms of culture and human behaviour.

The paintings Peter Halley made from the early 1980s onward contribute to what might now be considered the postmodern canon. Halley, together with his artist peers Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach and others, came to international prominence during that decade with varied approaches to art making sometimes identified as ‘neo-geometric conceptualism’ or ‘Neo Geo’. These artists were making new work that proffered critique of both expressionism and non-objective abstraction, in a context informed by contemporary ideas about social control, mediation, and simulation.

Peter Halley has written on art and culture throughout his career. His essays, first published during the 1980s, address postmodernist culture, contemporary art practices, and that decade’s digital revolution through the lens of post-structuralist critique.

Opposite – Two Cells With Circulating Conduit, 1987

Exhibition runs through to March 18th, 2017

Modern Art
4-8 Helmet Row
London
EC1V 3QJ

www.modernart.net

JEFF MUHS – SUPERNATURE

Posted on 2017-01-30

Jeff Muhs uses the idea of supernature as an ongoing manifestation of self-discovery for his painting process both intended and happenstantial. Muhs creates work that has become its own unique process of natural creation and discovery. This process began when he first stumbled upon a more spontaneous method of mark-making using improvised brushes and black oil paint over a highly prepared surface. Through the random and overlapping application of paint thinned to various degrees, an organic black and white cosmos evolves. These initial paintings, or backgrounds, are simultaneously ethereal and earthly, displaying an intuitive playfulness that is buttressed by the artist’s knowledge and understanding of his materials.

The black and white backgrounds serve as inspiration for the opaque areas of color that is applied next. These dense areas of color compliment the under-painting by offering a sense of order and stasis. Working within the randomness of the backgrounds, the artist composes colored areas that create a Taoist whole between the two main contradictory compositional elements. The push and pull between background and foreground allows the viewer to move in, out and through the matrix of paint. The fields of color present a plane where the eye can rest, an area where the turbulence ceases and subtleties emerge, and the true beauty of the work is divulged. It is here, at this crossroads of intention and chance, where expanses of dense color delicately dance with churning areas of black and white that a new order reveals itself…a new order that the artist has graciously pulled back the curtain to reveal its mastery.

Opposite – Waters of Oblivion, 2017

Exhibition runs through to February 25th, 2017

Lyons Wier Gallery
542 W. 24th St
New York
NY 10011

www.lyonswiergallery.com

SPENCER SWEENEY – VIVA LAS VEGAS

Posted on 2017-01-30

Sweeney’s artistic practice stays within the genres and styles of the fine arts, music, and performance. His creative work has always been informed by musical, visual, and social impressions and encounters. Even though the title ‘Viva Las Vegas’ may suggest otherwise, this exhibition is actually the result of months of introspection and a conscious focus on working exclusively as a painter in the studio. The artist worked on several canvases simultaneously, and with Sweeney’s well-known talent as a communicator, it is easy to imagine how in the process, the paintings interrogated and fertilized each other, how they fought and lovingly made up, and then turned away from each other again.

The paintings and drawings seem to show emotionally charged creatures and energetic spaces and landscapes. In explosive, distorted pictures with pulsating colours, the works go back and forth between artistic methods and media.

Opposite – Hide This Face, 2016/2017

Exhibition runs through to March 4th, 2017

Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin
Grolmanstrasse 32/33, 10623
Am Kupfergraben 10, 10117
Berlin
Germany

www.cfa-berlin.com