JAY HEIKES – KEEP OUT

Posted on 2017-05-22

For Keep Out, Heikes expands on his “Music for Minor Planets” drawing series, first started in 2013, releasing the delicate, graphite compositions from the two-dimensional confines of paper and wall and transforming them into a large-scale sculpture. The three copper sculptures, each measuring 10 feet in height, 15 feet in length, and 10 feet in width, visually references sheet music and will occupy much of the gallery’s floor space. Its bars, made of bent wire, expand and contract within and beyond their frames, engaging the surrounding space and seemingly reacting to unseen forces. Its musical notes, appearing as wax orbs, are in some instances affixed to the bars and in others have fallen to the floor, scattered. The work at once compels and repels the viewer, contributing to the overarching sense of tension. The sculpture takes inspiration from some of Heikes’ favorite musicians like Terry Riley, and highlights the power of additive intervention to change and alter artistic intention and experience.

Opposite – The Devil Has Left My Building, 2015

Exhibition runs through to June 17th, 2017

Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
NY 10011

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

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ED RUSCHA – CUSTOM-BUILT INTRIGUE

Posted on 2017-05-15

Throughout decades of formal experimentation, Ruscha has explored the role of language in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and bookmaking through a singular, sometimes oblique use of words. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, he honed his distinctive drawing practice to create some of the most compelling works of his career. The text drawings from this period, exquisitely rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice, bridge the spirited Pop art for which Ruscha first gained renown with the cerebral Conceptualism to which his work was essential.

The exhibition features a decade of drawings (1974–1984) towards the end of which Ruscha reintroduces the element of imagery. With the inclusion of one work on paper from 1986, we can see a clear shift to another stage of his drawing practice.

Drawing has long been considered the most direct process by which thought is transferred into image; but Ruscha almost completely conceptualizes his images prior to making them. Using a reverse-stenciling graphic technique, Ruscha cuts out stencils in the shape of letters and places them on paper. He then applies pigment around the covered area with unconventional tools, such as cotton puffs and Q-Tips, to create his typography utilizing negative space rather than line. Selectively trawling words and phrases from the American vernacular, with little regard to their prescribed meaning or intention, Ruscha subverts the symbolic system of language altogether. Words and phrases severed from specific time, location, or context resonate with just as much vitality and pathos as when the drawings were created.

Opposite – He Enjoys the Co. of Women, 1976

Exhibition runs through to June 30th, 2017

Gagosian
980 Madison Avenue
NY 10075
New York

www.gagosian.com

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TOBIAS PILS

Posted on 2017-05-15

The exhibition will be comprised of new paintings. Pils complex compositions present a field that is neither entirely legible nor abstract, but rather exists (and evolves) between these seemingly disparate states of representation. The result are compositions that continually agitate and shift between surreal-like, anthropomorphic forms and more hard-edge abstractions, challenging the notion of a stable image or perception.

“His compositions of marks have no representational intent to guide them yet often result in suggestive figuration. He likens a section of one of his recent paintings to the fronds of “palms”, while another, which displays a similar sequence of feather-like branching, contains a section that becomes to his eye an “arrow”. An entirely natural, virtually absent-minded stroke of the brush, a gentle curving motion that seems hard-wired into the functioning of the human hand-leads to such figurative resemblance. The representational associations that appear to Pils arrive after the fact, or perhaps even during the process of painting, but without guiding the outcome. Depending on how the curves cluster or branch, they may suggest feathers, leaves on a stalk, or hair. Or nothing.”

Opposite – Untitled (city), 2016

Exhibition runs through to June 17th, 2017

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
39 Great Jones Street
10012 New York

www.presenhuber.com

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CHARLINE VON HEYL

Posted on 2017-05-15

Charline of Heyl creates paintings that act as self-refreshing visual events, as enigmatic presences that seduce or disturb the viewer without a word. They are often funny, but they have no fear of poetic depth or even pathos. Activate the colors: they move, drain and recharge, depending on the time of day and position of the viewer. Interference colors, whose nature is paradoxical with the light to act, bring the hierarchy of tonality together. Copper, aluminum, dirty pastel colors, coal powder, fluorescent, but also graphic black and white are applied in unstable and broken layers, which creates different moods and emotions.

Drawing is an important element, although the lines and gestures are more likely to be stuck in outline than in their autonomous assertion. By repetition patterns are created, by movement or stabilization, tension or resolution. The narrative elements create their own energies, but they never break the promise. Together, composition, colors and lines slow down the view, stretch or deform the moment of vision, thus transforming time into space and making the picture an object.

Heyl is more concerned with visual effects than with the direct effect of a haptic surface. In doing so, she draws the practicality of acrylic the seductive nature of Impasto painting and oil. Brush strokes are not recognizable, which means that the image is often almost as printed. From a completely smooth surface, the work expands or contracts back into itself. Painted “stickers” destroy illusion with illusion where there is the danger that the painting might fall in love with itself.

Opposite – “Great Train Robbery”, 2017

Exhibition runs through to June 3rd, 2017

Capitain Petzel
Karl-Marx-Allee 45
10178 Berlin
Germany

www.capitainpetzel.de

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RAYMOND PETTIBON – TH’ EXPLOSIYV SHOYRT T

Posted on 2017-05-08

Pettibon’s work embraces a wide spectrum of American high and low culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, sports, religion, politics, sexuality, and literature. Taking their point of departure in the Southern California punk-rock scene of the late 1970s and 1980s and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary.

Opposite – No Title (In a wrestless…), 2017

Exhibition runs through to June 24th, 2017

David Zwirner
519 West 19th Street
NY 10011
New York

www.davidzwirner.com

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ELIAS SIME – TWISTED & HIDDEN

Posted on 2017-05-08

Elias Sime’s work is a meditation on connectivity and transformation. His unorthodox materials include reclaimed cell phone bodies, Soviet-era transistors, computer motherboards, brightly colored electrical wires, sections of plastic keyboards with other e-waste that has been discarded and sent to trash heaps across the African continent. This technological flotsam eventually washes up in the open-air markets of Addis Ababa, where Sime repurposes it into artworks. The works on view are part of an ongoing series entitled “Tightrope,” which refers to the contemporary balancing act between technology and tradition, humanity and the environment.
Sime achieves effects from dense narrative to austere modernist abstraction. Some works recall pure color-field painting while others refer to architectonic geometries, textile patterns and information flows. Figurative moments emerge in some – a human face, a bird wing, a frog leaping from a tree branch. The artist resists the collagist’s shorthand of using discarded objects as poetic stand-ins for individual lives and instead finds renewal everywhere, taking the greatest interest in new ways that objects and ideas connect. The emphasis is on the transformative power of human creativity.

Opposite – Tightrope: Narcissism, 2017

Exhibition runs through to June 17th, 2017

James Cohan Gallery
291 Grand Street
NY 10002
New York

www.jamescohan.com

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