MARTIN CREED

Posted on 2015-12-07

Creed is known for his instinct for making a large impact through minimal interventions in his environment and as a master of the overlooked moment. He exploits existing objects and situations by letting them speak for themselves – a crumpled ball of A4 paper, a stack of tiles piled on the floor, a wedged doorstop allowing a door to open only 45 degrees, or neons spelling out simple words and phrases such as “THINGS” or “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT”. Creed often works sequentially and a number of his works oscillate between two opposing states. In 2001, he won the Turner Prize for Work No. 227 The lights going on and off (2000), an empty room in which the lights turn on and off at five-second intervals. Work No. 1686 (2013) is a parked Ford Focus car that comes alive – its doors and windows open, the engine starts and the radio, headlights, horn and windscreen wipers are activated for then to power down 30 seconds later. Creed also explores the limits of objects.
Tables, chairs or plants might be brought together and organised according to size, height or tone, or the pre-defined limit of a product might be highlighted by creating serial works determined by the availability of the product from a manufacturer or stockist. Examples being the artist’s series of paintings of the same motif in different colours determined by the choice of colours in a particular range of paint, or the brush strokes in his stack paintings (horizontal brushstrokes stacked on top of one another)
that are determined by the size of the brushes in a given pack.

Exhibition runs through to January 30th, 2016

Peder Lund
Tjuvholmen allé 27
N-0252 Oslo
Norway

www.pederlund.no

  

MICHEL MAJERUS

Posted on 2015-12-07

Born in Luxembourg, Majerus lived and worked in Berlin until a 2002 plane crash tragically ended his life at the age of thirty-five. Majerus’s work often features text and graphics sampled from a diverse range of sources. The exhibition’s largest work, overdose (1997), presents a conglomeration of brightly-colored graphics on a monumental scale, depicting laundry detergent packaging, an ice cream wrapper, a club flyer, and Woody from the animated film Toy Story, a recurring character in Majerus’s work. Painted on fifteen panels, overdose is nearly sixteen feet tall by twenty-three feet wide, filling a wall of the gallery from floor to ceiling.

MoM Block Nr. 56 (1999) includes a reproduction of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, itself a blend of sampled graphics and gestural brushwork. By adding his own strokes, Majerus has transformed Basquiat and Warhol’s painting into an irreverent three-part collaboration.

From 2000 to 2001 Majerus lived in Los Angeles for a year. One of the paintings he made here, pornography needs you (2001), is included in the exhibition. On the nearly ten-by-eleven-foot canvas, a handful of five-pointed stars, like those on the American flag or the Hollywood Walk of Fame, accompanies the titular phrase as it tips down and over the painting’s bottom edge.

Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2016

Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 North Orange Grove
90046 Los Angeles
USA

www.matthewmarks.com

  

FERNANDO BRYCE

Posted on 2015-12-07

The exhibition will feature three major works, The Book of Needs, Arte Nuevo and ARTnews 1944-1947 which address the discourse of universal values during the 1940s and 1950s. These works chronicle the changing international climate following the end of World War
II and the beginning of the Cold War, and survey media representation of subsequent cultural shifts. Following his established practice, the artist analyzes the representations in historical documents with his own ink-on-paper “reconstructions.”

Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2016

Alexander and Bonin
132 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY
NY 10011
New York

www.alexanderandbonin.com

  

JAMES HYDE – GROUND

Posted on 2015-11-30

An influential and respected figure, Hyde uses the flat field of painting as a topological arena that ties together the physical substance of painting and the ground on which it is laid, extracting spatial dimensions and new meanings from this relationship. In these increasingly direct works, he utilizes abstraction to break photography’s semantic hold on the way we construct an image of the world.1

Hyde looks to the ideas of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson and their concept of the site and non-site. By framing the natural landscape within the artificial, associations attached to both nature photography and abstract painting are unpacked and deconstructed. As discussed with Lucía Sanromán, “By framing the photograph within the ‘objectness’ of painting…a type of painterly suspicion is created in the photograph”.

Beginning in 2009 Hyde took to the hills of California to photograph the vistas and great panoramas off Interstate 5. Coming from New York, Hyde was struck by the openness and vast perspectives of the California landscape. Two years later he revisited the sites he first photographed, including Pyramid Lake and the oak trees depicted in the series.

The title “Ground” resonates with the descriptive photography of western landscapes. In the painting context, the ground is the active place on which painting occurs. Hyde uses a home brewed paint for these works, consisting of pigment dispersed in acrylic mediums, and in most cases that pigment is a form of ground earth. In turn, Hyde’s photographs follow a “light-room” process developed in the computer, distorting and adjusting it and challenging the notion of any factual naturalism.

Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2015

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles
90034
California

www.luisdejesus.com

  

KIRSTEN EVERBERG

Posted on 2015-11-30

Everbergʼs latest body of work takes the working and living space of film director and writer Ingmar Bergman on the remote island of Fårö, Sweden, as a point of departure to explore the ways in which creative spaces are constructed and operate as sites of production. The new paintings presented continue Everbergʼs interest in the history and practice of filmmaking, thereby exploring the interplay between memory, fragmentation, photography, cinema and the subjective nature of perception.

Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2016

Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira 130
05501-000
Sao Paulo
Brazil

www.1301pe.com

  

ZILVINAS KEMPINAS

Posted on 2015-11-30

Verticals is an installation of unspooled VHS tape, constituting the entire gallery space, evenly dividing and filling it symmetrically. It is a controlled environment, defined by uniformity and monotonous order. Despite its geometry, Verticals sustains a kinetic character and occasionally is animated by natural air circulation in the gallery or by vortexes of air caused by passing visitors. Once the air calms down, the piece comes back to its original stance.

The strips of magnetic tape are suspended above the gallery floor at the same distance; they do not extend all the way to the ceiling, but “stop” at the same height evenly. Their ultra thin edges are facing the same direction. Vertical black pieces of magnetic tape represent elements of time. Barely there, they occasionally disappear out of sight completely, depending on a viewer’s position in the gallery’s space.

In the middle of the floor there is a black shallow box-like object with its surface exposed to the viewers. There are thousands of small steel bearings laid down in oil on its surface. At first they are perceived as one solid formation, but from closer inspection, one may notice an occasional movement here and there – the bearings are slowly moving, one by one, rearranging and re-positioning themselves into an infinite “drawing in progress”.

It is a kinetic sculpture, capable of regenerating itself every time, creating new shapes out of solid metal. The final result (form) is not an objective here, but instead the very process of “becoming”, the act of change and the beauty of chance are at the core of the piece.

Opposite – Bearings, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2016

Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira 130
05501-000
Sao Paulo
Brazil

galerialeme.com