ERIC YAHNKER – VIRGIN BIRTH ‘N’ TURF

Posted on 2012-09-03

For the past two years Yahnker has been preparing his massive drawings and sculptures for this exhibition, and it represents the culmination of his recent explorations. The works in this show range from meticulous, two-foot colored pencil and graphite drawings to towering ten-foot works on paper; from tiny sculptural interventions to massive three dimensional arrangements. The pieces en masse form a lyrical and disturbing poem – which takes the title Virgin Birth ‘N’ Turf – about the state of the union and our contemporary American moment.

Yahnker is a virtuosically talented drawer who choses to take densely layered political commentary as his subject matter. The often large-scale pieces are visually seductive and can easily be appreciated at the purely superficial level, but after ingesting the title and contemplating the image for a bit, many more upsetting and controversial ideas begin to emerge. The works are elaborately planned and constructed to hold up to even the most intense conceptual scrutiny. There is a wealth of information and excitement to be had the more you meditate on each work.

Opposite – Long Banged Jane, 2012

Exhibition runs from September 4th to October 6th, 2012

The Hole
312 Bowery Street
New York
10012

theholenyc.com

  

JOSE PARLA & REY PARLA – U.T.O.P.I.A

Posted on 2012-08-27

The Brooklyn-based brothers have had an on-going collaboration since childhood starting early in 1983. José drawing and painting, and Rey taking photographs of his brother and mutual friends out in the city. Respectively, José became known for his calligraphic and palimpsestic coded paintings while his brother Rey is best known for his experimental films and camera-less non-photo works he calls Scratch | Graphs. José having studied painting and Rey filmmaking the Picasso and Braque like duo are a Ying and Yang that create enigmatic works of art that are unique in their conversations.

The Parlá Brothers’ work has been exhibited at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in NYC, OHWOW Gallery in Miami, Paris Photo, and The Miami International Film Festival: The Avant-Garde Returns. A limited edition book will accompany the brothers’ colette show.

Opposite – Light Folding Flowing Writing, 2012

Exhibition runs from September 25th to November 18th, 2012

Colette
213 rue Saint-Honoré
75001
Paris
France

www.colette.fr

  

THOMAS SCHUTTE – FACES AND FIGURES

Posted on 2012-08-27

Over several decades, Schütte has created watercolours and drawings of acquaintances and friends, as well as many self-portraits, including the Mirror Drawing works. His drawings are often created in series, approaching the same subject numerous times as a means of engaging with the inner nature of the individual. Schütte’s drawings feed closely into his sculptural portraits, which are created in a similar spirit.

A work central to the Serpentine exhibition is Vater Staat (Father State) 2011, a towering steel sculpture of an authoritative figure who, paradoxically, appears frail and isolated. This formidable work relates to Schütte’s interest in shifts of scale; although epic, the work remains an investigation into fragility. Vater Staat resonates with the works placed outdoors in Kensington Gardens, the larger United Enemies sculptures; formidable yet anonymous figures, these are sited in the most public of spaces.

Opposite – Innocenti, 1994

Exhibition runs from September 25th to November 18th, 2012

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 3XA

www.serpentinegallery.org

  

RITA ACKERMANN – FIRE BY DAYS

Posted on 2012-08-27

‘Fire by Days’, a title inspired by French poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s ‘Vacancy in Glass’, began as an accidental spill of paint on the artist’s studio floor, which Ackermann mopped up using a Hungarian fire safety poster.

‘These paintings came to me from, or as, an accident: suddenly the forms and shapes of hastily cleaning up a mess of paint on a surface suggested something that wasn’t a figure or a face, but rather both, or abstract. This is how the first ‘Fire by Days’ images arose. I had no intention to make this picture. It was an accident.’
‘As Paul Virilio once said, “Sublimation of the hunt…the course of painting imposes a cleared surface, a sublimation of war”. The speed of the action demanded a pure surface in which I found the perfect image. To roll in complete freedom and depth in the desert; this is far more exciting than passing through a delimited course.’ Rita Ackermann, July 2012.

Opposite – Fire by Days The Fool II, 2012

Exhibition runs from September 18th to November 3rd, 2012

Hauser & Wirth
196A Piccadilly
London
W1J 9DY

www.hauserwirth.com

  

ENDS OF THE EARTH – LAND ART TO 1974

Posted on 2012-08-20

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts. Organized by MOCA Senior Curator Philipp Kaiser and co-curator Miwon Kwon, Professor of Art History at UCLA, the exhibition highlights the early years of untested artistic experimentations and concludes in the mid-1970s before Land art becomes a fully institutionalized category.

Rather than romanticizing notions of “return to nature” or an “escape from culture”, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview that reveals the complexity of the movement’s social and political engagement with the historical conditions of its time. Ends of the Earth exposes Land art as a media practice as much as a sculptural one, focusing on the extent to which language, photography, film, and television served as an integral and not a secondary or supplementary part of its formation.

Exhibition runs through to September 3rd, 2012

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N. Central Ave
Los Angeles
CA
90012

www.moca.org

  

WADE GUYTON – OS

Posted on 2012-08-20

Over the past decade, New York–based artist Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has pioneered a groundbreaking body of work that explores our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer.Guyton’s purposeful misuse of these tools to make paintings and drawings results in beautiful accidents that relate to daily lives now punctuated by misprinted photos and blurred images on our phone and computer screens. Comprising more than eighty works dating from 1999 to the present, Guyton’s first midcareer survey will feature a dramatic, non-chronological design in which staggered rows of parallel walls will confront the viewer like the layered pages of a book or stacked windows on a monitor. The exhibition will include paintings, drawings, photography, and sculpture, and will conclude with two spectacular new canvases, stretching up to fifty feet in length, which Guyton created specifically for the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer–designed building.

The title, Wade Guyton OS employs the common acronym for a computer’s “operating system,” linking Guyton’s art to the technologies of our time.

Exhibition runs from October 21st to January 13th, 2013

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York
NY
10021

whitney.org