ALEXIS HARDING – SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT

Posted on 2012-05-28

The relationship between what has happened, and what has been done, is not always clear in Alexis Harding’s work. Nor is the status of the material his practice corrals into place a clear cut question of cause and effect, or of the essential and the superfluously contingent. An awareness of questions of agency and possibility, the structures in which these occur, and the ways in which these react back upon one another are part of the disruptive but fecund power of his paintings.

Recent paintings demonstrate a technical approach in some respects unchanged from earlier work, but are offered up as a difference on another level, like the same sound caught by differently configured microphones. A gradated spectrum of gloss paint poured through a partitioned container and moved across a surface of wet oil colour on panel is a recent organising principle. These panels often take a regularised format, the 8′ x 4′ of a standard mdf sheet, or perhaps the circular tondo form. The upper skin of the paint in some of these works has left incremental ridges depending on interruptions of its journey across the surface, these ridges acting as a different sort of graphic trace to the initial frictionless pouring.

Opposite – Crack Tip (Unraveller), 2011

Exhibition runs through to June 23rd, 2012

Mummery + Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street
London
W1W 6RH

www.mummeryschnelle.com

  

SIROUS NAMAZI

Posted on 2012-05-28

For this exhibition Namazi extrapolates on the themes he has been addressing throughout his practice: social structures and patterns, architecture, consumption and detritus. In two major new works he focuses on the urban landscape in the context of instability and failure.

Leaning Horizontal (2012) comprises a supermarket shelving system full of products. The sculpture is a Ready-made, though here it leans against the gallery wall at a 45-degree angle. Through this act he distorts our understanding of the object and renders it uncanny. The sculpture brings up issues around consumption, commerce, exploitation, existence and security. The sculpture leans against the wall like a painting – object becomes image.

Opposite – Leaning Horizontal, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2012

Galerie Nordenhake
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
SE-113 30
Stockholm
Sweden

www.nordenhake.com

  

JULIAN OPIE

Posted on 2012-05-21

The exhibition includes a striking series of walking figures, which have increasingly become an important part of the artist’s practice. Simplified to the point of becoming human ‘logos’, walkers in vinyl are displayed in an extended line, recalling Egyptian friezes. In an intriguing and radical development for the artist, he has captured unknown passers-by from the streets of London rather than working with personally known subjects. The unwitting subjects reveal themselves in movement, captured in the moment, exhibiting their own idiosyncrasies in the way they carry themselves. Walking figures are also captured as still images on inlayed granite and stone.

Opie’s choice of medium is key in drawing attention to the physicality of his portraits. Two major new bodies of work mark a technical departure for Opie and juxtapose modern and classical sources. A group of mosaic portraits explore the relationship between sculpture and painting by emphasising the materiality of the imagery. This relationship is taken further in a series of painted busts on plinths in the same room, which beguilingly unite sculptural forms with flat imagery. The busts are the result of the artist’s use of three-dimensional scanning, a meticulous process that involves laser scanning the subject’s head from various angles. The resulting image has then been simplified, formed and dipped in resin, and then hand painted by Opie. Though created using cutting edge technology, the busts are also rooted in traditional sculpture dating back to the Roman period and beyond.

Opposite – Woman with shopping bag and scarf, 2012

Exhibition runs from July 11th to August 25th, 2012

Lisson Gallery
29 Bell Street
London
NW1 5BY

www.lissongallery.com

  

BLACK MIRROR – DOMINIC SHEPHERD & JOHN STARK

Posted on 2012-05-21

Claude Lorrain was famous for using the Black Mirror as a painting aid, a small slightly convex mirror with a darkly tinted surface. The use of a blackened rather than an ordinary silvered mirror resulted in a somewhat weakened reflection, which stressed the prominent features in the landscape at the expense of detail. It also lowered the colour key. The painter would turn his back to the scenery and analyze the view through the tinted glass which had the effect of abstracting the subject from the world imbuing it with a painterly quality.

My intention for the exhibition Black Mirror is to create paintings that reflect this world through a different light. The figures depicted are often absorbed in intimate rituals with their back to the viewer, veiling the action and creating a sense of ambiguity where the beholder is free to question the meaning. The specific objective is to create paradoxical images that reflect the psychology of the viewer through their interaction with the mirror- like painted surface, and the subject within. I hope to achieve paintings that can be read as both cruel and compassionate, warm and cold, dark and light. John Stark

Opposite – The Last Continent, 2012, John Stark

Exhibition runs through to June 30th, 2012

Ambacher Contemporary
Lothstraße 78a
80799 Munich
Germany

www.galerie-lichtpunkt.de

  

MICHIEL CEULERS

Posted on 2012-05-21

Setting off from a blithe and basic beginning, Ceulers has spent many long nights with painting: stripping it down, lovingly caressing it, kicking it around the room, taking its bent limbs and girding them with humor and grace, manhandling the poor thing so that you can witness every bruise and tear, each scrape and scratch, the mystical sprays and the many whispering brushstrokes he’s dragged across its long face. When they finally wander out of the studio to hang against the stark white walls of far-flunggalleries, the paintings bear all the marks of his love affair.

He strips the medium right down to its skeleton, peeling away all the unnecessary accouterments laden on poor painting by thousands of years to find out as best he can what the act can presently and personally mean. He endeavors to renovate the ancient practice with works wearing proudly their labors, sometimes singly and sometimes coupled together in handsome pairs. A rapid rigor reveals itself, unwinding through stripes and grids leaving the paintings at the end of the process curiously tender and refreshingly human.

Exhibition runs through to June 30th, 2012

Mihai Nicodim Gallery
3143 South La Cienega Blvd
Unit B
Los Angeles
CA
90016

nicodimgallery.com

  

KON TRUBKOVICH – LEAP SECOND

Posted on 2012-05-14

A new series of paintings, works on paper, and a sound piece translate psychological underpinnings through elegantly complex methods. The television static, weak transmissions, and tenuous connections he depicts suggest that somewhere behind all the noise and disrup- tion there is a broadcast confirming our existence and interconnection.

Prominent in the exhibition are a group of large-scale portraits of the artist’s mother, culled from just one second of home video, which documented the final party she threw in the U.S.S.R before the family immigrated to the U.S. Defining a transitional moment of flux, these works illuminate the difficultly of tracing the past and express our elusive connection to the concept of origin. Through oil on linen, Trubkovich visually describes the sensation of relating to a person or physical location that no longer exists, or at least not as remembered, and aims to parse latent recall into a tangible codex.

As a continuation on the portrait series, in the sense that the imagery now becomes even less absolute,Trubkovich moves to embedding profiles of Lenny Bruce or the word “MAMA” onto backdrops of analog noise or “snow.” These monochromatic paintings feel more primal or subconsciously linked, presenting impossible transmissions. Weaving through a personal narrative, the contradictions arising between the seen and unseen serve as a chronicle of his imagined memory.

Opposite – Out of the black and into the white, 2012

Exhibition runs from May 18th to June 23rd, 2012

Ohwow
937 North La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA
90069

oh-wow.com