THE ART OF MONO-HA – REQUIEM FOR THE SUN

Posted on 2012-03-05

Mono-ha’s primary tenet explores the encounter between natural and industrial objects, such as glass, stones, steel plates, wood, cotton, light bulbs, leather, oil, wire and Japanese paper, in and of themselves arranged directly on the floor or in an outdoor field. Evident in their works is a tendency based not on the art historical recuperation of objects, but on maintaining an affective relationship between works and our surrounding environment. That is, the works operate as a process of perceiving a perpetually passing present that opens the materiality of the work beyond what is simply seen. These practices are linked to the cultural milieu of process and post-minimalist art apparent on an international level during the 1960s and 1970s. What distinguishes their work is the refined technique of repetition as a studied production of difference developed over time in each artist’s practice.

The exhibition will show select key installations, works on paper, and photographs that unveil resonant concepts and artistic methods relative to the exhibition. Some themes include perceiving works as actions or events, experiments in topology and spatial continuity, visceral materiality, and the contingency of the body. While the art of Mono-ha has been the subject of exhibitions in Asia and Europe, it is virtually unknown in North America. Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha will provide the audience with a critical introduction to this extremely significant work.

Opposite – Phase-Mother Earth, 1968

Exhibition runs through to April 14th, 2012

Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.blumandpoe.com

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YVONNE ROEB

Posted on 2012-03-05

The sculptor assimilates collective images from everyday life, cultural history, mysticism, religion and dream in a surreal way. She deals with first questions and last things and often makes references to the history of art. In her works one will always meet persecuted, transformed, morphological beings or bodies trying to merge together but who at the same time are stuck in an inner struggle or even exert subtle aggression.Only the usability and the form allow conclusions regarding the history. The consensus of the essential has to be elaborated by the viewer. The panel looks like it has been made centuries ago, but obviously it was never finished or the images have vanished with years passing by. The plates become projection screens for the imagination of the viewer. But at the same time they emphasize their claim for autonomy.

Opposite – Next I noticed it was spring, 2011

Exhibition runs through to April 14th, 2012

Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf
Hanauer Landstrasse 136
60314 Frankfurt
Germany

www.wilmatolksdorf.de

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JOHN CECIL STEPHENSON

Posted on 2012-02-27

Stephenson was one of the core modernists of the 1930’s; indeed Herbert Read said that “he was one of the earliest artists in this country to develop a completely abstract style”.
‘Pioneer of Abstraction’ will be a survey of John Cecil Stephenson’s work between 1933 and 1939 covering his path from figurative painting to abstraction.

Born in Bishop Auckland in 1889 he won a scholarship to Leeds School of Art and later attended the Royal College of Art in London. On graduating he moved to Mall Studios, Hampstead where his neighbours and immediate circle included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo, Henry Moore and the art critic Herbert Read.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of lectures exploring subjects including Constructivism, Modernism and British Art in the interwar period, by art historians, curators and academics.

Opposite – Painting II, 1937

Exhibition runs through to April 29th, 2012

DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery
Aykley Heads
Durham
DH1 5TU

county.durham.gov.uk

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SAM FALLS

Posted on 2012-02-27

“The work in this show is involved with my interest in representing time, its persistence and the signs of life present in the inanimate. Using photographic processes combined with sculptural and painterly material, I’m trying to give a feeling to constant variables – like light and weather – as well as our relative experiences of time.

The house pictures in this show were taken in Joshua Tree, California on film. They serve at once as documentation of reciprocal artworks of mine in the making, as well as unique pieces themselves. I put large colored sheets of fabric along the interior walls of these burnt out houses to create a different, but no less honest, image of the house. The fabric was left up to fade where it was exposed to the sun by missing windows and doors from the overall architecture, creating an imprint via light on the fabric, not so different from a photogram. The film documentation of these altered houses was scanned into the computer, and I used the color-picker in Photoshop to choose the color of the fabric and mimic its geometry over the image. I printed the pictures and took samples of the Photoshop-produced colors to Home Depot where they digitally matched the colors and mixed enamel house paints. Just as Photoshop samples only a part of the color, so does the paint matcher at Home Depot. I then physically painted over the sky of these roofless houses using a roller, so the representation of these places is manipulated but true. I put the color inside the home physically with the fabric, I put that representation on film with light, I put color on top of the picture digitally and then, finally, I physically painted the color on the image: mimicking reality and creating something, perhaps, more in tune. Beyond this, the photograph is not only an image, but also a new object. It is formed over time, rather than captured in an instant.” Sam Falls

Opposite – Untitled (House, Red and Yellow, Joshua Tree, CA), 2012

Exhibition runs through to March 31st, 2012

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
CA 90069

www.mbart.com

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PABLO ALONSO – SOLUTIONS

Posted on 2012-02-27

Pablo Alonso is disclosing a new body of work that moves away from endgame narratives to new paradigms between painting and sculpture with the deconstruction as a starting point that questions the paintings authoritative status as well as the structure and the historical/cultural projection of the image.
Some preliminary works realized in public spaces and based on uncontrolled pictorial experiments through anonymous and collective acts on the streets, reveal a satirically mistrusting point of view of an esthetic attitude for a sociological understanding of art giving shape to this exhibition. In the studio, folding, sanding, polishing, stapling, rolling, spraying, flaming, rubbing are some of the actions that have influenced the paintings increasing corporeal and architectural qualities and generating tensions between autonomous Modernist abstraction and traditional representation in order to subsume both categories in a simultaneous vision of art historical epochs and genres.

Opposite – icoNo, 2008

Exhibition runs from March 3rd to April 21st, 2012

Wendt + Friedmann
Heidestrasse 54
10119 Berlin
Germany

www.wendt-friedmann.com

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PIETRO ROCCASALVA – STRANGE YOUNG NEIGHBOURS

Posted on 2012-02-20

Roccasalva explores the potential for art objects to become active agents of simulacrum, sites where the animate and inanimate worlds undergo profound crossing. Painting serves as the orbital center for a practice that includes sculpture, performance, and video, and that has increasingly come to represent a self-contained universe of poetic narratives and philosophical inquiries.Roccasalva has referred to his paintings as ‘microchips’, devices that organize an ever-expanding network of processes and allusions. Synthesizing compositional strategies drawn from religious iconography, modernist collage, and digital distortion, and skillfully rendered over months and even years, the figures in the paintings are both deeply familiar and impossibly strange. They freeze the gaze and conjure the sense that though artworks can never be fully understood, they are caught with their viewers in an endless feedback loop of exchanged signification.

The Strange Young Neighbours borrows its title from a standalone tale in Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the story, a near-catastrophic drowning plays a key role in uniting a young couple destined to be together since childhood.

Opposite – You Never Look at Me from the Place I See You, 2012

Exhibition runs through to March 24th, 2012

David Kordansky Gallery
3143 S. La Cienega BlvdUnit A
Los Angeles
CA 90016

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

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