TIM GARDNER

Posted on 2021-07-12

Known for his masterful watercolors marking moments in time, Tim Gardner depicts scenes that collectively form a vivid portrait of contemporary life. Drawing primarily on an extensive personal image archive, he uses photography as a point of departure to elucidate the psychological realism of lived experiences.

In his latest works, Gardner continues his exploration of the inherently complex relationship between people and the environment —a dynamic that became more pronounced during the past year as our ability to travel and be outdoors became increasingly formalized, regulated and restricted. In Theater Seats, LA Landfill, Gardner captures the moment after a truck has offloaded a heap of bright red theater seats, a poetic nod to the pandemic’s impact on the performing arts community. Ferrari, Morning Light and In the Garden regard calm, familiar moments in the suburban landscape with rapt attention, ordinary scenes that, through Gardner’s careful consideration of color, light, and composition, are transformed into meditations on an everyday sublime.

Opposite – Great Divide, 2021

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2021

303 Gallery
555 W 21st Street
NY 10011
New York

www.303gallery.com

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SOUFIANE ABABRI – BUNCH OF QUEEQUEG

Posted on 2021-07-12

“Eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of our individual lives. Without doing violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility?”
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1957)

It’s well past midnight at a salty New England inn when Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), is awoken by a strange bedfellow. Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner, is looking for a place to sleep. He’s introduced as an object of horror: candlelight reveals his “tropical tanning” to be a “purplish yellow” coat of Maori tattoos. “This wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me,” Ishmael recalls. “I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.” Melville never tells us what was felt – or indeed, eaten – but, by morning, Ishmael confesses, “You had almost thought I had been his wife.” The two men learn to love each other, in a story that has often been read as a coded tale of gay miscegenation.

Opposite – Bedwork, 2021

Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2021

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd
CA 90048
Los Angeles

www.praz-delavallade.com

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SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY – PNEUMA

Posted on 2021-07-12

The five new paintings – Pneuma (2020), Forgetting the Word (2020), Enigma (2020), Pieta (2021) and Loci (2021) – manifest an abstraction that is at once haptic and optic; their surfaces taut with a connective energy that holds pigment and fine skeins of pencil-work in mesmerising suspension.
The works arise from a meditative practice that takes breath as its medium and conceptual framework. For Houshiary, the physical manifestation of breath is the word. As is the case in each of the paintings the artist has produced over her fortyyear career, at the basis of these works is a web formed from two words, superimposed onto one another and inscribed with focussed repetition. Houshiary uses words to approach something wordless, the interconnectedness of all things.
Houshiary’s process is inherently physical. To produce these finely wrought surfaces and their depths, she must inhabit her canvases. Placing them flat on the floor of her studio, she moves across them, building layers of inscriptions on top of the sediments formed from pouring water mixed with pure pigment. Concentrating on dynamic movement, the mind and body unify.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2021

Lisson Gallery
22 Cork Street
W1S 3NA
London

www.lissongallery.com

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KNOX MARTIN – HOMAGE TO GOYA

Posted on 2021-07-05

Over the course of his seven-decade career, acclaimed artist Knox Martin has engaged with a wide range of artistic movements, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, establishing his own distinct style. On July 8, Hollis Taggart will open an exhibition that explores Martin’s particular affinity toward Francisco Goya and the ways in which that artist has served as an important source of inspiration for Martin since childhood. The exhibition, titled Knox Martin: Homage to Goya, features a selection of drawings from Martin’s series, titled Caprichos, which the artist has been evolving for several decades.

Opposite – Shadow, 2003

Exhibition runs through to August 6th, 2021

Hollis Taggart
521 W 26th Street, 1st Floor
NY 10001
New York

www.hollistaggart.com

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ATELIER DELL’ERRORE – RED LIGHT GOLD LIGHT

Posted on 2021-07-05

“Alarming Red light, blinding gold light. This is how the recent work of Atelier dell’Errore BIG shows itself. A work that arises, as in the past, from the edges of a precipice overlooked by many young people who experience the idea of limit. Atelier dell’Errore leaned on the edge of the precipice and a monstrous multitude emerged from its magmatic bottom. In the span of almost twenty years, they gave it shape, coming to develop a rich and composite language, which includes the sign, but also the word and, more recently, the dramaturgy. From its activity a collection of sprawling animals was born, with terrible names and abnormal dimensions, equipped with jaws, claws and beaks, always ready to attack to protect those who conceived them. An imaginary zoology in which the authors, rather than representing themselves as victims of an existential failure, have chosen to project their anxieties, but also to talk about themselves in their own conscious otherness of unsuitable, intractable, unassimilable creatures: a way to give power to their positions by radically opposing the mere positivity advocated by a society that admits only equal and compliant people. To this day, those deep black recesses continue to express telluric energy. The organisms that erupt are still formless, and equally indomitable; more metamorphic than ever, more incandescent than ever.

Opposite – La Tenda Oracolare, 2021

Exhibition runs through to July 21st, 2021

MASSIMODECARLO
Piazza Belgioioso 2
20121 Milan
Italy

www.massimodecarlo.com

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PAULINE BAZIGNAN – BATAILLE

Posted on 2021-07-05

Rather like a writer facing the blank page, Pauline Bazignan is also haunted by the prospect of leaving her mark on the immaculate surface of a new canvas. If she does indeed take up arms and enter the struggle, it is only so that the meaningful and intimate relationship she has established with her subject can come to life at the heart of this virgin territory. Her approach aims to tame the space and provide it with the lines that will become emotions and, in an almost indescribable manner, express the artist’s soul. Bazignan battles to leave apparent the traces of her dominion which, as the painting advances, become a motif in their own right amidst the recurrent corolla motif embodied by paint runs and the explosion of expressive effervescence that gradually takes over the entire canvas. The artist’s trademark compulsive all-over approach leads to a dense, but paradoxically airy entanglement; each painting is like a palimpsest with successive flows of paint that create one drip and run after another.

Opposite – 4.08.2020-26.02.2021, 2021

Exhibition runs through to July 17th, 2021

Praz-Delavallade
5 rue des Haudriettes
75003
Paris

www.praz-delavallade.com

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