GUY YANAI

Posted on 2020-06-29

Guy Yanai’s paintings are characterized by bold colors, simplified shapes, and a flattened depth of field. In his work, the banal is reduced to geometric segments in a stripping away of references to the tangible world in favor of a visual experience that is more akin to digital imagery—using Google Street view as a reference for a landscape for example. He often chooses everyday objects and spaces as his subjects, flattening and abstracting them in a way that seems removed and objective. Yanai has cited numerous sources of inspiration—from old, modern, and contemporary masters to digital imagery, television and advertisements—and his simplified representations may serve as a way to condense and organize the multitude of data we receive in reference to any person, place, or thing into concise representations with tight compositions.

Opposite – Diana, Princess of Wales, 2020

Exhibition runs through to August 9th, 2020

Praz-Delavallade
5 rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris
France

www.praz-delavallade.com

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MAGALIE GUÉRIN – q p

Posted on 2020-06-29

Magalie Guérin writes:
‘Abstraction seems related to memory somehow; a felt memory as opposed to an image memory perhaps. […] How does abstraction relate to time?’ Answer: through repetition. These works ‘started as twins but ended as distant cousins. Still, same family’. She continues, elsewhere, as follows: ‘In my latest body of work, I’m doing something somewhat similar because I’m repeating marks across multiple canvases. I’ll be working on, let’s say, four paintings simultaneously and doing the exact same painterly mark on all of them.’ Auto-plagiarism, but with a difference. What should we call this? Names and titles are difficult – too abstract. To un-title (be un-titled, un-entitled) is to see ‘properly’, or rather to be seen in its own seeing. So what do we call this? ‘Commensalism’? ‘Chain-painting’? Why not ‘entanglement’ (too trendy?); ‘reciprocal determination’ (too retro?); ‘interpenetration’ (toxic?); or ‘inter-pictures’, ‘chiasmic pictures’, resonance, symbiosis, endosmosis…?

Opposite – Untitled (res 7.1), 2020

Exhibition runs through to August 9th, 2020

Amanda Wilkinson
1st Floor, 18 Brewer Street
W1F 0SH
London

amandawilkinsongallery.com

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DAVID LEGGETT – WHY YOU REALLY MAD?

Posted on 2020-06-22

Why you really mad?, is a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based David Leggett which features paintings and works on paper from the last few years that utilize a comic style to deal with serious subjects like racial injustice and police brutality alongside lighter ones like art history and pop culture.
While he makes his works accessible with colorful depictions of Bart Simpson, Fat Albert, Alfred E. Newman and other somewhat familiar blobby characters coupled with catchy phrases, he does so to get you in. Once there, you will have to face the more difcult issues that are part of every work. The question in the title is Leggett’s, one he poses to anyone who might take ofense at his work.

Opposite – You can do what you wanna do, 2017

Exhibition runs through to July 18th, 2020

Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
CA 90038
Los Angeles

steveturner.la

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JONGSUK YOON – APRIL MAI 사오월

Posted on 2020-06-22

The more you explore Jongsuk Yoon’s paintings, the more you realize that her pictures have grown larger and bolder over the years, while continuing to evade comprehension. Their dry, floating colors and their linear and painterly all-over structure transforms them into diaphanous phenomena that seem briefly to condense, only to dissolve in the next moment into individual markings, lines, fields, and subtle moods of color and form.
The strange, resonating inability to place these pictures can be partially explained by the artist’s biography. Jongsuk Yoon was born in Korea in 1965. Her father ran a gallery for traditional Asian ink painting. She left her home country in 1995, when she was almost 30 years old, to study in Germany, among other places at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf under Fritz Schwegler. For a long time, she has been at home in two worlds, never feeling entirely at home in either. After exploring conceptual ideas in complex knitted pictures at the beginning of her career, she began to focus entirely on drawing and painting. Since that time, her work has been located within a structural inbetween space in which not only line and plane, colors and black and white, as well as abstraction and narrative elements, but more importantly also the traditions of Asian and European landscape painting encounter each other and mingle.

Opposite – Spring, 2020

Exhibition runs through to July 18th, 2020

Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
CA 90038
Los Angeles

steveturner.la

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PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU – BOSSA BOSSA

Posted on 2020-06-22

Bossa Bossa brings a series of recent works to our exhibition space, along with works created in situ, constituting an immersive installation that embodies the work of an artist who defines himself as an explorer. The phrase used in the title means “victory, victory” and refers to a cry of celebration and encouragement shouted by African migrants when they succeed in crossing the fences that separate them from Europe, a cry that is answered and repeated by those who remain on the other side of the barriers.

A self-taught artist, Jean Appolinaire Tayou abandoned law studies to dedicate himself to art and adopted his parents’ first names, giving them a feminine form by adding a final “e” in order to distance himself ironically from the importance given to authorship and the assigning of masculine and feminine roles, a shift that can also be applied to any reductive attempt to interpret specific geographical or cultural origins.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2020

Galería Javier López & Fer Francés
Guecho, 12 B
28023 Madrid
Spain

www.javierlopezferfrances.com

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