All Events - art ltd. magazine

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Stremmel Gallery – John Randall Nelson

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, February 11, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, Stremmel Gallery will host an opening reception for the quilts of Gee’s Bend and artist John Randall Nelson, American Curios.

Praised by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the abstract quilts from the tiny, isolated African-American community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, prompted a rethinking of commonly accepted artistic categories. Throughout much of the twentieth century, making quilts was considered a domestic responsibility for the African-American women in Gee’s Bend, an area of Rehoboth and Boykin, Alabama. As young girls, many of the women trained or apprenticed in their craft with their mothers, female relatives, or friends. The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. In 1937 and '38, the federal government commissioned two series of photographs of Gee's Bend. The images have since become some of the most famous images of Depression-era American life. This exhibition of the Gee’s Bend quilts is in correlation with the exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, which will be on display February 6- April 11, 2010.
Living in Tempe Arizona, John Randall Nelson has synthesized his illustration and sculptural experience into a unique body of work that combines painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and text. He is known for taking simple, yet bold, instantly recognized images of everyday symbols that function like words in a sentence. By manipulating the relationship between form and symbolism, Nelson encourages viewers to create connections, to assert their own ideas and interpretations. He emphasizes primitive and simplified images, exploring the art historical styles of imagism, tribal and folk art.

On Thursday, February 11, 2010, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the public is invited to the opening reception to view the work of John Randall Nelson and the Gee’s Bend quilts.  This exhibition will continue through March 13.  Stremmel Gallery is located at 1400 S. Virginia Street.  Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm, and Saturday from 10 am to 3 pm.
For more information, contact Stremmel Gallery at 775-786-0558 or www.stremmelgallery.com.

HOURS: Monday to Friday: 9am - 5:30pm
Saturday: 10am - 3pm
Gallery closed Sundays and holidays.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Emily Amy Gallery – The Feminine in Abstract Painting

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

February 12 - March 19, 2010

The Feminine in Abstract Painting: New works by Cora Cohen, Melanie Parke, Kiki Slaughter, and Margie Stewart  

Although the 'feminine' can no longer be defined as a strictly female trait, artwork is often seen as inherently feminine or masculine in nature.  By delving into the oeuvres of four female abstract painters from different regions, backgrounds, and generations the notion of the 'feminine' will be simultaneously challenged and embraced.  By exploring the style and context of each artists' work in relation to qualities that are often associated with femininity (such as sensuality and sensitivity) the consideration of a 'feminine' in abstract painting will manifest itself.

Tuesday through Friday 10-6, Saturday 11-5, and Sundays and Mondays by appointment

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Jack Rutberg Fine Arts – Reuben Nakian: Sculpture & Works on Paper

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

REUBEN NAKIAN: SCULPTURE & WORKS ON PAPER
January 16 - March 20, 2010

Los Angeles, CA – Among America’s most pioneering, and yet, enigmatic sculptors of the 20th Century is Reuben Nakian, whose works will be the subject of an exhibition at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, located at 357 N. La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. The exhibition opens January 16, with a reception from 5:00 till 8:00 p.m. and extends through March 20.

“Reuben Nakian – Sculpture and Works on Paper,” will feature nearly 50 works – some on loan from museum and private collections – including 30 sculptures plus select original prints and drawings. The exhibition spans work ranging from his provocative 1943 portrait of Marcel Duchamp - when Nakian took a decidedly independent stylistic shift - to Nakian’s iconic sculptures and drawings inspired by Greek mythology.

Reuben Nakian was born in 1897 in College Point, New York, (the fifth child of Armenian immigrants).  From 1916 to 1919, he apprenticed to the noted sculptor, Paul Manship in New York, along with Gaston Lachaise.  Nakian and Lachaise established their own studio from 1920 to 1922.  In 1922, with a stipend from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Nakian established his own studio.  Nakian’s early works of the 1920s and 30s were mainly of exotic animals sculpted in a sensually smooth manner typical of the era.

In the 1920s and 30s, Nakian received considerable recognition with numerous exhibitions in New York, including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Downtown Gallery and Wildenstein Gallery, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran in Washington D.C.  In 1926 he met Brancusi and assisted him in installing his first one-man exhibition in the U.S. 

In the mid 1930s, Nakian met the painter Arshile Gorky (and through him Willem de Kooning), who encouraged him to seek greater expression through abstraction. Nakian - already inspired by Picasso, and some of the European avant gardes, as was Gorky - sought to further his own expressive possibilities and pursued a course of modeling the figure with unprecedented freedom, atypical in American sculpture.  Indeed, Nakian’s unique style in sculpture anticipated artists such as Willem de Kooning’s work by more than two decades. Nakian’s immersion in Greek mythology captured his interest and served as the primary inspiration of his subject matter for the duration of his career, through the mid 1980s.

In mythology, Nakian found a universe of reflection and metaphor. Epic themes of struggle and sensuality are depicted in monumental form.  Nakian’s modeling, whether in large or intimate scale, expresses power and yet retains a tenderness and even good-natured joy; a balance nearly unfathomable for sculpture so raw and abstract in style.  In this exhibition works, such as “Salome” and “Europa and the Bull,” dating from the mid 1940s, belie their small scale of less than 9 inches in height, as they evoke a monumental presence with remarkable nuance.

Exhibitions of Reuben Nakian have been presented by major museums internationally.  Among them are the exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. In 1966, he was afforded a solo exhibition organized by Frank O’Hara at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Nakian represented America in the 1968 Venice Biennale.

Reuben Nakian’s works are included in the permanent collections of major museums throughout the world including the Albright Knox, Buffalo, N.Y.; Art Institute of Chicago; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Cleveland Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, UCLA Sculpture Garden; Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; High Museum, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; National Museum of American Art, National Portrait Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE; Stamford Museum, CT; Walker Art Center/Minneapolis Sculpture Garden; Solomon Guggenheim Museum, N.Y. and Whitney Museum of Art, N.Y.

The Smithsonian Institution produced a documentary on the life and work of Reuben Nakian in 1985 entitled “Reuben Nakian: Apprentice to the Gods”.

“Reuben Nakian: Sculpture & Works on Paper” opens on January 16 at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts located at 357 North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. The exhibition extends through March 20.  Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.  For further information phone: 323 938-5222 or email jrutberg@jackrutbergfinearts.com

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Fallbrook Art Center – World of Watercolor

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

John Adams/Pacific Morning

The Fallbrook Art Center will exhibit the World of Watercolor: Inaugural Signature American Watercolor Exhibition and the National Watercolor Society Travel Exhibition from February 7, 2010 to March 28, 2010. The exhibit will feature 59 paintings by the finest water media artists working today.

Invitational Opening Reception for FAC Members at the Premier Level and above on February 6 from 5-7pm.

The exhibition continues daily February 7—March 28, 2010, Mon-Sat 10am-4pm | Sun 12-3pm.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Mingei International Museum – Heroes & Artisans

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

HEROES AND ARTISANS | Feb 28, 2010 | Jan 02, 2011

Curator: Khery Camara Thiam and Cynthia Saucedo Villalobos

¡VIVA MÉXICO! — Heroes and Artisans, opening Sunday, February 28 at Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, celebrates the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence (1810), the 100th of the Mexican revolution (1910) and the folk art that colorfully and vitally expresses the nation’s spirit. Just as the heroes of independence and the revolution were great artisans in crafting the nation’s constitution, laws and institutions, so are its many artisans also cultural heroes, vibrantly perpetuating Mexico’s historical memory and its distinctive, exuberant and vital artistic tradition.

Presented in collaboration with Centro Cultural Tijuana and the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, the exhibition continues through January 2, 2011.

Board Huichol 'Birds', Yarn and Campeche bee's wax on wood, Mexico, Nayarit

Featuring works drawn from Mexico’s federal patrimony and from Mingei International Museum’s collection, ¡VIVA MÉXICO! — Heroes and Artisans reveals the vibrant creativity, imagination and artistic sensibility of Mexico through its folk art and introduces us to key events and people that shaped Mexico’s history and culture. Included in the 105 objects on loan from Mexico is a set of glazed and painted plates created in 1985 for the 175th anniversary of independence and the 75th anniversary of the revolution that commemorate the national heroes of these historic events. Among other exceptional objects in the exhibition is a monumental (more than six feet tall) abundantly ornamented, painted clay tree of life.

Organized around the three themes of SEARCH FOR IDENTITY, DAILY LIFE and RELIGION AND FESTIVITY, works in the exhibition express Mexico’s cultural diversity and are grouped as Independence, Revolution, The National Shield, The Sacred and Profane, Trees of Life, Pottery Vessels, Skeletons and Masks.de estos acontecimientos históricos. Entre otros excepcionales objetos de la exhibición se encuentra un monumental árbol de la vida (de más de seis pies de altura), hecho de barro, abundantemente ornamentado y pintado.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art – The Annual Monotype Marathon Print Exhibition

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Monotype Marathon
Annual Print Exhibition & Auction

Preparations are underway at The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) for the gallery’s annual Monotype Marathon – a print exhibition and fundraising event that features more than 100 original works on paper created by some of the Bay Area’s finest printmakers. The exhibition runs from March 6th through March 27th at the ICA and culminates with a silent auction fundraising event on the evening of Saturday, March 27th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Friday, March 5th from 6pm – 8pm, preceding the monthly South First Friday Gallery Walk.

A Talking Art program featuring a discussion with printmaker Joseph Goldyne will be held on Thursday, March 11 from 7 – 9pm at the ICA.

The 2010 Monotype Marathon event begins with an intensive weekend of art making by more than seventy-five professional artists in printmaking studios throughout the Bay Area. These artists are invited by the ICA to produce a number of monotypes during the marathon printmaking weekend event held in January. The ICA selects the best work produced by each of the artists to showcase in the exhibition and to offer for sale in the silent auction. Proceeds raised from the auction go toward the ICA’s exhibitions and educational programs.

The ICA seeks support for the Monotype Marathon from its members and from the community by selling sponsorships of $$300 that enable artists to participate in the printmaking workshops. Each $$300 sponsorship donation serves as the opening bid on any of the works in the auction. All Monotype Marathon sponsors are guaranteed to receive a unique work on paper from the auction.
Sponsorships are on sale now. Contact the ICA by phone (408.283.8155) or email (info@sjica.org) to purchase sponsorships.

Members of the public are also invited and encouraged to learn about printmaking by creating their own monotypes at one of the novice printmaking workshops being held on Saturday, March 20th and Sunday, March 21st from 10am to 2pm at the ICA Print Center. The workshop fee is $$250 per person and includes all materials and lunch. Space is limited to eight participants. Call the ICA at 408-283-8155 to register.

The monotype is a one-of-a-kind work on paper. It is a painterly form of printmaking requiring ink, a surface on which to print, paper and a press. The artist uses a variety of tools to apply the ink and sometimes adds collage, transfers, fabric and other materials.

The ICA Print Center is a collaborative fine art printmaking studio located in the ICA. The full-service facility offers educational programming, workshops, and production facilities to novice and experienced artists. The studio is managed by an on-site Master Printer and accommodates up to six artists. The 2010 Workshop and Michele J. Scott Open Access Program Schedules are available online at www.sjica.org.

Gallery Hours
Tue - Fri: 10 AM – 5 PM
Saturday: Noon – 5 PM
Sunday & Monday: Closed

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Paul Scott Gallery - Larisa Aukon: 'Short Stories'

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

sacred mountain

New works in oil by painter Larisa Aukon

Come see why so many collectors are falling in love of with the colorist works of Larisa Aukon. The Latvian native, who now resides in Flagstaff, continues to develop her unique style of painting landscapes and florals.

Aukon's color palettes are deep, richly-mixed and harmonious while her compositions are balanced and narrative.

Works of all sizes will be on exhibit.

HOURS: Mon-Sat 10-5:30, Thurs 10-9

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Joseph Bellows Gallery – Maggie Taylor: Selections from Almost Alice...and more

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present
Maggie Taylor: Selections from Almost Alice…and more.
The exhibition will feature selections from Taylor’s newest series Almost Alice as well as other new work.
It will be on view from February 20 – April 3, 2010.
An opening reception will be held on Saturday, February 20th  (5-8 pm).

Since 1996, after more than 10 years as a still-life photographer, digital artist Maggie Taylor has used a flatbed scanner instead of a traditional camera as her primary image-making tool. To begin her process, Taylor scours flea markets and the internet for antique photographs, toys and other objects, which she feels have a story to tell.  Taylor then scans each element into her computer separately and begins to layer and arrange them along with her drawings and small digital photographs. Using a computer, Taylor is able to play with these layers the same way that she worked with objects in her studio for a still life photograph. Although her images are not traditional photographs, she thinks of her scanner as a light-sensitive recording device she uses to sample the world around her.

Taylor rarely photographs contemporary people, preferring instead nineteenth-century images of unknown people.  She is drawn to the dream-like and mysterious aspects of their clothing and expressions as well as their likely attitude toward being photographed in that era – that a trip to a photographer’s studio was an important occasion involving long exposure times, contraptions to help the subject hold still, and artificial backdrops representing nature and architecture.

After reading Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the first time in many years, Taylor decided to create a series of images to accompany the original text. The three-year project was completed in early 2008 and includes 45 images illustrating Taylor’s interpretation of characters and episodes in the classic tale.  Each of Taylor’s Alices is a different Victorian girl; Alice as “every girl.” Through the use of modern technology, Taylor is able to fuse a time-honored piece of literature with found images and her own imagination.  The resulting images are in themselves an adventure in “Wonderland”.

Maggie Taylor received her BA in philosophy from Yale University and her MFA in photography from the University of Florida. Her work is featured in Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams (Peachpit Press, 2005), Solutions Beginning with A (Modernbook Editions, 2007), and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Modernbook Editions, 2008). Taylor’s images are in numerous public and private collections including Princeton University Art Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Museum of Photography, Seoul. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

HOURS
Tuesday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Shoshana Wayne Gallery: Oliver Michaels: Museum Postcards

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

OLIVER MICHAELS
Museum Postcards
March 6th – April 3rd, 2010
Opening reception: March 6th, 5-7pm

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased present its second solo exhibition of new work by Oliver Michaels.  This new show takes the form of an installation of seven new sculptures, each structure acting as a stage for the projected videos.  These videos animate images of sculptures taken from museum postcards so it appears the figures are talking. An act that simultaneously reveres, abstracts and defaces the chosen works, he hijacks the objects’ forms to create his own theatrical appropriations.
 
The scripts for the sculptures’ voices are composites of fragments taken from sourced texts that form into disordered aggregates.  In Lover’s, a black bronze bust of Lincoln asserts a monologue composed of hundreds of descriptions of objects, a male version of Gertrude Steins' Tender Buttons creating a perpetual procession of descriptive statements. In ‘Something Else Out There’, a small figurine gives endless directions that take the viewer on a peripatetic conceptual journey through ideas of contemporary place.  The resulting dichotomy between the object and the conjured images traverses the line between figure and landscape.
 In Chorus Line, we are presented with four projections of white marble busts that resemble a religious ceremony or Greek chorus. Their dialogue is a made up of texts that are invested in the melancholic: literature ranging from the poems of the Graveyard School to horror writing by unknown authors. Their interaction plays out as a sermon we can only partially follow, centered-around the story of a torturous spiritual voyage of enlightenment. The theatrical am-dram performances give the sculptures a perverse fallibility and a political polemic.   Joe’s Farewell presents a man in an ornament that depicts the scene of a young couple at a hearth.  One partner is stuck engaging in an over-personal word association in front of his inert stoneware counterpart.  Like Frankenstein’s monster, the subjects seem to have suffered a loss of mental faculties in their reincarnation, and are now engaged in their own detailed maniacal transactions.  And within this, there is an unseemly comedy of inappropriate behavior.  Although the subjects in Michaels' work present themselves with a type of authority, they are broken and impossibly fragile.   It is in this defectiveness that the works seem to hold an odd insight or promote the possibility for compassion.  Dark and dry and ever questioning, these new videos show people defiant and vulnerable...

Oliver Michaels lives and works in New York.  He received his BA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, London.  His work has been shown at P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amsterdam, the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, France and the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain to name a few.  In 2005 Michaels’ work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Herzilya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel.  Michael’s videos are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld Germany.

For more information please contact Kerry O’Bryan at (310) 453-7535

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Hang Art – Michael Shankman: Dream Home

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dream Home
a solo exhibition by Michael Shankman
March 1 - 15, 2010
Opening Reception Thursday March 4, 2010 6-8pm

With his recent paintings, Michael Shankman reveals interiors and exteriors of collapsing homesteads from suburban areas of Colorado, the area where he grew up. He contrasts imagery of contemporary dwellings built adjacent to century old homes. Shards of color and structural elements are depicted in large, explosive compositions that stand in comparison to his careful and delicate renderings of small clusters of suburbia.

The upcoming solo exhibition by Shankman, Dream Home, marks the continuation of an ongoing theme within his work: using the lens of architecture to express human values. Where his paintings once commented on fears of what is to come, this new series embodies the concept of ambition and the American dream. Centuries ago people migrated to this uninhabited frontier to build new lives, full of promise. Shankman sees similarities in the present-day migration of hopeful newcomers who continue to make their way to this mountain region, to build their homes among the skeletal remains of their predecessors’ dreams. The artist defines with paint brushes and pigments the inescapable reality that we have come no closer to finding Utopia in the American West.

Shankman's process varies, but most of these images were inspired directly by places along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, where mining attracted a wave of ambitious settlers in the mid- to late-1800s.  Abandoned homesteads dot the open space and are intrinsic to the landscape. Using photographs and sketches as starting points, Shankman translates this realistic imagery into a more interpretive aesthetic of decay and abandonment.

The suburban element follows a similar process of interpretive representation. The population of the Front Range has nearly doubled in twenty years, altering the landscape dramatically.  Where once there was open space and farmland, suburban sprawl now extends to the horizon. Shankman's small, square, modular panels mimic the standardization of newly developed enclaves, their modesty a reflection of their fragility.

The artist reception for Dream Home will be held First Thursday, March 4 from 6-8pm at HANG ART. This event is free and open to the public.

HANG ART is located at 567 Sutter Street, between Mason and Powell Streets.  Gallery hours are Monday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm and Sunday from 12pm to 5pm.  For further information or high resolution images, please call 415 434 4264.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Riverside City College – Hugh Kretschmer: Photographic Works

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Artist Reception
Thursday, March 4th 6-8:30 pm

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - LewAllen Galleries – Jimi Gleason: Linked by Light

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present Jimi Gleason: Linked by Light. Emphasizing seductive surfaces, nontraditional materials, and the luminescent use of color to catalyze close inspection of the mechanics of perception, the artist’s works qualify him as one of the most important practitioners of California “Finish Fetish” aesthetics. On view from February 19 through March 21, 2010, Gleason’s upcoming exhibition at LewAllen Galleries’s Railyard venue will present new works that merge the material and ethereal to evolve the methodologies of West Coast minimalism.

The artist’s profoundly meditative paintings instill contemporary abstraction with the dramatic glimmer of Cibachrome photography and the beautifully distorted edges of Polaroid film by means of a layering procedure that derives from printmaking techniques. Evidencingrigorous artistic discipline and a dedication to taking risks with both processes and materials, Gleason drags numerous gossamer layers of pearlescent acrylic paints down and across his canvases with hand-fabricated tools. Nearing the edges, he allows the paint to pool or smear, generating an emulsive effect that grounds his works in physical space while their highly atmospheric centers appear nearly transparent. Highly reactive to transient light effects and modifications in viewing position, the resulting paintings invite spectatorial involvement to suggest the infinitely broad experiential possibilities of art.

Born in Newport Beach, California, Gleason received his BA from the UC Berkeley in 1985. He then studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York City, where he worked as a photo assistant and photo technician. Returning to California, Gleason was employed in the studio of Ed Moses for nearly seven years. Synergizing the disparate technical and compositional principles developed during his exposure to printmaking, photography, and mixed media painting, Gleason is now the subject of considerable curatorial and critical applause. Exhibited in significant public institutions including the Armand Hammer Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum, the artist’s works are actively collected by a growing number of major public and private collections internationally.

HOURS Mon-Sat, 10-6; Sunday by appointment

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Haines Gallery – Xing Danwen: A Personal Diary

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ma Liuming, Performance 9 from A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-garde Art in 1990s, 1994  C-Print  40 x 60 inches / 27 x 40 inches  Edition of 10

It is an honor and a privilege to announce our upcoming exhibition with contemporary Chinese photographer Xing Danwen. In her first US solo exhibition of this oeuvre, Xing presents a portion of her series A Personal Diary, which chronicles the rise of the avant-garde and the emergence of performance art in Beijing’s East Village artist community in the 1990s. This important body of work by one of China’s most influential female artists is just now being introduced for public exhibition. Over the past decade, Chinese artists have received significant recognition, much of which has been market-driven. A Personal Diary provides insight into an under-recognized yet seminal moment in China’s recent past, providing a much-needed scholarly approach to the Country’s rich history of contemporary art. 

The 1990’s were a time period marked by greater freedom of expression for artists in China, creating a forum for the development and growth of new ideas. Xing herself was one of the few Chinese artists in the late 80s and 90s who was exploring the boundaries of photography and performance. She writes: “It was the transition for China from a traditional art scene to a more international presence. In the early 1990s many visual artists who worked as painters suddenly took off their clothes, performing naked in public; musicians from traditional and folk music backgrounds brought Rock and Jazz into many underground bars. They brought revolution to the tradition and looked for more avant-garde forms of art. ”

As a photographer, Xing documented the performance art and happenings of such artists as Zhang Huan, Xu Bing, Wang Jin, Song Dong, Rong Rong, Ma Liuming, and Fang Lijun. These artists along with Xing would soon become important figures both within China’s art scene and the art world at large.  A Personal Diary extends the importance of their work during this radical underground moment in Beijing and provides a basis for the expansion and growth of the current art movement in China.

Xing Danwen was born in Xi’an, China and attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1989 – 1992. In 1998, she temporarily moved to New York with a grant and fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council and earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts.  She has since expanded her practice to include mixed media, video and multi-media installations.  She has exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the International Center for Photography, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the First Yokohama Triennale and the Sydney Biennale of 2004.

A feature on the artist will appear in the February issue of Art in America with an article by Richard Vine. Xing Danwen will also be speaking at San Francisco Camerawork on the evening of March 2nd. 

HOURS  TU>FR 10:30AM - 5:30PM / SA 10:30AM - 5:00PM

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Haines Gallery – Alan Rath: Handful

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Reception with the artist: Thursday, March 4, 2010 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Haines Gallery is pleased to present Alan Rath’s Handful, on view in the gallery’s project room.  In this recent work, the MIT-educated sculptor continues his captivating and often humorous investigation into the relationship between humans and technology.

One of three works on view, the title piece, Handful, employs a single hand as its subject matter.  After photographing a hand from all angles, Rath used sophisticated programming to digitally link these still images into lively animations. Featured on three LCD screens, the images change significantly, never repeating.  Heat-seeking sensors on all three of the exhibited works cause them to “awaken” to the presence of viewers, allowing for interactivity that lends to the sense that the work is somehow alive. Rath’s works often produce this anthropomorphic effect; In his Monocle and Eye works, two of which are on view, wandering eyes animate mechanical structures; His Running Man series features digitally generated runners, endlessly jogging in place within jar-like glass sculptures or frames.  Many of these works are programmed to change over time according to complex directives (some evolve over 50 years).  Despite the complex programming and engineering that make up his works, Rath’s sculptures have become increasingly minimal in sensibility, and continue to be beautifully handcrafted. 

Alan Rath was born in 1959 in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.  Rath moved to the Bay Area in 1984, working as an engineer with Oakland artist Milton Komisar.  His own digital video sculptures and his subsequent contributions to the fields of contemporary sculpture and new media have received significant acknowledgement internationally.  His work is held in several major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hara Museum in Tokyo.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Robert Tat Gallery – Overlooked: a photography exhibit

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Overlooked:
A group of exceptional photographs from the Gallery’s collection deserving a second look.
                                                                                   
Tuesday – Saturday   11 – 5:30  & by appointment
Open the first Thursday of the month until 7:30 PM

Robert Tat Gallery presents a selection of photographs, all of which possess a quality of excellence that might not be easily noticed or appreciated.
 
There are photographs that, at first glance, may be easily overlooked. And yet, with further consideration, they prove to be truly remarkable and beautiful images. It is just such photographs that comprise the eclectic exhibition currently on view at Robert Tat Gallery, San Francisco. Some of the prints are by well-known photographers, others by lesser-known artists or even an unknown photographer. Authorship was not a consideration in selecting the images for the exhibition.
 

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Happy – William Conger and Michael Blasi

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Friday February 5 - Sunday March 28, 2010

Opening Reception:
Friday, February 5, 6-10 pm

HAPPY is pleased to present the renowned Chicago artist William Conger in his first-ever Los Angeles solo exhibition.  The esteemed artist will offer intimate gouache works that further investigate his trademark abstract style.  In a career that spans over 50 years, Conger continues to incorporate an eclectic vocabulary that is both hard-edged and biomorphic, static and yet sensual.  Electric snapshots that upon initial inspection are quite abstract slowly morph into dense landscapes gone slightly awry. These bravura works seem at home in Los Angeles speaking to our traffic-ridden and stress-polluted lives; yet Conger quietly reminds us how to cope. We are treated to his vision and to a technique that conveys how the most rich and delicious imagery can be profoundly touching. Conger’s career confirms a life of serious investigation based on the pure act of creating. William Conger lives and works in Chicago, is professor emeritus at Northwestern University, and is a recipient of both the Illinois Arts Council Grant (2008) and a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2008-09).  Recent one person exhibitions include a 1958-2008 retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center and Roy Boyd Gallery, Chicago in 2009.  His works are in major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois State Museum, Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Reader’s Digest Collection, NY, Portland Museum, Portland, OR, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS, IBM Corporation, Atlanta, GA and numerous other public and private collections.  Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the Union League Club of Chicago and group exhibitions at the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL, Printworks Gallery, Chicago, IL and the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN.  He is represented in Chicago by Roy Boyd Gallery.  www.williamconger.com

 

In our project room we feature recent sculpture by Michael Blasi.  Blasi’s bulbous sculptures, based on scholar’s rocks or “suiseki”, start from the artist’s 2 dimensional doodles and grow into hyper-active meditation objects.  Blasi’s generous use of color envelopes his delicately hand-crafted objects that hang freely or sit, firmly planted.  They are tenderly stoic, romantic laments that gently celebrate life and love while confronting and comforting the viewer in their sublime eccentricity.  Blasi received his BFA from Purchase College, State University of New York and participated in the Glasgow School of Art Student Exchange Program. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently teaches art for the LAUSD. www.michaelblasi.com

Hours are Mon - Sat 11-7, Sun 12-6.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum – Sanford Biggers & Melanie Schiff

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Exhibition Opening:   3.06.2010   7-9 p
Sanford Biggers: Moon Medicine
and Bloom Projects: Melanie Schiff, Stones

Sanford Biggers  Scene  2009  Digital C-print  30' x 40'

Sanford Biggers: Moon Medicine

Sanford Biggers: Moon Medicine is a major monographic exhibition featuring one of the most significant African American artists of this generation. Multi-disciplinary in scope, the exhibition comprises new and old sculpture, video, installation, a newly commissioned public performance, and an exhibition catalog. Biggers’ work is renowned for its meditative rigor and improvisatory edge, which is inspired by the hybridity and mixtures of diverse cultures and by his experiences living throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. The artist is interested in the philosophical and worship practices of Buddhism; Indo-European religious practices of Voodoo, Santeria, and Candomble in indigenous populations; and African American popular culture. 

This exhibition has been made possible in part by the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Susan E. Bower, Barry and Jill Kitnick, Jon and Lillian Lovelace, Mike Healy and Tim Walsh, and Kimberly Hahn and James Van Arsdale of Myopia Design. Special thanks to Wayne McCall and Associates, Santa Barbara, CA.

Melanie Schiff  Whitesnake   2008
Archival inkjet mounted and framed, 50' x 60'

Bloom Projects: Melanie Schiff, Stones

Utilizing formal elements such as the still life and the self-portrait, Melanie Schiff’s photographs address quiet moments wavering on the edge of a constructed poetic narrative and an instant found by chance. Multiple themes and symbols recur throughout her work, such as her playful use of light, landscape, the body, pop culture, and ideas of spirituality and meditation. This exhibition has been made possible in part by the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to Brush & Associates, Santa Barbara, CA and Wayne McCall and Associates, Santa Barbara, CA.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - Frederick Weisman Museum of Art – Mercedes Matter: A Retrospective

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first retrospective exhibition of paintings by Mercedes Matter, a key figure in the New York City avant-garde of the 1940s and '50s. Her extraordinary life and art spanned the 20th century and involved key movements, from early American modernism of the Stieglitz circle to European cubism to abstract expressionism. Her gestural paintings stand as fascinating examples of the revolutionary modern art movement known as the New York School.

When the Matter retrospective was recently shown at Baruch College in Manhattan, the Wall Street Journal declared it 'one of the best New York painting exhibitions' and said it gives us 'the monumental achievement of a monumental, but sadly overlooked, artist.'

Mercedes Matter: A Retrospective Exhibition features over 50 oil paintings and drawings created between 1921 and 1985. These works are accompanied by photographs, letters, and other ephemera by close friends such as Pollock, Hofmann, and Guston, offering a glimpse into her fascinating life.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - George Billis Gallery LA– Bonita Helmer

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Unseen Structure: Paintings 2000-2010

Bonita Helmer: The Unseen Structure opens Saturday, February 20, 2010 with an artist reception on Saturday, February 27th from 5 to 8pm. The survey of Helmer's work features selected paintings from the last ten years. The exhibition continues through April 10, 2010.

'Hardly a newcomer, Bonita Helmer has been working seriously since the 1980s when, in L.A.'s lively Neo-Exp atmosphere, she exhibited finely tooled gestural works that have become her primary creative interest.

Deeply schooled in everything from classical drawing to Zen Buddhism, from Kabbalah and New Physics to Jungian analysis, Helmer has exhibited nationally and internationally, worked in Paris and taught the exigencies of pigment and color, of finding an inner symbolic voice to countless college students. The artist numbers among her formative influences respected local painters and international luminaries like Francois Gilot who (though remembered by pop culture as the sole survivor of Picasso) is herself a rigorously trained painter and the artist's friend and peer.

Helmer indeed proves that with incredibly few abstract elements - texture, hue, chroma, edge, expanse--she can put us in mind of extremely complex ideas, ideas about matter and void, about the ineffable interchange between these. These are ideas/perceptions at the core our daily awareness of reality, basic to our notions of horizon, to our bodily awareness of scale, gravity, place and time.'                                                            –Marlena Doktorczyk-Donahue

Raised in Los Angeles, Helmer received her BA in Painting from UCLA in 1976 and did graduate work at Otis College of Art and Design and studied with Francois Gilot.Â Helmer currently teaches at Otis and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Espace Bateau Lavoir in Paris, Track 16, (2004), and The Orange County Museum of Art (1984). Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, and The California Art Review among others.Â She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Tuesday, 09 March, 2010 - George Lawson Gallery – Ward Schumaker & Susan Mikula

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

in the room for painting
WARD SCHUMAKER
fashion and logic: recent paintings

For the 15th show in the room for paper we are introducing the painting of San Francisco artist Ward Schumaker. Schumaker’s work has an agile spine, springing from an ever-evolving center of art historical balance. His swirling scumble recalls Cy Twombly, and his deft approach to gesture the painting of the French Tachist Georges Mathieu. Something in his graphic equivalent of skin grafting is reminiscent of the collage elements in Julian Schnabel’s work, and the recurrent, autobiographical references in Jasper Johns’ imagery. Without warning Schumaker will often introduce texts and iconic sketches into his abstract expressionist dust devils, calling on an ensemble cast of welter weight boxers, stylized fairies, abstract monkeys and kneeling sirens named Betty. He can treat painting like a garage sale and still have it come across as something pure and untainted. He does this with his touch and with his spirit and with an ingrained familiarity wit h the medium born of longstanding, diligent practice. He melds these disparate elements without losing the paint in it all because the paint is already in his marrow. Why juggle an ironing board, a tire iron and a stray catĞ Because you can, just as you can celebrate the agility of the human spirit, steeped in tradition and poised for discovery at every turn.

in the room for paper
SUSAN MIKULA
american device: recent photographs

The 15th exhibition in the room for paper showcases recent photographs by Susan Mikula, whose work was introduced in the gallery last September in the Transfocus group show. Mikula lives and works in New York and Western Massachusetts with her partner, political commentator Rachel Maddow. The pieces for this series, entitled American Device, were all photographed in 2009 at locations along the Port of Long Beach in California and the industrial ocean front from New Orleans to Galveston, particularly the Bolivar Peninsula. They were shot with a vintage Polaroid SX-70 using outdated film. Mikula's approach shares formal concerns with painters in the gallery in that she pays particular attention to the physicality and scale of her supports, and her use of an almost impressionistic focus emphasizes color and light. The softening of Mikula’s industrial landscape is reminiscent of Monet's study of the Rouen Cathedral. Her consideration of her picture as an object, however, aligns her with the dialogue amongst painters in the wake of Robert Ryman's white paintings. Her imagery is evocative, calling up intangible feelings and associations, yet her means are disciplined, drawing upon the full range of her photographic medium to assert a concrete presence.