Portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a self-described collector of souls who recorded her sitters on canvas through six decades of the 20th century, among them Andy Warhol, Bella Abzug, Allen Ginsberg and Annie Sprinkle. Neel always sought the”authentic”, moving from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem just as the Village was gaining reputation in the art scene. She sacrificed almost everything for her art, delving so far into the psyches of her sitters she would almost lose herself. Yet Neel was also a dedicated mother, raising two sons in the bohemian world she inhabited. Filmmaker Andrew Neel, Alice Neel’s grandson, puts together the pieces ofthe painter’s life using intimate one-on-one interviews with Neel’s surviving family and personal archival video. The documentary explores the artist’s tumultuous biography and the legacy of Alice Neel’s determination to paint her era.
Month: April 2007
John Hodany
JOHN HODANY
“WORKS ON PAPER”
April 27 – May 19, 2007
Opening Reception with the Artist Friday, April 27, 6-9 p.m.
For his first Scandinavian solo exhibition John Hodany shows a series of 5 large-scale works on paper.
In these paintings, John Hodany uses repetition, creating patterns and then breaking them using his own painstaking process of cutting and relocating areas of the painting. This creates a ghost-like impression in which the trace of the image that has been cut and replaced seems to imprint on the background. Time, space, landscape and architecture interact and reiterate. The effect of the broken or inverted patterns brings to mind the way a song by the Velvet Underground can solidly depend on a left-out drum beat.
In his own words John Hodany is interested in “the combination of drawing, painting and sculpture into one complex form”. John Hodany was born 1974 in New York and lives and works in New York and Berlin. His work has recently been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Jani Hanninen
Jani Hänninen (born 1974), an angry young man, whose graffiti-based relaxed paintings are tinged by a critical attitude, black humour, engaging irony and an urban beat.
A portfolio titled “Black Dreams” containing four silk screen prints has been published by Galerie Anhava in conjunction with the exhibition.
Erik A. Frandsen
The Real Unnaturalism, opening thursday 26/4.
Other Scenes
OTHER SCENES
Rita Ackermann
Gusmano Cesaretti
Daniel Higgs
Becca Mann
Ryan McGinley
Daido Moriyama
Jockum Nordström
Raymond Pettibon
Gee Vaucher
April 21 – May 26, 2007
Opening reception, Saturday, April 21st, 6 – 8pm
Live Performance by No Age
Curated by Aaron Rose
Exhibition catalogue published by Nieves, $20
Other Scenes presents an eclectic group of emerging and established artists all of whom share disturbing yet romantic visions. In these artist’s works, a discreet form of protest exists; a desire to find love amongst the ruins, beauty in the shadows. Aaron Rose is an independent curator currently living in Los Angeles. He is co-curator of the museum exhibition, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture which opened in March 2004 at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and will tour the world through 2008. Rose is also a publisher, writer and co-editor of ANP Quarterly, a free arts/lifestyle magazine. Thank you to Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Team Gallery, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 96 Gilespie, London, and Rathole Gallery, Tokyo. Special thanks to RVCA Artists Network Project for their generous support.
Rita Ackermann (b.1968) is an artist born in Hungary, trained in Budapest and Vienna, and currently working in New York. Her work first became prominent in the mid-1990s as the result of her seductive paintings of semi-autobiographical nymphets and her close association with musical groups such as Sonic Youth. Over the years her style has evolved to include more metaphysical themes, still populated by svelte waifs, fashionable nymphs, and other girlish sprites combined and recombined in an almost serial fashion, albeit with a very contemporary take. In 1974, Italian photographer Gusmano Cesaretti embarked on a documentary photography project exploring the streets of East LA. These rarely seen photographs of Chicano life in the ’70s, including images of graffiti filled stores, walls and garages become, in their harsh black and white austerity, almost like abstract paintings. These photos were eventually published in a small run book, ‘Street Writers’ (1975) which included a transcribed audio tour of East Los Angeles and became a pioneer book in Chicano culture. Daniel Higgs (b.1965) is an artist/musician best known as the lead singer for the Baltimore band Lungfish, but in recent years has begun recording and performing as a solo artist with increasing frequency. His rarely-exhibited, highly detailed, visual art is legendary in underground circles for it’s scarcity and has been identified by the artist as “one’s own experience of reality offered in reckless worship.” Becca Mann (b.1980) is a Los Angeles artist who combines abstraction with both found and invented images to create spaces in which the dead may reside. Consistent in her paintings, elements of light and atmosphere emerge as narrative tools. Becca Mann is a recent graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA in painting and critical writing. While living and working in Chicago she organized a series of group shows in “alternative venues,” including a ballroom and a crumbling 19th century mansion. Ryan McGinley’s (b.1977) photographs of his friends exuberantly indulging in irreverent behavior are neither sullen nor saccharine. His early photographs were influenced by subjects such as graffiti, queer culture, skateboarding, and sloppy parties. Since then his work has taken on a more playful approach, featuring young people in various states of undress and abandon, usually interacting with themselves and nature. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including being the youngest artist in history to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2002. The works of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) often show everyday people and everyday things in a manner not to be found in the average Tokyo tourist guidebook. Whether by using blur or cropping, Moriyama’s bleak and lonely, highly grained, black-and-white pictures expose a seedy, yet hauntingly beautiful underbelly of 20th Century Japan. His fifty-year photographic career as led him to be considered one of Japan’s great modern photographers. Swedish artist Jockum Nordström (b.1963) combines naive-folk collages and drawings to become visual streams of consciousness. He makes drawings of ships, tiny dioramas of cities, and men in uncomfortable suits, all rendered in a deliberately crude folk-art style. His compositions are spatially dimensionless, but the figures that populate his odd, rickety landscapes are vividly robust. Raymond Pettibon (b.1957) is a cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, designing logos, flyers and albums for bands such as Black Flag and Circle Jerks. Since then, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Gee Vaucher (b.1945) is perhaps best known for the extensive body of work she created during the late seventies and early eighties. As designer of albums and propaganda for the renowned English punk band ‘Crass’, she created some of the most disturbing and acclaimed images of the time. Her work is generally accepted as having been seminal to the iconography of the ‘Punk Generation.’ When ‘Crass’ disbanded in 1984, Vaucher felt the need to explore other areas of work, abandoning the tightness of her more ‘overt’ political statements in favor of a more loosely expressed personal politic.
www.robertsandtilton.com
Group Show Specta
Charles Webster
Nir Hod "Faded Heartache"
Nir Hod is a missionary of beauty. Fame and loneliness, heroism, youth, glamour and death are served up in his work in heaping doses. The heroes and heroines in his paintings – most of whom are cast in his own image – play parts in a grandiose, imaginary melodrama that belongs to the realms of eternity, mythology and fairy tales. The world depicted in his paintings appears as if it truly belongs to the young. His beautiful, glorified heroes never sweat or emit body odors, nor will they ever grow old. Even in death, their beauty will remain pure, untouchable and untarnished.
The glamour parcel that Hod presents to the viewer in a saccharine-sweet, ostentatious cellophane wrapper reveals itself to be a capsule filled with emotion, passion and death, which challenges ideas about beauty in the era after modernism.
On April 27th, 2007, galerie davide gallo has the pleasure of presenting the first European solo show of the Israeli artist Nir Hod. In his last series of paintings, the artist resumes and emphasizes topics that he previously began in his artistic career.
“Soldiers”, a series presented in its entirety in 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv deals with the themes of beauty, death, sacrifice, and youth, themes already clear and perfectly developed in his work. In this new series of paintings, Nir Hod concentrates on the feminine identity
“Farewell Sofia”, a painting representing a dog, shows the absence of the woman, standing for melancholy and separation. “Soldier in Sinai” is a painting which incorporates all the themes of Nir Hod. The topic of sacrifice and death as a consequence of war is emphasized with greater determination.
“Two Girls” is a hymn to love and intimacy, feminine identity from another painterly perspective filled with irony and poetical desecration. “Masturbation” is a work in which the artist reaches a rare technical perfection. The perspective and the asymmetrical cut are the true protagonists of the painting. The joy, the ambiguity of pleasure and the recurring ambiguity of the line between death and sleep, and between life and dream constitute the nucleus center as well as the poetry of Nir Hod.
“Mother and I” refers to childhood as lost mythology, a romantic dream. In this work there is also an underlying ambiguity: the realism of the description and the irrealism of the subject and of the space that encircles it.
The landscape is like that in a fable, the intimate serenity of the emotional dialogue between mother and son set against the nearly scientific analysis of visual data which gets lost in an infinite game of details
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn, Stand-alone, solo exhibition opening 27 April 2007, Arndt & Partner, Berlin
We are delighted to announce the opening of the solo show Stand-alone by Thomas Hirschhorn at Arndt & Partner Berlin on Friday, 27 April 2007 from 6 to 10pm.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s new work will extend over all four rooms of our Gallery 1st Floor.
We herewith cordially invite you and your friends to join us for the opening and want to draw your attention to the following lectures:
On Thursday, 26 April 2007, 8 pm, Thomas Hirschhorn will give a lecture with the title Arbeit, 1990–2007 at Berlin’s Humboldt University. The venue is lecture room 3075 in the Main Building at Unter den Linden 6. Arndt & Partner is hosting a further lecture by the artist on Saturday, 28 April 2007, 2 pm
On occasion of the 3rd Berlin Gallery Weekend we will have extended opening hours:
Saturday through Monday, 28 – 30 April 2007 from 11am to 6pm.
Seonna Hong
Seonna Hong
“Our Endless Numbered Days”
April 27 – May 26, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27th from 6-8 PM
We are pleased to announce Seonna Hong’s second solo show with Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery.
“Our Endless Numbered Days” is a darker, more introspective step into the world of a girl where ominous black birds, bears and horses loom and languish as harbingers of some kind of doom. These silhouettes, outlines of our actual selves, cause tumult and discomposure in the mind of the protagonist. But it may be that this chaos is the appropriate provocation for change, forward momentum, and even hope.
Working on canvas, Hong continues to use a flat painterly style. Large areas of negative space, left raw and unfinished, push up against smaller moments of obsession represented in the details of embroidery. Cut pieces of canvas add to the texture and feeling of these pieces, creating subtle dimension and depth.
In a series of smaller untitled paintings, Hong uses more abstract imagery – a shadowy representation of transition and movement.
Hong was a recipient of a 2006 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and opened her first solo museum show as a part of the “Suburban” series at the Knoxville Museum of Art.
We are also pleased to announce that Seonna Hong will show with Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. in Japan in 2008. Founded by Takashi Murakami in 2001, Kaikai Kiki is a multilateral art enterprise. Its goals include the production and promotion of fine art, as well as the management and support of select young artists, and the organization of art-related events and projects. This will mark Kaikai Kiki’s first exhibition with a US based artist in Japan.
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is located at 621 West 27th Street on the ground floor. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from11-6.