Month: November 2008

See you to night, Wes opening, it looks pretty EVIL::::::::
V1

Brandstrup

Very nice::::
Eddie Martinez
Zieher Smith

The artist will be present at the Vernissage

Avanthay Contemporary

The Approach

NATHAN HYLDEN
Still Now Again
November 25th, 2008 – January 10th, 2009
Opening reception November 22nd, 6-9 p.m.

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Nathan Hylden in Germany. For the show a wall is build to divide the main gallery into two spaces. The modified architecture is creating an almost mirrored doubled situation in which a series of nine large scale paintings are hung in. The series is the result of pictorial-technical processes utilizing strict repetition and accumulation principles: During the first step of the process, the artist covers the canvases with a layer of gold paint, the effect of which changes as soon as one moves around the work. The canvases are then stacked into overlapping groups and sprayed with yellow paint over the intersections. Following this, with a stencil, black paint is applied onto each individual canvas creating a striped pattern. This working process allows for each painting to be both the starting point for and the result of the next one. The paintings are simultaneously positive and negative form and thus index of one another as well as autonomous and unique objects. In this way the work becomes an investigation of cause and effect in artistic production.
In the smaller backspace of the gallery, Hylden is showing a second series of works, which can be seen as a reflection of the work in the main space. Untreated aluminum sheets are screen-printed with the image of a blank canvas. Again all the works are serially connected. The screen-print series presents blankness as image, neutralizing the differences between the representational and abstract. Gilles Deleuze states: “modern painting is invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés that are already lodged on the canvas before the painter even begins to work.” The image of the blank canvas is a presentation of emptiness, which is also completely charged with meaning. The artist then juxtaposes painted canvases of the same dimensions to the prints, so that the relationship between image and material is complicated. Each image is the corporeal shadow of the one of the previous and the next.
Hylden raises the questions of the circumstances of an image and its material manifestation as the subject of his art. To achieve this, he develops a syntax following the conceptual tradition. Painting is a medium traditionally linked with the idea of uniqueness. In Nathan Hylden’s work it is used within a reflection of seriality of art based on mechanical repetition and an efficiency in the materials selected: unmixed, standard metallic paint, fluorescent spray paint, stencils, untreated painting surfaces. Each individual work is closely related to a series or a body of works resulting from actions carried out through a long period of time. Through the daily activity in the studio the repetitive gestures become the connecting element between all works. By showing the series in the exhibition “Still Now Again”, the artistic process freezes for a moment and thus reaches its culmination. A poster showing a canvas printed with the exhibition dates further emphasizes this temporal aspect.

Nathan Hylden (*1978, Fergus Falls, Minnesota) lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena, California and as a guest student at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main. His works have been shown in solo exhibitions at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo and Art:Concept, Paris, among others. Hylden’s paintings were shown for the first time at Johann König, Berlin in the group show “Zuordnungsprobleme” in Spring 2008.

Johann Koenig

The exhibition Political/Minimal presents art works from the past forty years that are minimal in form and political in content. 

The works reference Minimalism and formally delineate themselves with it. They are characterized by two- or three-dimensional shapes such as circle, square, sphere, or cube. However, the focus of these works lies not on geometrical abstraction or pure aesthetics. On the contrary, ecological, social, economic, and ethical statements are their conceptual framework. The works’ titles, materials, or context of production refer to larger narratives.

Political/Minimal finds its points of departure from the tension between the self-referential aesthetics of Minimalism and the often outspokenly critical nature of artistic practice. 

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach 

With kind support by the Capital Cultural Fund, Berlin.
 
Accompanying to the exhibition, a catalogue will be published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, containing texts by Klaus Biesenbach, Michael Archer, and Jenny Schlenzka (ed. by Klaus Biesenbach, German/English, 23 x 23 cm, 145 pages, 44 color ills., 28 b/w ills., 29 Euro, ISBN: 978-3-941185-07-4).

KW Berlin
Berlin Biennale

Kurinazutto

Brandstrup

Javier Peres is pleased to present two exhibitions in Los Angeles:

“Sack of Bones (Los Angeles)” curated by Blair Taylor and Ellen Langan
November 20 – December 20, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 20, 2008, 6 – 9 pm
Peres Projects Chinatown (969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, 90012)

Mark Flood
“Entertainment Weakly”
November 22 – February 7, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 22, 6 – 9 pm
Peres Projects Culver City (2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, 90034)

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“Sack of Bones (Los Angeles)”, curated by Blair Taylor and Ellen Langan
A group exhibition featuring Jack Goldstein, Dan Colen, Tara Delong, Neil Jenney, Dash Snow, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Mark Flood, Bill Hayden, George Herms, H.C. Westermann, Rosy Keyser, Bruce LaBruce, Daniel McDonald, Andrew Rogers, Arsen Roje, Agathe Snow, William C. Taylor, Donald Urquhart, Oscar Tuazon, Eli Hansen, Kaari Upson, Sebastian Mlynarski and Banks Violette.

Toted around, thrown in the corner, recovered as relic or disposed of as useless, a sack of bones is unavoidably deformed. It is an apparently dead object subject to the intentions of its creator, or its purveyor, or its consumer, or maybe just its times.

The group exhibition “Sack of Bones” comes from a viewing of Paul Rachman’s 2006 film, American Hardcore, in which Mark Flood appears as an interviewee on the topic of 1980’s punk rock. The tone of the film is reverent, to be sure, but more than an ode, the voices in the film present conflicting parts pride, humor, fraternity, anger, bitterness, nostalgia, and what are often doleful mechanisms for dealing with the here-and-now. That Flood was both part of Hardcore as it existed musically (in 1980 his band, Culturcide, put out their first 7-inch: “Another Miracle/Consider Museums as Concentration Camps”) and has been practicing visual art for over 30 years poses an interesting question: how, if at all, can art be hardcore? By embodying adolescent punk obsession? By miraculous use of irony? By a simple withdrawal from popular territory?

Consider, for example, the tangled ‘attitude problem’ precipitated by Reagan-era punk; there is the myth of a pure strain of FUCK YOU, there is the myth of the majority’s snide perception of its counter-movements, and then, somewhere in the overlap, there is the problematic dilution of any rebellion’s once-potent beginnings (causing cycles of backlash and resurgence pretty much ever after). In the art world this tangle is further convoluted by the relishing of trade and an inherent affluence, elitism and circuitous pandering that can compromise anyone’s well-intentioned we/they stirrings.

The exhibition as a whole may appear deadpan, satirical or pathetic – in any case each of the constituent works turns its back on complacency, and, in doing so, becomes material evidence of resistance (kicking from within the sack). In other words, with all that is stacked against the mutinous artist and the mutinous viewer, hope could lie in objecthood itself.

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“Entertainment Weakly,” a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood.
Inaugurating the Peres Projects gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles, the exhibition will include mixed media drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation from the past and present.

Flood is a Merry Deformer, romping through the art world’s carefully arrayed aisles with a stencil and a can of spray paint, rearranging its face. Matters of identification are fertile ground upon which to sew mischief, and yet Flood never abandons the potential of a beautiful phenomenon in favor of just being stabby. The surface of a text panel or lace painting still holds all the subtle irregularities and shiny moments prone to seduction.

The works exhibited here cover three decades of Flood’s output, from the defaced advertisement drawings of the early 1980s to brand new assemblages fashioned from the local Texas debris of Hurricane Ike. Bathed in a acid-lime light, the group together presents, in Flood’s words, “topics for non-discussion: our relationship with pictures of celebrities, the effects of vibrant community on layers of dust, market correction fluid, accidental suicides, casual sex with photographs, healthy stalking, shared recipes for aesthetic disasters.”

“Sack of Bones (Los Angeles)” will be on view at Peres Projects (969 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles 90012) through December 20, 2008. “Entertainment Weakly” will be on view at Peres Projects (2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034) through February 7, 2009. Gallery hours at both locations will be Tuesday through Saturday, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M and by appointment.

Peres Projects