Month: February 2009

SIMON EVANS Island Time


James Cohan Gallery is pleased to introduce Simon Evans, a London-born artist, who currently lives and works in Berlin. Former pro-skateboarder and writer, Evans found his voice as a visual artist and has been exhibiting his work since 2003. This is the artist’s New York gallery debut show.

Simon Evan’s delicate text-based works are collaged and assembled from prosaic materials including found paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings, colored pencil and white out. They describe a world poised between two poles of earnestness and irony. With his anxieties laid bare and his wry brand of melancholy, Evans presents us with a veritable laundry list of drawings that take the form of diagrams, charts, maps, lexicons, diary entries, inventories, cosmologies and epistolary entreaties that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope.

The exhibition Island Time will be installed over two galleries with titles such as Escape and Rescue Plan and Everything I Have that point to inspiration taken from both the mundane and personal. The title of the show Island Time is a reference to Robinson Crusoe and the hand-made objects that were critical to his survival on a desert island-a metaphor that draws connections between the state of being shipwrecked, to the role of the artist as an outsider, to the artist’s personal biography living as an ex-patriot in a foreign city. Evident in the work is Evan’s preoccupation with counting and charting-an activity also key to survival as a castaway.

In the main gallery, the drawing Green City presents an exact copy of a tourist map of Berlin redrawn in green ball point pen and white out. Evans says that, “Tracing things is a way of making something mine in a world which feels already filled with too much.” He goes on to describe the significance of the color green in this exploration as a reference to naiveté and a utopia unspoiled by experience while at the same time making an allusion to the flip-side which is Berlin’s darker history. Green also marks the season in which the drawing was made-it took an entire summer in a very green Berlin to trace this map. The companion piece Home Country is a map of the London Tube made of woven paper. This depiction of the artist’s hometown, with all of the Tube lines drawn in black, communicates a web of ideas and reflections about the notion of homeland. Other works in the show will include One Hundred Mix CDs for New York which is a collection of mix CD’s that are arranged together in one frame. In this sprawling work, Evans attempts to encapsulate his feelings about art and music, in particular regarding the gesture of exchange that typifies the making of mixed CD’s.

Simon Evans currently lives and works in Berlin. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions in 2005 at the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO) and White Columns (New York, NY.) He has participated in the 2006 Sao Paolo Biennial (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and 2004 California Biennial (Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, CA.) Evans’ work has been included in international group exhibitions most recently at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, Switzerland); the Tate Modern (London, UK); the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan); and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany).

James Cohan

John Bock "No Time No Screws"


John Bock
“No Time No Screws”

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present for the fourth time the new work of John Bock in his second solo exhibition. John Bock born in Gribbohm, Germany, lives and works in Berlin.

John Bock uses the form of performance as artistic medium, combining theater, video, installation and sculpture. Most of his early actions or performances were termed “lectures” and originated in the idea of an academic lesson on economic concerns. Starting out from that basis he has developed over time increasingly complex, large-scale installations in which he employs simple everyday objects and materials, like wood, fabric, wire, cotton wadding, toothpaste, shaving cream, cleaning products, and food, which he treats and combines in unusual ways in order to create simple structures of life as well as art’s evolution into abstract forms and paranoid models.

In his lectures Bock combines speech, dramatic elements with these everyday objects, which are transformed into sculptures. His performances are various and most of the time he uses amateur actors. After each lecture, the objects that he has used are left on stage creating a theatre-collage. The language he uses is not very clear, it is a mutation language that flows on the sculptures. The sculptures as objects are more relicts, vehicles, instruments, which try to combine the artist with the audience and the outside world. This auction comes from a personal utopia of the artist who wants to share it with the audience, hoping that this utopia will influence it. Significant role in the work of Bock plays this interactive connection with the public

The current exhibition with the title “No Time No Screws” presents the new installation work of John Bock, which consists of transformed parts of a bus. These refer to a lecture-performance that Bock did in a city bus, invited by XYZ last October, traveling through the streets downtown Athens. The video, documenting the performance, is also central part of the show.

John Bock has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Athens Biennale (2007), Venice Biennale (1999 and 2005), Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), and Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian (2004). He has exhibited worldwide in Museums and Art Institutions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000); the Museum Bojmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2003); and the ICA in London (2005); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (2006); Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007); Graz Kunsthaus, Graz (2008).

Eleni Koroneou Gallery

ANDREAS JOHANSSON ’STUDIES OF AN IMAGINARY PLACE’


ANDREAS JOHANSSON ’STUDIES OF AN IMAGINARY PLACE’

In his paper-collages Andreas Johansson exposes his imaginary and nihilistic project and invites the spectator behind the constructed perspective of his landscape sceneries.
It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to our second solo show with the Swedish artists Andreas Johansson. At the exhibition ‘Studies of an imaginary place’ Andreas Johansson will be showing seven large paper collages, made out of photography’s he has taken of areas from his close environment.

At first glance Andreas Johansson’s 2-D paper-collages appears to be photography’s of deserted and demolished places, where al human civilization seems to have left the dilapidated concrete- and iron-constructions to the mercy of mother nature. Wild bushes and weed perforate the asphalt in front of the towering – almost roman-like – concrete columns. The graffiti-painters have long since decorated all vertical surfaces of the ruins and a (very) clear blue sky lies on top of an ever-seductive horizon. Although a closer inspection reveal that these landscapes – on one hand quite and on the other hand grand sceneries – are meant to be just as illusory, just as full of poetry and pent-up feelings, as the landscape paintings of the Romanticism. Andreas Johansson’s paper-collages are not only a deconstruction of the real existing places in his environment. They are also a re-construction of new imaginary places. A kind of ‘non-places’. Places that without a pre-existing history are left open to an almost nihilistic kind of perspective.

In Johansson’s sculptural paper-collages it becomes even more evident, that landscape sceneries are always (more or less) a construction of the artists mind and the spectators point of view. In his sculptural paper-collages his illusory way of playing with surfaces and depths becomes evident in the simplest way imaginable. The third dimension of the sculptural collages reveals that only from one angle, and one angle only, are things perceived in the right perspective. If the spectator takes one little step to the left or right, the illusion is broken and the reality of the distorted perspective becomes evident. In the sculptural collages Johansson exposes his imaginary and nihilistic project and invites the spectator behind the constructed perspective of his landscape sceneries.

Andreas Johansson (1977) live and work in Malmö, Sweden. He is a graduate from the Art school Idun Lovén and The Art Academy in Malmö (2006). He has previously been exhibiting at Kunstverine Hannover, I.A.S.P.I.S. in Stockholm and the Photo Festival in Arles, France. He is also represented at Malmö Art Museum and several other public institutions.

Bendixen