Month: March 2009

LINA BERTUCCI “Women in the Tattoo Subculture”


LINA BERTUCCI
“Women in the Tattoo Subculture”

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present for the fourth time the recent work of the American photographer Lina Bertucci in her third solo exhibition. Lina Bertucci born in 1958 in Milwaukee, lives and works in New York.



The artistic practice of Berucci begun in the end of the 80’s with a series of black and white photographs that show people from the narrow enviroment of the artist, focusing on the romantisim and aesthesisim of that period in New York.

Beginning of the 90’s Bertucci created a new series with the title “Other Voices Other Rooms”. She photographed numerous New York artists early in their careers, including Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Orozco, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Payton and Wolfgang Tillmans. Using the emerging artist as her subject, she creates a body of work, which captures the artist and reveals his unique psychology. These portraits collectively present a curious context of contemporary artists and New York City as their common affiliation. 


The current exhibition at Eleni Koroneou Gallery presents the most recent photographic series with the title “Women in the Tattoo Subculture”. The series, consisted of 21 portraits of women, explores the fluctuating periphery between exhibitionism and marginalization through the ritualized practice of tattooing. Bertucci’s portraits reveal psychological tensions between the pursuit of inner conviction and a desire to seek out trend.

In order to examine this contemporary subculture, Bertucci travelled to various tattoo conventions in the United States and abroad, photographing women between 19 and 59 years old both in her studio and on location. Here, she chooses to frame the subjects in simple, timeless poses that formally accentuate the fimale figure and at the same time poetically delineate their illustrious tattoos.

Bertucci completed her M.F.A in photography at Pratt Institute in New York and received her B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin.
She is known extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, with exhibitions at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per l’Arte, Turin, Italy; P.S.1, New York; Hara Museum, Tokyo; and, the Chicago Cultural Center.

Eleni Koroneou Gallery

Liz Markus: Hot Nights At The Regal Beagle


Liz Markus: Hot Nights At The Regal Beagle

In Liz Markus’s second solo exhibition at ZieherSmith, she moves beyond the hippie era subjects of her last show to an unexpected side of American culture. Instead of portraits of long-haired drop-outs, the artist now approaches emblematic subjects of opposite persuasions:

Too young for a first hand experience of the 60s, I was 13 when Reagan took office as president. My knowledge of Nancy Reagan was limited to her penchant for red Bob Mackey dresses, the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, and the obvious power she held in the White House. My parents ingrained in me a distaste for the Reagan administration but I didn’t think much more about Nancy until I came across a classic photo of her in Vanity Fair several years ago. There was something about her face that was compelling. Initially, I had hoped that she wouldn’t immediately read as Nancy but as a generic WASP matriarch of that era. Nope. Everyone knew she was Nancy. I think she must be very tightly wound up inside and I still absolutely dislike her politics. However, I can see that she was a strong and powerful woman in a time when there weren’t a lot of examples like Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama around. –Liz Markus
The exhibition is not limited to images of the former first lady, but Markus freely associates imagery from the Reagan era and beyond. Taxidermy obliquely refers to WASP interiors, while Kenneth Noland inspired targets pay homage to the mid century idols that inform her techniques. Further subjects in the series range from punk rocker John Rotten to the editor and writer George Plimpton, while motorcycles speak as much to mid-life crises as to the Easy Rider protagonists of her past work. Somehow the spectrum of a distant life pokes its spectral countenance through smeared lenses. Through these ghosts— both icon and iconoclast suffer and shine under her caustic, reverent brush.

In all, the works are united by her practice with saturated washes of acrylic on unprimed canvas. Though she has a remarkable degree of control, Markus also surrenders to chance as she pushes and pulls the paint with both brushes and gravity. The results of fresh paint mixing erratically convey both a sense of urgency and unlikely surprises of color, gesture and a chemical vibrancy.

Liz Markus is based in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BFA from School of Visual Arts. Her work is currently featured in a group show at Nicholas Robinson Gallery, New York and will be included in an exhibition curated by Angela Dufresne, SCA Contemporary, Albuquerque later this year. Other recent group shows include those at Gallerie Opdahl, Stavinger, Norway; James Graham & Sons, New York; and Werkstatte, New York among others.

Ziehersmith

Erik A. Frandsen


Faurschou Beijing is very pleased to present the Danish artist Erik A. Frandsen and his first solo show in China.

Painting in the expanded field
Erik A. Frandsen is a painter who, like many of his contemporary colleagues, does not restrict himself to painting on a canvas. His paintings belong in an expanded field. Throughout his career Erik A. Frandsen has constantly, with great inventiveness and artistic sensitivity, gone beyond classic boundaries of painting. His paintings unfold either as installation or three-dimensional object – or as a reworking of painterly problems.

Different strategies
Erik A. Frandsen’s works thus encompass an array of different strategies and materials. In his early paintings he applied a variety of objects: Rockwool, lead, plastic trays, photos, eggs, steel wire, and neon tubes. This was done to avoid mere decoration, and to add a vehicle for meanings – or to block for them. He has become famous for his photo series taken of him and his wife embracing with lights affixed on their hands. The camera’s long exposure time transforms their caressing into white painterly strokes in the images. He has made statements in neon tubes; made paintings in the colour palette of photo negatives as well as lustrous exclusive mosaics made in the antique traditional style of Venetian smalti.

The duality
Erik A. Frandsen has always been interested in people and life, and he has an eye for strange stories and distorted views of reality. Thus the figurative is prominent in his art. However for Erik A. Frandsen art is a duality, or a “double space”, of figure and structure, positive and negative, physical objects and abstract forms challenging each other, and thus creating tension in his works.

“Frozen Moment Desert”
This duality is maintained in Erik A. Frandsen’s installation of his recent works at Faurschou Beijing. “Frozen Moment Desert” is an installation in two rooms.

One room is devoted to his steel works. Large steel plates are engraved with flower motives. They are literally ‘cool’ paintings done without any colour, canvas or brush, but ‘painted with a drill’. And they are truly “frozen moments” as the flowers are captured in a specific state of their short life.
The other room is a visual bombardment of colourful large format paintings. These images could be said to have been ‘painted with photographs’, as they have their origin in snapshots from the artist’s many travels where something seen or experienced is captured in a “frozen moment” by the camera and later reworked into these large scale paintings.

Memento-mori
Erik A. Frandsen’s beautiful stainless steel flowers are though not only decorative. It is easily detected, that they are simple wild flowers, weed, even cannabis, if not memorial wreaths from Sachen-Hausen or withering lilies.
In an art historical context the flower motive has sustained as a symbol of beauty, sensuality, life, death, and vanity, and Erik A. Frandsen has earlier applied the flower motive as an ambiguous symbol in his artistic exploration of intimacy, relationships, and home life.
His images with flowers are classic memento mori-motives – but in a new form. The cool steel reflects the flowers that are projected into the images, thus preventing the viewer from reflecting himself without at the same time seeing the flowers. In this way the works acquire an extra dimension when making the viewer aware of his own role in an art universe – thus connecting art and reality.

Images of a contemporary visual culture
Art and reality are likewise connected in the reworking of the photographic images from our everyday reality into the mediated reality of painting.
Erik A. Frandsen obviously points to a shift in the pictures expression and meaning when an episode of waiters washing out door chairs, are blown up to the format of almost 3 x 4 meter.

Many of Erik A. Frandsens images are of his wife and children and have the character of a personal family album, which they are not. The photographic reality is a constructed reality – which is what Erik A. Frandsen’s succeeds in making us pay attention to.
Everywhere in his images one finds symbols and objects from contemporary visual culture: Coca-Cola bottles, Marlboro cigarettes, Mickey Mouse, Spider Man, and the boxing gloves’ “Stars and Stripes”. It is a way of visual commentating that goes back to Rauschenberg’s and Warhol’s silk screens. In Erik A. Frandsen’s works these motifs are though not isolated, but recirculated as part of the visual reality of today.

With their humorous, unconventional, and astonishing contents, Erik A. Frandsen’s works are thought provoking. His choice of aesthetically beautiful materials such as mosaics in Venetian smalti, large scale paintings, or shiny engraved steel plates makes these existential moments both disturbing and an aesthetically pleasurable experience.

FAURSCHOU