Month: July 2009

Jem & Bates

Another Jem & Bates piece:::
Great & Bates

New York, July 30, 2009 — Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York is pleased to announce the representation of British painter Annie Kevans. Perry Rubenstein Gallery will present a selection of the WAMPAS Baby Stars this summer in conjunction with Richard Woods’ exhibition The Nature Show. In February 2010, Kevans will have a solo exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, marking her first large-scale solo exhibition in the US. Kevans has been exhibiting regularly throughout Europe since 2004.

Annie Kevans uses bright oil paint with a loose brushstroke and carefully composed negative space. Her technique allows her to portray an innocence to her subjects alongside a power; her characterization and style speaks to fantasy rather than realism. Kevans is fascinated by the representation of power and sociopolitical systems, and does extensive research for each series in order to craft and then visualize characters both real and imagined (often times the combination of the two). Kevans paints portraits of the famous and the infamous, the seen and the unseen. Her paintings are intimate in scale but epic in subject matter. “My paintings reflect my interests in power, manipulation and the role of the individual in inherited belief systems,” she says. “It is important for me to examine the duality of truth and falsehood throughout my work.”

In the series Boys (2004), Kevans depicts infamous 20th Century dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as wide-eyed toddlers. In Vamps & Innocents (2007), she focuses on portraits of silent film stars of the 1920’s. For All the President’s Girls (2008-2009), Kevans painted all of the Presidential mistress on record, some of whom are household names (Marilyn Monroe, Monica Lewinsky), others who are little known or even unnamed (George Washington’s mistress, one of his slaves, just goes by “Venus”). WAMPAS Baby Stars is the London based painter’s most recent series. Kevans culled from Hollywood image archives of a selection of starlets who were elected by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers in the 1920’s and 30’s as faces of the future, idealized celebrations of American beauty destined for stardom. With the exception of a few Hollywood legends (Joan Crawford, Mary Astor, and Fay Wray among them), most of the girls did not end up crossing the threshold into movie stardom; Kevans portraits map those who were forgotten.

Annie Kevans was born in Cannes, France and lives and works in London. She earned a BA from Central St. Martin’s School of Art & Design in London, 2004. This fall she will have a solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London (November) and will be included in the much-anticipated exhibition The Power of Paper at the Saatchi Gallery (dates TBD). Past solo exhibitions include Vamps & Innocents, Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Vienna (2007); Swans, Art Work Productions, London (2007); and Girls, Studio 1.1, London. Kevans’ work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, notably at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (2001); Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich (2008, 2007); Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Italy (2007, 2006); Contemporary Art Projects, London (2007). Kevans was a finalist for both the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2006) Women Of The Future award (2007) in the UK.

Perry Rubenstein Gallery

Bates & Jem

Great & Bates

Alex Schweder "Ours"

The Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco is pleased to announce an exhibit of work by Alex Schweder, titled Ours. The show will include the large-scale pieces Plumbing Us, Our Weight Around Us, and an installation of scratch-and-sniff wallpaper.

Schweder, an architect turned artist, is among a new group of emerging practitioners in which the gallery is invoked no longer as an area of display, but as a testing ground to formulate new paradigms of spatial practice. Here, architecture functions as a medium or spatial protagonist, through which forms of agency may be invented, negotiated, provoked, uncovered, eschewed, or displaced.

In the three works included in the exhibit, Schweder addresses the domestic while redefining the prescribed roles of objects such as toilets, furniture and décor. In Plumbing Us, man and woman share a drain on a conjoined urinal. Straddling the wall that normally segregates them, this work requires bodies to mix prior to their removal. Similarly, with only enough air to fill one of the two conjoined sofas in Our Weight Around Us, users of this furniture must work cooperatively. If not, and one person stands while the other is still seated, the seated person will fall to the floor. Schweder’s scratch-and-sniff wallpaper explores color and scent in relation to their construction of a “succulent” space. Set up with different ratios of scented scratch n’ sniff varnishes and colored inks, the wallpaper is transformed to have an olfactoral effect in addition to its characteristic visual impact.

Alex Schweder is the 2005 – 2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture. Since this time, Schweder has been experimenting with time and performance based architecture including Flatland at the Sculpture Center in New York; This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used to Smell at Western Bridge in Seattle; Melting Instructions at the Tacoma Art Museum; Its Form Will Follow Your Performance at Gallery Magnus Muller in Berlin; Stability at Lawrimore Project in Seattle; and a yet to be titled exhibition on performance architecture scheduled at the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA in 2010. Schweder’s projects have been collected by several eminent individuals and institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is a three time artist in residence at the Kohler company and will be in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Fall 2009.

Jack Hanley