Month: September 2009
The Law of Fives
Fall Exhibitions Opening
Gardar Eide Einarsson
AMY STEIN
AMY STEIN
DOMESTICATED
September 10 – October 31, 2009
ClampArt is pleased to announce the exhibition of Amy Stein’s photographic series, “Domesticated”- the artist’s first show with the gallery.
In this body of work Stein explores the archetypal motif of man verses nature. More specifically, her photographs explore the tenuous relationship between man and animals as human civilization continues to encroach upon nature. Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from citizens of the small town of Matamoras in Northeast Pennsylvania, which borders a state forest, Stein’s photographs are inspired by true events.
The artist writes: “My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the ‘wild’ and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world.”
Amy Stein was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. In 2007, she was named one of the world’s top fifteen emerging photographers by American Photo Magazine. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and in Europe, and her photographs are represented in such prestigious public collections as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; the San Jose Museum of Art, California; and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona.
Copies of Stein’s first monograph will be available for sale during the run of the show. [Domesticated (Portland, Oregon: photolucida, 2008), 64 pp., 25 color illus, $24, with an essay by George Eastman House curator, Alison Nordström.]
dr. lakra
Yigal Ozeri
Desire for Anima – Yigal Ozeri
Opening Thursday September 10, 2009, 6 – 8pm
September 10 – October 24, 2009
Mike Weiss Gallery presents Desire for Anima, an exhibition of new oil paintings on paper by Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri. His paintings of young women are unusual for their uncanny realism and psychologically engaging presence. This is achieved by Ozeri’s using both still photography and video in their initial stages, and painting the final works with thousands of tiny brushstrokes which animate the paintings’ surfaces.
This series of paintings explores portraits of young women, either standing together nude in dense grass fields, or posed alone, often wearing a pink diaphanous and lace gown. Many appear like film still, caught, unawares, unselfconsciously laughing, or moving through the lush backgrounds. Others gaze directly at the viewer in a somewhat challenging and unsettling manner. In some, all that is visible are fragments of the girls’ body – faces, limbs, richly textured garments. In every painting, Ozeri captures the vulnerability of the girl’s bodies, at the transitional age between youth and maturity. For the artist, the results of his paintings express his feminine “anima”, Carl Jung’s concept of the essential woman. This psychological presence is the hidden essence of his work.
Ozeri begins his process for these paintings by bringing a photographic crew to verdant landscapes in which he places the young women within the final composition in order to get precisely the results he is seeking. After choosing among the resulting images, he takes these and begins the painting process. The results are cinematic portraits of almost photographic realism. Their carefully staged, conceptual installations reflect the high-definition realism that today pervades media including television and movies; while their almost invisible brushstrokes, in the manner of traditional tromp l’oeil painting, play on concepts of perception and illusion.
Yigal Ozeri has exhibited extensively throughout Israel, Europe and the United States, and his work can be found in many prominent collections, including Albertina Museum, Vienna; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Westchester; Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington DC; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, Netherlands; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and The Jewish Museum, New York. The artist lives and works in New York City.
COPE 2
Kenny Scharf
OLAF BREUNING
Michael Benevento is pleased to present an exhibition of recent photographs and sculptures by Olaf Breuning. This is the artists first solo show in Los Angeles.
The Swiss-born, New York based artist presents a continuation of his recent series, Color Studies, incorporating large photographs and sculptures that focus on the action and resolution of poured paint. With a physical transformation of the gallery space, the figures, objects and actions within the photographs, as well as the sculptures, become the backdrop for a celebration of the unpredictable movement of paint.
With the entrance and first gallery painted entirely in black – the absence of color, Breuning sculptures both blend and contrast with the space. Breuning adds his own background in the form of three all-black sculptures on which red, yellow, green, and blue paint is carefully poured. This combination creates a tension between the material of the sculpture and the natural tendencies of the paint. In addition to the sculptures, there are eight photographs in the room, which present a competition between background and foreground with the same primary colors of paint poured over different figures and objects ranging from the high-art throwback, The Odalisque, to bubbles floating through the air.
The more intimate rear gallery is painted entirely white – regarded as the combination of all visible colors, Breuning continues to evoke tension between the surface and the paint. These three photographs question the relationship between the fluidity of poured paint and rigidity of the grid.
Outside the gallery, set against the back drop of the urban landscape, a light box has been affixed to facade of the building displaying another of Breuning photographs. With the inextricable links to advertising that the light box provides, this plays into Breuning’s familiar fascination with the mass media and popular culture, as well as his desire to speak in a universal language.