Gilbert Hsiao, Quad Band, 2011
Purple and orange cut paper on purple and orange paper
9 x 9 inches

Brent: We met in the afternoon outside the Apple store, downtown San Francisco. It was March, coolish… and we wandered back to Telegraph Hill. On the way we talked.

It came as a bit of a surprise that you were not really aware of or interested in op/perceptual painting when you first began painting. What, then, prompted you to start making art that way? Or, is ‘that way’ a misnomer?

Gilbert: I was aware of op as a historical movement of course; I was an art history major at Columbia before deciding to move into fine art. And op is one of the most distinguishable styles out there. Even if it wasn’t around to be seen first hand (which it certainly wasn’t in the 1960s in the town of Terre Haute, Indiana where I grew up) its influence was everywhere; you didn’t have to go to a gallery or museum to experience it. I bought record albums (a habit which lasted for four decades and resulted in thousands of LPs from all over the world) and studied the covers and the posters in the head shops that were full of op influences. My mother even gave me a fascinating Richard Annuskiewicz puzzle when I was a kid. However; I never intended to make art related to op; what I’m making is just where I ended up.

At the same time, in the last quarter of the 20th century op was pretty much invisible in the New York arts scene, where I had moved in 1974. When Phillip Taffe was appropriating Bridget Riley in the eighties, Riley herself was nowhere to be seen. After the Responsive Eye show at MOMA in 1965, she did not have a solo show in New York until her retrospective at DIA in 2000. One could see an occasional Vasarely here and there, though rarely his best work, and I was totally unaware of the work of figures like Julian Stanczak, the members of the Anonima Group (Ernst Benkert, Ed Miezkowski, and Francis Hewitt), Edna Andrade, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Francis Celentano, Tadasky and Jesus Raphael Soto. And of course there are the many Europeans, who seemed to have had a comparatively more receptive audience on the other side of the ocean, but who remain pretty much unknown here. My introduction to these people came through the Internet, and later, in person at the Optic Nerve exhibition in 2007 in Columbus, that was the first major museum exhibition in America that focused on the movement in decades, and through an excellent ongoing series of exhibitions at Dee Wigmore’s gallery in New York, which continues to this day.

When I was studying art history, I became interested in what I saw as musical elements in the work of artists as diverse as Uccello, Cezanne, Mondrian, Stuart Davis and Pollock, and I wanted to find a way to make work that incorporated similar elements. I also had a radio show at WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, and was exposed to a wide array of music including, most influentially for me, the minimalist music that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were writing at the time. The basic structural motif of this music seemed simple enough, but the simplicity was deceptive, and from these simple structures emerged a complicated music that was mesmerizing, but not overwhelming or overdone. For me, it was an aural counterpart of what I call perceptual abstraction, which is how I refer to my work.

Continue reading.

Regina Bogat, Decagon 7

May 31 – July 1, 2012

It is a privilege to welcome this fine artist back to her native borough. Regina Bogat was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is the widow of the painter Alfred Jensen and has two children, Anna and Peter. She lives and paints in New Jersey. She has crossed two rivers in order to have this show.

Bogat’s initial fascination with the octagon led to the evolution of these paintings. Ogdoadic (8 points), Decagon (10 points), and Heptadic (7 points) stars will be shown. While it is tempting to explore the meaning of the stars — the why and wherefore of the artists’s choice of subject matter — that desire falls away as one is drawn into the stars themselves and the mysterious swirling layers of paint and light. The stars emerge from the background and then they become the background. The paintings are their own mystique.

Regina Bogat has a long and distinguished history of exhibitions in the U.S. especially New York and New Jersey. Her work has also been included in group shows in Germany and Switzerland and in many prominent collections. Most recently, she has shown with Fausto Sevila at the Simon Liu gallery in 2006.

Upon seeing one of Bogat’s paintings, the critic John Caldwell wrote, “The painting is very large, but every inch of it is activated, both in terms of form and color… Quite frankly I have never seen anything like it. Miss Bogat is revealed here as a direct uncompromising sensibility…”

Paula Overbay, Blue Moon, 2012
Acrylic on paper
9 x 10 inches

June 1 – July 1, 2012

StoreFront Bushwick presents a group show “Cosmology” opening on June 1.  Artists include Nancy Bowen, Matthew Mahler, Paula Overbay, and Lauren Seiden.

June 22 – August 11, 2012
Opening: Friday, June 22, 6-8pm

A group exhibition of reductive, mainly monochromatic works spanning or hybridizing multiple media.

Participating Artists:
Vincent Como, Julian Dashper, Linda Francis, Michelle Grabner, Russell Maltz, Victoria Munro & Carrie Pollack

Installation view

May 19 – June 23, 2012

Western Project is proud to present the first major Los Angeles exhibition of works by Brian Porray. Now a resident of Claremont, California, the artist paints and collages large-scale works influenced by his twenty-plus years on the neon streets of Las Vegas:

This work is sort of like the psychedelic memory of a psychedelic memory. All of these pieces are focused solely on the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, an enormous black pyramid shaped mega-resort that was built during my first year of high school. Since I wasn’t old enough to party on The Strip, my experience of Las Vegas at night was as a neon backdrop for chemically enhanced desert parties. I vaguely remember standing in the dirt staring up at the beam of light shooting out of the Luxor’s peak – – after a minute my eyes adjusted and I could almost make out what looked like huge black bats swarming around the top of the pyramid. The light didn’t dissolve the way a flashlight does – it was so much brighter. It felt solid, like I could climb up through it. I hadn’t really looked at the light until that night, and I remember being terrified – – psychologically it totally fucked me up.

The Luxor and its beacon are central themes in this body of work as a point of conceptual origin; the triangle is the basic unit of formal organization and composition. In the 1990’s the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas was seen as a premier example of post-modern architecture; the black glass pyramid intentionally recalling the history of other desert pyramids. As pure architectural artifice on the Vegas Strip, the Luxor created an ominous, but transformational experience for the artist.

–(\DARKHOR5E/)– is a convoluted universe of spaces/atmospheres/images; conversely, made with economic means: painted, drawn, slashed and pasted together. Most of the works have a central point, radiating outwards, breaking space into a multitude of micro worlds and patterns. The notion of traditional grid space is usurped by triangular shapes which explode and multiply in myriad possibilities, as though science and technology have crashed and burned into a formal and toxic landscape. The artist also uses drawing and printing to reproduce or replicate motifs of space, all heavily collaged on canvas. The images can not be taken in by the human eye all at once due to the multiplicity of forms. Formally tied to the 1960’s Op art of Bridget Riley, Porray’s constructions move sideways and contrary: compositions burst with seeming chaos while bound together in a kind of Buckminster Fuller / tweaker architecture.

The work plays notions of ornamentation, systems, and orderliness into unexpected corners; humorous, apocalyptic and radiant. His vision is not of an organic nature, but conceptual, mathematic realms. While some of his geometric patterning mirrors folk art quilts, they also recall the futuristic films, Brazil and Blade Runner, yet any somberness is eradicated as the artist seems to have hacked Matisse’s color wheel to animate the darkness.

Using cyberspace language: leet or leetspeak (once an obscure language of computer geeks and hackers) to title his works, Porray melds notions of the digital and material worlds; techno language as a code to point to or locate objects and more, essence. In –(\DARKHOR5E/)– , the veil has dropped, the acid too, and so the definitions we hold precious: now we see.

Brian Porray’s work was recently acquired by the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles; he is a 2012 Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska; and a previous recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2010. Brian’s work has appeared in New American Paintings #84, and #87. He was included in ‘Spectrum’ at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, California, and has shown at Tomkins Projects, Brooklyn, New York, Trifecta Gallery in Las Vegas, and Sheppard Fine Arts in Reno, Nevada. Porray is an MFA graduate of the University of Las Vegas.

Brian Porray is an MFA graduate of the University of Las Vegas, and lives and works in Claremont, California.

Mark Dagley, Concentric Sequence, 1995
72 x 72 inches

September 7 – October 27, 2012
Opening: Friday, September 7, 6-8pm

A solo exhibition by New York painter Mark Dagley.

Sharon Brant, #3-2011, 2011
Acrylic on linen
18 x 24 inches

November 2 – December 22, 2012
Opening: Friday, November 2, 6-8pm

A solo exhibition by the Beacon, NY-based painter Sharon Brant.

Installation view with Jan van der Ploeg (wall) & Edward Collinson (floor)

April 19 – May 26, 2012

On the 19th of April Boetzelaer|Nispen will open a group show called: Dark Matter. The show will feature the work of Jan van der Ploeg, Oliver Guy Watkins and Edward Collinson.

To explain gravity and the expansion of the universe physicists have come up with the theory of Dark Matter. Supposedly it makes up 83% of our universe although not even the finest of instruments can see, touch, smell, taste or hear it. Dark Matter in the arts refers roughly to the same principle. It is the part of the artwork that’s suggested but which is not there for the viewer to see. The three artists in Dark Matter all have their own methods of ‘suggesting’.

Jan van der Ploeg’s work is best described in three words: colour, repetition and scale. His large scale murals appear to solve problems that the architecture of the exterior of a building or the space within poses. His murals also confront the flatness of the wall, sometimes by suggesting a relief, sometimes solely by changing the architecture with geometric fields of colour. In Dark Matter Van der Ploeg will apply a large mural on a large stretch of wall. He will also show several small scale works on canvas.

Edward Collinson confronts the architecture of space as well. His large sculptures are born from a desire to change the space and let viewer experience this. As well as the altered experience of architecture in the sculptural works, Collinson uses material in a very overt manner, cramming it in to the works. The excess of mass and material Collinsons work might be an attempt to reveal a completeness/incompleteness in our material world.

Oliver Guy Watkins chooses to treat the space like a stage, where his works function as the coulisses that suggest a surrounding. In his graduate exhibition at Central Saint Martins in 2011 he transformed a room by staging it to look like a cavernous space with ice on every surface. In Dark Matter Guy-Watkins will install a similar work that stages the effect of a frozen burst water pipe. By doing so he suggest and event that did not happen, preserved by circumstances that are not present in the gallery. Guy-Watkins will also produce an edition for Dark Matter.

Soledad Arias, ON AIR, 2012
White neon light
4.5 x 17.5 in | 11 x 45 cm
Edition: 3 + 2AP

May 1 – June 22, 2012

RH Gallery is pleased to present ON AIR, the first New York solo exhibition by Soledad Arias, opening May 1 and on view through June 22, 2012. RH Gallery will also present a solo presentation of Soledad Arias’ work at Pulse, New York, an art fair to be held at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York and on view May 3-6, 2012. Soledad Arias’ text-based work explores the slippage of meanings in the aesthetic and literary reading of texts. The title of the exhibition, ON AIR, refers to live broadcasting relating to the dialog initiated by Arias’ work while also relating to the breath of air necessary for speech. The work explores the materiality of text as well as its poetic, visual and phonetic meanings within the context of dialogue and colloquial communication.

In four, thirty-three (2011), Arias references John Cage’s composition of the same name. Often referred to as Cage’s “silent” piece, the work consists only of environmental sounds for the duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Arias translates her reading of Cage’s composition into a short straight line of white neon light. In phonetic neon [ha] (2012), she records and translates the exclamative “ha” into a white neon sign resembling a sound wave symbolizing the meaning of the word and its phonetic structure simultaneously.

In the series annotations (2011), Arias creates diagrams with stage directions for imaginary sets. By providing only the basic elements of a narrative, the viewer is left to construct a plot based on these cues. Drawn from spoken monologues which inspired annotations, Snippets (2009-2010) consists of graphic representations of the cadence of the artist’s voice.

In the acoustic wall series (2011-2012), Arias uses text to create an open-ended narrative. acoustic wall #1 (2011) is comprised of a series of phrases printed in vinyl such as “she whispers to herself,” “faint pause” or “gasps for air.” The phrases are arranged across a wall in order to direct viewers to construct their own narrative based on the rhythm and emotional content of the text. The series titled acoustic prints (2012) consists of extracted phrases from the acoustic wall series to produce a series of archival digital prints which combine and present the texts in yet another form.

Soledad Arias was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She currently lives and works in New York City. Arias was awarded a BFA and MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and she has exhibited her work in galleries and museums both nationally and abroad. Her work has been featured in numerous institutions including MoMA P.S.1 (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Jersey City Museum (New Jersey), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), El Museo del Barrio (New York) and The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York). Awards and residencies include The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, The Banff Centre for the Arts and the MFA Fellowship for the School of Visual Arts.

Installation view

thru May 27, 2012

The solo exhibition ‘Oshkosh’ of the American artist Michelle Grabner can be visited until the 27th of May. Every saturday and sundays from 14.00 – 17.00 hrs. and by appointment.

Oshkosh is the name of the town where Grabner was born. It is a small Wisconsin municipality known for its brand of coveralls called Oshkosh b’gosh. Returning to domestic fabric patterns for her show at PS her interest in domestic abstraction returns to the fore.

Installation view (Li Trincere at right)

May 6 – June 10, 2012

Did You See Heaven?

In a conversation with the artist Mary Heilmann at the Art Institute’s Modern Wing a while back, she asked “Did you see Heaven?” in reference to her brushy green painting (titled Heaven) then on exhibit. I remember so well the way she mischievously smiled that question. With big eyes. It still makes me smile.

It is that knowing yet playful attitude that inspires Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA and WYSIWYG, two presentations of paintings at PEREGRINEPROGRAM. Mary Heilmann folds into her work the legacies of Albers and de Kooning, and the two shows of Did You See Heaven? are built from those ideas, taking as their starting points the potential of intimacy with color and gesture in abstract work.

Beyond their essential material, paintings are also conditions for self-awareness. Did You See Heaven? is less about an agreement of recognition than it is about our differences in the presence of these works. Implicit in the statement are two other questions. If heaven is that state of bliss and ecstasy, could we see, or find it in abstract paintings? More importantly, if one agrees that the heady and sublime is indeed within reach from these works, where will we locate it and how will we understand it? Yes, there might be a bit of hyperbole here, maybe, just a little bit, but let’s not forget Heilmann’s big eyes.

– EC

Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA

Just as our “heavens” differ, we will each find our own way of experiencing this display of work. Individuated by form and scale, color in these paintings punctuate and notate, become figures, become experience, echo and contrast each other. In addition, the range of approaches, materials and postures further complicate our perceptions and conceptions. Through a spectra of physical and affective textures these works call our attention to subtle, even unnoticed things, saturating both eyes and mind.

What arrests each of us and how we apprehend the single work and exhibition is unpredictable. We come to these paintings with unique inclinations, memories and cadences. One might draw moth-like to a bright thing, a dark thing, remember the time when, stop a minute for, think an irrational thought, or slow, to imagine the work being made. Abstract works are unending because they are so flexible and indeed, the nimbleness of these paintings invites ours as the forms push, and pull, and the colors wheel.

The artists: Levi Budd and Jack Holström Schneider live and work in Chicago, IL, where they are completing their degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Michelle Grabner is a Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at SAIC. She co-directs the artist project space The Suburban in Oak Park, IL, and The Poor Farm, a non-profit art space and residency in Little Wolf, WI. Ethan Greenbaum lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has forthcoming exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Projects, NY, and the Aldrich Museum, CT. Sam Jaffe lives and works in Chicago, IL. She will open a show at Grand Bizzare Gallery this August. Larry Lee works and teaches at SAIC, and recently had a solo exhibition at Kirk’s Apartment last November. Li Trincere has shown throughout the US and Europe, and has received an NEA grant along with Pollock/ Krasner grants. Trincere recently had a solo exhibition with MINUS SPACE, in NYC. Don Voisine is a member of The National Academy of Art, and president of American Abstract Artists. His work is also exhibited widely throughout the US and Europe. Jon Waites was born in Santa Fe, NM, and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

PEREGRINEPROGRAM presents Levi Budd, Michelle Grabner, Ethan Greenbaum, Sam Jaffe, Larry Lee, Jack Holström Schneider, Li Trincere, Don Voisine, and Jon Waites in Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA.

Gabriele Evertz working in her studio, NY

May 26 – July 8, 2012

Robert Swain, Untitled, 6×7-5A RO#3, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 84 inches

May 18 – June 23, 2012

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, Color Affect, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for painter Robert Swain and inaugural exhibition in its new gallery located in the Santa Fe Railyard Arts District.

Swain has spent his entire career devising a unique system for organizing over two thousand colors and studying how humans interact with and feel color. His study of color is less theoretical and more empirical as evidenced by his highly systematic approach to painting over the past four plus decades. Through his rigorous evaluations, Swain has gone beyond how we perceive the physical effects of color to how we experience the emotional and physiological sensations produced by color in certain arrangements and configurations. Thus, his paintings go beyond physical observation to a phenomenological affect.

Swain thinks of color as energy and a trigger for a series of physiochemical reactions in humans that results in certain sensations. Through abstract painting, Swain can uncouple color from any cultural signifier and cognitive system and examine the pure affect of color on the human psyche.

The emotional and psychological ramifications result from the combination of the particular colors, their values and degree of saturation as well as adjacency to other colors, overall organization and scale. In this exhibition, two series of Swain’s paintings will be presented: the well known meticulous grids with their flat pristine surfaces and his newest all-over paintings with their lush painterly surfaces referred to as the “Brushstroke” series.

Robert Swain received a BA Degree from the American University in Washington, D. C. in 1964. Currently, he lives and works in New York City and is a Professor at Hunter College. He has had eighteen solo exhibitions, the most recent being a major retrospective at Hunter College / Times Square Gallery in 2010. His work has been included in over sixty group exhibitions, including The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In 1968 he was included in The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Thirty-First Biennial and again in 1998 for The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Forty-Fifth Biennial. Advertise with EyesIn Magazine

Swain’s artwork is represented in over 284 private and public collections, including The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Milwaukee Art Center, The Everson Art Museum, The Denver Art Museum, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Julian Jackson, Crossing 12, 2012
Oil on panel
24 X 24 inches

May 17 – June 16, 2012

A solo exhibition by NYC painter Julian Jackson.

Lynne Harlow, Measuring a Summer’s Day, 2012
Blue and orange latex paint and vinyl, dimensions variable
Installation view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca – a museum with impunity

When a public institution conducts itself in an unprofessional and unprecedented way that does injustice to artist, curator, partner institutions, and the general public, it is a story that deserves to be known.

The exhibition Minus Space en Oaxaca was conceived by artists Emi Winter and Matthew Deleget. Deleget is co-founder and director of Minus Space in Brooklyn, New York, one of very few venues internationally specifically dedicated to exhibiting and promoting reductive art. As co-curators, Winter and Deleget proposed a group show of editions and multiples accompanied by four larger, site-specific works. The proposal was made to a group of Oaxacan cultural institutions that were receptive and agreed to host the shows in a coordinated, simultaneous effort in their respective venues in the city. The planning and initial meetings with the museum directors began in December 2010, with an opening date subsequently set for March 15, 2012. Each institution sent an official letter of invitation to the artist it would host: The Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) acted as lead institution by inviting Matthew Deleget as curator to present the exhibition of multiples at the main IAGO galleries, and further invited Dutch artist Jan van der Ploeg to create a wall painting at a second IAGO venue (Avenida Juárez); the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños (MUPO) invited US artist Russell Maltz to create a work in its courtyard; the Biblioteca Henestrosa invited Swiss artist Daniel Göttin to create a wall work in its exhibition space; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO) invited US artist Lynne Harlow to make a work for its courtyard called Cubo Abierto. The invitation from MACO went out later than the others because the museum had changed directors. Incoming MACO director Ramón Jiménez Cuen signed the letter to Harlow and sent it on January 13, 2012.  Read full article.

We are delighted to announce that gallery artist Gabriele Evertz has received The Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). One of two recipients this year, Ms. Evertz was personally selected by Mr. Alkazzi from a pool of 1,500 applicants. She will receive a cash award of $20,000.

“We live in a fast-moving culture that grows increasingly more abstract, away from the physical touch, away from the physical ground of being – away from the act of creation by hand,” said Alkazzi regarding the creation of the award, which was presented for the first time in 2010. “I want in my own way, to encourage the glorious expressions of pencil, brush, and paint, and to nurture the kind of artist and the kind of art that I like and respect.”

“NYFA is honored that Basil Alkazzi has asked us to oversee this important award, which will have a significant impact on the recipients. It is incredibly moving to see an artist so dedicated to giving back to his community, “ said NYFA Executive Director Michael L. Royce. “To be able to award $20,000 to each of these extraordinary painters is a joy and we are so grateful to Basil for making it possible.”

Ms. Evertz noted, “I received the news of this honor in a letter from Mr. Alkazzi in which he expressed the hope that I ‘will also reach out towards other gifted artists.’ Indeed, whenever possible, it has been my pleasure to curate shows around the themes of color, light, and perception and I intend to continue to present relatively unknown painters who have devoted their life’s work to this particular aspect of painting. This award will also enable me to do the obvious: purchase materials to embark on a major body of work that has preoccupied me. Further, I am preparing for two solo shows this year; one in Riverhead, NY and one in Santa Fe, NM, and the funding will enable me to prepare a publication. Finally, I can now begin to realize the long-term project of documenting and archiving my own work, something every artist ought to do but is not often in the position to do. It is therefore with the greatest joy and humility that I am accepting this award. I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Alkazzi and the New York Foundation for the Arts for this honor.”

About Basil H. Alkazzi
The British artist, Basil H. Alkazzi, is a prolific and, in his own words, a “compulsive” painter. His distinguished career as an artist spans almost 50 years. Six monographs of work have been published, the most recent being Resonant Echoes – The Art of Basil Alkazzi by Dennis Wepman in 2007. His work is held in the public collections of museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum – Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Santa Barbara Museum in California, The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, The National Council in Kuwait, and Centrum Sztuki in Warsaw, Poland. In addition to being a gifted painter, Mr. Basil Alkazzi is also a generous philanthropist. In 1986, he established The Basil H. Alkazzi Foundation Awards, which are presented annually at the Royal College of Art in London. A cosmopolitan, he has travelled widely, and he has lived for long periods of time in London, Athens, and New York. He currently resides in Monaco.

For additional information about Gabriele Evertz, please contact the gallery.

EPITAPHS
A New Book of Poetry & Images
by Gerald Jonas & Sanford Wurmfeld

Please join us for a special reception, reading & book signing:

Friday, May 4, 5-8pm
Short reading at 7pm

Gerald Jonas, who was on the staff of The New Yorker for 30 years, is a poet, editor and writer. The poems in this book began with a question: Who can speak for the dead?

Sanford Wurmfeld is a painter and the Caroff Professor of Fine Art at Hunter College. His images in the book were scanned from a series of watercolors that were made by layering washes of primary colors: cyan, magenta, yellow or black. Wurmfeld’s original watercolors will be on view at the gallery.

The paintings and poetry in Epitaphs, created independently by first cousins, came to speak to each other on the page in unexpected ways.

Epitaphs will be available at the reception for a special discounted price of $30. It is also available online at MINUS SPACE for $40.

David Robbins, Talent, 1986
18 gelatin silver prints
10 x 8 inches each

May 2 – June 16, 2012

Participating Artists:
Alan Belcher, Gretchen Bender, Ashley Bickerton, Jennifer Bolande, Michael Byron, Clegg & Guttmann, Jenny Holzer, Thomas Lawson, Larry Johnson, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Peter Nagy, Joel Otterson, Steven Parrino, David Robbins, Cindy Sherman, Robin Weglinski

In 1986 David Robbins produced Talent, a photowork comprised of eighteen black-and-white headshots. He invited a coterie of artist friends associated with Gallery Nature Morte and early Metro Pictures to have their portrait taken on 46th Street by a studio photographer, James Kriegsmann. Twenty-five years later, Michelle Grabner brings them back together.

Unmoored from its ever-alluring 80s context, Talent and the collection of work constituting 25 Years of Talent, proposes a significant line of questioning today: What does talent look like now? How have signs of production and exchange evolved over the past twenty-five years? Why is commercial success always the first frame we employ to assess the individual artists included in Talent? How is authorship, the artistic persona, and the contemporary imagination shaped in a social field of connectivity? How has that field changed over time? Or has it?

There is no better way to forward these questions than to convene an exhibition of recent work by Talent’s artists. With the exception of Gretchen Bender (1951 – 2004) and Steven Parrino (1958 – 2005), who are represented with older pieces, fifteen of Talent’s artists are featured with examples of new art works. In some cases the work reveals striking conceptual and material departures from 1986. For other artists, systems of ideas have remained fixed for the past quarter century. Robin Weglinski, the only artist in Talent to leave behind art making, is represented in the exhibition with a personal artifact, the thick length of braided hair that she sports in her Talent portrait. The townhouse provides the perfect time capsule in which to study these questions as well as our own modes of judgment and our collective art world’s apparatuses for success.

25 Years of Talent is accompanied by an exhibition catalog that includes essays by Michelle Grabner, Tim Griffin and David Robbins in addition to interview exchanges between Randi Hopkins and twelve of Talent’s eighteen subjects: Jennifer Bolande, Alan Belcher, Clegg & Guttmann, Ashley Bickerton, Joel Otterson, Robin Weglinski, Michael Byron, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Lawson, Peter Nagy, and Allan McCollum.

Eugen Batz, The Spatial Effect of Colors and Forms, 1929

May 3 – August 12, 2012

The biggest Bauhaus exhibition in the UK in over 40 years presents the modern world’s most famous art school. From expressionist beginnings to a pioneering model uniting art and technology, this London exhibition presents the Bauhaus’ utopian vision to change society in the aftermath of the First World War. Bauhaus: Art as Life explores the diverse artistic production that made up its turbulent fourteen-year history and delves into the subjects at the heart of the school: art, culture, life, politics and society, and the changing technology of the age.

Bauhaus: Art as Life will feature a rich array of painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and installation. Exemplar works from such Bauhaus Masters as Josef and Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Hannes Meyer, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Gunta Stölzl, will be presented alongside works by lesser-known Bauhaus artists and students.

The Bauhaus: Art as Life public programme also brings to London a host of workshops, talks, films and performances as well as a major Creative Learning initiative for the Bauhaus exhibition, the Art School Lab, an intensive two-week summer school held at the Barbican and led by leading practitioners from all artistic backgrounds.

Hélio Oticia, Penetrável Filtro (Filter Penetrable), 1972
Mixed media installation
99 x 234 x 318 inches

May 5 – June 16, 2012

For the first time in New York, three of the late Brazilian avant-garde artist Hélio Oiticica’s rarely-seen multi-sensorial installations of color: Penetrável PN1 (1960); Penetrável Filtro (1972); and Penetrável PN28 “Nas Quebradas” (1979) will be on view at Galerie Lelong. Oiticica’s invention of the Penetrável (Penetrable) series brought a new dimension to his work, allowing him to create built environments and develop outdoor installations such as the well-known Magic Square series. The Penetrables are considered among the first artistic installations, and have not been credited enough for their contribution to early conceptual art. Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables opens the public on Saturday, May 5, 2012 from 6 to 8pm. The artist’s brothers César and Cláudio Oiticica, who direct the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Brazil, will be present.

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Oiticica investigated color in space in a cohesive, continuous oeuvre, until his untimely death in 1980. He began with the Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema drawings and then liberated his painting into space with series entitled Bilateral, Relevos Espaciais, Bólide, Núcleo, Penetrável, and Parangolé. Not only are the Penetrables a natural progression in his own work, but also within the continuum of the art historical canon. Oiticica avowed, “It is not a matter of copying Mondrian, but of blazing the trail for a painting of pure color, space, time and structure.” Furthering his notion of bringing painting into real time and space, in 1961 Oiticica wrote about the Penetrables:

“Here, color exudes both the decorative and the architectural…so as to become purely aesthetic and intensely experienced [vivenciada] or purely aesthetic in the sense of a heightened experience. They are like movable frescos on a human scale except that (most importantly) they are penetrable.”

What makes the Penetrables stand out amongst Oiticica’s body of work is the viewer’s involvement as a participant and “discoverer of the work.” Oiticica’s first free-standing Penetrable, Penetrável PN1 is a small corridor of bright yellow-hued, sliding panels which the participant can move to activate the work. One of the largest Penetrables, Penetrável Filtro takes the concepts of PN1 to a grander scale in a labyrinthine structure. Penetrável Filtro allows the participant to wander through multiple corridors and curtains of green, blue, yellow, and orange, and end by drinking this color from a glass of orange juice. Created the year before his death, Penetrável PN28 “Nas Quebradas” guides the participant on a gravel path through an architectural structure made of wood, brick, and yellow panels with a jute roof. Here, Oiticica takes inspiration from the shantytowns, or favelas or of Rio de Janeiro, and achieves ones of his primary goals of fusing art and life, providing “vivências” (experiences). Although the Penetrables were created in the 1960s and 1970s, the immediate experience of engaging with the works brings them to the present moment.

Hélio Oiticica’s installation Cosmococa C1 (1973/2010), made in collaboration with Neville D’Almeida, is featured in the exhibition Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space, organized and previously exhibited by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and on view until May 13th at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. His famous installation Tropicália (1967) is currently being exhibited in From Revolt to Postmodernity (1962-1982) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Oiticica’s work was presented in the major international arts festival Europalia in Belgium in 2011, and in the São Paulo Biennial 2010. The solo traveling exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Museu É o Mundo was presented at the Fundação Itaú Cultural in Sao Paulo and the Paço Imperial and Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro in 2010. In 2007 and 2008, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tate Modern, London presented the landmark retrospective Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color.