Andre Saraiva working on the production of his sculptures for Andrepolis his up-coming NY show at The Hole, Brooklyn. Photo Olivier Zahm
Featured works on Exhibition A
André Saraiva is a Portuguese graffiti artist you may remember from the Paris night scenes in the art documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” His signature character is a winking smiley face called Mr. A whose visage was ubiquitous on mailboxes in France during the 1990s. Since then André has become almost a nightlife legend with his global Le Baron enterprise (Paris, New York, Tokyo, and the occasional pop-up club). He also marked his foray into the world of cinema last July with his film debut, “The Shoe,” starring Leo Fitzpatrick and Annabelle Dexter-Jones. Early this year Half Gallery hosted André’s first solo art exhibition, “Love Letters” in New York and he will have a major show at The Hole this summer, opening June 7th.
Featured works on Exhibition A
The tension of loss and temptation, the modern voodoo in contextualizing detritus as keepsake: there is a fearlessness at the heart of Aurel Schmidt’s work which has mesmerized the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, Dakis Joannou, and The Whitney Museum to name just a few of her followers. Although Schmidt’s style varies greatly from that of Kara Walker, both artists refuse to tone down their often confrontational subject matter for any one particular audience, an admirable quality in today’s contemporary art world. She is perhaps best known for her explorations of grotesque beauty (think cigarette burns and banana peels), but it is simply one of the many paradoxes embedded in her sculptural drawings. As Robert Rauschenberg once said, “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” Anyone familiar with Aurel Schmidt’s art must be inclined to agree.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Is it a knife or some exotic tree leaf? A set of tiny high heels or strings of lowercase “A”s? Simone Shubuck is an expert at making broken drawings: extremely intricate and almost impossible to pin down. Whether she’s depicting shell monsters or a frayed ribbon, her hand seeks the comfort of repetition, but with a novelty that pushes the imagery beyond obsession. Embracing her background in floral design, Shubuck’s interest lends a steady subtext to her work which is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.
Featured works on Exhibition A
For her breathtaking debut at White Columns, Cynthia created a new series of pictures that gave us a totally different perspective on the term site specific. Daignault will hang a painting of a slide projector on one wall of the gallery and then directly across from it place another painting of the image she imagines it should be illuminating. Part of this same exhibition — which later became its own stand-alone show at Lisa Cooley — were her CCTV paintings. Essentially, she paints the screen of a closed circuit television and all its associative hardware, but makes the scene it’s capturing specific to the view from which it’s alleged to be monitoring. Her representational practice really needs to be seen in person to fully appreciate, however a catalogue of her TV paintings is due out any day now. As well as having her own rich practice, Cynthia has also worked as an assistant to many major contemporary artists including Sean Landers, Josephine Meckseper and Kara Walker.
Featured works on Exhibition A
A New Jersey native, Les Rogers currently lives and works in New York and New Jersey. His work, which has been exhibited most recently at Haunch of Venison and Leo Koenig Gallery in New York and Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris, reflects his unique brand of abstract realism. Les’ paintings are collected by several prominent art collectors including Elton John and real estate mogul, Jerry Speyer. A show of new works by Les will open May 12th in Paris at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve.
Featured works on Exhibition A
In his 2011 show at Higher Pictures, “Everything Keeps Being Nothing,” Sam Falls continued his exploration of how an artist today can reconcile painting and photography on a single surface. Writing in The New York Times, critic Roberta Smith commended his skillful negotiation between printmaking and advertising. Falls commitment and curiosity — along with obvious talent — recently landed him on Forbes “Top 30 under 30″ in art and design. His next solo show in New York will open May 10th at American Contemporary and be accompanied by a new book from Karma who published his Val Verde volume last year.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Maybe you read about Elle Muliarchyk’s “Lips of Babel” project last year in T Magazine. It’s an intoxicatingly funny video of fifty models’ lips reciting tongue twisters in their native language. The combination of sexy and strange is something of a specialty for this gueriila-style photographer who spent her formative years in Vietnam and the Czech Republic. Our favorite body of work is a portfolio she conceived with curator Neville Wakefield where Elle accessorized saintly statues in churches and synagogues to make these holy and ancient icons feel very, very present. The photographs were later displayed as a solo exhibition at Milk Gallery in 2009. On the editorial side, Elle is a currently a contributor to V and W magazines as well as The New York Times.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Mugshots, mice and teenage party animals might make for strange bedfellows, but the subjects all make cameos in Adam Stennett’s paintings, most recently during “Mind Control and Other Magic Tricks” at The Gatewood Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina. We remember loving his 2008 show “Off the Grid” in East Hampton with John McWhinnie. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at The Portland Art Museum, The Chelsea Arts Museum and The National Arts Club.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Richard Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949 and is widely recognized for popularizing “re-photography”, perhaps most famously with his cowboy pictures appropriated from classic Marlboro advertising. His landmark 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim, “Spiritual America”, featured many iconic Prince pieces from his nurse paintings to his upstate photographs, monochromatic jokes, car hoods, t-shirt paintings, and his de Kooning women. Recently, his exhibition “Prince/Picasso” opened at the Picasso Museum in Malaga, Spain and will be on view there until late May. We strongly recommend you see it for yourself.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Richard Butler is best known as lead singer of The Psychedelic Furs, but his artwork suggests echoes of Leigh Bowery and Jenny Saville. Formally trained as a painter, Butler follows the long tradition of musicians from John Lennon to David Byrne, who first found inspiration at art school. Strikingly beautiful, his portraits almost unanimously deliver that familiar perfume of melancholy. Last March, he staged an ambitious solo exhibition here in New York at Freight + Volume.
Featured works on Exhibition A
We were first introduced to Peter Dayton’s artwork by the late John McWhinnie, a rare book/art dealer who always had the most extraordinary taste. Last summer, Peter was part of two interesting installations in East Hampton. He painted a decommissioned fighter jet nose cone for the group show “Nose Job,” along with Richard Prince, Dan Colen and Aaron Young. Currently the next phase of this project is on view in Tucson, AZ until May 2012 where many of the same artists re-imagined WWII aircraft as canvas at The Pima Air and Space Museum. Lesser known is Peter’s performative work like rock n roll therapy, a hilarious interactive piece in which ‘patients” are analyzed based on their personal history with music. In the 1970s, Peter was a founding member of the legendary punk band La Peste. His work has been exhibited at Salon 94 in New York, The Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, and The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton where he is part of their permanent collection.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Spencer Sweeney was a featured artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and later participated in MoMA PS1′s “That Was Then…This Is Now” exhibition. He is represented by Gavin Brown’s enterprise where his 2011 solo show, “The Pharaoh’s Lounge” included his lively party paintings and a working sauna. As co-owner of Santos Party House, he often moonlights DJ-ing and frequently does promo visuals for the concerts they host in much the same tradition Peter Doig makes announcements for his Studio Film Club series. Along with artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Spencer blurs the parameters of traditional art making by creating situations for greater public engagement.
Featured Works on Exhibition A
Richard Kern was a standout in last year’s celebrated show “After Shelley Duvall ’72″ curated by artist Bjarne Melgaard at Maccarone Gallery. The exhibition featured his punk-pop video work, but Kern is best known for his sexy — often voyeristic — portraiture. Although 1995′s “New York Girls” might rank as his most famous book, the East Village photographer has done over a dozen monographs and is currently completing a new volume — shhhh — for Taschen. Internationally he has presented shows at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Kenny Schachter in London, Feature, Inc in New York, and this month in “You Killed Me First” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. ArtForum compared his iconic pictures to Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinely, but unlike his contemporaries, Kern creates cultural screensavers with a pioneering post-Warholian aesthetic.
Photo Credit: KAWS
Featured Works on Exhibition A
Julia Chiang lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was recently listed among the 100 Artists to Watch by Modern Painters, and is working on a solo exhibition at colette in Paris this coming April. Julia works with various media and on multiple scales. Her work is often inspired by the stories and visuals of day to day life, personal histories, and the strengths and weaknesses within us all. She has exhibited at places such as Half Gallery, OHWOW, Deitch Projects, Tina Kim Gallery, Printed Matter, and The Hole.
Leo as Exhibition A Co-Founder Bill Powers
Featured Works on Exhibition A
Currently featured in a two-person show at Max Fish, Leo Fitzpatrick is perhaps best known in the art world for his title page poetry series. As an actor, Leo is familiar to the public at large for films like Larry Clark’s KIDS and notable turns in HBO’s The Wire, Sons of Anarchy, The Shoe and Kalup Linzy’s shorts. Leo Fitzpatrick’s mixed media work is in the private collections of Terry Richardson, Daphne Guinness, Richard Kern, James Frey and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. His book F#*k Friends was published by OHWOW in 2009. He can be found most Saturday nights DJ-ing at Lit.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Last April, street art legend Lee Quinones was commissioned to paint a giant mural in Los Angeles as part of MOCA’s wildly popular “Art in the Streets” exhibition. This summer, he took part in the group show “Nose Job” at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton, curated by Carlo McCormick, where major contemporary artists including Richard Prince, Dan Colen, and Swoon painted nose cones of decommissioned military planes. He also appeared as a guest judge on Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” A native New Yorker by way of Puerto Rico, Lee Quinones’ work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Most recently, he was featured in BAM’s 10th annual Next Wave Art exhibition.
Featured Works on Exhibition A:
What Richard Prince did for re-photography, Jessica Craig Martin continues to do for cropping: namely narrowing the viewer’s focus and reconstituting narratives to go beyond surface reading. Whether she’s covering the Gay Pride Parade for Purple Diary or the Venice Biennale for The New York Times, Jessica remains at war with the obvious. Her work is in the holdings of The Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum.
Featured Works on Exhibition A
Jack Siegel was quite literally born on the Fourth of July and there’s an American pervasiveness in his pictures from the dusty palm trees of his native California to the lobby carpet pattern in your local cineplex. He swept onto the scene last year with a two-person show, “Imagined Nostalgia,” for which he and Lucien Smith were celebrated in The New York Times. “When a photograph is successful I get a visceral feeling of intimacy,” he says of his shooting style. While not a direct member of The Still House Group, he is recognized for the association. Jack represents a younger generation of photographers attempting to reconcile the medium between a snapshot aesthetic popularized by Warhol and the new monumentalism of an Andreas Gursky.
Featured works on Exhibition A
The Swiss born artist, Olaf Breuning, boasts an incredibly diverse body of work that includes photography, video, drawing, installations, and live performance. At Art Basel in 2008, he constructed a 150-ton Sphinx out of sand in South Beach. Olaf was a standout at last year’s Move! , a two-day performance held at MoMA’s PS1, where he dumped paint on models as part of his “Carrie” installation in collaboration with designer Cynthia Rowley. When asked how he views himself in the art world, Olaf explains that he lives in “the base camp at Mount Everest”—metaphorically—where he’s “content to spend the rest of his days, always within striking distance of the peak.” He is represented by Metro Pictures in New York.
Featured Works on Exhibition A:
It’s not always what you say, it’s the urgency with which you say it…and the viewer gets that sense immediately when confronted with Xaviera Simmons’ artwork. Such was the case with her “Superunknown (Alive In The)” installation at MoMA PS1 for Greater New York 2010. Her serialization of boat people captured a magnitude and desperation that both riveted the eye and generalized these refugee’s plight in a powerful consolidation. Whether she’s taking a pilgrimage with Buddhist monks or collaborating with local Williamsburg musicians, Simmons experiential approach is self-evident. Her most recent exhibition was entitled “Wilderness” at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York. The use of nature is a recurring backdrop in Simmons’ photography, reminding us that beauty is the beholder of all eyes.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Go see Michael Bevilacqua’s painting “Hello My Name Is…” in “Masters of Reality” group show at Gering & Lopez on 5th Ave before it closes on December 23rd.
New York-based painter Michael Bevilacqua attended Long Beach State University and Santa Barbara City College, later continuing his studies at the Cambridge College of Art and Technology in Great Britain. Bevilacqua has exhibited internationally including solo shows in Beijing, Copenhagen, Milan, Tokyo, Madrid, Barcelona, and New York. He has also exhibited in group shows at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; The Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT. His work is in numerous public collections including The Mitsuni Collection, Tokyo, Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.
A snapshot from Borthwick's show at Half Gallery
Featured works on Exhibition A
Mark Borthwick continues the tradition of the Hudson River School in finding spiritual salvation through nature. By letting bits of light into the back of his camera and slightly exposing its film, Borthwick creates dreamlike color clouds that shadow his photographs with soft lavenders and rich reds. His commercial work includes a Cat Power album cover as well as editorial work for the likes of Purple, Pop and Vogue. His mixed feelings toward this industry might best be described by the name of his mid-career survey, “Not in Fashion.” Give him nameless lakes — over Louis Vuitton — and he’s happy.
Featured works on Exhibition A
Dustin Yellin lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His artworks are based on an accumulative process of painting on multiple layers of resin or glass, creating three-dimensional forms. Utilizing discarded found objects he explores how we move within a mental environment of shifting depths- redolent of Deleuze’s “A Thousand Plateaus.” Common subjects in his artworks are biological imagery. While historic artists like Leopold Blaschka and Ernst Haeckel have used their techniques to represent real biological forms, Dustin Yellin’s artworks exist as permutations of natural life and form. His paintings use a method of representing three-dimensional forms that is reminiscent of both lenticular images and rapid prototyping. The technique approximates a static volumetric display and is autostereoscopic, as his artworks appear 3D without the use of special glasses or viewing equipment. “Memories occupy physical matter in the brain,” he explained during a recent exhibition in London and to viewers this concept is self-evident. Dustin Yellin is represented by Vito Schnabel.
FEATURED WORKS ON EXHIBITION A:
For the things she pictures are emblems of her desire for those things and much else—desire is endless. And the way she pictures things, her deployment of artifice, shows how her will tempers her desire, so that her yearning can never be the simple kind that would engulf her, obliterate her, if it were ever fulfilled. Cultivating autonomy, she pictures not only things but also the act of picturing. Luxuriating in the possibilities for meaning, she elaborates it, teases it, and submits to its inevitable ambiguity. It is not just that red is red and, at the same, the color of a pair of running shoes. Ambiguous form is impossible to separate from ambiguous feeling. - Carter Ratcliff
