l.a. centric | arts
gallery exhibitions | february 2013
MARA DE LUCA CRUISE COLLECTION 2013
PREMIERES 2.23.13
LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034 www.luisdejesus.com
V I R G I N I A K AT Z Tracing Places – 8 Years March 2 – April 13, 2013 Reception: Saturday, March 2, 4-6 PM
Tracing Places – 8 Years, (detail) 2005 – 2013. Installation of collected paper ephemera, hand-cut into 2 centimeter squares. Approximately 75” x 150”
RUTH BACHOFNER GALLERY Bergamot Station Arts Center 2525 Michigan Ave G2 ▪ Santa Monica ▪ CA www.RuthBachofnerGallery.com
January 13, 2013 – February 17, 2013
Joyce Kozloff Other Geographies
207 W. 5th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 213-806-7889 www.cb1gallery.com
Lavi Daniel “A Seed With A Mind Of Its Own” February 9 – March 9, 2013 Reception: Saturday, February 9, 5 – 7 PM Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM – 5:30 PM
Grant Mudford
2525 Michagan Ave, B4, Santa Monica, CA 90404 t. 310 828 8488 www.rosamundfelsen.com info@rosamundfelsen.com
A PARTICIPATING EXHIBITION OF:
www.cnp-la.org
LAUREN MARSOLIER Transition FEBRUARY 20-MARCH 30
ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY
AT BERGAMOT STATION ARTS CENTER 2525 Michigan Ave Suite B7 Santa Monica, CA 90404 P: 310.315.1937 / F: 310.315.9688 info@robertbermangallery.com www.robertbermangallery.com
HERBERT BAYER "Leaning Spiral Tower" tabletop edition, c. 1969 34 3/4" x 14" x 10 3/4"
"Undulated Wall" tabletop edition, c. 1967 37" x 21" x 21"
"Memorial Sculpture" tabletop edition c.1960-2007 48" x 21" x 21"
These sculptures and others from the Herbert Bayer Family Collection are available in editions of 6, in sizes from tabletop to monumental. For more information, contact:
EMIL NELSON GALLERY 2862 COLORADO AVE SANTA MONICA, CA 90404 www.nelsongallery.com Email: info@nelsongallery.com
exhibitions
Public Privates is the first solo exhibition of Adam Mars’ large-scale, mixed media brick paintings, which expose contemporary media-obsessed culture and address the collapse of privacy into a larger public forum. Appropriating aesthetic elements from an urban art context, Mars’ paintings blend veracious humor with the sensibilities of California pop art. Focusing solely on the elements of color, text and surface,
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ADAM MARS Feb 8 - Mar 23 Gusford
these works use simplicity and incisiveness to resonate with the viewer. Their relationship to viral communication is evident in Mars’ clever phrases, which strive for a sense of familiar originality. Overlaying the monochromatic brick, stenciled witticisms such as Retardashians, I Loved You, then I Googled You, and Good Lay, Bad Texter, cover a diversity of topics while remaining truly relatable to a massive
audience connected by shared social experiences. Engaging within the context of celebrity culture, but also looking to the ubiquitous nature of social media, these paintings, like communication in the digital era, are grounded in the necessity of brevity. Mars’ works astutely examine what it means to live in a rapidly evolving society and ultimately drive to question the ambiguity of the future.
Adam Mars, all works: (named for display text), acrylic and spray paint on faux brick; 42.5 x 48 in.
GEAN MORENO & ERNESTO OROZA Wharton + Espinosa thru Mar 23
As they have done in their previous research-driven projects, artists Moreno and Oroza begin by zeroing in on contemporary variations of an object typology — in this case, they began with the souvenir — in an effort to understand how it functions in relation to forces of contemporary production, the generation of urban morphology and identity, and the changing terrain of user engagement. In a previous project entitled Pre-City, for instance, they sought to understand how an abstract plane made up of the different but limited shapes, specific metrics, and repeating objects that make up the stocks of building depots, construction sites, landscape nurseries, home improvement stores, and even pet stores, becomes a determining set of codes and sequences that simultaneously
constrains and open distortive new potentials in urban morphology and city production. In physics, a moiré pattern is an interference or distortion created when two grids are overlaid at misaligned angles or slightly different mesh sizes. As part of their 2010 Quebec Biennial project entitled The Moiré House (Or, ‘Urbanism’ for Emptying Cities), Moreno and Oroza posited the “Moiré House” as a space where two or more functional fields meet to confuse and expand a house’s main function. The tense exchange of the incompatible demands placed upon it serves to become the structure’s most telling quality and dominant marker of identity. Economic downturns are often the accelerating contextual force that causes this form to proliferate. “Imagine diagramming the residen-
Gene Moreno & Ernesto Oroza: installation view of “Orange Tsunami” at Wharton + Espinosa
exhibitions
tial functions of a house as a pattern, and then imagine overlaying upon that a second pattern of functions usually not associated to the home: a ham-curing establishment, beauty salon, cake shop, scrap collection yard, or marijuana growing house.” The visual field of these superimposed functions, engaging these multiple patterns, produce a Moiré effect. In “Orange Tsunami,” the artists use an invasive pattern of object organization, undermining the standard normally dictated by the gallery’s natural architectural shape. This complicates the design and layout of the existing structure to create a rubic that skews the natural rigid logic of gallery constructs. It removes decision-making based on intuition and design codification to perpetuate this Moiré effect.
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exhibitions
Drawing from the influences of both classical painting and minimal abstraction, Travis Collinson’s paintings and drawings creates a framework for people, nature and space to exist in an anxious state of entropy. With a skewed perspective and distortion of unassuming subjects, objects and environments, the artist’s compositions are at once familiar and enigmatic. Collinson’s painting and drawing style, influence by the early work of Lucien
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TRAVIS COLLINSON thru Feb 16 Maloney
Freud, juxtaposes near-photographic rendering, subtle exaggeration and a pallet of muted tones to create remarkably quiet scenes inhabited by sublime, psychological subjects. Collinson has shown throughout California, most recently at the Berkeley Art Museum exhibition ‘Hauntology’ and Eli Ridgeway Gallery in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum as well as numerous private collections.
Travis Collinson, Pink Western, 2012, graphite and white chalk on colored paper, 27.75 X 29.75 in
CYNTHIA ONA INNIS Walter Maciel thru Feb 16
Shine, a new exhibition of work by Cynthia Ona Innis, continues her interest in nature and interpreting the cyclical manifestations of landscape into well articulated abstractions. This past fall Innis became an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Golden Gate National Park just north of San Francisco. Set within an old military building on a hill and adjacent to a restored missile site, her studio overlooks the ocean and sublime environment of rolling hills and majestic valleys. The new work continues to be a study of forms under transformation, exploring exchanges that are seen and unseen to the eye and exposing moments when one thing becomes another. The subject specifically relates
to the changing notions of light in the course of a 24 hour period. Time, movement and observations of the effects of light on the eye are explored within the range of weather patterns ranging from extremely bright coastal days to dense fog and pitch-black nights. The interference of light seen on objects and through the camera lens becomes the focus and is visually recreated using a variety of collaged information such as satin, silk and reflective metallic fabrics layered with ink and acrylic paint on canvas, wood panel and paper. In contrast to the layering of materials, there are tightly drawn areas of patterns, overlapping honey comb-like networks made from observations of light and the dust and pollution
Cynthia Ona Innis: (clockwise from top right): Catchlight, 2012, acrylic, ink and satin fabric on wood panel, 11” x 14”; Flash, 2013, ink, acrylic and satin fabric on canvas, 48” x 60”; Sunset & Batteries, 2013, acrylic, ink and satin fabric on wood panel, 38” x 43”, Shone, 2012, acrylic, ink and satin fabric on wood pane, 16” x 20”
exhibitions
left in its path between the eye/camera and the natural/artificial light source. The work takes on a landscape format with a narrative created by a combination of drawing, painting and overall relationship of fabrics. In addition to the paintings and drawings, a new video will be shown produced in collaboration with East Coast based video artist Adam Frelin. The video explores the experience of traversing a pedestrian tunnel that leads to the Point Bonita lighthouse, near the artist's studio, and the light effects inside of the tunnel and the area. The project was created with information and footage collected by Innis and Frelin and exchanged, highlighting each artist’s vision and interpretation.
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exhibitions
WHITNEY HUBBS thru Mar 9 M+B
Whitney Hubbs’ first Los Angeles exhibition,The Song Itself is Already a Skip, is dark, raw, powerful and swimming in sensuality. Her work is at once blunt and lyrical, formal and improvised, recognizable to daily experience and yet totally foreign from it. Full of unlikely visual rhythms, Hubbs’ work creates and provokes with aesthetic force. Her images reside in a reticence of feeling. Through profound light and dark, a specific refusal of continuity or seriality, as well as latent eroticism, Hubbs demonstrates over and over her disinterest in generic narratives. Her work persuasively follows its own internal logic through her willingness to challenge the relationship between photographic immediacy and “authenticity.” This is the point of contact where reality and representation become muddled. While we are accustomed to the photographic medium as the revelator, Hubbs confounds this idea. Abstracting through framing and with little desire to illuminate or provide an understanding, Hubbs prefers to leave the viewer feeling. It is a sense of intuitive wonder you are left with. If you care to look into the corners and crawl into the vastness, you find yourself pulling wonder out of the chaos and revealing something more.
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Whitney Hubbs: (fop) Untitled (Boulder), 2011, silver gelatin print, 40 x 50 in, edition of 5; (bot) Untitled (Wave), 2012, silver gelatin print, 20 x 24 in, edition of 5.
LAWRENCE GIPE Lora Schlesinger thru Feb 23
exhibitions
Ranging from landscapes (natural and industrial) to genre portraiture, the subject matter is inextricably bound to the 20th Century, encoded deeply by that prior era's fascination with technology, progress and ideology. Executed using layers of varnishes and glazes, the style of these works references the 19th Century, transporting them further back in time and melding photography and the academic conventions of painting into a nostalgic fusion. In the connecting small gallery, LawrenceGipe creates a "21st Century Annex" with the display of two stark graphite drawings based on photos taken of riot police during the Occupy Frankfurt protest in 2011. These pieces provide a contrast with the front room's vision of a romanticized world, and suggest the continuation of a grim, authoritarian reality. Since 1986, Lawrence Gipe has had 49 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US and Germany. Later this year, Zero+ Publishing will release a book on his career, Lawrence Gipe, Century of Progress.
Lawrence Gipe: (top) Panel No. 11 from Salon (1931), 2012, oil on panel, 18 x 24 in; (bot) Panel No. 9 from Salon (1936), 2012, oil on panel, 12 x 9 in
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exhibitions
CRAIG TAYLOR thru Jan 6 CB1
In “Essence, transference, no cigarettes”, Craig Taylor continues his investigations of painting and drawing offering both the aesthetic experience arrived at through historical approaches to abstraction and the interplay of image associations. Subject matter appears, dissolves, and reemerges into a broader meditation on the nature of abstraction and the painted object as emotive. For this show these investigations also are brought into the third dimension as sculptures. In this exhibiition, the figurative and specifically portraiture as a format, is coming to the surface and making an appearance. Craig Taylor displays an acute awareness of the conventions and limitations of both abstraction and representation. Chunks of image and figures float to the surface and create their own vernacular of signs and marks. A narrative unfolds through an understanding of how the painting is made. Erotic serenity and clarity of thought collide with scatological playfulness, and the historical role of abstraction. Taylor’s influences are as diverse as Henri Matisse and Carroll Dunham, Joan Mitchell, and Peter Saul, all of whom provide a context for the gestures and marks that coalesce and fragment in these paintings, forming and reconstituting moments of pictorial and narrative legibility. Taylor’s work is freighted with a 20th century American concern for the role and nature of abstract painting it is simultaneously buoyed by a romantic touch rooted in 19th century French tradition. The space in the work is alternately atmospheric and descriptive, immediate and subtle, with painterly insouciance tempered by the presence of Surrealist grotesqueries and aggressive structural devices. Loose, luminous areas come to coexist with opaque graphic forms. Poetic and ruminative without being bound to tradition, funny and knowing without being defined by the rhetoric of postmodernism, the works are stylish and relevant without being subject to the whims of art world fashion.
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Craig Taylor: (clockwise from top right): The Fugitive Elements, 2012, paper, plaster and acrylic; Influence of the Atmosphere, 2012, oil on canvas, 72 x 54 in; Flick Think Films, 2012, oil on linen, 30 x 26 in
“PAPER” The Prospectus thru Mar 1
exhibitions
This group exhibition features six artists who each create “works on paper.” The flexibility of this dynamic material is highlighted by a variety of processes including drawing, printmaking, collage, mixed media and assemblage. A highly interactive material, paper is uniquely responsive to each artist’s treatment of it.
(clockwise from top) Chad Atti, The Garden Final; Brad Eberhard, What’s In the Box?; a work by Roger Herman.
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ADAM MARS
P U B L I C P R I VAT E S FEBRUARY 8 - MARCH 23, 2013
GUSFORD | los angeles 7 0 1 6 M e l r o s e A v e n u e | L o s A n g e l e s , C A 9 0 0 3 8 | w w w. g u s f o r d g a l l e r y. c o m
LINDA VALLEJO MAKE ‘EM ALL MEXICAN
GEORGE LAWSON GALLERY | LOS ANGELES
Palm Springs Convention Center - 277 N. Avenida Caballeros, Palm Springs
FebRuARY 15-17, 2013 February 14 - Valentine’s Day Opening Preview Party benefits the Palm Springs Art Museum 55 prominent national and international galleries Presidents Day Weekend + Palm Springs Modernism Week
Friday Saturday Sunday
Feb. 15 Feb. 16 Feb. 17
10am-8pm 10am-8pm 10am-6pm
Select from 1000+ important contemporary works of art Over $100 million in art for acquisition Lifetime Achieve Award to Artist Mel Ramos + Public Retrospective Arts Patron of the Year Award to Helene Galen The Art of Shooting Stars Panel and Party hosted by the Palm Springs International Film Festival Meet the Artists and Curators Reception Museum Curators Weekend Retreat
palmspringsfineartfair.com 800-211-0640
Media Partner
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
CHING CHING CHENG
“ Transverse” JA N UA RY 17 TH R U F E B R UA RY 28 , 20 1 3
OPENING RECEPTION J A N U A R Y 1 7, 2 0 1 3 | 5 : 0 0 P M – 9 : 0 0 P M PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER Courtesy Design Loves Art at the Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA
8687 MELROSE AVENUE, SUITE B257, LOS ANGELES, CA 90069 INFO@ARTMERGELAB.COM | 310.913.1133 | TUES. – FRI. 11:00AM - 5:00PM
W W W. A R T M E R G E L A B . C O M