Jules Buck Jones @ Champion

Jules Buck Jones’ first solo exhibition at Champion, Animal Again, is comprised of new works on paper, video, and a massive installation, all of which extend his investigation into the concepts of wildlife, natural science, mythology, and abstraction. Animal Again builds on Jones’ earlier work by bringing together both drawing and sculpture - choppier, heavier marks abstract the mask-like animal forms. Employing a larger-than-life presence intrinsic to the changing dialogue between man and the animal kingdom, his characters continue to center around the hawk, fox, owl, and toad. Depicting these animals without their eyes invites the idea of transformation as each drawing becomes a potential shell for one to enter, wear, or maneuver. The illusion of hollowness is created in response to a fascination with the desire, and sometimes unintentional urge, to actually become the animal. This opens up a new direction which allows for the addition of new media to complement Jones' rhythmic drawing style. Emerging from a densely-wooded landscape installation, Jones’ works meld his intuitive process with drawings of species indigenous to Texas and the Northeast. Jones closely observes wildlife native to these areas and immerses himself in naturalism while studying notions of shamanism. Jones' concentration draws on stories and the role of animal imagery in prehistory and creation myths - especially as they relate to harnessing real animal power within ceremony.  Jules Buck Jones was born in Northampton MA and grew up in Northern and Central Virginia. He received his BFA fromVirginia Commonwealth University in 2005 and MFA from University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Jones was Artist in Residence in Everglades National Park in the summer of 2009 and completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT this past winter. Showing throughout Texas with solo shows in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, Jones’ works are in the collections of Austin Museum of Art and Everglades National Park. He is also part of several collaborative teams that practice large scale installations and collage. Jones lives and works in Austin. For further information or images please contact 512 354 1035 or sonia@championcontemporary.com. Animal Again will be on view from February 25 through March 26, 2011. Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6 PM.  Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery include The Sultans Played Creole, curated by James Cope, opening April 2, remaining on view until Saturday, April 30.

Images From The Opening!

bruce wilhelm 2010

there's more i bet from 2010, these are prints. i have both of them 1/10. bruce is at risd for his mfa '12, putting out awesome work i assume. the last subjects he discussed with me (the approach included) promise to be great and strange.

stay tuned over here to find out

Jenna Weiss @ Grizzly Grizzly

Friday, November 5th from 6 to 10 pm
319 north 11th street
ste. 2d
grizzlygrizzly
Jenna's link

Daniel Lane new works!

Theresa Pfarr @ Grizzly Grizzly

grizzly grizzly

Grizzly Grizzly is proud to present new works by Theresa Pfarr, we will be hosting this event on June 4th from 6 to 9 pm.

the gallery is located at 319 north 11th street in Philadelphia


My paintings are derived from cultural, commercial images of women, as they address me. The aggressive and pervasive nature of commercial imagery compels me to answer in the interest of creating a dialogue. Provoked by the shifting status and mutable portrayal of women in mass culture, I work to articulate the mixture of euphoria and dread I experience in viewing women’s magazines. Incidentally and anxiously, I discover and draw from the loss of my identity when subject to the meanderings of the female image in our culture. I treat the cultural, commercial and personal as one in my work, through a process of collecting, collaging and manipulating images into my paintings. Through this process the paintings become part self-portrait and part mass culture icon, I want to articulate where the two overlap. My work has evolved to this point through a process of examining the historical narratives and contemporary conventions used in advertising. Drawing from religious imagery, pop culture and themes of innocence, I am exploring and following visual points of tension and continuum in what allows mendacity to function as truth, and vice versa.



“I could no longer console myself with Rilke’s line: ‘Sweet as memory the mimosas steep the bedroom’….The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because it fills the sight by force, and because nothing in it can be refused or transformed (that we sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent…)” -Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Trudy Benson @ Freight + Volume

the press release


May 6th - June 13th, 2010


Reception: Thursday, May 6th, 6-8 PM
 
FREIGHT AND VOLUME

542 West 24th Street
New York, NY
10011
PHONE: 212 691 7700

FAX: 212 989 8708
HOURS:

Tuesday - Saturday

11 AM - 6 PM or by appointment
 
freight + volume

Trudy Benson - MFA Show - Tomorrow - GO!

Colleen Rudolf @ Grizzly Grizzly

Grizzly Grizzly
elephant feet shoes, need I say more?
Hours : Sat-Sun 1-6 pm
319 North 11th Street, 2nd Floor

Ranbir Kaleka

Auroboros:

To light up his path, a horse rider turns on his torch/flashlight, but light from the torch doesn’t brighten the rider’s path but the beam of light illumines only the back of his own horse.

I was thinking of many things: The sheer impossibility of absolutely accurate predictions of what lies ahead in time and space, the necessity of illuminating the past before a movement forward, cyclicality, self-reflexivity, the ancient Ouroboros symbol of Serpent swallowing its own tail, the failure of systems, the futility of circular thinking.

This too: At the legs, the man’s  body merges with the horse’s body, implying they are one. The man could be looking for its scattered self to put it all together in one piece. The horses body would fit into one piece as a jigsaw puzzle but the shape of the pedestals makes this ‘coming together’ into a whole an impossibility.

The little girl is added digitally to give sense of scale,.. the sculpture is a a little under 2.50 Metres (over 8 feet) tall.


Warmly, Ranbir



P.S.
Ranbir is an amazing artist that I had the wonderful opportunity of presenting his lecture at SAIC, he has sent me this new work and I am working on getting the video of the lecture uploaded which will be posted here soon.

Yevgeniya S. Baras and Robert Scobey

GrizzlyGrizzly presents our new show featuring Brooklyn painter Yevgeniya S. Baras and Philadelphia multimedia artist Robert Scobey.
Our opening reception will be Feb 5th, from 6 to 10 pm
The Grizzly is located at 319 North 11th Street, 2nd Floor.
Gallery hours are Sat & Sun 1 to 6 pm




G

Jorge Benitez

Believe the hype: Otero is on the rise

By Lauren Viera, Tribune reporter

January 8, 2010

Sometimes, hype is all we have to go on.

I first learned about a voracious young painter named Angel Otero last spring, shortly after he received his master of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute. Even then I was late to the party: At 27, the Puerto Rico native had already reached milestones that most artists rarely allow themselves to dream about.

For starters, in February, several of Otero's works were exhibited at Spain's major international fair of contemporary art (ARCO), represented by the very hip, Canary Islands-based Leyendecker Gallery. On the first day of that fair, every last one of Otero's paintings sold. Weeks earlier, at the Circa '09 international art fair in Puerto Rico, same thing: All paintings sold, all on the first day.

By summer, Otero was on a roll. He received the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund in the Performing and Visual Arts, a prestigious grant awarded by invitation to just one visual artist annually, in the generous sum of six figures to be invested over two years.

One of his works was selected for inclusion in the Museum of Contemporary Art's "Constellations" exhibit, on view last summer and fall alongside major paintings by Andy Warhol, Rene Magritte and Francis Bacon, among others. The icing? In October, Otero was chosen as the honored guest artist at the Art Institute's annual big-ticket fundraiser, BareWalls, adding his name to an elite list that includes Ed Paschke and Cynthia Rowley.

That was last year, Otero's fourth living in the States. He moved to Chicago in 2005 on a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute after growing up in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, a small city best known for its pork rinds. He was raised by his grandmother in a household he's said was devoid of books and paintings.

"What I could consider art around me back then was the stuff that shocked me or affected me," said Otero via telephone from his Brooklyn studio, which he set up in the fall with his Annenberg fellowship funds. "[My] work is about these sorts of memories, or confronted memories … to find some sort of interesting conversation between what is abstraction, material process and memory. There's abstraction, there's paint and then there's all these things together."

Somewhere between Otero's brain and his paintbrush, his interpreted memories become three-dimensional. What finds its way onto the canvas (often painted black, to start) are bright, textural spurts clinging to the surface. The resulting paintings are bizarre, but not off-putting. What could easily appear crude and clumsy, like an amateur experimenting with new materials, instead is laced with meaningful detail in the least likely places.

In a solo show at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Otero's "The Golden Vase" (2009) is abstract, for sure — the flowers in the vase are splotches of peeling, colored acrylics; the table on which it sits is a web of silicone squirted into a grid resembling rattan furniture. But there's very little irony. The vase has depth, and it's obvious that this thing — this object — was foremost in Otero's mind when he was painting it. As Otero explained, when you're raised middle-class, as he was, household possessions present an interesting aesthetic.

He clarified: "If they need a countertop, the high-class people have the budget for granite; the poor person just needs a slab of wood. And then the middle-class person has contact paper that looks like granite, and it's perfect. I like that; I grew up around that. I have found my way to navigate through all these memories and objects, through the stuff of my family, and also confront them with these ambitions of painting."

"Untitled (golden bowl)" (2009) is more controlled than "The Golden Vase." The bowl itself is nearly invisible, but lining the surrounding canvas is an immaculate system of tiny squares — blobs, really. It's gold-leaf, deconstructed.

Gold is everywhere in Otero's work. He attributes it to "weird kitsch" objects present in middle-class families, and the best example we've seen is his "Winners" (2009) installation at Kavi Gupta Gallery: three tiers of trophies covered with gold oil-paint, crusted up into Otero's signature flecks. Underneath those scabs of paint, you can just barely make out a guy frozen in a bowling stance, or a dude popping a wheelie on his motorcycle. The top trophy is the largest, and it's so thick with paint, the figure is diminished to a vague, marshmallow-y silhouette.

Otero likens his thick layers of paint to layers in a cake, adding them one at a time until he has a finished piece. They're created by coating mirrors with oil paint, playing with colors as he goes. Once they're dry, they're scraped off in whole sheets. The resulting layers are so thick and textural, many critics (including this one) have at first mistaken them for fabric.

The back room at Kavi Gupta Gallery features these uber-textural works exclusively. Here there are no golden bowls or vases on tables — just layer upon layer of color and texture, oil and tar poured onto canvas, piece by piece.

"I don't want to be so direct," Otero said of his layering process. "That's why all these things have paint on top of them in different techniques, in order to find that effect."

On the heels of the Kavi Gupta Gallery show, more of Otero's new work will be exhibited in a solo show Jan. 23 at the Chicago Cultural Center. It's a heck of a way to kick off a new year.

I asked the young painter if he felt differently since graduating and receiving so many honors.

"To be honest," he said, "the only thing that has changed is the responsibility that takes over me. I have this weird abstract pressure to work more, and I'm trying to do the best I can, but I swear to God I'm still floating in the air. I swear I still can't believe it sometimes."

Angel Otero at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington Blvd., 312-432-0708; kavigupta.com. Through Jan. 30.
"Touch with Your Eyes: Recent Works by Angel Otero,"
at Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 312-744-2947; chicagoculturalcenter.org.
Opens Jan. 23; gallery talk with the artist Jan. 28.

lviera@tribune.com

Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

Joshua and Tisch Abelow

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Joshua and Tisch Abelow.






Joshua and Tisch share the same last name because they are brother and sister. Until recently, these two artists lived in different locations (Tisch in San Francisco/LA, Joshua in Berlin). Currently, these artists find themselves working in their respective studios in their hometown, Frederick, MD. This exhibition aims to bring their works even closer together by showing their paintings/drawings in the same space for the first time.

The gallery will hold an opening reception on January 8th from 6-10 pm and will be open by appointment.

GRIZZLY GRIZZLY opening

GrizzlyGrizzlyis our new gallery in Philadelphia, here are pictures of the inaugural show and ensuing mayhem. Yes we take submissions, email me.

Jorge Benitez

Castilian Conjugations Recent Paintings by Jorge Miguel Benitez

Artist Statement (In two parts)

Paintings, like grammar, have tenses. Some artists paint in the present and others in the future. Most paint in either the past or the conditional, and egotists tend to paint in the imperative. I prefer to paint in the subjunctive. It addresses the uncertain and the hypothetical. In Castilian it is an essential and difficult tense.

On a technical and conceptual note, I do not use any photographic or digital references. I paint exclusively from hand-generated drawings.

Jorge Miguel Benitez
2009



Part two: Why are the titles in Castilian?

I have no interest in identity politics, and I do not plan to walk in Angela Davis’ revolutionary combat boots. However, even without titles these paintings would still address the nexus of words and images, culture and history. Castilian has been the dominant language of Spain since the expulsion of the Muslims and the founding of the Spanish Empire in 1492. The language has a Latinate directness. Julius Caesar’s famous “veni, vidi, vici,” translates into vine, vi, vencí. The verbs imply a personal pronoun that can be dropped without losing the structure of a complete sentence. Furthermore, the combination of grammatical precision and conciseness with hard consonants and short vowels gives Castilian a staccato rhythm that stresses the speaker’s will. In contrast to Latin Americans, peninsulares, as Spaniards are sometimes called, retain a harsh, clipped sound that echoes the commands of Roman legions and Spanish tercios.

Still, it would be a mistake to think that Castilian lacks subtlety or the capacity for diplomatic assuagement. The subjunctive tense alone allows it to express horrors obliquely. I can say things in my native Castilian that would be unforgivably offensive in English. A simple diminutive modifier can turn a phrase into a mocking insult or a tender endearment. Love, cruelty, reason and irrationality coexist in an exquisite and delicate balance. The most pedestrian empirical observation can be expressed lyrically while remaining boringly factual. Formal and informal pronouns establish social hierarchies yet permit an egalitarian illusion. In short, Castilian defies objective detachment. The speaker can be cool or warm but never uninvolved. Castilian projects a lack of faith in reason even when the thoughts are rational. Lastly, these paintings reflect a linguistic and visual culture that revels in contradictions and accepts life’s unfair and arbitrary nature. Life, like art, can be interesting in spite of its meaninglessness.

Jorge Miguel Benitez
2009

Trudy Benson

Trudy

John Phillips

Susanna Coffey @ Jared Melberg Gallery

Susanna Coffey
Plantings and Cuttings

September 19 - October 31, 2009


Susanna Coffey’s small-scale paintings of flowers are carefully and thoughtfully presented as either single blooms, cuttings of branches and vines or images of living foliage. The artist says, This exhibition is a special one for me...The work I am more known for is a kind of portraiture that is loaded with social and political content. These pictures are of a different kind, very intimate, direct and for me, private. I am trying to make beauty from beauty.

An internationally recognized artist, Coffey received a BFA from the University of Connecticut in 1977 and a MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1982. Coffey is a professor of painting at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She divides her time between Chicago and New York City.

Zak Prekop & Jon Pestoni

Lisa Cooley is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings by two artists, Jon Pestoni, from Los Angeles, and Zak Prekop, from Chicago. The exhibition runs from September 11 until October 18, with a reception for the artists on Sunday, September 13, from 6 until 8 pm.

The paintings of Jon Pestoni and Zak Prekop have clear affinities – their separate practices arise from a conceptual foundation, but are executed with intellectual playfulness, subtlety, lightness and lyricism. Both artists are highly aware of art historical precedent and yet aim for the discovery of unique forms. Both bodies of work deliver formal investigations with a critical edge.

Neither figurative, nor purely abstract, Jon Pestoni’s paintings are imbued with an experiential quality. They highlight paint application, materiality, rich color schemes, and occasionally, blunt, aggressive brushwork. His work is explicit and avoids visual pretense in a direct, immediate way. Scale and color shift subtly from work to work, revealing the internal logic of Pestoni’s practice and contextualizing each individual painting.

In certain works, wide, dragged brushstrokes create thick horizontal bands across prepared grounds. Pestoni sometimes contrasts these severe strokes with small, lyrical surface marks and lines, adding yet another layer to the work. Such contrasting moves address the heavy ground beneath and imbue the painting with a decorative but opposing tension.

Pestoni’s work plays with ideas of negation. The artist might seem to deny the viewer access to the “interior” of the work, but in fact he is playing with the trope of deriving pleasure from inaccessibility, thereby amplifying awareness of the work’s materiality and nuance. Pestoni pushes the act of building up and breaking down, painting something in and painting something out, unifying this practice into a single picture. In short, much of the activity in these paintings is the work of erasing the work. By investigating disappearances, the paintings become evidence of a process and saturated with visual and indexical meaning.

Collage and pencil drawing spark the composition of Zak Prekop’s oil paintings. The artist uses these two non-painting mediums to create the nuanced structures, the destabilized geometry, the rambling, gestural creases and the shallow, color-filled ridges that characterize the surface of his paintings.

This approach yields a range of pictures, some of which are more about drawing, others more about painting. Some pictures combine both ideas, emulating collage to create an illusion of torn paper within the underpainting. Other incongruities are evident - torn paper and quick marks suggest immediacy, but Prekop’s creamy paint application and subdued palette evoke a contemplative, slow reading. His layers of color range from translucent to opaque, but always retain a striking luminosity.

Prekop’s paintings are notable for their levels of refinement, interiority and sincerity. Even in his larger canvases, the artist conjures an intimate experience for the viewer. Diagetic, almost invisible marks reveal themselves only when viewed at certain angles while the quality of the artist’s lines feel introspective and meandering. Reinvesting seriousness and the personal into tropes of abstraction, Prekop creates a new form of subdued and cerebral non-representational painting.

Jon Pestoni lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA in Art from UC Berkeley in 1992 and his MFA from UCLA in 1996. His paintings were included in The White Columns New York Annual 2008, curated by Jay Sanders. His work has also been exhibited in New York at Leo Koenig Inc and Marianne Boesky Gallery as well as at Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2005 he has lectured in Studio Art at UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Riverside. Upcoming exhibitions include a two-person show with Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago.

Zak Prekop lives and works in Chicago, where he also received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He is currently studying at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. He has recently exhibited at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago and Roger Björkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, Sweden.

The gallery is located at 34 Orchard Street between Hester and Canal in the Lower East Side of New York City. The closest subway is the East Broadway stop of the F line. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, from noon to 6 pm. For more information or images, please email the gallery at frontdesk@lisa-cooley.com or call 212-680-0564.

Bruce Wilhelm / Jon Clary

Bruce's Site

Jon's Site



Here's the installation shots from their show at Eleanor Harwood in San Francisco. Two of my favorite people and artists.