Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks feature bursting color, pattern and unique perspectives.

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1. A selection of paintings, collages, drawings and prints by Dado from the 1970’s. His phantasmagorical dramaturgy draws its inspiration from a sort of redemption, through painting or drawing, of adolescent memories of tragedies and human cruelties that occurred in his native Montenegro at Jeanne Bucher Jaeger
2. A group show featuring six contemporary photographers from Africa and its diaspora. The exhibition explores multiple themes that challenge accepted notions of belonging and identity; the everyday and the fantastical; the past and the future; the public and the private at Red Hook Labs
3. Anne-Sophie Cochevelou offers a reflection on the cultural appropriation within an “unplanned obsolescence” – through a maximalism that is dear to her, thus celebrating the richness and variety of different cultures through reclaimed material. The artist questions the female body within the post-modern society and particularly the paradoxes of feminism through a costume-based performance at Isabelle Gounod Gallery
4. Presented on yellow walls, Natalie Frank’s new paintings in paper and on wood portray women who have created worlds of their own liking–full of voyeurism, performance, pets and the hot colors and exuberance of horror films at ACME
5. Mike Davis renders complex paintings embedded with symbols of mortality, folly, and hubris in the style of the Netherlandish Flemish Primitives such as Bosch, Bruegel and van Eyck. His oil paintings create an alternate world where anything is possible, combining arcane personal symbols with social commentary. His work depicts a world of myth and colliding timeframes, a land “on the other side of the bridge,” but one that resonates with our own—not as memory but as a dream at Copro Gallery
6. Collin van der Sluijs’ work is marked by the various artistic techniques he blends together to render his unusual subjects. He has created his own intricate, colorful, odd world with the subjects of his pieces. He takes inspiration for these subjects from the personal pleasures and the struggles of daily life. This world when expressed through the various techniques Collin has mastered, creates beautiful, multi-dimensional pieces of art work, that draw the eye in and keep it there at Vertical Gallery

May 10, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Imagination, inner worlds and their impact and implications on the outer world take precedence in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Fascinated by the persistence of animal imagery in mythology and communal cultural imaginaries, Matthew Grabelsky superimposes its presence onto his depictions of the contemporary world. For the artist, the animal becomes a manifestation of the inner workings of the hidden subconscious, literally revealing the latent identities and motivations lurking beyond the composure of the human mask at Thinkspace Gallery
2. Dima Drjuchin’s “The Infinity Key” consists of a new series of paintings whose subject matter continue to reflect the artist’s unique hyper dimensional worlds densely populated with his fictional characters and creatures at Campfire Gallery
3. Ward Shelley makes paintings with information the way historians make stories from facts. His new exhibition is titled “The Felicific Calculus” and presents eight new paintings that tease out narratives on the subject of consumer culture at Pierogi
4. Having been heavily influenced by British culture in the 1990s, Scott Listfield plays homage to this time in his life using British urban landscapes as his backdrop and referencing iconic British music. Using his astronauts, he takes us on an alternative journey through the streets of London, creating a strange world of the familiar yet surreal at StolenSpace Gallery
5. Camilla d’Errico on her latest work: ““With my ‘Dances with Dreams’ showing, I wanted to invite audiences to explore the hauntingly beautiful states of the subconscious mind – while awake and in dream.  The feeling as though they were walking through a colorful and serene dreamscape when pondering whether the girl in each portraiture is dreaming or whether she is the viewer’s dream.” at Corey Helford Gallery
6. Amy Hill’s inspiration for her most recent body of work is American Folk Art, which served as a reflection of the artists’ impressions of society, its needs and mores. In updating these paintings, Hill has depicted urban children decorated by logos, tattoos, piercings, drugs and digital media. This allows for an examination of the phenomenon of innocence, its value, and the possibility of its survival in a fast moving world at Front Room Gallery

May 3, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists explore energy, memory and interaction.

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1. By knitting together childhood recollections, photographs old and new, the moving world seen from the windows of trains, stills harvested from the television set and other media, Edwige Fouvry pursues an “emotional truth” in which the recorded, the remembered, and the imagined must each play a role at Dolby Chadwick Gallery
2. Something Else features ten artists whose work deals with the energy inherent in living things. Each artist constructs a world in which the activity of life is visually enacted, not by specific portrayals of the forms of existence, but by an emphasis upon their innate core energies and exuberantly pulsating character at The Painting Center
3. Wayne Koestenbaum considers his latest paintings novels: “Crowded, incident-packed, meandering, digressive, unplanned. Conglomerations of marks.  Anthologies of moods.  Messy and non-figurative, but threatening at any moment to spill into image” at 356 Mission
4. Apropos of the current political scene in America and barbaric events worldwide, Lou Beach’s exhibition of new collages is titled, A Plague of Fools at Craig Krull Gallery
5. Yuichi Hirako paints brilliant and fantastical scenes in deep and wild forests where plant-like humans intermingle with elements natural and man-made. The artist is interested in the different meanings given to nature depending on religious and cultural backgrounds. In Japanese tradition, the forest is regarded as mystical and sacred, while in Western folklore, the forest is often portrayed as wild and barbaric. As all societies move towards greater dominance over nature, Hirako examines the desire for humans to coexist with the natural world at Fouladi Projects
6. In Entrance to the Void, George Condo condenses the disparate styles of his previous artistic periods into individual paintings that broach the void between figuration and abstraction. Moreover, his new body of work becomes a philosophical exercise in counteracting ideas of ‘nothingness’ through the visual consolidation of a personal, and in this case, artistic history at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles

April 26, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday’s Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists examine the places where inner and outer worlds collide and form communication.

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1. A pioneer in what could be called photographic abstract expressionism, Liz Nielsen audaciously experiments with photographic process, expressing her individual psyche while attempting to tap into universal sources of imagination. Even when creating images based on visual realities, Nielsen favors a highly abstracted mode. In her latest show, The Medium she has created pictures at a larger scale than was previously possible for her and which allow her to further explore the expressive potential of color. Reflective and cerebral, Nielsen’s pictorial notions make an elemental impact somewhere between the luminous and the sublime at Danziger Gallery
2. Meeting, for the first time in a European institution, Swoon, Maya Hayuk, MOMO and the artistic duo FAILE offer a multi-dimensional picture of culture 2.0, the cosmopolitan spirit of the museum. The exhibition highlights the relationship between the artist’s own aesthetic and his desire to communicate with his audience at The Millenium Iconoclast Museum of Art
3. The Ocular Bowl examines vision through physical manifestations of light and sight lines, metaphorical symbolism and transcendental themes. The works include build upon conflicting attitudes about belief at Kayne Griffin Concoran
4. Jules de Balincourt’s practice occupies a distinct emotional hyperspace, ranging with easy fluency across abstraction and figuration, collective imagination and singularized perception to make idiosyncratic connections within the landscape of contemporary westernized culture at Victoria Miro
5. Joe Bradley on his work: “I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who has painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present.” at Gagosian
6. Maser combines his experience as a graffiti artist with his formal art education to develop this singular body of work, balancing hard-edged blocks of neon color that congeal into expressive, figurative compositions. “Orbiting on the Periphery” continues Masers’ exploration into the philosopher and mathematician Thales of Miletus’s theory; “mens sana in corpore sano,” in which physical health and condition are recognized as an essential part of psychological equilibrium at Lazarides Rathbone

April 16, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists explore impact of chaos and mythology on their art creation.

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1. Keiichi Tanaami’s Visible Darkness/Invisible Darkness contains powerful images drawn from dreams and memories, most notably those from his experiences as a child during World War II at Sikkema Jenkins & Co
2. Aaron Morse’s various landscapes depict survival amidst a harsh ecology, the strangeness of inherited mythologies, and perspectives obtained from a distance at ACME
3. Franz Ackermann seeks to chronicle new urban realities and the ways in which they are perceived, at a time when both realities and perceptions are driven by ceaseless flows of tourists and information. His monumental paintings take the form of large exploded views that combine architectural elements with numerous Modernist references and abstract shapes in a burst of colors and materials at Galerie Daniel Templon
4. Dave McDermott continues his ongoing allegorical examination of the complexities of human nature and the societies we build to house them, the isolation inherent in those structures, and how we represent those ideas through art itself at Brenna Griffin
5. Erik Jones challenges viewers to see beauty in his chaotic, mixed-media works that merge nude subjects with nonrepresentational, abstract elements. Describing the human figures in his compositions as “aesthetic anchors,” they are the calming foreground upon which bursts of color, stenciled shapes and custom-made stickers create surreal landscapes at Jonathan Levine Gallery
6. Hope Gangloff is known for creating vibrant and truthful portraits of her friends as a way to share her view of modern American life. By capturing this generation of young adults in her illustrations and paintings, she documents this era’s struggle during these tumultuous times at Richard Heller Gallery

April 13, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists investigate the human tendency to collect and the subsequent impact on our environment.

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1. Crystal Wagner’s water influenced installation Surface Tension at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
2. Hassan Sharif ‘s tapestry-like works in this exhibition are conceptually linked by their relationship with the human body and social structures. Recently, Sharif has centered his production around large-scale wall sculptures that incorporate objects that, as he describes, “people depend on greatly to keep up with their daily routines and activity. So long as they are alive, they keep using, exhausting, and relying on them as if they are, in one way or another, part of their own bodies.” at Alexander Gray Associates
3. Tony Tasset has said his goal was to create a universal logo that expressed the contemporary environment of chronic evaluation—a graphic emblem of trending at Kavi Gupta
4. In Dents and Abrasions we find John Divola renegotiating the territory of Vandalism. Here we find abandoned dwellings, located at the edge of human existence, and found to be in decrepit and dysfunctional condition at Gallery Luisotti
5. Rosanne Ebner ‘s Joie De Vivre “pays homage to the natural world, representing the power of regeneration through nourishment and the ability to procreate instead of consuming through greed. The neglect of today’s world is ruining the balance of a deeply symbiotic relationship with nature.  This disconnection needs to be addressed so we can revive the relationship with our natural world and safeguard the future survival of the species” at Ashok Jain Gallery
6. Gregory Euclide’s “Extract” cultivates a quiet presence of human intervention in each rendered environment at Hashimoto Contemporary

April 5, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

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