Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks examine the art of science and technology.

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1. Louise Despont’s Energy Scaffolds and Information Architecture examines the movement of energy at The Drawing Center
2. For Lights Out, Michael Kagan reinforces his fascination with man’s moments of triumph over nature’s limits captured through iconic imagery at Joshua Liner Gallery
3. Larissa Fassler’s work is constructed out of a mass of topographic tracking, sketches, observations, and feelings that she experiences on site, and that are then synthesized into large graphic compositions, models, and sculptures at Jérôme Poggi Gallery
4. Agostino Arrivabene’s approach to painting stems from his artistic influences Gustave Moreau and Odd Nerdrum. He follows traditional methods that include grinding his own pigments and the almost forgotten technique of mischtechnik. This attention to the minutiae has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings actually embodying a process of alchemical transformation, in which the physical matter of painting itself is transmuted into extraordinary light-filled visions at Cara Gallery
5. Felipe Pantone’s “W3-DIMENSIONAL” takes inspiration from Teilhard de Chardin’s 1950’s theories, which postulated the existence of “an enveloping sphere of thought, a living tissue of consciousness, enclosing the Earth and growing ever more dense.” at Mirus Gallery
6. Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise examines our modern era of mass surveillance at Whitney Museum of American Art

February 17, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists challenge limits and the manner in which we look at things.

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1. The works in Salmon Eye feature a unique marriage of Eddie Martinez’s gifts as a draftsman and a painter.  Many of the paintings in the exhibition originated as small, sharpie drawings on paper.  The drawings are enlarged and silkscreened onto the canvas. Using this black silkscreen as a starting-point, Martinez then builds up shapes and layers, sometimes using the outline of the silkscreen as a formal blueprint, or sometimes disregarding the lines or covering them entirely at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
2. Patrick Brennan’s Up Against Natureconcerns ideas around the natural world and its limits – promoting an experience that comes out of looking at the landscape but also questioning our connection to it. Confronting the natural world with a synthetic dream-like version of its self, these paintings decontextualize our understanding of traditionally perceived ideas around the sublime at Essex Flowers
3. Ellen Berkenblit’s paintings are vibrant celebrations of color – neon greens, pinks, blues, and oranges are cut and shaped with an array of blacks that reveal the artist’s dedication to mixing her own colors as she works. Berkenblit’s practice complicates the polarity between representation and abstraction. Through her capricious application of paint and calligraphic line, she creates a wickedly comical atmosphere where cartoonish representation and serious abstraction fuse and overlap at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
4. Betty Woodman’s Breakfast At The Seashore Lunch In Antella challenges the eye to reconcile two- and three-dimensional spaces simultaneously: flat tables battle the perspectival architecture that surrounds them for perceptual dominance. Each painting is a window into a realm of vibrant possibility, one in which idealized, even abstract, beauty reaches its highest expression in the tactile, utilitarian, and embodied objects and activities of everyday life at Salon 94
5. Ted Gahl, Shara Hughes and Christoph Roßner’s work all exist in the borderland between representation and abstraction. With deft understanding of painterly tradition, these three artists confidently and independently traverse the pictorial plane, adding their own personal interpretation. The paintings feel as if they are in this cyclical feedback with their maker, without concern for a viewer, while simultaneously rewarding any viewer who looks at Romer Young Gallery
6. In Andrew Holmquist’s STAGE LEFT painting is re-conceived as a tool or device for exploring the way that other mediums – film, costuming, comic books and ceramic sculptures – can meld together to assemble a fictionalized alternative to reality at Carrie Secrist Gallery

 

February 9, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The art is this week’s gallery picks is all about focus and shifts in practice and process.

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1. Steve Roden went a year without painting and then began again at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
2. Subliminal Shifts unveils an assemblage of artists living and working in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, all of who predominantly practice an abstract idiom, investigating paint through a lens that is entirely distinct at Tracy Williams, Ltd
3. In “Voyeur”, Vanessa Prager installs sixteen new paintings, some viewable only through a tiny peephole. Prager paints dense and furry oil paintings that relish in the peaks and valleys of extruded oil paint. With multiple colors of paint on the brush she blends pigment not just in the X or Y dimensions but gravity-defyingly outward into the Z. Her subject is the face, and her technique creates an image that hovers between figuration and abstraction in a sort of non-image at The Hole
4. Margo Wolowiec’s Double Blind expands upon her distinct woven practice with three new freestanding sculptures grounded by a large double-paneled wall work. In this body of work, the artist continues her examination of digitally sourced images while presenting the viewer with a conflicted field of doubles through the artist’s process of dye sublimation transfer onto polymer threads and weaving them together on a handloom at Anat Ebgi
5. Emanuel Röhss’ new works in Invitation to Love stem from the artist’s recent examination of the relationship between the Hollywood entertainment industry and the Ennis House in Los Angeles, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the name of a fictional soap opera which appears in the TV series Twin Peaks at Thomas Duncan Gallery
6. Further Notice presents new figurative and abstract paintings in Wayne Herpich’s distinctly rigorous technique, one where he employs a series of reiterative horizontal, sometimes layered, wavelike forms across the surface of the canvas. In full command of his often bombastic decisions in pigment, patterning, and texture, Herpich creates masterful, dissonant, compelling, complex and innovative works that resist classification at Blackston Gallery

 

February 2, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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We’re exploring identity and culture through the body in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body presents work from artists representing diverse Bay Area communities, and centers thematically on how these artists grapple with cultural identity and its relationship to the human condition at San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries
2. In Katherine Bradford’s Fear of Waves , painting and swimming share immersion and a certain loss of control that is simultaneously wild and structured. The body in nature; we see ourselves situated in relationship to the deep other at Canada New York
3. The compelling work and storyof Vivian Maier at Merry Karnowsky Gallery
4. Tattooing in London has a long and rich history, dating back to a time before Captain Cook made his adventures to the Pacific. Tattoo London will offer insight into the history of professional tattooing in London as well as revealing life inside four contemporary tattoo studios in the capital via Museum of London
5. Expanding on her language that traditionally highlights misfits, outcasts, and the misunderstood – Allison Schulnik introduces a wild new cast of mythological creatures replete with centaurettes, unicorns, and otherworldly outsiders in various stages of liberation. Continuing her exploration of selfhood through diverse and rich allegories, her new subjects radiate gracefulness that is both vulnerable and stoic—a type of synthesis that is a hallmark in Schulnik’s work at Mark Moore Gallery
6. Lani Emmanuel’s figures of young women portray emotion and identity by focusing on body language, gesture and gaze. She captures each figure’s self-expression through their wardrobe. For most adolescent girls, fashion is a means of self-expression that allows for identity experimentation at Lora Schlesinger Gallery

 

January 26, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists draw inspiration from the comfortable and the insights of their intuition.

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1. Lori Ellison’s paintings and drawings are characterized by dense, pattern-filled compositions executed with a devotional intensity. The work incorporates both abstract geometric motifs and those drawn from nature. Organic motifs found in some of the works were inspired by Ellison’s visits to the recent Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art at McKenzie Fine Art
2. The work in Chris Oatey’s current exhibition is created through a meditative process. A painting develops outdoors over the course of several days. Falling snow covers the surface and subsequently melts to randomly distribute layers of pigment. The paintings serve as vehicle for later drawings.at CB1 Gallery
3. Created during a very brief period, from 1989 until her early, unexpected and tragic death at the age of 29, Illse D’Hollander’s oeuvre exhibits a highly developed sense of color, composition, scale and surface, through the use of subtle tones and pared down compositions. On her work: “A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide. When referring to ideas, it implies that as a painter, I am not facing my canvas as a neutral being but as an acting being who is investing into the act of painting. My being is present in my action on the canvas.” at Ilse D’Hollander
4. Taking the pathetic, melancholic and disillusioned attributes present in daily life, as well as the more mundane, and that which thrills and exhilarates us, Shrigley’s work is both honest and entertaining, contemplating issues such as death, love, insecurities and other emotional traumas in a manner that is quite factual and unapologetic at Galleri Nicolai Wallner
5. From hard-line bands to vivid stains to veils of color fields, Ronnie Landfieldʼs work always reflects his transforming insights on color and life. As the artist said in a recent interview, “I believe the most profound paintings allow people to look at the work and access the ability to see themselves.” at STUX + HALLER GALLERY
6. In Comfort Inn, Matt Phillips paintings simultaneously evoke and employ the deeply familiar architecture of decorative surfaces, textiles and fabrics, suggestive of a habitable yet transient domesticity. Like the Comfort Inn hotel across the street from his studio, his work conjures, as he puts it, “a space that is initially foreign… even artificial, yet somehow becomes a stage for something deeply human.” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

January 19, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Recognizing MLK




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Today, I’m working on a galleys deadline for my forthcoming Pattern Studio book for Chronicle. But in fine tuning illustrations and copy editing text, I wanted to take a break from regular scheduled programming to illustrate a piece of art reflective of the day. Here is the famous image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a true hero in American history.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

– MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

 

January 18, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
On Instagram.