Pattern Pulp

Color, Memory + Culture




Color-TV-Fields

Everyone from the 80’s can remember this design and it’s symbolism. It represented a momentary pause in programming – one that accompanied a noise I don’t think I’ll ever forget. As with all things nostalgic these days, both the art and media worlds have harnessed this iconography to convey new messaging.

Francis Alÿs’s painting is part of a 40 work show in London titled, The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium. Curated by Luc Tuymans, the pieces focus on geometric abstraction and constructivism from the 20th century. The works touch upon cross-generational ties as well as distinct color fields.

In other more commercial realms, this Apple TV ad is a clever and simple throw back to a recognizable image associated with TV culture. Brilliantly, they’ve reclaimed the irony of the meaning. I wonder what millennials think when they see it.

 

December 7, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists hone and reinterpret techniques in order to explore the landscapes around them.

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1. Simon Hantaï: Blancs highlights the artist’s groundbreaking series of multi-colored paintings from 1973-1974. His signature method of the pliage technique involved folding the unstretched canvas, painting the exterior and then unfolding the canvas, resulted in a composition imbued with both painterly control and serendipity at Paul Kasmin Gallery
2. Laura McPhee’s The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta presents images that are less an overview of this city of 15 million than a glimps into its complex, often conflicted soul. The photographs gauge both the history of personal spaces and impart a sense of intimacy and calm that often belies the maelstrom that can be found in the external world at Benrubi Gallery
3. Teresita Fernández’s newest body of work continues her exploration and interest in scale as an elastic concept, and the correlation between the immense and the intimate; the vast and the miniature; the macro and the micro. Shrinking the viewpoint in order to amplify what we see, Fernández worked with malachite mineral rocks, using imaging techniques to look at their interiors. What initiated Fernández’s interest in exploring the inside of these heavy, earth-bound materials was their uncanny likeness to the actual full-sized landscape of the Viñales Valley, an iconic and surreal landscape in rural Cuba at Lehmann Maupin
4. Ryan Mrozowski’s Open, Other, End duplicates, repeats, and inverts the most commonplace of imagery (oranges, polka dots, birds, flowers, grass) in endless variations. These items, broken into their constituent parts and stripped of specific or personal context, reveal the uncanny and absurd appearance of a world subject to excessive cataloguing and archivingat On Stellar Rays
5. In this new and intertwined bodies of work on view, Meghann Riepenhoff continues to explore themes of landscape, time, and impermanence and subjects of rain, ocean, and shoreline at SF Camerawork
6. Ryan McGinley’s Winter photographs portray his nude figures in frozen landscapes at Team (gallery, inc.)

 

December 1, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks are full of quirk and wonderment.

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1. M.A. Peers’ new exhibition is a summation of the two idiosyncratic areas she has explored throughout her career — dog portraiture and painterly abstraction at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
2. In Ulrich Wulff’s most recent paintings, we are presented with a figure that has made reoccurring appearances in nearly all of his paintings for over a decade. This character, with it’s bulging, antenna-like eyes, embodies for Wulff a mutable, calligraphic, or even cartoonish attempt at self representation. Though it can be identified as a central actor in a narrative tableaux of sorts, it’s primary function is to orient the artist in the endless field of possibility that opens up any time a new painting is begun at TIF SIGFRIDS
3. David Shaw’s sculptural work mines the domestic and cosmic, nature and science, craft and fine art. Organic materials brushes against the machine made and the distinction between the two breaks down. It is in this state of entropy that Shaw finds release, if not radiance at Bailey Gallery
4. For WONDER nine leading contemporary artists created site-specific installations inspired by the Renwick. Together, these installations will turn the building into a larger-than-life work of art at Renwick Gallery
5. In Informal Arrangements, Michael Wolf juxtaposes an abstracted view of Hong Kong’s seemingly endless industrial facades with an intimate perspective from within its hidden network of back alleys, in a series of photographic typologies and vernacular sculptures.at Flowers Gallery
6. Leon Benn’s paintings are inhabited by participants, either person or animal, engaging in pleasurable activities within hallucinatory environments at Roberts & Tilton

November 24, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists examine the intersections of our spirit and our minds.

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1. Coalescence brings together the psychedelic styles of New York-based collage artist Sebastian Wahl and Grass Valley/San Francisco landscape painter Justin Lovato. Curated by collector Brian Chambers, this exhibition of multi-dimensional urban mandalas and op-art natural settings evolves the contemporary visionary genre established by artists Mario Martinez, Damon Soule, Oliver Vernon, and David Choong Lee at Luna Rienne
2. Fernando Reyes show, DANCE – DREAM – DRAMA, is very much about body language, or the conscious and unconscious ways in which our bodies communicate, often with much richer honesty than verbal language allows at Mercury Twenty
3. FIGURATION INSIDE/OUT examines portraiture through the depiction of the body, mind, and spirit. The paintings by the four accomplished artists in this exhibition were selected for their engaging personal expression, and styles. Their genre, unalike and varied, runs from realism, abstraction, narration, symbolism, patterning, and adornment at Nancy Margolis Gallery
4. For this show ,Oliver Jeffers has combined classical landscape and seascape painting with technical measurements. Through this juxtaposition, the artist presents the viewer with two modes of representation, one artistic and one scientific. Rather than increase our understanding, this combination makes things less clear by providing superfluous distraction whilst highlighting the boundaries of perceived knowledge. Thus, Jeffers points to two underlying obstacles of human cognition, the tendency to overthink and the inability to fully comprehend at Lazarides Rathbone
5. Jason Jagel’s CRAP SHOOT acknowledges the inherent gamble –the experimental nature– of making art, an arena where literally anything can happen at FFDG
6. Ryan McGinley’s Fall photos find art historical precedent and inspiration in the likes of Frederic Church and the Hudson River painters – Romantic landscapists working in the same region in which McGinley took these photos. Delicately avoiding the trappings of clichéd fall foliage photography, McGinley employs the coloristic lushness of Northeastern autumn as a setting for his models that is at once ecstatic and moribund: these bodies, frozen by the mechanism of photography, are placed in a landscape that is dazzling for the very reason that it is transitional, caught between periods of verdancy and barrenness. McGinley carefully constructs a world orchestrated by a dichotomous imagination: the public and the private, humanity and nature and even life and death exist in these pictures as a correlative nexus at Team Gallery, Inc.

 

November 17, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Textile and texture abound in this week’s gallery picks, as our artists explore their materials and their culture.

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1. Omar Chacon latest show Las Mesalinas y Otros EnsayosLas Mesalinas y Otros Ensayos intertwines his heritage with his interest in classical Roman culture and myth. Chacon’s colorful and energetic configurations symbolize both the unity and diversity of the Americas, specifically Colombia, where he was born and raised and New York, where he currently lives at Margaret Thatcher Projects
2. A retrospective of Frank Stella’s prolific output from the mid-1950s to the present through approximately 120 works, including paintings, reliefs, maquettes, sculptures, and drawings at Whitney Museum of American Art
3. Hilary Harnischfeger presents wall-mounted and free-standing works composed of clay, plaster, paper, ink, and minerals in this exploration of the landscapes surrounding her work area in the Catskill Mountains. Referencing both the body and the landscape, these new works tend to be at odds with themselves, both raw and overworked, adroitly crafted and accidental, peaceful and violent at Rachel Uffner Gallery
4. For Dead Treez, Ebony G. Patterson assembled five eye-popping tapestries and a life-size figural tableau of ten male mannequins, dressed in a kaleidoscopic mix of floral fabrics. Meant to present a complex vision of masculinity, the installation is a meditation on dancehall fashion and culture, regarded as a celebration of the disenfranchised in postcolonial Jamaica at Museum of Art and Design
5. Jeffrey Gibson, who is half Choctaw and half Cherokee, creates sculptures and paintings that intermingle more traditional Native American art with contemporary art and culture. Almost all the works in the show contain text that are charged with personal meaning, elaborately embroidered in beadwork and testament that design can have content at Marc Straus
6. Sheila Hicks’ revisits and reimagines The Treaty of Chromatic Zones, a monumental bas-relief of pure pigmented fiber originally realized for Art Basel Unlimited in June of 2015. Hicks showcases the supple and flexible qualities of her materials, sometimes deconstructing and reassembling previously used entities to explore their infinite possibilities of form and movement at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

November 10, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The artists in this week’s gallery picks use location as metaphor and inspiration.

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1. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Continental Shift reflects on the hypothetical underground passage connecting Europe to Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar at Galerie Jérôme Poggi
2. James Hyde’s Ground “uses the flat field of painting as a topological arena that ties together the physical substance of painting and the ground on which it is laid, extracting spatial dimensions and new meanings from this relationship. In these increasingly direct works, he utilizes abstraction to break photography’s semantic hold on the way we construct an image of the world” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
3. Inspired by scenes from his everyday life, this entirely new body of work continues Nobuyuki Takahashi’s careful observation of place and distills from an undulating world a quiet sense of equilibrium at Rena Bransten Projects
4. The cycle of the destruction and rebirth of Detroit at Five Myles
5. Where Seonna Hong’s previous works focused on reckoning, forgiveness and ‘wishing I said all the things I didn’t say,’ If You Lived Here I’d Be Home by Now explores the possibilities of what’s to come. In the artist’s words, “My once melancholic and somber pieces have given way to a new kind of hopefulness.”  at Jonathan Levine Gallery
6. Mary Iverson, on her latest show You and Me in the Aftermath: “For many years, I have been inserting shipping containers and shipwrecks into pristine landscapes, inspiring conversations about the relationship between the environment and industrial activities. In my current body of work, I have brought the figure into the scene, adding another layer to the narrative.” at G. Gibson Gallery

November 3, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
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