Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Our artists are focusing on adventure and leisure time in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Focusing on informal moments shared by friends and lovers,Nicole Eisenman’s paintings concentrate on interior spaces and those casual situations that occur only behind closed doors, be that of the studio, a New York apartment or a train compartment at Anton Kern Gallery
2. Marcel Dzama presents new film works, sculpture, and large format drawings alongside a walk-in installation at Sies + Höke
3. As a member of a generation of artists noted for their “return” to figurative painting, Jocelyn Hobbie has honed a formal inventiveness in which neoclassical figures with pensive expressions are depicted amid bold and striking patterns. Her heightened naturalism and enhanced degree of saturated color reveal an uneasy relationship to realism and firmly root these unusually psychological paintings in the age of post abstraction at Fredericks & Freiser
4. As life in America continues to distance itself from the countryside, vacations and travel are a time to reintroduce the self to nature. As summer approaches in America, this idolized time of year brings thoughts of travel, escape, and road trips. With individual freeways that stretch over 3,000 miles, taking the car across country reveals America’s boundless diverse landscapes, as travelers immerse themselves in America’s ever changing personality at Joshua Liner Gallery
5. In the party game Who’s Coming to Dinner? participants are asked to choose any number of dinner guests, famous or not, from any period in time, and imagine what the party would be like. Annelie McKenzie’s exhibition is her personal variation of that game, except that she has imagined a museum exhibition, choosing artists—famous or not, from any period in time–and they become her “Old Masters” at CB1 Gallery
6. When we think of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art, it is often the names like Frazetta and Hildebrandt that come first to mind. However, all along through the art history of the genre you have women such as Kinuko Craft, Mary Blair, Julie Bell, and many more who have been creating their own visual worlds and illustrating the worlds of authors, filmmakers, and game designers. For the first time, the work of women in this genre will be exhibited together in Point of Vision: Celebrating Women Artists in Fantasy and Science Fiction at Society of Illustrators

June 15, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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In this week’s gallery picks, women play the narrative.

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1. Susanna Bauer and Leigh Anne Lester’s muses are the found fallen leaves, and the buds of flowers that haven’t fully grown.  Marrying both human and nature again, their work is a tribute to nature at Muriel Guépin Gallery
2. Carrie Moyer’s Sirens explores and extends the legacy of American Abstraction while paying homage to many of its seminal female figures among them Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Murray, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In Moyer’s compositions color is the sole character, playing every role: energy, matter, ooze, architecture, the cosmic and the cosmos. Through her use of gravity, velocity and stasis Moyer transforms and frees vivid primary hues to express new kinds of animation or fullness, which in turn propels Moyer’s ongoing exploration of her medium at DC Moore Gallery
3. Anna Elise Johnson collects official photographs taken during meetings between the leaders of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the U.S. State Department and various heads of state undergoing structural adjustment. Johnson’s acrylic sculptures structurally readjust the photographs that represent, support and solidify these imperial operations. at The Mission
4. Through nearly 100 works made by 34 artists over the past seventy years, this ambitious exhibition traces ways in which women have changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the postwar period at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
5. In new paintings and collages, Karen Kilimnik creates richly enigmatic narratives, inscribing her images with signifiers that obliquely reference histories of representation and myth. Mining the vernacular of tapestry reproductions of Baroque and Renaissance painting imagery, Kilimnik doubles down on the expressive potential of the reproduction, rendering her scenes with patchy brushwork and sprinkling her finished paintings with glitter, or adorning them with selections culled from from her library of idiomatic imagery at 303 Gallery
6. JOAN BROWN HERSELF is a survey of eleven self-portraits made between 1970 and 1980, the period during which Brown firmly established herself as an artist with a unique vision at CB1 Gallery

March 15, 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

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Our artists are crafting stories and expanding upon themes in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. Trenton Doyle Hancock’s I Want To Be at the Meeting After the Separation will feature a number of new paintings, part of Hancock’s ongoing grand saga portraying the birth, death, afterlife and dream-like states of a range of characters, particularly the Mounds (half-animal, half-plant like creatures) and their aggressors, the Vegans at Hales Gallery
2. In his latest body of work, Paul Wackers continues to play with notions of the familiar, creating dynamic and increasingly complex visual environments replete with recognizable yet ultimately unknowable objects. In these paintings of shelves, windows, and interior landscapes, forms range from non-representational layers of viscous paint to discernible objects at Morgan Lehman Gallery
3. Alexandra Grant and Steve Roden: “These Carnations Defy Language” began as a “seed”—a conversation between the artists in regards to Mute Objects of Expression, an anthology of the French poet Francis Ponge at Pasadena Museum of California Art
4. Edith Beaucage’s Chill Bivouac Rhymes invites you to follow a small group of teens at a rave concert. In parallel to Roland Barthes search for openness of interpretation in literature; Beaucage organized her current exhibition to allow for a looseleaf narrative at CB1 Gallery
5. Kelsey Brookes: Plants Of The Gods features new monumental paintings based on Brookes’ scientific investigations into nature’s ancient botanical compounds at Eric Firestone Gallery
6. Santi Moix’s works have long been characterized by their accumulation of saturated biomorphic forms that are simultaneously figurative, narrative and abstract. Here, Moix returns to the central themes in his oeuvre, evoking plant and animal life by sifting through the breadth of studies and trial works on paper then collaging them onto large canvas backdrops at Paul Kasmin Gallery

June 23, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Our top gallery picks this week experiment with layers and the spaces where ideas intersect.

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1. Mark Grotjahn employs a palette knife to drag, scrape, and feather densely woven layers of oil paint. Aggressively worked from the center of the painting, the impasto offers a glimpse into the many layers of color comprising the composition at Blum & Poe
2. Askew’s Exodusrefers to the perpetual migration of people within the greater Pacific region. The underlying themes of cultural identity are explored through an experimental style of portraiture, abstraction and graffiti still life paintings depicting traditional Pacific foods at Goodspace Gallery
3. Katharina Grosse presents pictures on canvas which seem as if made for the imposing, lofty space in which they are being shown. Compressed into the two-dimensional, rectangular format of a panel painting, the works point virtually outward, beyond their material bounds at Galerie Johann König
4. Adrian Ghenie’s paintings are all about alienation and the angst that accompanies it at Nicodim Gallery
5. Merion Estes’ Dystopia features new large “tapestry-like” paintings continuing her ongoing body of work exploring the intersection of nature and decoration at CB1 Gallery
6. “The Sound of Creation” is composed of a selection of painted works accompanied by corresponding musical tracks as the result of a creative collaboration between the artist Beezy Bailey, and the composer and music theorist Brian Eno at ArsCulture

May 19, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

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