Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




gallerypicks_patternpulp154

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

*            *            *

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




gallerypicks_patternpulp147

Contemplating patterns and paths in this week’s gallery picks.

*            *            *

1. Jerry Carniglia’s process-driven methods and exploratory nature parallel his constant and evolving search for meaning that may be found in the unseen and otherwise unarticulated structures that underlie all of existence at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
2. In Esmé Thompson’s paintings and multi-panel wall reliefs the use of color and pattern create a dynamic and engaging viewing experience.  Colorful and bold, the paintings attest to a lifelong interest in decorative designs as diverse as those found in Islamic textiles and ceramic tiles to those of medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts at Bowery Gallery
3. In 1905, Hilma af Klint received a ‘commission’ from an entity to create her most important body of work, The Paintings for the Temple. Consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups, the artist painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science at Serpentine Galleries
4. Nathan Hayden (b. 1977) dances each day to induce visions that he draws on small pieces of thick torn paper referred to as “the cards”. The shapes and geometric patterns he derives from inner and outer landscapes bounce between abstraction and figurative representation, resulting in drawings that explore personal mythologies and hallucinations. Hayden’s latest series of paintings for Pure Pretty Fever depicts hallucinatory landscapes at CB1Gallery
5. Robin Mitchell’s intensely colorful paintings are a combination of stitch-like marks layered over radiating imagery. Her exhibition, How Many Heartbeats in a Lifetime?, continues a line of visual thinking that has progressed through her previous four exhibitions at Craig Krull Gallery
6. Donald Groscost creates large paintings that challenge the viewer’s perception of the traditional medium. The show will feature his earlier works executed in the early 2000s, which are formal investigations of painterly abstraction and the process of image simulation in our digitized era. His oils on canvas deceivingly appear to be created by some form of virtual media, with a vibrancy of palette that only heightens the impression of a mechanically transmitted image at Heather Gaudio Fine Art

March 8, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




gallerypicks_patternpulp140

Exploring overlaps and contrary concepts in this weeks gallery picks.

*            *            *

1. While the natural world plays a profound role in Matthias Meyer’s work, he achieves in its depiction a synthesis between the representational and the abstract. Both mysterious and revealing, the water’s surface reflects its surroundings while simultaneously drawing the viewer’s attention into the depths beneath at Danese Corey
2. “Pulling imagery and motif from organic form, architecture, media and design I create densely layered, mixed-media paintings that are invested in process and grounded in traditional craft. I’m interested in the overlap of nature and culture and the patterns present in both; the tension between them drives my exploration of color, surface and materiality.” – Nina Tichava at George Billis Gallery
3. Gao Rong has navigated notions of femininity and identity through domestic architectures in her previous series in which she created facsimile houses, rooms, and sites of memory rendered entirely in embroidered thread. Rather than romanticize the handicraft, however, Gao threads narratives together painstakingly through these embroidered fabrics, sometimes mimicking the act of suturing a wound. For her current solo exhibition, The Simple Line, Gao condenses this process into abstract hoops that dissect the tensions between formalist styles and traditional folk craft indigenous to female domestic life in China at Klein Sun Gallery
4. David Lefebvre manipulates his landscape paintings Galerie Zurcher
5. Rock and Refuge, Carol Es’ latest exhibition, will include her Joshua Tree paintings as well as a drawing installation from her ongoing Journal Project at Craig Krull Gallery
6. Tony Ingrisano’s practice draws inspiration from various infrastructure systems, from man-made power grids to naturally occurring river circuits. Ignoring their intended functionality, Ingrisano instead focuses on the beauty and rhythm found within their forms. The work presented in this exhibition furthers Ingrisano’s exploration of the aesthetic possibilities surrounding organizational systems by expanding into the theoretical. His interest lies specifically within geometric perspective and what a breakdown of the rules governing that perspective can add to the discourse about systems at Lesley Heller Workspace

January 13, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




gallerypicks_patternpulp89

Nerds rejoice! This week’s gallery picks highlight the delight of books and the written word.

*            *            *

1. In this exhibition of new work, Sam Jaffe continues her investigation into the tensions between the handmade and the industrial made. Jaffe states, “Above all, my work is about surrendering to materials and the fetishistic nature of material culture.” at 65GRAND
2. The Archives, Tony Bevan’s latest series, sees the artist taking on infinite space. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel”, a story depicting the universe as a library, these labyrinthine repositories of books allude to the vast spaces of the imagination at Ben Brown Fine Arts
3. When Danae Falliers explored the extraordinary, Rem Koolhaas-designed, Seattle Public Library, she photographed the building and its endless stacks and shelves of neatly organized books. Due to the relatively low lighting conditions, all of the text along the book spines softly disappeared, and Falliers recognized that her library photographs had edged closer to pure abstraction, an idea that she with ran with when creating the work for this exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery
4. Charlotte Cornation’s porcelain books inspired by her oniric life using Jung dream interpretation at Galerie BSL
5. Dwyer Kilcollin latest work is deeply invested in an examination of the image from the inside out. Kilcollin’s work encapsulates a fluency in the virtual that is subsequently rendered materially-cast by hand using a gestural application of crushed rock and resin.  Many of the works evoke familiar forms: a sweater, a book, a backpack, a pair of binoculars-their forms pigmented by the view beyond the fence  at M+B
6. In Self Illuminated, Christine La Sala asks, “What can we learn from The Giant Quiz Book?” This propels her to explore the possibility of illumination through assemblage, dioramas, and light, offering interpretations on questions from the book at Alter Space

December 10, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




gallereypicks_patternpulp66

We’re celebrating the Fourth of July by looking at America through time and space in this week’s gallery picks.

*            *            *

1. . As children, Damian Stamer and his identical twin brother would explore the woods around his home. Within his work are the memories and images of ruined buildings from a time and way of life in the South that was and is coming to an end at Zane Bennett Gallery
2. Rhode Island-based Steven Coyle’s new beach series at Paul Thiebaud Gallery
3. No doubt we are living in the future, but is it the place we imagined ourselves growing up into when we were young? at Gauntlet Gallery
4. Bill Owens’s Suburbia (1973) is a series of strange and compelling photographs that reveal the complexities of the American middle-class landscape.at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
5.Having spent a great deal of time in the Southwestern United States, John Oteri is inspired by those areas and uses them as backdrops for the majority of his work. at Joe Wade Fine Art
6. Robert Weingarten describes Pentimento, his recent body of work, as “a re-affirmation of the power of photographic memory.” Beginning with historic photographs that document major events of the last hundred years, Weingarten re-visits the original locations of these pictures and then makes photographs of the site as it exists today at Craig Krull Gallery

 

July 1, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




gallerypicks_patternpulp33

Exploring the interesting relationship between creation and destruction.

*            *            *

1. Maja Lisa Engelhardt explores creation through great whales and winged fowl at Elizabeth Harris Gallery
2. Beguilingly beautiful, XOOOOX’s women convey a sense of melancholy and introversion and allude to the growing displeasure with the uniform, consumption-driven hype of the fashion industry at Mead Carney
3. Natalie Frank pictures people in various states of disintegration. Intimate portraits, surreal scenes, and large-scale constructed narratives poke at what it means to be human: the absurdity, desire, violence, and loss or claim of self at ACME Los Angeles
4. “I am interested in religion, gender and sex as each attempts to categorize the individual and define the individual’s place within a society: instituting roles, rituals and traditions. I am a painter that engages in sculpture and body performance for the making of objects” at Western Project
5. The multi-layered compositions of tilted bars and stripes in colorfully orchestrated cubistic spaces that have characterized Ned Evans’ recent paintings have been distilled in his latest work into more minimal equations at Craig Krull Gallery
6. Nina Tichava interested in the overlap of nature and culture and the patterns present in both; the tension between them drives my exploration of color, surface and materialit .at George Billis

October 22, 2013 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
On Instagram.