Pattern Pulp

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 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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This week’s gallery picks explore the intertwined nature of environment, memory, and culture.

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1. Observations in Nature is bound thematically by the metaphor of the shark. Influenced by philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the film “JAWS” (1975), Abdul Mazid’s conceptualization of the shark refers to society’s tendency to insist upon the “othering” and villification of people, ideas, and practices at Shoshana Wayne Gallery
2. The Chosen Form of Your Destroyer is focused on a new series of mixed media works by Ian Francis depicting the coexistence of beauty and destruction in modern society at Lazarides Rathbone
3. My Dakota captures not just the state of South Dakota’s changing economy and landscape but also a personal catharsis. Rebecca Norris Webb came to understand the series as a means of addressing her grief for her brother—“to try to absorb it, to distill it, and, ultimately, to let it go.” at The Cleveland Museum of Art
4. Robert Minervini’ Invisible Reflections surveys six monuments in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Each of the six paintings depicts one individual monument, but interwoven with this imagery are white line drawings which represent the memorial’s historical framework. Minervini’s work invites the viewer to become more engaged with the rich history of San Francisco, with the hope that it will inspire further inquiry into our surrounding environment at Rena Bransten Gallery
5. Inspired by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel, the exhibition Memory Burn observes mortality and death in relation to recording devices. The title of the exhibition refers simultaneously to unforgettable visions burned in the mind and to digital burning used to archive memories.
at bitforms
6. FAILE, a Brooklyn-based collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, raises questions about our relationship to consumer culture, religious traditions, and the urban environment by blurring the boundaries between fine art, street art, and popular culture at Brooklyn Museum

July 28, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s gallery picks are shaped by shared experiences and connections.

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1. Peter Wayne Lewis’ paintings refer to the building blocks of nature at its fundamental level from a micro as well as macro point of view at JayJay
2. Jacolby Satterwhite is interested in process as a metanarrative: the narrative between past, present, and future, and how that process relates a broad, shared experience at OHWOW
3. Pat Passloff’s Abstract Expressionist paintings from 1950 – 1959 at Elizabeth Harris Gallery
4.Over the past decade, Jonas Wood has developed a singular style of representational image-making. Working from a vast archive of photographs––shot and collected by the artist or sourced via the Internet––Wood reinterprets everyday views from his life at David Kordansky Gallery
5. Florian Maier-Aichen captures a distinct sense of time, place, and memory in his photographs, connecting viewer and subject through expansive aerial views and analogue digital abstractions.at Blum & Poe
6. Robert Proch’s Land Without Footprints presents a futuristic realm where perspective is distorted and humans connect solely in a web-orientated universe at Lazarides Rathbone

November 26, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Examining culture and custom in this week’s choice gallery picks.

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1. With a nod towards environmental issues and man’s permanent interference with nature, Lucy McLauchlan’s latest work is reminiscent of her engagement with the local community, uncovering moments where the two worlds collide and escaping walls of concrete and steel at Lazarides Rathbone
2. In the past, Lisa Kokin has incorporated readable text or text translated into form in her art. In her new work, she has substituted text for fragments of stripped-down zippers with (in her own words) “their attendant metaphors of concealment, closure and impenetrability.” at Seager/Gray Gallery
3. Charlie Smith explores Making/Unmaking at GRIN
4. Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurls a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form at Alcatraz
5. Anna Fidler’s paintings celebrate the euphoric, rebellious and mythical while consciously contemplating the transformational qualities of ritual and landscape at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art
6. Jamex de la Torre states, “‘Folkloric’ refers to our interest in the Mexican vernacular; ‘acid’ represents our contemporary reinterpretations and utilization of new material technologies. In this body of work, we have explored tendencies to revisit our 60s and 70s flower child art roots with free-flowing images of beautiful and strange nature at Mindy Soloman Gallery

October 7, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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In this week’s gallery picks, our artists explore the complex relationship between the present and the past with their richly layered techniques.

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1. Knowingly borrowing what iconography lies just as easily in thrift shops as any museum collection, Holmes navigates grandiose concepts of biography, introspection, and materiality with all the sincerity of a scrawled cocktail napkin at Mike Wise Gallery
2.Using Renaissance images, long forgotten in dusty archives of museums, Ingrid Dee Magidson combines them with the contemporary materials and objects at Unix Gallery
3. Sage Vaughn explores the physical and abstract associations of the phrase “nobody’s home” through an examination of stale interiors and the vacancy with which society unquestioningly consumes objects and occasions of mass appeal at Lazarides Rathbone
4. Lalla Essaydi covers her models, and sometimes the garments and walls, in layers of hand-painted henna calligraphy, subverting traditional Muslim gender stereotypes through the presence of the written word.at Jenkins Johnson Gallery
5. Yinka Shonibare’s latest show focuses on education, enlightenment, and opportunity – all ideals embraced by Dr. Barnes at Barnes Foundation
6. Through Margo Wolowiec’s dizzying textiles, the internet’s grating imagery washes away into something softer, almost dreamlike, like when cereal turns to mush after hours left in milk at Johansson Projects

 

February 4, 2014 | By: Shayna Kulik

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