Pattern Pulp

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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In this week’s gallery picks, process, pattern and color reign supreme.

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1. Rosson Crow has long been fascinated by history and the psychology of interior spaces, and has addressed subjects as varied as French Revolutionary interiors, New York City graffiti and the films of Alfred Hitchcock in his work. This exhibition represents Crow’s response to the paintings of Florine Stettheimer and debuts a new technique of Xerox transfers layered with painting on the canvases at Sargent’s Daughters
2. Richard Hull calls his recent paintings and drawings “stolen portraits.” His crayon drawings, in particular, are portraits in the form of hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a representation of a particular individual at Western Projects
3. The bold brushstrokes and swirly shapes in Yayoi Kusama latest works seem to hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, they transcend their medium to introduce their own pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. As such, while they continue Kusama’s innovative exploration of form, subject matter, and space, they also represent a connection to her work from the past six decades at David Zwirner
4. In James Little’s new paintings, color and structure are critical fixations that complement his geometric pictorial style.  The edges of his vertical bands are saturated with lucid color as they give way to other patterns – chevrons, rectangles and zigzag designs of varying widths at June Kelly Gallery
5. By folding, tearing, and combining, Yun-Woo Choi obfuscates the meanings constructed in two-dimensional printed material in an attempt to deliver intuitive feelings to the viewer at Open Source Gallery
6. Carlos Estrada-Vega’s paintings are composed of more than 300 blocks of color. Considering each as an individual brushstroke, Estrada-Vega proceeds to compose his paintings intuitively, mounting these pieces onto metal plates using magnets at Margaret Thatcher Projects

May 12, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

A Background & Foreground Mashup




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In celebration of Art Basel, which kicks off this week, W Magazine commissioned a collaboration between George Clooney, Girogio Armani, Yayoi Kusama, and Emma Summerton for their latest art-inspired cover story. The dots playfully balance Clooney’s serious stance and sharp suit, a fun juxtaposition of moods. Off the heels of the Louis Vuitton mashup, Kusama continues to swim between the art and commercial realms. The cover reminds us a bit of this, this and this, yet has a masculine timelessness that’s uniquely fresh. If you’d like to purchase the second print, the good folks at Artsy just released the details today.

 

 

December 2, 2013 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s exhibitions have a confined and restricted feel at first glance – but are they?

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1. Lari Pittman’s compositionally dense works play with the social and current realities of today, with an interest in ornamentation and surface, and draw on the legacy of history as told through the Western canon of painting and the applied arts at Regen Projects
2. Images of fantasy goddesses are hidden within Siggi Eggertsson’s densely patterned walls, ceiling and floors in his latest show at Spark Design Space
3. Yayoi Kusama’s I Who Have Arrived in Heaven at David Zwirner
4. Sandra Chevrier’s series “cages” is about women trying to find freedom from society’s twisted preconceptions of what a woman should or shouldn’t be. These women encased in these cages of brash imposing paint or comic books that masks their very person symbolizes the struggle that women go through with having these false expectations of beauty and perfection as well as the limitations society places on women, corrupting what truly is beautiful by placing women in these prisons of identity. By doing so, society is asking them to become superheroes at Reed Projects
5. “Burning Chair,” Takashi Ishida’s most recent work, was created by shooting one frame at a time to produce a “moving image” of drawing animation, in which a natural line propagates itself like a wave. Ishida drew on a wall and floor made of concrete with chalk, then sprinkled water over his drawing to erase the chalk lines. The water dried out and disappeared, creating a repetitious image; the use of such malleable materials on concrete surfaces only emphasizes the image’s generation and disappearance at Taka Ishii Gallery
6. Themes of authority, control and power feature heavily in both the technique and content of John Tsombikos’ latest show, commenting upon political and social frictions while presenting a progressive transition from graffiti into an unforgiving body of new work at Lazarides

November 5, 2013 | By: Shayna Kulik

Trend: Dotted Chaos




I’m a fan of circular symmetry just as much as the next designer, but when it comes to free form chaos, it can be really refreshing to just let loose. David Huffman’s done just that within a topographic landscape for Floating World #1, his mixed media on canvas piece that’s currently on display at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Applying a similar layering technique with an explosive saturated palette, Yayoi Kusama’s latest project is just as eye-catching.

Pairing a white room with stickers and children, organized chaos creates a living, breathing installation.

The full pictorial set can be viewed on This is Colossal. It’s worth a visit, as the process is a nice reminder that beauty often has a singular focus.

 

January 5, 2012 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
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