Newsletter. Los Angeles 2015

Transcription

1 Newsletter Los Angeles 2015

2 Neil Beloufa Born 1985 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Paris France. Neil Beloufa is a French-Algerian artist who utilises the interview format to make videos that are disquieting mixtures of fact and fiction, the utopian and the dystopian. Beloufa does not seek to to differentiate between these polarities: everything is presented with a neutral outlook marked with occasional touches of humour and irony. Talking to people he meets on his travels, the artist creates loops that comprise of many disjointed stories as opposed to a single coherent narrative. His practice also extends to sculptural assemblages of paper, metal and household materials such as electrical wiring, with which he evokes environments that seem part experimental laboratory and part domestic space. In Fake Vintage Frame: Lights, Beloufa s concerns with the ambiguities between fact and fiction take the form of an archetypal symbol of the artistic canon the picture frame which is distorted through textured media and boldly graphic line, to suggest the inherent alterations of reality which occur as life is rendered as art. Like Beloufa s video works, the piece compels us to ask what it means to create a work of art, and how such processes of creation can slip between fantasy and untruth. Neil Beloufa has been honoured with numerous prizes such as the Audi Talent Award (Paris, France, 2011), the Grand Prix at Indie Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal, 2009), the Grand Prix at the 24th Hamburg Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany, 2008) and the ARTE prize for European Short Film at the 54th Oberhausen Film Festival (Oberhausen, Germany, 2008). The artist has exhibited at various notable venues worldwide including the Fondation Ricard (Paris, France, 2014), the New Museum (New York, USA, 2014), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK, 2013), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France, 2013), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA, 2013) and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France, 2012). He has also participated in the Taipei Biennale (Taipei, Taiwan, 2014) and the Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, China, 2014). His works are held in many public collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Sammlung Goetz (Munich, Germany) and the David Roberts Art Foundation (London, UK). Title: Fake Vintage Frame: Lighters Date: 2013 Medium: Steel, styrofoam and electrical cords Size: x 182.9cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 2

3 Sayre Gomez Born in 1982 in Chicago, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Sayre Gomez is a conceptual artist whose body of work includes paintings, sculptures, installations and artist s books. His cerebral projects often employ found images and text as a means to comment on the ambiguous nature of communication and personal exchange. The artist s works are characterised by a formalism inspired by typography and graphic design, along with the use of repetition that often bleeds into distortion and abstraction. Sayre Gomez s text and images are sourced from various blogs and archives, selected purely for their formal qualities. He is most attracted to subjects that imbue a sense of familiarity yet remain difficult to place. This untitled painting typifies Gomez s abstract experimentation, blending turquoise and indigo hues in an expressive confluence which seems at once to recall the irregular surface of flowing water and the flecked marks of marble stone. Gomez s painted works engage boldly with the evocative potential of the medium, lending an almost musical quality to the interplay of tones and textures on the canvas. Gomez s works have been exhibited at venues including the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, USA, 2011) and the Art and Culture Center of South Florida (Hollywood, USA, 2009). His work is also represented in the prestigious Rubell Family Collection. contact@newartworld.co.uk Title: Untitled Abstract Painting with Purple and Green Date: 2015 Medium: Acrylic on canvas mounted on board Size: x 152.4cm 3

4 Anthony Pearson Born in 1969 in Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles. The human perception of light is central to the practice of Pearson, one of the most renowned artists of the Los Angeles contemporary artistic milieu, whose work may be considered to build on the legacy of Light and Space movement which has its origins in the same city. Pearson s work draws on a minimalistic palette together with a range of formal approaches to render the act of seeing a self-conscious process. The artist has recently been engaging with a new typology in his works which he has termed Etched Plasters : a surface of plaster set in a frame, which is then marked with several implements leaving a complex two-dimensional plane of interconnected marks. These pieces are an invitation to consider the visual richness of surfaces, and they claim as their project a documentation of the optical experience of Californian life. Anthony Pearson has been shown worldwide, including a solo show at the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, USA, 2012), and further exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA, 2015), the decordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, USA, 2012), the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, USA, 2011) and the California Museum of Photography (Riverside, USA, 2008). His work was shown as part of the city-wide fotofocus biennial in Cincinnati, (USA, 2012). Pearson has been collected by prestigious institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA) and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA). contact@newartworld.co.uk Title: Untitled (Plaster Positive) Date: 2015 Medium: Pigmented hydrocal in walnut frame Size: 72.4 x 54.6 x 7.6 cm 4

5 Oscar Tuazon Born in 1975 in Seattle, USA. Lives and works in Paris, France. Oscar Tuazon s oeuvre unites the aesthetics of Land Art and Minimal Art, and thus links a certain notion of abstraction with construction. Influenced by his deep reflections on the history of art from recent decades, Tuazon s practice evokes references to Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Belying his status as an importance figure within contemporary process-based art, Tuazon s works such as Square Panel incorporate a vocabulary of marks, scratches and stains that function as traces of the environment surrounding the work s production: elevating the process of creation to equal status with the finished piece. This piece draws upon Tuazon s concerns with regard to how humanity s built environment is redefined, even gradually redesigned, by the act of inhabitation. Oscar Tuazon has held numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Ludwig Museum (Cologne, Germany, 2014), the Museum Boijmans Van Veuningen (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2013), the Fondazione Giuliani (Rome, Italy, 2012), The Power Station (Dallas, USA, 2011), the ICA (London, UK, 2010), the Kunsthalle (Bern, Switzerland, 2010), the David Roberts Foundation (London, UK, 2009), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (St Louis, USA, 2008). In addition to this, he has participated in group exhibitions at the Rubell Family Collection (Miami, USA, 2012), The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada, 2012), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA, 2012), the Migros Museum for Gegenwartskunst (Zurich, Switzerland, 2010), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France, 2010), and many more. His work is also held in important public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Musée d Art Moderne (Paris, France), and the MoMA (New York, USA). Title: Square Panel Date: 2013 Medium: Plaster, steel, wood Size: 165 x 165 cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 5

6 Mike Bouchet Born in 1970 in Castro Valley, USA. Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. Since the early 1990s, Mike Bouchet has been producing a seemingly boundless array of conceptually rigorous works including paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, actions, interventions, and performances through which he critically questions political, economic, and cultural systems and the role of the artist in society. At once deadly serious and parodic, his works walk the line between art and life, fantasy and reality, often purposely creating confusion between these categories. Long Big Cuban is a strong example of Bouchet s ability to depict quotidian objects in an exaggerated manner that pushes them into the realm of the absurd. The hyper-realistic detailing and saturated colours of this piece divest its subject of figurative significance and transform it into a potent symbol of consumption and excess, with further implications as a commentary on the surplus and wastage of contemporary society. Mike Bouchet has exhibited extensively, holding solo shows at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany, 2010), the COBRA Museum (Amstelveen, Netherlands, 2010), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France, 2008). He has also participated in group exhibitions at S.M.A.K. (Ghent, Belgium, 2012), the GARAGE Centre of Contemporary Culture (Moscow, Russia, 2011), as well as the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo, Norway, 2009), to name but a few. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Fonds National D Art Contemporain (Paris, France), the Deutsche Bank Collection (Frankfurt, Germany), the Bernard Arnault Collection (Paris, France), the Francois Pinault Collection (Venice, Italy), the LVMH Collection (Paris, France), and many more. Title: Long Big Cuban Date: 2014 Medium: Oil on canvas Size: 160 x 240 cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 6

7 Mitchell Syrop Born in 1953 in New York, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Mitchell Syrop s investigations into the interactions between text and image began with a fascination for the language of advertising billboards he saw as a young student in New York. This preoccupation developed into an explicit focus of his practice, as he began combining it with film and image reproduction technology, fusing artistic practice with commercial media projects. The ready availability of such technologies in LA in the 1970s exerted a formative influence on his oeuvre, as his films began to be adapted for commercial broadcast on television. Moving into the 1980s Syrop began working more extensively with photography, and in recent years his work has focused on the significance of combining images and text from diverse provenances to produce discordant effects. There works are sophisticated examples of the complex allusive symbolism that Mitchell has gradually condensed into minimalist combinations of words and images. The pieces demands the viewer to consider the words divorced from their original significance, while we are simultaneously prevented from fully viewing the images by the words intrusion into the space of the composition. Mitchell Syrop s work has been exhibited at important group shows including at the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, USA, 2014) and the California Pacific Triennial (Newport Beach, USA, 2013). He has been collected by the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (East Logan, USA) and the MOCA Grand Avenue at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA). Title: Brush Stroke Title: Reality Therapy Date: 1988 Date: 1988 Medium: Torn poster in artist Medium: Torn poster in artist frame frame Size: x cm Size: x cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 7

8 Alex Ruthner Born in Vienna in Lives and works in Vienna. The visual field of Alex Ruthner s canvases is deceptively complex: within a seemingly haphazard surface of bold gestural brushwork and splattered paint is interwoven with marginal, figurative images. These might be references to pop culture motifs such as Mickey Mouse, or more abstract components like a section rigidly geometric horizontal line patterning, but they serve to interrupt the looseness of the remaining composition, and place multiple artistic vocabularies at play with one another. In a further level of complexity, Ruthner s works may also be seen as literal representations: of the back of a worn postcard, for example, or the traces of doodles and smudges on a piece of note paper. His paintings collapse the distinction between abstract gestures and literal representation. They also stage playful interruptions in the field of fine art by imagery from visual subcultures like comics and animations. Alex Ruthner s works have been exhibited at ERSTE Bank Ausstellung (Berlin, Germany, 2011), the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austira, 2010), the Vienna Art Foundation (Vienna, Austria, 2010), and the National Museum of Montenegro (Cetinje, Montenegro, 2009). During his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy he was awarded a year s travel scholarship to the Athens School of Fine Arts. Title: As a designer, I m totally free to do what I want. I don t have a collection plan. what s exciting today is to be free Date: 2015 Medium: Oil on canvas Size: x 254 cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 8

9 Katherine Berdhardt Born in 1975 in St. Louis, USA. Lives and works in New York, USA. Painter Katherine Bernhardt explores representations of modern-day first-world excesses the figures in her canvases seem to languish in jaded poses of celebrity ennui, by association evoking the decadence and potential corruption underlying the systems which have facilitated their lives. This series by Bernhard depicts familiar subject matter on monumental canvases. The artist employs a graffitilike technique to render in acrylic and spray paint crude but jaunty depictions of objects such as Doritos, Diet Coke, cigarettes, and hamburgers and fries. The monochrome backgrounds are painted last by the artist, pushing the objects into the foreground and detaching them from a sense of pictorial depth. Bernhardt s work has been shown in group exhibitions internationally including at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK, 2010), the Foundation Salomon (France, 2010), the National Arts Club (New York, USA, 2009) and the Barat Foundation (Newark, USA, 2009). Title: Sharpies Date: 2014 Medium: Acrylic and spray paint on canvas Size: 243.8x cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 9

10 Oliver Osborne Born in 1985 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lives and works in London, UK. Oliver Osborne is an important emerging Scottish artist who studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London. Osborne s work juxtaposes the abstract and the figurative with an impassive simplicity. His large panel pieces take the form of either diptychs or of multiple stretchers amassed together on the wall into rectangles, within which smaller areas of the work feature detail in the form of drawing and text. Osborne is best known for his thoughtful pairings of excerpts from cartoons found in European language textbooks with painstakingly hand-painted abstract backgrounds. Sometimes puzzled, at other times struggling or surprised, the cartoon figures act as metaphors for the act of looking. The artist often entitles the works with phrases from the same textbooks, tempting us to read the entire work as a poetic consideration of the words, and simultaneously lending a subtle humour to the works bold presence. In 2012, Oliver Osborne was named one of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, a leading prize for emerging art practitioners in the UK. His work has been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK, 2014), the Liverpool Biennale (Liverpool, UK, 2012), the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, UK, 2012), and the Royal Academy of Arts (London, UK, 2010). Artist: Oliver Osborne Title: 193 C Date: 2014 Medium: Oil on silkscreen on linen Size: 205 x 154 cm contact@newartworld.co.uk 10