Ramiro Gomez: Domestic Disturbances in New York Times

Article: Ramiro Gomez's Domestic Disturbances

(New York Times)

"I first noticed the work of the young Los Angeles artist Ramiro Gomez across a series of recent art fairs, on account of those Hockneys of his: that is, paintings that were dead ringers for Hockneys — same scale, same colors, same composition — except that something was always just slightly off. Take Gomez’s large-scale version of Hockney’s iconic ‘‘American Collectors’’ double portrait, for example, which Gomez’s Los Angeles dealer, Charlie James, exhibited at the most recent Expo Chicago. It looks almost exactly like the original portrait of the couple in question, clenched in a grim rictus amid the sculptures in their backyard garden, except that Gomez replaced the two collector protagonists with a pair of dark-skinned gardeners of the sort who regularly do the actual tending of such gardens. Into another Hockney, of one of those nondescript West Los Angeles apartment buildings with its wide front lawn, Gomez slotted a groundskeeper, rake extended. That was the genius of the whole series: how in much the same way that, back in the ’60s, the English transplant Hockney first opened our eyes to so much that we had previously overlooked in Los Angeles, rendering all sorts of things visible to us as if for the first time (those boxy apartment buildings, the distinctive street signs, the moderne furniture, that light), so Gomez seemed to be allowing us, indeed forcing us, to notice the very groundskeepers and housemaids and pool cleaners who make that look, the look of Los Angeles, possible, rendering visible a whole world of people, our fellow humans, who often go unseen (and who, for that matter, because they are sometimes ‘‘illegal,’’ often strive not to be seen).

Powerfully effective work, I remember thinking each time I came upon a fresh brace of such images at subsequent fairs, though I also found myself wondering whether such Hockney-riffing wouldn’t get old pretty quickly, if that were all there was. As if to immediately undercut such concerns, however, the booth interiors regularly featured an evolving array of framed smaller pieces: torn-out pages of sleek ads and photo illustrations from the pages of Architectural Digest and Vogue and the like, hawking this lighting fixture or that kitchen cabinet or the other dream family in their dream backyard. But in each instance, Gomez had meticulously painted in, off to the side (in one case even only barely reflected in a posh vanity mirror), a nanny or housekeeper or gardener or handyman. They were faceless and self-effacing almost (though not quite, and in fact emphatically not) to the point of invisibility, the blur of paint on photo recapitulating the blur of status involved, the way the figures themselves both belonged and did not belong in the picture."  More at NY Times

Pyszczek: 30 Emerging Artists to Watch This Summer

Article:  30 Emerging Artists to Watch This Summer

(Artsy)

Przemek Pyszczek’s studio may only be a 20-minute ride on the train from Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, midway along a line most frequented by the Easy Jet-set on their way back and forth from Schönefeld Airport for sleepless weekends of bad drugs and great music. But the kilometer-long stretch of warehouses in Schöneweide which used to house East Berlin’s most important power station and now, in part, Pyszczek’s sundrenched atelier is a Berlin those hoards—and, for that matter, most of those who populate the city’s increasingly booming city center—rarely see. 

This is Ossi country, untouched by the city’s newfound, relative economic prosperity of tech firms and startups of all colors, and thus relatively unchanged since the wall came down, save the stoppage of the whirring turbines that employed the micro-region’s residents. It’s a fitting setting for the 30-year-old, Polish-born, Canadian-raised, Berlin transplant to create works that trace his home country’s transition since the fall of the iron curtain and an ongoing journey to rediscover his own past. 

Fornieles, Brock, Yellin: The exhibition revealing summer's dark side

Article:  "The exhibition revealing summer's dark side"

(Dazed Digital)

The structure of the show is semi-abstract and associative in form and there are several intertwining lines of work that run through it. Some works directly engage with the mire of popular culture. The show opens with the film work Century 21, a masterpiece by the late Jeremy Blake, that takes the ‘American Dream’ on a bad acid trip and it closes with Ed Fornieles’ Pool Party, a half-an-hour long video (featuring Mercedes Kilmer) which I see as a deadpan critique of reality TV and entertainment culture – implying a clear narrative direction in the show. In between we’ve got Petra Cortright’s flash animation works – with their mash-up of cheap online soft porn content and virtual overabundant landscapes, and Gabriele Beveridge’s work that elegantly appropriates and critiques the aesthetics of luxury culture. -Nick Hackworth

Another contrasting strand of works is abstract and aesthetic and includes Kadar Brock’s works of paper that manifest the aesthetics of erasure, Thomas van Linge’s minimal, cool and reflective works and Isabel Yellin’s exuberant, fabric based abstractions – which remind me of serious gestural painting fused with pop-songs. These works function in the show as a metaphor for the surfaces and screens that define the space of modernity. Sites of seduction. Deconstructing that idea we have Nicolas Deshayes’ strange and compelling pieces – both seductive and grotesque – with their jellyfish forms floating on a shiny, plastic whiteness and also the cracked surfaces of Arslan Sukan’s scanned images of smartphone screens and of Ali Emir Tapan’s heat tempered mirrors which evoke a fragile and beautiful otherworldliness.    -Nick Hackworth

Ghenie: Venice Biennale Expands Its Scope

Article:  "Venice Biennale Expands Its Scope"

(NY Times)

Many of the collectors who did attend walked through the Giardini to the Romanian pavilion, where the Berlin-based painter Adrian Ghenie was showing 19 works dating from 2008-2015 in a presentation titled “Darwin’s Room.” Steeped in European history, blending abstraction with figuration, the rational with the irrational, Mr. Ghenie’s paintings have recently sold for as much as $2.4 million at auction.

But though the show included two new paintings, there were no works for sale in his Venice pavilion. Would-be buyers of Mr. Ghenie’s latest paintings will have to wait until October, when he will have his first show with the Paris dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.

Mr. Ghenie, 37, is astutely aware of the pressures of the art market — auction and dealer sales were valued last year at an all-time high of €51 billion, according to a report published by the European Fine Art Foundation in March.

“The market is so crazy,” said Mr. Ghenie, who creates about 15 paintings a year.

“It’s frustrating to see people make so much money so quickly,” he said. “I feel I’m being speculated. It’s not me. It’s the new art world.”

“But I don’t care,” he said. “I’m keeping these two new works for myself.”

Titus Kaphar: History Refuses to Repeat Itself in Titus Kaphar’s CAC Exhibit

Article:  History Refuses to Repeat Itself in Titus Kaphar’s CAC Exhibit

(CIty Beat)

"In Latin, “vesper” means “evening star” or, more commonly, just “evening” — a junction of night and day. Although it refers to a surname in the Contemporary Arts Center’s new exhibit from Titus Kaphar, The Vesper Project, the word feels right at home. Polarities coexist at every turn in The Vesper Project, a culmination of the lost storylines of the Vespers, a 19th-century New England family who “passed” as white despite their mixed heritage, which made them “negro” in the eyes of the law.

Kaphar’s themes are lofty. Racial inequality, criminal justice, fractured identities and the way we traverse the fluxes of time, space and history are braided — sometimes literally — into his work. 

Broader cultural and social narratives play an important role. Take “The Jerome Project,” a series in which the artist creates layered portraits from mugshots of men who share his father’s name. 

In a poignant extension of this series, the faces of young men such as Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Michael Brown and others are layered on top of each other, like multiple exposures, in chalk on asphalt paper. It is a haunting critique of how society amalgamates these victims’ identities, but also a way to canonize young black men whose lives were stolen. 

In “Watching Tides Rise,” an oil painting of a sailboat adrift on a roiling sea of tar, Kaphar peels back a corner of his canvas to reveal the blank wall. The painting acts as a sort of succinct thesis, its wrinkles and warps reflecting an altered history in the exhibit that doesn’t necessarily expose any easy answers."   more at City Beat

Jordan Casteel: Artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Artist: Jordan Casteel

(Sargent's Daughters)

Sargent's Daughters is pleased to announce that Jordan Casteel has been selected as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum, marked the next cycle in this vital program by announcing that Jordan Casteel, EJ Hill and Jibade-Khalil Huffman have been selected as the Museum’s artists in residence for 2015–16 and will begin their eleven-month tenure in October. 

Each will receive free use of a studio space on the Museum’s third floor, a $20,000 fellowship grant and a stipend of $1,000 for materials. At the end of the residency, the Museum will present an exhibition of the artists’ work. “This is the program that put the ‘Studio’ in our museum’s name,” Thelma Golden said. “It is fundamental to all aspects of our mission of being a home to outstanding artists of African descent—helping us forge connections between artists and the community, and keeping us at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice. I congratulate our wonderful current artists in residence on an exhibition that speaks eloquently of their distinctive visions and look forward to welcoming our new artists when they begin their year with us in October.”

Jordan Casteel (b. 1989 in Denver, CO) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Casteel received her MFA in 2014 from Yale in New Haven, CT. In 2015 Casteel had artist residences at Yaddo and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council was also included in Color II: Identity and Society at the Gund Gallery Kenyon College. Additionally, her work was selected for inclusion in New American Paintings Northeast Issue #116 - 2015. In 2014 Casteel had her first solo exhibition in New York with Sargent’s Daughters and she will be having her second solo exhibition with the gallery in October 2015.

For more information on Jordan Casteel please contact the gallery at 917 463 3901 or info@sargentsdaughters.com

Justin Mortimer: Discusses His Latest Work, And The Serendipitous Magic Of Painting

Article:  Justin Mortimer Discusses His Latest Work, And The Serendipitous Magic Of Painting

(Artylst)

"British painter Justin Mortimer’s latest works are currently on display at Parafin Gallery, London. The artist's painting reflects upon a figurative world in a state of 21st century 'Baconian' disorder, often pushing the boundaries of figuration and landscape with a slight fetishistic overtone. The artist's usual necrotic hues give way to the artificial colours of medical garments and smoke bombs found in images from the ongoing Ebola crisis in Africa, and recent political disturbances. Mortimer creates a voyeuristic tableaux from a collage of internet-sourced images, often returning to motifs and re-working them as he strips back the images to reveal a disturbing narrative of suggested violence and physical oppression - but also one of beauty."

Adrian Ghenie: For Adrian Ghenie at Nicodim Gallery, 'how' just as important as 'why'

Article: For Adrian Ghenie at Nicodim Gallery, 'how' just as important as 'why'

(LATimes)

"If you enjoy pop music, you know that reading the lyrics is not the same as listening to the song. The way the words get sung has everything to do with what they mean.

The same is true of painting, even though viewers often forget that how a picture gets painted is just as important as what it depicts. The relationship between subject and style, or form and content, is integral to Adrian Ghenie’s 10 oils on canvas at Nicodim Gallery.

Based in Berlin, the Romanian artist paints portraits: small close-ups of men’s heads and large landscapes, each populated by a solitary individual. In terms of subject matter, Ghenie’s paintings are all about alienation and the angst that accompanies it.

The men in the small portraits (the artist is portrayed in some) are monstrous combinations, their faces slapped together from fragments of other faces, including self-portraits by Vincent van Gogh and Francis Bacon as well as Llyn Foulkes’ demented cartoons and Chaim Soutine’s meat paintings. The landscapes and street scenes are equally bleak, their isolated men adrift in a contemporary rendition of Edward Hopper’s grim cities.

But the way Ghenie paints — lushly and vigorously and with reckless abandon, piling it on thickly and scraping it off furiously — is a pleasure to behold. It’s clear that he loves paint and that he knows how to move it around.

The sensuality of his process slams head-on into the subject matter of his images. The makes for paintings that tug viewers in various directions.

Pleasure and pain do not collide so much as they swirl around each other in a complex stew of mixed messages, ambivalent emotions and unsettling suggestions."

Pieter Hugo: ‘Kin’ a Personal Look at South Africa

Article: Pieter Hugo: ‘Kin’ a Personal Look at South Africa

(chelseanow)

"South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s newest book, unlike his others, is intensely personal. “Kin” is about family and about country and Hugo’s relationship with both.

Photographed over the last eight years, Hugo calls this collection of color portraits, still lifes, cityscapes, and landscapes “an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being colonial driftwood.” He says, “South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place…how do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me, now they are more confusing.”

Searching for answers, he begins by photographing what he considers “home” as both an intimate and public place. Hugo does not shrink from showing intimate pictures of his immediate family alongside those of his “kin” which include the homeless, the aimless, the elderly, a racially mixed couple, and others he felt were part of the overall narrative. Other telling photographs include a still life of a dead or dying houseplant and one entitled “Green Point Commons,” which shows a man lying near a huge tree that’s been bent over by the wind — it looks like it’s crying..." more at chelsea now

Ibrahim Mahama: Bienale Arte 2015

Video: Ibrahim Mahama: Bienale Arte 2015

(labiennale.org)